Going Walkabout

“I hate to do it, Jaime, you’re a good worker and know you way around an auto engine—and I like to do my part in helping lads returning from the Falklands. But word’s got around and you have a reputation now that’s hurting my business, so . . .”

That’s what Patrick had said to me at the auto garage in Bishop Cleeve, and I couldn’t fault him on that. I had gained a reputation. I couldn’t help that. It’s what the Navy had let me go for after I’d returned from the Falklands in late spring of the year, 1982. But it had been there, on board the HMS Broadsword, that I had started gaining that reputation, and not just from other sailors but from the older ship’s officers as well. I had, in fact, liked it better from the older officers. I hadn’t gone looking for it. It’s what others had brought me to.

And I had been doing just fine at Oxford, studying creative writing, when the Navy had pulled me out of studies, at twenty, and sent me off to the war with Argentina over islands I’d never heard of. I’d gone willingly. Write what you know and continually expand your experience in what you know, my creative writing tutor had said, so, joining the Navy and learning what was in the South Atlantic was meant to broaden my experience. It just didn’t last long and it gave me experience in something else altogether.

After I was bounced out of the Navy, it was right here to the Cotswolds and Bishop Cleeve I’d come, where my father, a village doctor divorced from the mother who had raised me alone, was in the final stages of dying. Caregiving for my father had given me a chance to be doing something useful while I contemplated what to do next in my turned-over life. Perhaps it would be back to Oxford when my father’s finances were settled after he died.

It took most of the summer for my dad to die. His house immediately went into receivership, the village having had rights to buy it, and I’d moved to Clyde’s farm on the eastern side of the village. Clyde was an older man, a widower, who I had taken up with while taking care of my dad. He wasn’t so old that he didn’t have the itch anymore, and he was well put together enough to still be attractive to a young man who needed attention. He lived alone and in some isolation. I’d met him at a pub, and there’d been no encumbrance in hooking up. Later, I suppose my dad dying and the village seeing I was now living at Clyde Davies’s farm clued them in to what was what, and it was all coming down on me now.

So, here I sat, two months into the summer, and a glorious one it was this year, at a table well away from everyone else, at the Dove and Fox, numbing myself with ale and contemplating the “What next?” I’d rather settled at the farm, helping Clyde with the morning feedings; going into town to work on auto engines, working with engines being a skill I’d picked up on the HMS Broadsword; writing in the evening; and lying under Clyde at night.

“Would you be happy with a bit of company while you drank? I don’t like drinking alone and you look like you could use the company.”

He was old—at least appreciably older than I was, in his late forties or early fifties—graying hair in profusion, both on his head and in a beard. He was stocky, wearing a peacoat, and looking nautical. “They tell me you were in the Navy, down at the Falklands. I was in the Navy too. I know how it is being spit back out onto the land, your life changed. May I sit? I brought you another one.”

And, indeed, he had two mugs in his hands.

“Yes, please, sit with me.” I didn’t see any reason not to be social. He was a good looker.

He sat, introducing himself as Sid Bailey, just passing through from Plymouth to Liverpool to pick up another merchantman. He still went to sea.

“The sea is a lifestyle all its own, as I think you may have found,” he said while we chatted, discussing naval matters and only slightly touching on their current lives. “Things happen at sea to change a man’s life. Don’t you agree, son?”

“Yes, I certainly can agree with that,” I answered. What I had learned at sea, not having even been there long, had changed me completely.

“And a man gets set in his ways and his habits. His needs and his wants.”

“Yes, I suppose,” I answered. “His needs?” I added, beginning to get the reason why he had approached me.

“It’s a long way from Plymouth to Liverpool—a long way to be doing without what he is used to getting on shipboard.”

Ah, yes, I was right about what his interests were and why he was expressing them to me. I wondered who in the village had directed him my way.

“Needs,” I repeated.

“Yes, needs,” the man said. “I am told you are an accommodating young man. That was volunteered when I noted I was a sailor and asked if there were any others about.”

“Accommodating?” I asked. But even as I was asking he was placing a small wad of pound notes on the table near my now-empty mug.

“I hope I haven’t heard wrong,” he said. His other hand had gone under the table and gripped my knee. When I didn’t flinch away from that, the hand moved inward, between my legs on the thigh, just above the knee. I let my legs go slack. I’d already become aroused by the man while we were talking. Clyde wasn’t my whole world. He smiled and moved his hand higher on the inner thigh. My legs spread even more.

“You will need to be direct,” I said. “It won’t do here to make wrong assumptions. We aren’t the big city here.”

