While My Wife's Away

by James Lear

  Perhaps she hadn’t come home herself.

  6

  IT’S MAY NOW, THE FINAL HALF-TERM HOLIDAY BEFORE ALEX leaves school, and he’s gone away with Angie for the whole week to revise for his exams. That leaves me home alone with a lot of time for thinking and the freedom to do whatever I want. What I really want to do is see Graham and get fucked, but he’s away too, on a long-planned trip to the south of France, where he has a house that needs a lot of work, ‘otherwise I would have invited you,’ he said, and I pretended to believe him. I’d happily live in a building site if his cock was up my arse, but I didn’t say that; it doesn’t pay to appear to be too keen, especially with rich men who think you might be a gold digger. He said he’ll call me when he gets home, but I suspect he won’t. I’m too complicated. I’ve got a wife and kids, an undecided sexuality, too much drama for a man whose life runs on such orderly lines as Graham’s. And let’s face it, he can afford younger, handsomer companions who come without baggage.

  In Graham’s absence, with a house at my disposal and a growing recklessness as it dawned on me that my marriage was coming to an end, I placed my own ad on Craigslist. After several drafts, I came up with this.

  While My Wife’s Away

  Bi-curious married guy, fit, 42, seeks masculine guys, any age, for NSA fun. Please be sane, genuine, and in good shape. This week only. Evenings. Travel or accom. Your photo gets mine.

  Short and to the point, not promising anything I can’t deliver, but allowing for the fact that someone might come to my house—‘travel or accom—and specifically marketing myself in the most effective way, as a straight man taking a walk on the wild side, see him once, do whatever you want to do, and you’ll never have to see him again. I know a bit about salesmanship—I’ve done enough work for marketing departments over the years, tweaking online campaigns, making sure the buttons work—and I know you’ve got to have a clear message right upfront, something that grabs the punters by the balls and won’t let go. And this is it: While my wife’s away, a whole story in four words, a straight man, limited time, urgent, illicit, exciting.

  Within half an hour, my inbox was busy. I could have a different man every night if I wanted. If I took time off work, I could do daytimes as well. Perhaps a week-long orgy would get this out of my system. I could stuff myself with cock to the point of surfeit and self-disgust.

  I fired off a few replies, sent headless photos where requested, discussed in a little more detail the things that I was interested in doing. Some of them never replied: time-wasters and photo collectors, the lot of them. Others were too keen, insisting that I give them my address RIGHT NOW. Others suggested doing things that were stupid or life-threatening; if anyone mentions the words bareback, raw, or breeding, they go straight in the trash.

  There was one, however, who seemed sane and sexy, and very different from my previous encounters. A young Frenchman, just twenty, student, athlete, basketball player, tall, muscular, of West African descent, describing himself as ‘curious.’ Less than half my age. The same age as my daughter. That gave me pause. How would I feel if one of my kids was replying to online ads, going around to old men’s houses for sex? Well, at least if he came to me I would take care of him, make sure nothing bad happened, give him some good advice. And fuck his beautiful arse, and get his lips round my dick, and see him come over those rippling abdominals.

  My pastoral interest went only so far.

  I wrote back asking where he was and when we could meet. He was only about five miles away. He was free this very evening. Within a few more exchanges, I’d arranged to pick him up at his gym at seven o’clock and bring him back to my place.

  It may sound as if I did all this without a second thought. My wife’s away, and I’m wasting no time in picking up strangers online and bringing them back to the family home, probably to fuck them in the marital bed, exposing myself and Angie and the kids to all sorts of dangers, let alone what the neighbours might think. And in a way that’s true; my brain was so jammed by lust and by the compulsion to change my life, that I rushed headlong into a situation I could scarcely control. But there is another part of me that has thought long and hard about what I’m doing, that grieves for the family I am destroying and for the years of untroubled happiness that Angie and I once enjoyed. What went wrong? Is it me that changed or her, or both of us? Was our marriage a massive mistake? And why am I destroying it in this reckless way, precipitating disaster, when I really need to sit down with her and talk things through? We could see a counsellor, make things work, acknowledge how we’ve changed, embrace a new relationship. Maybe she’d even accept that I needed a bit of cock on the side from time to time and would turn a blind eye.

