A Month in the Heart...

The full title of this story series isn't "A Month in the Heart . . .", which sounds to me like a Hallmark movie, but "A Month in the Heart of the Country", just FYI. This version is edited slightly from the original version that appeared on the site, mostly just for typos but also one character who up until now has been minor is going to take more of a centre stage, and I needed to go back and tweak her initial appearance. Further episodes of this story will be appearing in Group Sex; chapter 4 is coming along nicely and there are some surprises in store -- the balance of power is going to start shifting in the next chapter . . . hope you enjoy.

"Come on!" said Chris. "It's perfect!"

"What?" I said. "How?"

"For fuck's sake, Alex," he said, sitting down next to me and stuffing chips into his mouth. "If we go without you we're just a bunch of desperate horny guys, but if we go with you, we're a bunch of cool sophisticated horny guys with one gay friend. Women love guys who are cool about being around gay guys. I'm not saying we have to tell them everything about what we've been doing, but I'd be totally cool about kissing you in public. Imagine. We'd all get laid for sure."

I said "I'm . . ."

And then I stopped myself.

I had been about to say "I'm not your gay friend." I was no longer quite so sure about that.

At this point I had let all of the guys fuck me. I'd let Chris do it twice. I had enjoyed it. I wanted it to happen again, even if, looking at Chris, it struck me that he wasn't exactly my type. For all that he was sort of good-looking, he was also a bit flabby and he still had spots and his hair didn't look too clean. For my part, I didn't like the kind of music that I thought gay people were supposed to like, and I didn't like the theatre or cabaret or dressing up or any of those other things that I thought gay people liked.

But then it occurred to me that not all straight people liked whatever it was that straight people were supposed to like -- I wasn't totally sure what that was, but it was probably the opposite of having pride marches and cross-dressing. Straight people presumably were supposed to like . . . going to church. With guns. So probably, it was assumed somewhere that the most fun a straight person could have would involve going to an army church.

I didn't want to do that, though. And I couldn't really say to Chris "I'm not gay." I didn't think I was gay, but I realised that it was only because I kept thinking of it in terms of how I'd seen gay men representing themselves on TV. They were all usually pretty fabulous, which was not something I considered myself to be. There didn't seem to be many normal-type ones, but I reflected that perhaps they just didn't get on TV.

--Aren't you forgetting something, said a voice in my head. Have you ever fancied a man in your life?

--Not that I can remember, I admitted.

--You fancy girls. Whose arses do you turn to look at when you walk down the street?

--Girls'.

--But you like being fucked.

--Yes.

--Well, then, it's clearly more complicated than you imagined it was.

"It's gonna be fucking great, Alex," said Chris, eagerly shovelling chips into his mouth. "When they see you with us, we'll be fighting them off."

"I came down here hoping I'd get off with a girl too, you know," I said.

"Yeah," he said, frowning, "but . . . we don't want to send out mixed signals. If you try to come across as bisexual it's gonna be confusing. It's much better if you're just totally gay."

I stared at him. Once again I remembered that Chris had brought me down here for a reason, and now that he'd decided what I was good for, he didn't give a fuck about me, or about what I wanted.

"So you all get to score with girls and I don't?" I said.

"Well," said Chris, "that's the luck of the draw."

"I don't see why Alex can't be bi," said Pete. "Come on. He's not a fucking decoy."

"It's gonna fuck everything uuup!" said Chris, in the whiny tone that he adopted whenever it looked like he might not get his way.

"Well then," said Pete, glancing at me, "fine. Maybe I won't go."

"Nooo!" Chris whined further, his face turning puce with exasperation. "The only way this works is if we're all totally straight except Alex!"

"I think you're right," said Steve, frowning. Ray looked dubious. Danny was sitting at the table, eating fish and chips, ignoring the debate. It annoyed me.

"I'll tell you what," I said, fuming. "If all of you manage to score with a girl tonight, then fair's fair. You got lucky. But if you don't, and you come to me hoping I'm gonna be a fucking stand-in, or whatever, forget it. If you want to spend the night with me, then so do I. If you want to go after the girls, good luck. But I'm not gonna be a substitute for anyone."

There was a silence at this, and I sensed that Chris was now very angry. He ate his fish and chips in a cold silence for a long moment. Finally he looked at me.