“I was told you took cock,” he said. “Is that direct enough for you? It’s been a long haul from one port to the next for me. I’m randy as hell. You’re a right handsome young man. I allow as you must have learned to go under sailors like me during your float down in the South Atlantic. The man who told me you took cock was right scandalized by it. But I wasn’t. I saw it as a stanching of my need. So, what say you? Do I order you another drink and we just say we didn’t click and I walk away, or do you take up that money and we go up to the room I’ve booked here for the night?”

I’d just lost my job and it was over what everyone here in Bishop Cleeve seemed to think I was willing to do for a man. My dad was dead now and I’d done what I’d come to do in Bishop Cleeve. And I’d lost my job and would be completely dependent on a farmer with rough hands who took what he wanted quickly and roughly and then rolled over and started snoring. I’d already contemplated going walkabout. If I did, I’d need some wherewithal to do it. And I’d just lost my job.

His hand under the table had reached my crotch. A finger had run down the line of my shaft through the material of my jeans and had found and was rubbing its cap.

“Need I pull away?” he asked.

“Not unless you wish to,” I answered.

I was hard and he knew I was. I wasn’t pulling away. I was slouched down in the chair, legs spread, vulnerable and nonresisting. He could see that I was slightly trembling. His eyes were boring into mine, dominating and commanding me. He had gauged me for a needy submissive, and he wasn’t wrong. I disengaged eye contact and turned my gaze down to the surface of the table, an act of surrender and we both understood it as such.

“I must tell you that I’m not a whore,” I said, fighting for whatever dignity I could get. “I don’t have a regular or smooth way of approaching this.”

“If you take the money, you’re a whore,” Bailey said. “It’s just for an hour. This isn’t romance or a commitment. I just want to use your body for an hour. You have a very desirable body for use. A whore is what I want. I don’t want to marry you; I just want to fuck you once. I can feel that you want me—you want a man, a sailor, inside you. You want to be used by a sailor again. You don’t have to take the money. You could just come upstairs with me and we could use each other for an hour. But there’s no reason for you not to take the money. You’ve already decided to come upstairs with me. It’s just a matter now if you take money for it or not.”

Shuddering, I stood from the table, picking up the wad of money as I did so. “So, where is this room you’ve booked?” I said.

In the upstairs room, Bailey took off his peacoat and tossed it aside. He wasn’t looking at me when he said, “Strip down, Laddie, and let’s see what we have to work with.” As I stood just inside the door and stripped down, he pulled a Henley shirt over his head and sat down on the end of the bed. “Nice, very nice,” he said when he looked at me standing by the door, naked. “Turn and bend over. Spread your cheeks and let’s have a look at your hole. Yes, yes, good. You’ve been well used haven’t you? Now, come over and go down on your knees to me.”

“I’m not a prostitute,” I murmured.

“I don’t really care what you call yourself as long as you bend over and take my cock,” he answered. “This isn’t any sort of love affair we’re having, Laddie. You don’t have to do anything special for me. Just suck my cock and then lay there and give me your hole.”

He unbuckled himself, pulling the thick leather belt out of his trousers and unbuttoned his fly as I turned, walked over to him, and went down on my knees between his spread legs. He was a compact, muscular man, with a thick matting of salt-and-pepper hair covering his torso and arms and legs. Under the matting was considerable black and blue tattooing on his torso. An engorged, up-curved, thick, but not terribly long shaft pushed up through thick pubic hair. He grasped my head between his hands and forced my face down to his groin, I took his cock into my throat and gave him deep head as I had been taught to do aboard the HMS Broadsword. He grunted his approval and moved my head on and off the cock with the control of his beefy hands.

“There, the Navy taught you to blow a man well,” he said.

Before I could bring him off, he had risen, turned me belly down on the bed but standing on the floor, and was crouched behind me, fondling my cock and balls, milking them, and tonguing my hole. He stroked me and squeezed my balls, with me moaning and writhing under him until I shot my load, which didn’t take long as keyed up as I was by the situation.

He moved on to pleasing himself and using me. He held my head down into the mattress with a grip on the back of my neck with one hand, and he strapped me with the belt on my buttocks, back, and thighs with the other as sailors had often done on HMS Broadsword, his grunts harmonizing with my groans. When I became more vocal from that, he stuffed my smalls in my mouth to keep me quiet, covered me from behind, mounted and penetrated me, and, gripping my wrists in his hands to hold me to the bed, arms over my head, he fucked me hard.

I felt I was in the embrace of a furry beast, and I relaxed in his embrace, concentrating on the sliding of his shaft—not the biggest I’d taken nor as thick as Clyde’s was, but gloriously stretching and taxing anyway—inside my passage. He freed my right hand, which I moved under my belly, working on matching the stroking of my cock with it to the thrusts inside me of his. I came again under my own hand.