  Instead, I’m taking a sledgehammer to the whole thing. I want to get caught and punished. I know I’m guilty. It’s a very easy, comfortable place to be. You let go of all responsibility. And it’s even easier when I look at a photograph of Pascal’s broad shoulders, smooth back, and round arse.

  So I’m in the car driving to an ugly brown building on the edge of a retail park, litter bins overflowing, but I don’t see any of it, because all I can think of is Pascal and what we’re going to do together, how it will feel to kiss him and fuck him, and how this could be the last hammer blow to my marriage, smashing through the present to reach an uncertain but necessary future.

  He’s there already, perched on a concrete bollard, a grey tracksuit top with the hood up, tight blue jeans, a kitbag on the ground beside him. He’s looking around nervously, biting his thumb, fiddling with his earphones, which keep falling out. He hasn’t seen me yet, and for a moment I watch him, taking in his youth, his discomfort, the lowering of his brow, the curve of his thighs. Then I take pity and beep the horn. He looks up, smiles, raises a hand, and jogs over to me. I lean over and open the door.

  ‘Hey, Joe.’ He takes his earphones out as he climbs in. ‘Pascal.’

  We shake hands over the gearstick. I can feel heat from his body.

  ‘Good workout?’

  ‘Yes, it was fine. Today I do martial arts.’ His accent is French overlaid with London inflections. ‘Hard work.’

  ‘I’d better watch my step then.’ I want to kiss him, to make out in the car like a couple of kids.

  ‘So we go? To your place?’

  ‘Of course.’ I start the car. We make small talk. He is sweet and shy and funny, he wants to know all about me, how long I’ve been married, how old the kids are, what I do for a living, and for a while I forget what we’re doing, we’re just two guys chatting in a car, colleagues perhaps, passing the time, sussing each other out, that’s as far as it goes. And then I glance sideways at him, and I see his hand resting on his crotch with a visible bulge, a smile on his face, his eyes half-closed, and it suddenly hits me that I’m taking a twenty-year-old athlete home to fuck instead of my wife.

  I swerve a little, say ‘shit,’ and then mask it with a laugh, I feel the blood surging into my cock, and my GPS makes alarmed little pinging noises because I’m exceeding the speed limit.

  Any of the neighbours might have seen us coming home. They’d assume that I was giving a lift to one of Alex’s friends, I supposed. One or two of them would know that Alex and Angie are away, and they might wonder who my guest was, but they would never in a million years jump to the conclusion that I was bringing young men home for sex. Any explanation would occur to them before that. If they were using binoculars, they might notice that both Pascal and I had erections, and that we were hurrying a little over parking and opening doors, fumbling with keys, standing closer together than was necessary.

  As soon as the front door was closed, we kissed. He tasted of chewing gum. He pressed himself against me, holding onto my neck, the weight of his body almost tipping me over. I braced myself with one foot behind, put my hands on the tight denim of his arse, and squeezed. His tongue was in my mouth, kissing with the passion of a horny teenager, which is exactly what he had been a few months ago. Maybe I was his first man.
Maybe his first anything. He’d have dated girls at school, then concentrated on his sports, avoiding the issue, trying not to look at the other guys in the showers, trying not to get hard.

  He was hard now. I could feel it pressing into me as we stumbled around the hall in a clumsy waltz, back together, front together, tongues entwined.

  ‘My God,’ he said at last, coming up for air, ‘I did not expect this.’

  ‘You OK?’

