It wasn’t that I physically looked old. My mirror and regular compliments assured me of that. It was something else. ‘You have a confidence beyond your years,’ Deidre had told me, when I complained to her that people had unreasonable expectations of me.
There wasn’t really anything to be done. The glint of experience and calculation in my eye was not something you could take a moisturiser to.
But turning thirty did mark the end of something that I couldn’t define exactly. It was a transition that seemed all at odds with my sense of myself and caused me such deep unease. As for actually saying the words ‘I’m thirty’—impossible!
All I could think of was how to thwart it. I’ve always had a certain talent for recognising obstacles ahead and manoeuvring to avoid them, or employing a little manipulation if circumstances permit. So, I began to plan. Certainly, my birthday would not be celebrated doing anything commonplace. I would not be heading up the table at a Thai birthday banquet, enduring remarks that got bitchier as the bottles got emptier. But nor would I embrace or ignore what was befalling me—no, what I did was far cleverer.
Blake and I went on an overseas birthday holiday. We had three weeks in Italy, basing ourselves in Rome. After that long flight into ‘the eternal city’ I felt somewhat eternal myself. The holiday was perfect, and it wasn’t a celebration of, or an escape from, my birthday as some of my friends implied. The beauty of my plan was in the final detail. We flew home via the States, spending five days in New York for the shops, the theatre and the boys. The flight from Los Angeles to Sydney was the big indulgence of the holiday. We upgraded to business class. We left Los Angeles at 11pm on Wednesday 16 June 2004 and arrived in Sydney at 6am on Friday 18 June 2004. The day in between—my birthday—was lost in the business-class blur of French champagne, Valhrona chocolates and pampering by Taylor, a most obliging young flight attendant.
It was ingenious even if I say so myself. I didn’t understand exactly how the intricacies of the International Date Line worked, nor did I want to be informed. Blake was told to shut up when he tried to offer a scientific explanation. As far as I was concerned, the 17th of June 2004 had never dawned and I had never turned thirty. I had a confidence beyond my years and I had made use of it to outwit a most unwelcome landmark.
3
Chapter Two
To: [email protected]
From: Mr Gigantic
Subject: Are you satisfied with your size?
Message: Add three inches. Give him deeper penetration. Our Penis Enlargement Pill will expand, lengthen and enlarge your penis by up to three inches. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!
I met Blake eighteen months after my father died. I was oblivious to it at the time, but now I can see that during that year and a half, I was looking for someone to distract me from what I’d lost. I even dated a daddy, a guy nearly twice my age, for about a month. There was a string of other brief entanglements that flared momentarily, then fizzled away, usually due to the guy being uninterested, duplicitous or drug-addled. I was probably awfully needy and that put guys off. But with Blake, things were different right from the outset.
We met most respectably at the theatre, somewhere that could be mentioned in polite conversation when people enquired. Over the years, I had grown weary of fudging the answer to that particular question. Some people were not content with an airy ‘Oh, out and about’, but would insist on specifics. Straight people in particular were persistent, perhaps wanting to prove how ‘with it’ they were, that they knew by reputation some of the Oxford Street haunts. Occasionally, I found this so irritating I told them the truth. Once, when I was rather drunk, I told a friend of my mother’s that I’d met Justin, John or whatever his name was at ‘an orgy in an old church’. The woman froze for a full minute, utterly unable to respond or move away from me. Finally she remarked, ‘I knew attendance these days was very poor. I just never realised they were forced to go to such lengths.’ Then she lowered her voice and hissed. ‘Is it those Anglicans?’
The play that Blake and I met at was an unlikely choice for a couple of gay boys: ‘The Vagina Monologues’. Elisabeth was doing a stint in it and I’d dutifully gone along, alone. Strauss had bailed on me at the last moment when he learnt the play’s title and would not be swayed. ‘Darling, you know I adore your mother, but truly, I don’t want to see her vagina, listen to stories about her vagina, or whatever it is this piece involves.’