He jerked and grunted and filled me, deep with a load of cum. When he’d done so and I’d felt the tension drain out of him, he took up his clothes and went into the small bathroom attached to the room and cleaned himself up. I lay there, panting, regretting the loss of the feel of being enveloped by his muscular, hairy body. When he came out, he was dressed and told me I could use the bathroom and instructed me, “Then leave. We’re done here.” At the door, though, he turned and said, “It was a good lay. It should hold me to Liverpool.”

I had taken the money. He’d made me a rent-boy on land. I’d taken money from a few on the HSM Broadsword, although not many, but this was the first time I’d taken money for sex on land. And that was despite whatever rumors about me floated around in the village.

When I went downstairs, he was in the pub, sitting alone at a table, nursing a mug of ale. He didn’t look up when I passed him and I made no effort to connect with him. I felt slightly ashamed—but only slightly. He’d given me more attention than Clyde did at the farm. If the whole village was going to know about me and censor me for the life I now led, I might as well enjoy it. Even the strapping had made me feel more alive then ever before on dry land.

The barkeep, Archie, called me over to the bar before I could reach the outer door and I assumed he knew what had happened upstairs in his inn and that I was going to be banished from the pub. But that wasn’t the case at all.

“If you be wanting to take another one on, he’s waiting over by the stairs and I’ve told him what room to use,” Archie said. “You’d be doing it for half of this.” He opened his palm to show a wad of pound notes.

“Do another one?” I asked, confused and not keeping up with him.

“Aye, I know what you’ll do for a man. We haven’t had male whore here at the inn for some time—only the girls—but if you wish to be in the business, we have business here for you. We have soldiers and sailors aplenty going through here, and many of them have been trained to want their own by the circumstance of their service.”

It looked like a lot of money, even getting only half of it. The village had already marked me as a male whore and I’d just come downstairs from being a paid whore. I’d lost my job today. I needed the money. It was past time when I could say I wouldn’t be a paid whore for a man.

The man was tall and gaunt. He was maybe in his late forties, balding and gangly looking. He was dressed like a farmer coming in to the village to deliver his produce. His eyes were already undressing me. His need must be great to so openly ogle me and to have the money to spare to fuck me.

His cock was long and this thrust was hard and deep as I lay on my back on the bed and he gripped my legs under my knees, raising and spreading them and rowing them back and forth like the oars on a rowboat in a rhythm that matched the thrusts of his shaft. I took my cock in my hand and worked on coming with him. I was in male whore mode.

Before he left, he told me he’d been a soldier and that had taught him what sort of lay he wanted. So, the barkeep was right about soldiers and sailors.

* * * *

I was lying on my side, my left knee drawn up into my chest, my right hand between my legs, inside the pouch of the jock strap I’d worn to bed, fondling and stroking my cock, while Clyde’s heavy body rode over mine from in back. A muscular arm embraced my chest. His left leg pinned my bent one down, his face was buried in my throat, kissing me there. His thick cock was inside me, languidly stroking, filling and stretching me. I panted and whimpered, filled to full stretch by him. His sex slave. He was old and sour and not much to look like, but when he got me into this position, he was God.

His thrusts were slowing down rather than speeding up. He’d had a tiring day on the farm. I’d avoided him. He’d been too tired and concerned about a cow close to birthing but having complications to speak at supper. I’d thought he would forego sex when we went to bed. But I’d been wrong. It was a question now, though, what would come quickest with him—an ejaculation or sleep.

We’d hardly spoken to each other, each of us possessed by our own cares. I thought for the hundredth time of leaving him. He was just an old, sour, man. We’d sleep separately that night, I decided. I’d just let him stew in his own juices. But as I walked back toward the bedrooms, he hand clamped down on my wrist and he guided me to his bed. And he put me down on the bed, pulling my clothes off me. And he’d held me down on the bed with his powerful body, penetrated me, and fucked me.

I came in the pouch of my jock strap and, with a grunt and a jerk, Clyde came in my ass channel too. He was asleep and snoring less than a minute later, still inside me.

I woke at the usual time in the morning. It was still dark outside and would be for another hour. But Clyde was already up and gone, early even for him. I knew he was fretting about the cow and had called a vet. I didn’t know if that was the only thing he was fretting over, though. Other than the sex last night, performed to silence, he had avoided me as much as I had him. Had he heard already that I’d done it for money for two men at the Dove and the Fox? He’d surely learn of it, though. Would he throw me out when he learned I’d been not just a lay for men in the village but a paid whore for them as well?

He barebacked me. Would that, at least, change when he knew I was doing it for money at the Dove and the Fox?

I hadn’t struck any sort of a deal with Archie. After the second man, he’d asked me about doing it on a regular basis. “There are men enough around who would be interested in fucking a strapping young man like you,” he said, “and we get pass-through trade with the itch for it too. You’re a handsome young man. There will be trade enough of men wanting to ride you.”