  He stepped back, grabbed the bottom of his hoodie in both hands, and with one smooth, elegant move removed all his upper garments. The photograph had not done him justice. His body was a perfection of skin, muscle, and bone, but it was in movement that it revealed itself, in the easy grace of every gesture. I kissed the side of his face, his jaw, his neck, tasting soap, and the slight saltiness of sweat. Before I could work my way down to his nipples, which I really wanted to suck, he pulled me back up to his lips, moaning as our tongues touched again, the sound trapped inside. I had to have him naked now, in the hallway, with the full-length mirror beside the door reflecting the rear view. I pulled the drawstring of his pants, felt the satisfying little jump as the knot was untied, then pulled them down, boxers and all. Pascal’s cock sprang up with the bouncy energy of the very young, slapped against his corrugated belly, and then swung around like a crane. I took hold of it, pulled him toward me, and with my other hand grabbed his naked arse. It was smooth and round and solid. We kissed again, and I wanked him until he said, ‘No! Not yet. I am too close.’ My hand was wet with his pre-come, my mouth with his saliva, and my finger had found his hole, which was damp with sweat.

  He kicked off his trainers and pulled off his pants, naked now but for a pair of worn white socks, brilliant against black skin.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go upstairs.’ I took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom where I hadn’t slept for months; even now, with Angie away, I kept to my single quarters. Now I was making a triumphal return with a horny twenty-year-old. The familiar furnishings —the old dressing table we inherited from Angie’s mother, the chest of drawers, the vase on the windowsill—seemed strange to me now. I’d changed the bedclothes, of course, and put away the framed photographs. Condoms and lube were on the bedside table. Tissues. I was prepared for anything.

  I pushed Pascal back, one hand on his chest, and he fell with a bounce to the bed, propping himself up on his elbows, a position that accentuated every muscle in his torso. I knelt before him and removed those tiny white socks. I kissed his feet, rubbing the soles with my thumbs, hearing him sigh, then worked my way up his legs, over the fuzzy hair on his shins to the mighty thighs, feeling the muscles tense as my lips touched him. Then, placing a hand behind each knee, I lifted his legs, opened them, and pushed them back until they touched his stomach, and exposed his arsehole. I looked up. Pascal was watching through half-closed eyes, his mouth open, lips wet. He knew what was coming, and he wanted it.

  I kissed his balls, the scrotum smooth, whether naturally or otherwise I couldn’t tell. I licked, outlining each testicle with my tongue, and then, very gently, took each of them into my mouth, tugging slightly, letting him know that he was all mine. Pascal was groaning now. The sound, although soft, seemed to fill the room, the whole house. I tried to get both balls in my mouth at the same time, as others have done to me, but I failed. They were too big. Instead I worked my way down the shiny perineum until I reached his hole.

  I have eaten a good deal of pussy in my time, but never an arse. If you’d asked me to do it a year ago, I’d have turned my nose up in disgust. But now, knowing how good it feels, I wanted to rim Pascal until my tongue was half way up his digestive tract. I wanted him to feel what I have felt, that sense of surrender and being possessed, the strange mixture of heat and coolness that comes from a vigorous tongue and lips on your anus. Pascal gave himself totally, pressing against me, reaching around to hold his cheeks open so I could get in further. We both knew where this was leading.

  I was still fully clothed, and much as I could happily have eaten him out all day, Pascal had other plans. He rocked forward and, using his thighs as levers, wrestled me to the carpet, sitting on my chest. Now he towered above me, and I was the helpless one. He shuffled back so his wet hole made contact with my hard cock and started to unbutton my shirt. When it was open, he ran his hands over the dense fur on my chest and stomach, angling himself down to press his cock into it, leaving diamond chains of pre-come in the hair. While he was thus engaged, I unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my jeans, and, somehow, pushed them down. Now there was only a thin layer of cotton between my cock and Pascal’s arse. He soon saw to that. He dismounted and, kneeling at my side, peeled my underwear down. I was naked now from throat to ankles, my arms still in shirtsleeves, my feet hobbled by trousers and pants, but that seemed to satisfy Pascal.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said, and with lightning speed vaulted over the bed to grab the condoms and lube, which he’d obviously spotted the moment we walked into the room. ‘You are going to fuck me.’

  It wasn’t a question, or an order, more a statement of fact. After a few minutes of playing with my cock, he rolled a condom onto it. His hands were shaking a little.

  ‘Is this your first time, Pascal?’

  He waved his hand a little. ‘I’ve tried a couple of times.’

  ‘Tried?’

  ‘It didn’t work out.’