Blake had been at the play with a lesbian friend. We were the only gay men in the audience and afterwards in the foyer, we both felt conspicuously alone. Blake’s friend had abandoned him for a group of women she knew; I was waiting for Elisabeth to emerge from backstage. Somehow, Blake and I gravitated towards one another. At first, it was just a convenient way to pass the time, but as we chatted, I began to appreciate that Blake was rather different from the boys I usually encountered. No doubt it was because he was new to Sydney. He’d been in town only three months having moved from Canberra for a job with Citibank. He was a country boy originally, who’d been raised near Albury, then gone onto Canberra to attend university. He was twenty-five, two years younger than me, though he seemed much younger. As he described all his discoveries in Sydney, his face flushed with pleasure, I realised it was his optimism that made him seem young. His enthusiasm was as joyful and unrestrained as that of a child. As he spoke, he rocked back and forth, then catching himself, plunged his hands into his pockets as if to anchor his excitement.
I was happy to listen to his slightly naïve conversation. It was a refreshing change from the jaded, cynical prattle other guys spouted and besides, I did find Blake quite easy on the eye. He was almost six foot, with slightly wavy brown hair, smooth flawless skin and striking brown eyes that drew your gaze. He was also smartly dressed, not in the usual jeans and tight tee shirt garb, but in snugly fitted khakis, a navy blazer and a slightly transparent white cotton shirt. Everything was impeccably pressed. When he shrugged off the blazer, then rolled up his shirt sleeves, I could tell that beneath the clothes, his body was tanned and ripely muscled. His nipples were two tantalising dark smudges through his shirt.
I had dismissed him at first as too callow and conservative. Yes, he was attractive, but I hadn’t felt that instant grunt of lust which was my usual barometer for proceeding. He was someone you could imagine petting; not doing it to doggie-style. Yet with the jacket off and those big, sincere eyes turned upon me, something began to stir. When he turned away from me to check on his friend, I was able to dwell upon the impressive swell of his butt which had previously been camouflaged by his jacket. Then Elisabeth descended on us, tapping me on the shoulder as I ogled Blake’s butt. Blake was completely star struck. I hadn’t mentioned my mother to him initially. I didn’t want him hanging around me in order to meet her and then her reading more into the situation. But our conversation had moved onto other topics and I’d completely forgotten about Mother.
Elisabeth loved meeting guys I was dating. She had her own cockeyed theories about my type and tastes, and would badger anyone she got to meet with questions that I considered highly inappropriate. Her arrival was awkward. Her glance told me she had caught me ‘appraising’ and she turned all her attention on Blake, who was completely startled to find the star of the show so interested in him. He blushed and stammered and finally made his excuses to run back to his friend, overcome. ‘He’s shy,’ Elisabeth declared.
‘You scared him off,’ I snapped back.
Blake had his back to us, whispering urgently into his friend’s ear. ‘Oh well, now you can appreciate him from your favourite angle,’ she added wickedly. ‘Go after him.’
I did. Just to get away from her. I tapped him on the shoulder and suggested we swap numbers. ‘Oh,’ his eyes widened in surprise. ‘Oh, yes please.’
He seemed so flattered and thrilled, I was charmed again. Clearly, he had thought I was out of his league which was a viewpoint I rather liked. I’d had more than enough of various Oxford Street muscle boys and th
eir lofty opinions of their own self-importance. Blake’s friend Gemma—a butch public servant up from Canberra for the weekend—eyed me with undisguised suspicion as Blake punched my number into his mobile. Luckily, Elisabeth strolled over at that moment and I hastily introduced the two of them. Gemma was ‘a big fan’, though did seem to have Elisabeth slightly confused with Noni Hazlehurst. This type of blunder always riled Elisabeth. I knew we only had a few moments before there would be a scene to rival anything we had seen on stage. I hastily whipped out my own phone and got Blake’s number safely recorded. ‘She’s my mother,’ I explained, ‘and I need to get her home. She can get a little toey after a performance.’