I couldn’t see Clyde putting up with that or my having any sort of welcome in Bishop Cleeve if I did that, though. I didn’t give Archie an answer. I didn’t really think this was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write and I enjoyed the engine mechanics. When my dad’s estate was settled, I could go back to the university—someplace that didn’t know me as the village male whore. But until then . . .

When I went to the kitchen, I saw that Clyde already had had his breakfast. The sound of an approaching vehicle pulled me to the window and I saw that the vet had arrived. He spoke with Clyde beside the cow shed for a few minutes while I chewed my toast and drank coffee at the window, and then they went inside. I was itching to get outside but I didn’t want to encounter Clyde, especially if the vet was there. The vet was a very conservative man too, so I didn’t want him see Clyde and me together at all. Clyde didn’t mind my living with him and him getting his sex off me regularly, but I knew he was sensitive to what those in the village, including the vet, had to say about that.

I left the house and headed in the other direction, deciding to take a short walkabout that would help me clear my head and prepare myself for near-term decisions. The late summer weather was glorious, every direction I looked in returned a painting of beauty. If Clyde threw me out, I guess that settled what I’d tell Archie at the Dove and Fox to hold me until my dad’s estate was settled. Archie had said I could work and room at the pub as well as service men if I needed a place to stay.

I was beginning to wonder if Archie wanted me too, and just didn’t know how to ask. If it came to where the Dove and the Fox was my best option until my dad’s estate settled, I guess I could go under Archie. Did that make me a common whore? I didn’t really want to answer that.

My walk took me up to the top of nearby Cleeve Hill, the highest point both of the Cotswolds hill range and of the county of Gloucestershire, from which I could look down into the surrounding countryside. The late summer weather was warm. The views were breathtaking. As I stood up there, two young men, outfitted as hikers, came up to stand near me to enjoy the view. They were both handsome and fit young men of about my age and they nodded and smiled at me. I smiled back. I wasn’t surprised to see hikers here. A couple of walking tour journeys had been established for hikers to enjoy the Cotswolds at their leisure. Bishops Cleeve was on a section know as the northern section of Cotswold Way, and Cleeve Hill was a feature of that walk.

The way the two young men related to each other and touched told me that they were lovers, which was fine with me. I didn’t feel so alone in the world. I briefly thought of how lucky they were to be on this hike together and enjoying the Cotswolds and each other. I was envious. They were being more comfortable with their relationship than I was with the same lifestyle. They didn’t seem to care if I knew they were lovers or not. Something in the way we smiled at each other seemed to make them comfortable with who and what I was.

When they moved back down the hill and disappeared on the path in a stand of trees, I remained for a few minutes at the top of the hill. I heard them, though, as I was coming down off the heights. They were in the bushes in the stand of trees I’d seen them enter. Their shorts and briefs were off. One was on his back, his hands encasing the waist of the other, as the young man on top rode the bottom’s cock, rising and falling vigorously, and calling out the passion-pleasure of their coupling. The one on the bottom was hitting the other one in the chest with his fist and reached up and slapped the man on top sharply, first one way and then the other. This didn’t seem to faze the young man on top. He laughed and rode the cock all that more vigorously.

I stood there, within their sight, if they wished to acknowledge my presence, but they were so into each other that they weren’t bothering to look. I envied them their pleasure and didn’t rush to walk away from observing them.

While I watched, I became aware that I wasn’t the only one observing. Another man, higher on the path, who apparently had been somewhere near the top of Cleeve Hill when I’d been there, although I hadn’t seen him before, was also watching from a short distance. He wasn’t just looking at the fucking pair, though, he was looking at me too.

He was a fit-looking man of forty or so. He was too far away from me to see well, but he appeared to be handsome enough, robust, and to have a head of sandy-red hair. He looked vaguely familiar to me, but from this distance I could not see him well enough to consider where I might have seen him before. He was expensively dressed in tweeds and was carrying a walking stick and wore sturdy hiking boots. I surmised that he had been on the Cotswold northern section hike as well as the young men had been and, perhaps, had been following them with the hope of observing them doing what they were doing now.

His presence broke the spell of the moment, and I turned back to the path down toward Bishop Cleeve and Clyde’s farm. As I walked, though, I had the sensation of someone following me, and when I turned my head, I saw that the man hadn’t remained, watching the fucking pair, but was behind me. He followed me all of the way down from Cleeve Hill and along the narrow road bordered by hedgerows back to Clyde’s farm. When I turned into the farm, I held up by a stone fence where I could observe the road without being seen. The man passed by without turning into the farm road. He had come a little closer to me than he had been on the hill and following me down, and I sustained the thought that I’d seen him somewhere before, but I still couldn’t place him. He did register as handsome, though, with rugged good looks. I was aroused by older, fit men, and I had to admit that he aroused me.