  ‘OK. Sure you want to do this?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’ From the way he was plastering lube over my cock, he seemed more than sure, but I knew all too well how desire could diminish with the first stab of pain. But he was in peak physical condition, and well able to control his muscles, so I was optimistic. Even if it didn’t work out, I’d get inside him, and see the pain on his face, and that would turn me on too. I wanted to hurt him. Not a particularly nice admission, but lust isn’t nice. Now he was working lube between his buttocks. I watched and waited.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ I held my dick upright. ‘It’s all yours. Think you can take it?’

  He threw one leg over me and sat, his slippery arse making direct contact with the rubber end of my cock. Without breaking eye contact, he took hold of me, aligned me with his hole and, after a deep breath, moved down so the head of my dick entered him. And there he held me, his thigh muscles ridged with tension, his eyebrows drawn, expelling air through his nostrils. One jerk of my hips and I’d have ripped into him, but that was not what either of us wanted. Watching his expression was enough for now—pain and pleasure mixing on his face.

  After a minute he said, ‘OK,’ and lowered himself a little further, until the thickest part of my cock was stretching his hole to the max. Then he screwed up his eyes and sucked the air through his teeth in pain.

  ‘Want to stop?’

  ‘No. Shit. I don’t know. I get this far and then it hurts too much. Look.’ He flopped his cock around—it had gone quite limp and small. ‘What can I do?’

  I was the experienced one now, and I knew that all he had to do was rest, relax, and try again. I lifted him gently off me. He sat on my stomach, breathing hard. ‘It’s OK. We’ll get there. I’m going to fuck you, Pascal, and you’re going to have a great time. First we’re going to get you hard.’

  I reached up and pinched his tits; he gasped, and put his arms behind his head, showing off his pits, the muscles along his ribs, stretching his stomach. Slowly the blood returned to his cock. My hands ran down the swell of his chest, over his abs, and down to his trimmed pubic hair. I wanked him gently, squeezed his balls, ran the tip of my little finger over his hole and just inside, pulling out a long strand of juice. It worked. His cock went from nought to sixty in about thirty seconds, and when I tasted his pre-come, licking my fingers, he reached full hardness. Oh, to be twenty again.

  He was eager, reaching round to feel my cock, checking that I was still hard. No worries there; the thought of being the first man to fuck him right was keeping me as stiff as a pole.

 
‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘When you’re ready. Take it slow.’

  Pascal did as he was told, inching down until he reached the point of pain. Then he stopped. Perhaps this just wasn’t going to happen, and we’d have to do something else . . . but no, he took a couple of deep breaths and then slid right down me. I felt everything open inside him, and instead of shoving my cock into a jar of walnuts, I was suddenly fucking a ripe, juicy melon, or a piece of butter, or velvet, or something. Pascal’s face opened up like his arse, his eyebrows lifting, mouth and eyes widening in a smile as he touched base.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said, unable to believe the feeling. I knew exactly what he was experiencing. I let him become accustomed to the fullness, and then I gently rocked my hips against the floor, setting up a motion that moved my cock around inside him. There was so much pre-come running down his shaft that I thought for a moment he’d come already, but no—Pascal was good to go and ready for the fuck of a lifetime. Nothing ever compares to the first time you get properly, successfully fucked, when you realize that sticking a penis up your arse isn’t just something weird, but gives you access to a whole range of sensations that you never dreamed of. The mental, emotional, and physical experience of being well fucked seems to be kept secret, possibly because if every young man knew just how good it feels, he’d be sitting on the first hard cock he could find instead of dating girls and doing what society expected of him. If Stuart had fucked me the night before I got married, things might have been very different. I’m not saying I didn’t love Angie or that sex with her wasn’t great —but I’m wondering now, as I see Pascal’s face transformed by penetration, watching the juice running down his dick like nectar from a lily, whether I wasn’t really gay all along. I settled for what was offered, what was easier, because I knew no different and didn’t have the courage or the opportunity to explore the alternatives. Maybe it’s different for my kids’ generation—they seem more aware of what’s out there, and there’s less pressure to conform.