But it was too late. Elisabeth had turned on Gemma and was berating her. ‘I have never appeared on “Better Bloody Homes and Gardens”, a fact you would know if you hadn’t been too stingy to buy a programme.’
I put my arm through Elisabeth’s, propelled her out of the foyer, insisting it was time for supper.
Blake sent me a text the following day, apologising for Gemma, who was ‘mortified by her mistake’. He suggested dinner on the weekend. When I agreed, he proposed Tabou, a restaurant one of his colleagues had recommended. It was then that I realised the seriousness of his intentions. This was a real date—dinner for two at a French restaurant on a Saturday night. ‘My treat,’ he also insisted.
The dinner that night was perfect, though extremely rich. ‘I feel like I need to walk some of this off,’ Blake groaned when we finally staggered out of the restaurant.
‘I can think of other ways of working it off,’ I replied smoothly which made Blake blush.
We went back to my place. There I discovered that as well as being new to Sydney, Blake was also rather new to gay sex. After spending half an hour in passionate foreplay—on the couch, the floor, and the stairs to the bedroom—he confessed, blushing again, that he’d scarcely been fucked before. But there was a longing in his eye and a tremble to his lip which betrayed he was immensely turned on by the prospect. ‘I’ve tried it twice, but it didn’t work that well, for me at least,’ he whispered. ‘It kind of hurt.’
But that first fuck was magic for both of us. Afterwards, we lay in my bed, his head on my chest, and he stroked my cock, declaring it ‘absolutely perfect’. It was the most surprising compliment. I am not renowned for my size. In fact, the shameful truth is that my cock size is less than average. I was accustomed to my dick being disparaged rather than praised. I felt a stab of genuine affection for Blake. This boy was a discovery.
When I was in my early twenties, ‘my shortfall’ didn’t really cause me too much grief. I was young and exceptionally cute and that more than made up for it. But I’d noticed as the years passed that guys seemed to become less forgiving. They would roll down my underwear all slavering excitement and then go ‘oh’. It was amazing that so much deflation and disappointment could be conveyed in that small, innocuous interjection. They always seemed to have a change of heart about sucking me off. Usually, the dynamic would change completely and I’d find their cocks shoved in my face instead. I had to do the work, give the pleasure, as I’d been judged deficient.
I also found myself obliged to take the passive role in sex, which wasn’t really my first choice. But it was rare to strike a guy who wanted to be fucked by me. That daddy guy I dated even gave me a book on the topic, ‘The New Bottoming Book’, and told me to ‘bone up, then bend over’. I guess he was trying to help, but the inference hurt—that’s all you’re good for—and there was just something about the whole power dynamic that didn’t sit right with me. In everyday life, I tended to be the dominant one, the guy calling the shots, and in bed I wanted to be on top too, at least some of the time.
Once or twice, I even had walkouts. Someone would come home with me, we’d both be all worked up, my briefs would get yanked down … and then abruptly everything would change and the guy would start putting the clothes back on that had just been cast off. Now, I’m an actor. I don’t like walkouts. I especially don’t like them before I’ve even been given a chance to perform. After that happened a few times, I made a point of sussing out what guys were into before we got to the stage of having sex. Maybe it spoiled some of the magic and mystery, but it helped me avoid some of the serious size queens.
Being with Blake was different. He made me feel good about something that had become a source of deep embarrassment and anxiety to me. In those first few months of dating, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Admittedly, Blake was a bit of a novice, but he was an eager pupil and very keen to experiment and improvise. He even bought books on gay sex and read them for instruction, not titillation.
Sex with my other serious boyfriend Ant had turned problematic after a while. I found him very butch and sexy, and naturally I wanted him to fuck me. He was HIV positive, but I wasn’t particularly fazed by that. It had taken so long for us to end up as boyfriends and I was so in love with him, I didn’t care. I was twenty-two at the time, ‘the golden boy’, untouched by death or disaster. We had a blissful honeymoon of about six months before we struck a problem: a condom split during sex which we only discovered after the fact. It was before pep was available. We both freaked out. I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep properly for weeks. I got run down, then I caught a bad flu which flipped us both over the edge. I was convinced I was sero-converting. It was an extremely tense time and when I finally had the reassurance of a negative test, I discovered that wasn’t entirely the end of it all.