Seeing the hikers on Cleeve Hill and how open and free they appeared to be in their sexuality put the bug in my mind to distance myself from the situation in Bishops Cleeve for a while to make some near-term plans. Clyde might throw me out, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. He wasn’t a long-term solution for me. I didn’t really want to live on a farm and work there. I didn’t really want Clyde and his simplistic, simply animal relief approach to sex. If I was going to go with men, I wanted it to have passion and testing in it. The dominating hairy sailor, with his belt lashings, and even the gaunt man who followed him with his rowing of my legs to the beat of his vigorous thrusts were more satisfying than anything I got from Clyde.

The vet was still there, and the two were still in the cow shed when I arrived back at the farmhouse. The sounds of the cow’s pained mooing from the shed indicated that they’d be there for some time still. I needed to break out, to get someplace where I could think.

I decided to take the Cotswolds Way northern section hike myself for a few days. There was no time of the year better to do it than this. I changed to hiking clothes, packed a rucksack, left a note for Clyde that I’d gone walkabout for a few days, and left the farm, cutting across country to pick up the northern section pathway, headed northeast toward Winchcombe, some five miles away, where I would stop for lunch.

Already, as I walked away from Bishops Cleeve, I was feeling more freedom and less stress.

* * * *

I had walked something more than a mile toward Winchcombe from Bishops Cleeve, enjoying the warm, sunny July morning and beginning to organize my thoughts on my current situation and opportunities when I became aware of him—the red-haired, robust man in his forties—following me at a distance. He was still in hiking tweeds, with a walking stick and sturdy boots, but now he had a rucksack on his back. He, like me, was out for a long walkabout and was on the same pathway as I was, but he continued to hang back at a distance.

Oddly enough, I didn’t feel threatened by his hovering presence. He seemed to be an attractive, fit man. I assessed all men I encountered for their sexual possibility, having done so secretly for years, and this man was intriguing. He wasn’t coming close enough to me to be threatening, and if attacking me was his intent, he’d had plenty of opportunity in the last mile of walk to have done so.

His presence there behind me cut into the feeling that I was alone. I lessened my pace, assuming he would catch up with me—and possibly just pass on beyond me, nodding his head, to show that he was just hiking the Cotswold Way northern sector, as I was. But when my pace lessened, so did his. He kept at nearly the same distance behind me no matter my pace, so I picked it up again, wanting to visit Sudley Castle, the resting place of Henry VIII’s last queen, Catherine Parr, before lunching in Winchcombe.

One thing the man’s hovering presence did for me was to change my thinking from my situation and what to do about it to the man, and it was while thinking about him and I fancied that my thought of having seen him before was that, now that I focused on it, I thought he’d been in the Dove and the Fox the previous day when the sailor had taking me to his room above. But even so—and the more I thought about it the more I convinced myself it was so—there seemed to something more than that in my memory about such a man.

If he had seen the sailor take me upstairs at the pub, maybe he knew what I’d do for a man and was following me for that reason. Maybe he wanted to cover me as well, which would be quite all right with me. It made me consider him all the more as a possible dominator. The thought added pleasuring thoughts as I walked—and he followed.

I did tour Sudley Castle and visit Catherine Parr’s tomb when circling around east of Winchcombe. I looked for him as I walked through the castle gardens, but I didn’t see him. It was almost a disappointment not to have done so. Nor was he in sight when I stopped at the Cock of the Walk pub in the town for lunch.

He was there again, though, a good distance behind me, walking at whatever pace I set, when I exited the town to the northeast and stopped to visit the Hailes Abbey ruins. He didn’t come into the ruins—at least not anywhere within my sight. It was becoming quite a mystery for me, and that—the thought of a mysterious stranger—was what suddenly lit the bulb over my head. That was what a story I’d written was titled—“The Mysterious Stranger”—and it was about a similar situation. A man pops into a young man’s thoughts, first as a possible threat and then a conundrum and, finally, a yearning, as the older man appears to the younger one, constantly hovering there but not coming forward. In the end, the young man is obsessing about the older one—who he was and what he wanted.

I didn’t wish to obsess over this man, although he’d taken over my thoughts when I had intended for this walkabout to be a catalyst for planning my future. But the mystery of who he was was solved in a flash even if why he was following me wasn’t solved. Thinking of the story I’d written surfaced the reading at the Bishops Cleeve bookstore I’d gone to to relieve the tedium of watching my father die. The reading had been done by a novelist, Forrest Adams, who was on a writing sabbatical in the village. He was a handsome, red-haired, robust man in his forties. It occurred to me that he was the man who was now following me on the northern sector trail. Our eyes had met at the reading and some form of mutual recognition had gone between us. At the time, I thought it was related to writing, and I had built u[ the courage to talk to him briefly afterward and ask him if he’d read something of mine and comment on it. He said he would. That something was the “The Mysterious Stranger” short story. I gave him a copy, but I hadn’t heard from him subsequently.