"You're under forfeit," he said coldly.

"I can walk out of here whenever I want," I said, looking him in the eye. I was nervous and scared of what might happen, but I was also really angry.

"Chris," said Pete, "come on. For fuck's sake."

Then, to my great surprise, Chris closed his eyes and shook his head and opened them and looked at me.

"Jesus fucking Christ," he muttered. "This is ridiculous. Of course you can. Fuck's sake. Look . . . I'm sorry. Okay? Seriously, Alex. I'm sorry."

I looked at him, startled.

"This has been crazy," he said. "I mean, last night was great, and we had the contract and all and this morning was great too, and you've been so fucking amazing but . . . you're right. Of course you can do whatever you want. I'm sorry. I'm being a total prick."

I stared at him. He looked back at the others. Pete nodded at him -- yes, you are being one, keep apologising. Danny glanced up at us briefly. Ray buried himself in his fish and chips. Steve looked brooding.

Chris looked back at me and held out his hand. I took it.

"We're friends," he said. "We don't have to make this into a big thing. Of course it's up to you. Everything was based on the idea that there were no girls here, but that's changed now."

"Fine," I said. He and I shook hands, the first non-sexual physical contact we'd ever had.

"I still think you should come to the pub, though," he said, grinning.

"What kind of girls are these?"

"Mixed bunch," said Pete. "Cute. Lot of different types. Seems like a local girl is having her friends down from college."

"Could be good," said Chris, munching chips.

I considered it for a moment.

"I'm in," I said.

I didn't change my clothes all that much. The lingerie under my shorts seemed a bit conspicuous, so I went to my room and stripped off and looked through my clothes.

As I stood naked in my room, looking through my stuff, I realised that I wasn't shivering. It was a warm night.

I gazed for a moment at my reflection in the mirror. I realised that my outline was pretty good in itself. All I had to do was make it look clear.

I took the tightest pair of jeans I could find and put them on, just as I was, commando. Then I put on a slim-fitting t-shirt and a light jacket, and I decided that that was enough. I pulled my sneakers onto my bare feet. I wanted to give an almost subliminal impression that there was as little as possible between whoever I was talking to and my body. I wanted to force people to imagine what I looked like naked.

I reasoned that the original idea was pretty good. It would make us stand out if one of us were dressed like he expected people to be looking at him. I was fully prepared to bear out any claims the others might make that I liked being ass-fucked, but on the other hand I was not going to deny that I was interested in girls.

In short, we would simply tell the truth -- but only if we were pressed would we admit that my bisexuality had been established just 20 hours earlier, and that before then I'd been a virgin.

Dear reader, let's just say that if we'd had sat down and had a serious think beforehand about what effect this strategy would have on a group of intelligent female college freshmen, I don't think that the other guys would have gone along with it.

Because it was the cause of all the fun, the sexiness, the hi-jinks, the unbelievable bad behaviour, the bliss and the heartbreak that followed.

* * *

It was a 15-minute walk to the pub, and over my t-shirt I was wearing only a thin jacket. It was a warm night. I put up with Chris grabbing my ass and squeezing it every so often. It seemed like a reasonable price to pay.

When we got to the pub, I was amused to note that the other guys automatically went in first and left me to come in last; either conventional chivalry didn't extend to your suddenly-gay friend, or else I was still just invisible to them as anything other than a sex toy.

However, when I went in the door and looked around and saw the Girls, sitting at a large table, the holiday suddenly became a great deal more complicated.

They all looked gorgeous to me. They were all somewhere between 18 and 21, they were all dressed like they were from the city, and they all carried themselves with a confidence that the locals just didn't have. There were about six of them, I couldn't quite tell exactly how many, but while I got a general impression of smart, sophisticated college girl, my eye lit on two in particular as I ordered my pint and waited for it, next to the other guys.

One of them was smaller than the others and also louder. Very pretty, in a neat, fresh-faced kind of way, she also had a notably foul mouth and a London accent, both of which were kind of engaging. She had silky dark hair and a face which managed to be both squarish and delicate, and like the others she was wearing mostly black, with a silky blouse over the top. Her skin was pale and lightly freckled and she glanced up at me as I entered, checking me out and, I thought, smiling quietly to herself.