The accident had scarred us. After that, anxiety always seemed to pervade the sex act to some degree. Our days of carefree romps were over. We were both wary and nervous about another mishap. Ant had a few problems getting hard. So we made a change and I ended up topping him, which he wasn’t that into, and though he never said anything, I had my suspicions as to why. But it wasn’t only the sex that was strained. All the minor irritations that I’d previously dismissed began to mount up. His penny-pinching ways were the main aggravation. So many costs had to be split and he always wanted to calculate our ‘exact shares’ based on usage. I only wished he would examine and express his feelings with the same scrupulous attention he devoted to the telephone and supermarket bills.
But that broken condom also made me confront things I’d tried not to dwell on. I began to think seriously about Ant being HIV positive and what that might entail for us in the future. Back then, in 1996, guys were still dying of AIDS at an alarming rate. The obituaries in the gay newspaper every week were testimony to that. I was only twenty-two years old. It seemed terribly young to be grappling with issues of disease and mortality.
We struggled on for another six months before Ant eventually called an end to the relationship. When he said the words, my primary emotion was relief: he had spared me from having to do the deed. I didn’t want it said or thought or thrown back in my face that I had broken up with him because he was HIV positive. We explained it away to people as a case of the timing being wrong; that we could never live together; that the sex had burnt out; that it was just too difficult. That final reason was the closest we came to giving voice to the real stumbling block, even to each other.
I’d been so infatuated and obsessive with Ant. Snaring him had taken forever and spurred me to extreme lengths. Then, when we were finally together, everything became so intense and dramatic. Being with Blake was easy by comparison. The relationship developed quite naturally without all the complications and craziness. We were extremely sexually compatible which provided a solid base and the intimacy developed from there. I didn’t feel all that passionate about him initially, but I was attracted to him and enjoyed his company and attentions. That sounds like a tepid endorsement, but after what I’d been through with Ant, it was a much better starting point for a relationship. Initially, my feelings were a little lukewarm, but I figured that they could only grow. After all, what became of boiling passions? Great surges of hiss and steam initially, but eventually they burnt out, boiled dry, or cooled.
Of
course, Blake had much stronger feelings than I did and that rather suited me. He was determined to win me over and proved to be extremely attentive and romantic. He would ring me twice a day without fail, send me little messages by e-mail, cook me dinner, take me out for dinner, buy me flowers or little gifts, and arrange special dates or weekends away. Naturally, I was flattered and charmed. We also had enough common attributes and interests and our differences didn’t really disadvantage me much. Blake wasn’t only passive in bed, he was pretty amenable to me calling the shots.
But what I liked best about Blake was his unaffected enthusiasm. He had no shame or guile. After two weeks, he declared that he was in love with me, and he repeated those sentiments regularly, even though I failed to reciprocate. It was so refreshing after all the attitude and game-playing I’d encountered with more worldly guys. After six weeks, I still hadn’t told him that I loved him, though I had become quite dependent on him. If he failed to make one of his twice daily phone calls, I felt a little bereft. One weekend, he went to visit Gemma in Canberra. He invited me along but I declined—that Gemma was hosting a party was no inducement—but to my surprise, I discovered that I missed him terribly. When I admitted as much on his return, his face lit up with awe and pleasure. ‘Really?’ he asked, reaching for me.
Of course, I had to fuck him. Afterwards, when he murmured that he loved me, it felt completely right to repeat those same words back to him.
We were a couple, officially, which meant it was time to meet each other’s friends. I could tell that my trio—Strauss, Ant and Blair—all thought I could do better. When Blake went to the bathroom, they passed judgement. ‘He’s cute of course but somehow he seems …’ Strauss got a little lost finding the right adjective to complete his sentence.
Time to Upsize (The Indignities Book 1) Page 3