And here he was, following me along the Cotswold Way hiking trail.

I thought back on the story, wondering if somehow in the writing of it I had revealed my preferences for men. I couldn’t decide whether or not I had.

I looked for him when I left the abbey and set out on the final, six-mile hike of the day to the lodging I’d picked out for the night between Wood Stanway and Stanton. Sure enough, he’d picked up on me again outside the abbey and accompanied me all the way to the countryside inn and pub, the Dancing Boar. Seeing him again gave me a sense of both comfort and arousal. I was entering a submissive mode that I took on when I was with older men who covered me. I relaxed and gave over control and decision making to the man, leaving it to him to enfold, embrace, and possess and use me.

He was coming for me. Surely he was coming for me.

Now that I knew who he was and that our eyes had met in some sort of recognition, my heart was racing, I was feeling randy, and I couldn’t think of anything beyond him—what he looked like in the nude, what he would do in lovemaking in bed. How big was he built? I thought of that without embarrassment. I wanted to be possessed—to be stretched. It was almost a feeling of loss that swept over me as I walked through Stanway and couldn’t see him behind me. Was he only going this far for the night? When I had checked, there didn’t seem to be any more inns in the area for the Cotswold Way hikers than the one I had picked out, the Dancing Boar, but maybe he’d known of one in Stanway.

It was fretting for naught. When I reached the Dancing Boar, he already was there, in the pub, sitting near the fireplace, with a mug of ale before him. Doing my best not to acknowledge or to go directly to him, I went to the bar and engaged a room for the night and ordered a mug of ale. What if I was wrong? What if his trailing behind me and being here at the same inn where I would be spending the night was all happenstance? How embarrassed would I be if I approached him only to find out he had no intentions toward me at all—that he wasn’t even the novelist Forrest Adams?

But none of that was the case. “The man over there has already paid for your drink,” the barkeep said. “He did that when he signed in for a room. He said you would be along shortly, and here you are.”

I turned and nodded to Adams, my being sure now that he was Forrest Adams and we’d met and had knowing eye contact before, and he nodded back. I drank my ale, picked up my rucksack, and went out into the hallway and to the foot of the stairs. I had only mounted two stairs when I felt him there, close behind me and then beside me. He put a hand possessively on one of my butt cheeks as we mounted the stairs. I felt his hot breath on my throat, and he whispered in my ear, “I know you go under men. I want to fuck you. Will you give it to me?”

“Yes,” I answered.

* * * *

The first time we fucked was immediately upon entering his room, with little preparation other than our day of buildup on the hiking. We went at each other gloriously like wild animals in rut. We’d done all the foreplay we needed to do on the hike through the Cotswolds. We didn’t even fully undress, and the coupling was so insistent that we both came quickly. I was on my back on the foot of the bed, boots and shorts and briefs off, but with T-shirt still on, the front hem pulled over my head, with my chest exposed to his nipping teeth.

Forrest was standing on the floor between my spread legs, trousers unbelted and unbuckled, fly faired open, briefs waistband hook under his balls, hiking boots still on, and shirt on, but unbuttoned and flared. He had his arms embracing my chest tightly, and he was inside me, grunting and thrusting. My heels were pressed into his calves and my hands had run under the material of his trousers and briefs behind and were clutching, squeezing, and pulling his butt checks into me in the rhythm of the wild fuck.

He was licking and chewing on my nipples as I arched my back and head and cried out, “Yes, yes. Screw me! Fuck the hell out of me! You’re a stud!”

He was a stud. And he did just that—fucked the hell out of me—to a quick ejaculation from his both.

He said nothing as we fucked and other than exclamations of being taken hard and gloriously. I said nothing either. Nothing had been said after his statement of intent and mine of acquiescence on the stairs. Nothing was said by Forrest in the second fuck either. We weren’t going to do anything to explain any of this until we’d both been drained of animal lust.

After the first time, he pulled off and away from me and stood five feet from the foot of the bed, his eyes focused on me, as I moved my body fully up onto the bed on my back. I pulled the T-shirt over my head and lay flat, propping my head up on two pillows so I could see him clearly at the foot of the bed, a hand gripping his still half-hard, thick cock, the cock haloed in a bush of red, curly hair. Panting hard, giving him what I knew was a wild “fuck me again” look, I took another pillow and stuffed it under the small of my back, lifting and rolling up my pelvis. I spread and bent my legs, placing my feet flat on the mattress. With my thighs spread I was giving him a great shot of my hole and the effect he’d already had there. The hole was dilated and his cum was dribbling out of it. I lifted and fondled my balls with one hand while stroking my cock up again with the other and giving him another “fuck me again” look.