The other was more average height, but in other respects she was the weirdest-looking one.

She seemed quieter than the others, but she was always laughing at everyone else's jokes and seemed to have a broad grin permanently on her face. She definitely had some kind of Asian/Far Eastern ethnicity somewhere, even if, being from my own corner of northwestern Europe, I couldn't pin down exactly where, and she wore horn-rimmed glasses which exaggerated her geekiness. Her skin was a little darker than the others, and she had slightly pink cheeks. She was wearing various layers of more or less skin-tight black things, including jeans and a t-shirt, and a tattoo spiralling up one of her upper arms.

But what really got my attention was her hair. Cropped very short to her head, it had been painstakingly dyed in a black-and-green chequerboard pattern.

She glanced up at me too, in mid-laugh, and I was sure that she looked at me for a bit longer than she needed to.

I thought she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen.

I got my pint and joined the other guys, and it wasn't long before Chris had turned on his rather oily charm and had got talking to one of the girls in the group, a small, sexy blonde with a long nose, round blue eyes, full lips, perfect if slightly prominent teeth and a faintly amused expression, exactly the kind of girl that Chris normally went for. We talked amongst ourselves but soon he'd got her looking at us as he pointed us all out, and she smiled in our direction in turn as he gave her all our names.

I had to admire Chris. He was sociable in a way that I wasn't. He had a gift of making people want to do what he wanted them to do, and it had a lot to do with bullshit and pretending that you were the most exciting person in the room and that this room was the most exciting room in the world, and it was obviously bullshit because he always had a certain way of glancing past you, as if to make sure that there wasn't somebody even more interesting than you. But he'd turned the charm on with me last night, and he was turning it on now with the small blonde girl. He had her laughing, and soon he was involving other guys at the table with the conversation he was having with her, even while he positioned himself so that he was clearly the leader of our little group.

And so it was, a little while later, that I got up and went to the bar, and found myself standing next to the girl with the cropped green-and-black check-dyed hair and the horn-rimmed glasses.

She turned and glanced at me and smiled. I smiled back.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said, brilliantly.

"Nice town," she said, raising her eyebrows and nodding, as if to compliment me.

"Oh, I'm not from round here," I said, smiling apologetically.

"Oh," she said. "Neither am I. Oh god, that's kind of a relief." She laughed. She had slightly prominent front teeth and, now that I could hear it, an American accent, but I couldn't place the region.

"I'm Alex, by the way," I said. "I think our friend has met your friend."

"Yeah, so it seems," she said. "I'm Grace."

She held out her hand.

"Nice to meet you, Grace," I said, shaking it.

"Nice to meet you," she said. "I have to admit, I don't really know what I'm doing here."

"You and me both, then," I said.

"Oh you too?" she said. "Cool. I kind of came down cause my girlfriend wanted me to. But now I'm here I'm like . . ."

She glanced around and lowered her voice to speak just into my ear.

"There is literally nothing to do here," she drawled, drew back and looked apologetic.

"I'm sorry," she said, an anxious expression crossing her face. "Is that mean?"

"No, not at all," I said. "That's what we've been thinking. We're down from Dublin."

"Oh right," she said. "That's where we're from. I mean, that's why we're here. I'm not from Dublin myself."

"Where are you from?"

"San Francisco," she said.

I silently blessed my luck.

"I know it," I said. "Well, a bit. I've been there."

"Oh really?" she said, looking slightly relieved.

I had. I had been there with my family two years earlier, to visit a friend of my parents. I had a memory of hills and amazing bookshops and skyscrapers and too many homeless people on the streets and great food.

"I have," I said. "Which bit are you from?"

"I live in the Castro."

"That's where I stayed," I said with mock incredulity. "We must have just missed each other."

"It's uncanny," she said. "I feel it's like, fate gave us that chance, and we just missed it."

"I curse fate," I said, "and its oily non-meety-ness."

She paused.

"I'm sorry," she said, smiling. "I forgot your name."

"Alex," I said.

I was pleased that she admitted it, and wanted to hear it again.

Our drinks came and we paid, and went back to the seats. She returned to her seat but since our respective groups had by now merged with each other, we sat next to each other.