There was no question I was inviting him to have his way with me again.

We were eyeing each other, both still panting from the feverish coupling, cooling down and revving up again. He stood at the end of the bed, pulling off his boots, trousers, briefs, and shirt. He posed in a bit of a crouch, cupping his balls and the root of his reengorging cock. He was solid, compact, and muscular. His complexion was ruddy, and he was hirsute, his hair changing color as it descended his body. The curly mop on top being sandy-red, the swirls of curls around his pecs and on the line running down the split of his chest to his pubes a redder tone, and his bush flaming red.

We held pose for a few minutes, each of us working ourselves stiff again, the eyes of each of us on the erection of the other. Then, slowly, he moved toward the bed as I arched my back, moaned, and whispered, “Yes, yes. Fuck me again. Use me. Make me feel it.”

He didn’t do so right away. Reaching the foot of the bed, he leaned over, ran his arms under my knees, and pulled me toward him. His head dipped, and I gasped and groaned as he took my cock in his mouth and gave me head. Periodically, as I writhed under him, murmuring, “Fuck. Shit. Yes. Shit. Fuck,” and held his head between my hands, his mouth went to my balls, sucking them in and driving me wild from the vibration of his humming and sucking. The mouth moved lower and he ate my ass out, as I rocked against him, took my cock in hand again, and stroked myself to another ejaculation.

My coming prompted him to move up onto the bed on his knees and to turn me over onto my stomach. I raised my arms and grasped the rungs of the brass headboard overhead as he ran an arm under my belly, raised me up on my knees, mounted me from above and behind, penetrated, and fucked me to his own second release.

We stretched out alongside each other on the bed then, exploring each other’s bodies with our hands and our mouths, until we both slept. When I woke it was dark outside. Forrest was gone. The bedside light was on and under it, laying on the nightstand, were the manuscript of the “The Mysterious Stranger” I’d given him to read and a wad of pound notes.

The manuscript was annotated in red ink. It was heavily marked up, giving me the initial misgiving that he had found it to be crap. But that wasn’t the case. There were a lot of technical notes, yes, but some of the comments were praise and all of them were helpful. On the cover, he’d written the words, “needing,” “sensual,” “seeking” and the phrases “strong writing” and “shows great promise.”

And the greatest compliment of all was that he had sought me out and given me what he thought the short story indicated that I needed. I couldn’t say he was wrong.

He wasn’t in the pub for supper and he didn’t appear to me that evening. I could have sought his room out, but I was afraid that maybe he hadn’t stayed in the inn—that he had gotten what he wanted from me and that, perhaps, it wasn’t as good as he had expected it to be.

Regardless, he had taken great care of me sexually and, almost as important, had left me notes on my manuscript that gave me valuable guidance and hope for a desired future I’d been unsure of. I was far less unsure now. I went to sleep with a bit of regret that Forrest Adams wasn’t in bed beside me, but grateful for what he had given me—even if he had now walked out of my life again.

* * * *

I looked around for Adams both inside and outside of the inn when I came down the next morning for breakfast, but I didn’t see him. When I checked with the barkeep, he opened the reservations book and said that Adams had already breakfasted and left. I felt deflated and sad. It was a new sensation for me. Never before had I felt the need to be with someone that I did now. I’d always been very independent. I realized now that I’d also always been lonely.

It had been a pleasant encounter and he’d returned my manuscript, giving me hope and direction on my writing. One comment explicitly explained it all to me.

“You need the experience you write about,” it said. “You almost have it, but not quite. You need to be fucked by a man who will take you totally.”

He had given me the fuck he said I needed. He’d taught me something in this way of delivering his critique. I’d just written words in the story, only half way being able to convey what I was trying to express and how. By putting experience to it in being my man of mystery, following me here, and silently taking me as he had, he had brought the emotions I’d had in writing the story vividly to life. I thanked him for that. I couldn’t expect him to hang around for more.

But the sex had been really, really good.

After breakfast and having my coffee thermos refilled, I started off in the increasingly warm day for the next stop on the Cotswold Way northern section route, the village of Broadway, some six miles distant.

A mile and a half into the walk, Forrest Adams fell into step beside me and we were walking together. My emotions lifted. I’d been afraid that he was finished with me, having told me what he thought I needed to further develop my writing and then having provided it. I was afraid that had been the end to it. Whereas before I set the pace and he had been meeting my pace some distance behind me, we both recognized now that he was master and I was slave and I deferred to him on the pace.

“Are you all right?” he asked, initiating the conversation as we walked. We were on an old Roman road running between rolling hills of wheat fields and meadows dotted with sheep, near the village of Liverton. “Were you all right with that?”