We talked about movies and agreed that we preferred funny to scary. She explained the concept of 'mansplaining' to me and I promised not to explain anything to her without checking that she wasn't already an expert on the subject. "Don't worry," she said with a grin, "I'm not an expert on anything."

That too turned out to be untrue: she turned out to have read about 500 times as many books as I had. In short, we had a great conversation. I won't bore you with it. It's never fun to hear how much of a good time somebody else had.

Everybody else was having a good time too. I wasn't paying too much attention to others because I was focused on Grace, but soon three hours had passed and we were all very merry and a bit drunk.

Chris leaned over and said "How are you dudes getting on?" with a big smile.

"Great," I said. "We'll be doing even better when you stop calling us 'dudes'."

"I've just been talking to the others," he said, waving his hand at the other girls, who were watching us with interest; I sort of got the impression that they were especially interested in me. "We're talking about getting a carry-out and continuing this at the house."

"Does that sound good to you?" I said to Grace. She shrugged and smiled.

"Sure."

"Fab," said Chris. "Let's get some in."

So we pooled our money and Chris, Ray and Pete went to the off-licence next door and came away with heavy bags full of drink. Then we all put our jackets on and went out into the night.

It had got cooler, and there was the kind of light drizzle that you get in Ireland, which is more like mist on steroids. It made you damp without actually getting you positively wet. Grace and I dawdled at the back, as we walked along the road in a long, straggling group. We were still chatting, friendly; being so inexperienced with girls, I wasn't sure yet if she really liked me, or just liked my company, or if there was a difference, but she didn't seem in any hurry to talk to anyone else.

Then, as we trudged along a country road in darkness, I saw that Chris and the blonde girl he'd been talking to all night had stopped, and the others were gathering around them and watching us catch up.

A small warning bell rang in my stomach.

As we approached, I saw that all the girls were staring at me and smiling. The guys mostly looked a bit uncomfortable. Chris, alone among us, was also smiling.

"Alex," he said, "we've been having a little chat."

"About what," I said cautiously.

"Our little . . . arrangement," he said. "Lesley and the girls are very interested."

"What arrangement?" said Grace, looking at me.

I looked at Chris and he looked back at me, and I blushed.

"Do I . . ." I said.

"Yes," said Chris flatly. I swallowed. I had absolutely no idea what way this was going to go.

"We were playing poker a couple of nights ago," I began haltingly, "and I lost. We agreed that I had to pay a forfeit. So . . ."

Grace looked at me expectantly, and looked at her friends, who were grinning excitedly.

"The forfeit," I muttered, "was that I have to do whatever the guys tell me to do. And so basically, I'm . . . you know. Their bitch."

"Their 'bitch'," she said, testing the word in her mouth, "like, in what . . . sense?"

"Like in the sense that they all fucked him," said the girl with the London accent.

"Fucked, like, really fucked?" Grace said, staring at me with slowly dawning comprehension.

I nodded dumbly.

"Oh I see," she said, frowning, "so you're gay?"

"Well," I said, "I wasn't before all this."

"You're

not

gay?" she said, looking even more puzzled.

"I think I'm . . . equal opportunity," I said. One of the girls laughed and Grace stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. She had a curious expression, wary but also sort of compassionate.

"So you're like these guys' sex slave right now?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes," I muttered, rubbing my face with my hand. I was mortified.

"O-kay," she said.

"Hot," said one of the girls.

"And I think we should seal that with a little demonstration of how far you're willing to go, Alex," said Chris.

"Really?" I said weakly. The girls cheered, except for Grace, who kept watching me.

"Yeah," he said. "Lesley here and I were talking, and we'd like to see you walk the rest of the way home wearing nothing but a blindfold."

"Oh come on," I said.

"It's a forfeit," said Ray sternly. "You have to obey."

I stood there staring at them. They all watched me expectantly, except Grace, who lowered her eyes and glanced at the others.

I didn't like being pressured like this, but on the other hand . . .

It would certainly make for a memorable night.

"How am I going to avoid walking into things?" I said.

"We'll lead you," said Chris.

I hesitated again. It was insane. It was the most exposing thing I had ever done. On the other hand, it was dark, it was night, and it couldn't be denied that the girls seemed to want it to happen.