“Yes, it was fine. I didn’t realize that was what I was writing about. Thank you for bringing that to life . . . and for reading and commenting on my short story. That was very helpful.”

“You will be a fine writer, Jaime,” he said, “but the sex. The fuck. Was that—?”

“That was great,” I said.

“But I get the impression it might have been a bit tame for you. You were in the Falklands. In the Navy. Is that where you were initiated?”

“Yes.”

“The sailors. Some of them were rough with you, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“But you were fine with being controlled and manhandled and taken hard.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“I think you would like to write directly about that—about rough sex that’s been had on you. You want to get the experience down in stories, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But there isn’t a market for that.”

“Yes, there is. I will direct you to it.” We walked in silence for a bit before he addressed me again. “The other day, when I saw you on Cleeve Hill. You were watching two young men fuck. They were doing it with abandon and vigor. It got a little rough, although that seemed fine with both of them. You lingered to watch and I could see that you were aroused. You were attracted to doing it outside and rough, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose I was.”

“Do you think I came to you and covered you last night just to give substance to what I was critiquing your short story about? Do you think it was just part of a lesson?”

“Well, I didn’t know what to think about that.” In truth I hadn’t thought anything about it. It was all just so . . . so overpowering.

“I came on to you because I wanted to fuck you from seeing you at the book reading I’d done in Bishops Cleeve and even more so when finding out about you revealed you took cock from men. Your short story just told me how badly you wanted it. But I could see in what you wrote that you felt constrained. You’re an excellent writer, Jaime. You need to write without constraint—with abandon and vigor.”

He let that sinking is as we walked a bit further, before he spoke again. “See that tree over there, in the wheat field—the one rising up from just over that hillock?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Walk over there, through the wheat field. Strip as you do so. Be naked and lying under the tree over the rise when I reach you.”

“You want me to—?”

“I want you to do what I tell you to do. You are a submissive. You want to be told what to do. Do it. I will take you hard this time. It’s what you want. It’s what you want to write about.”

I did as he demanded. The wheat was at its tallest, nearly four-feet tall, not far from the summer harvest. I pulled my T-shirt over my head, slipping the rucksack off my shoulders and dangled it from a wrist as I walked. I unbuckled and unzipped my shorts and had pulled them off my legs by the time, naked, I reached the tree. Lying down in the shadow of the tree, protected from sight of the Roman road by the dip in the hillock, I lay on my back between the roots of the tree, spreading and bending my legs, digging the pads of my feet into the moist soil and lifting my pelvis up.

I was grasping my cock with one hand, panting, and raising my other arm, holding onto the trunk of the tree with the other when Adams appeared, naked, and carrying his clothes and rucksack in his hand. He was fisting his engorging shaft in the other.

“Yes, yes, fuck me,” I called out as he sank down on his knees between my spread thighs and hovered over me. He slapped me across the face, one way and then back the other, snapping my head from one side to the other.

“Fuck! Shit!” I cried out and then was gurgling as he gripped my throat with his hand and started controlling my breathing. The fingers of the other hand penetrate my ass and he immediately started opening me up as I gurgled, clutched ineffectively at the wrist the hand he was choking me with my hands, and worked his fingers in my anal channel.

“Stop resisting,” he said, taking his hand on my throat long enough to slap me again. He reached into his bag and came up with wrist restraints on a cord. He bound me with my arms raised above my head and the cord around the base of the tree, imprisoning and immobilizing my arms. He popped a ball gag in my mouth and I became completely his to do what he wanted with me.

The hand went back to gripping my throat and the fingers of the other penetrating my ass passage again. They found and stroked my prostate, sending me to heaven. I relaxed, found a rhythm in taking breaths in the pattern of his gripping and release on my throat, and rocked against the hand at my ass.

When I came for him, he pulled his hand out of my ass, snaked his arm under my waist, raising my pelvis to him, penetrated with his cock, and fucked me. He positioned my ankles on his shoulders and he fucked me in this position for several minutes. After a while, though, he withdrew, turned me, gasping and groaning, on my belly, raised me to my knees.

I lurched and jerked as he struck me repeatedly, hard on my buttocks. I screamed into my ball gag when he took his belt, folded it over, and struck me several times on the back, buttocks, and thighs with one hand while reaching under my belly with the other and squeezing my balls and milking my cock.

He mounted me high on top and from behind and thrust up inside me. This time he concentrated on working my prostate, slamming on it again and again with the head of his cock, making me jerk and bite into the ball gag with each hit as I writhed under him. I came a second time from his working my prostate with his dick and stroking of my cock with his hand. He relentless fucked me to his own tensing, jerking, and spurting climax.

It was a glorious fuck. To his, “I think that’s the way you like it best” statement, I had nothing in opposition to say. A tumble of words that would express on paper what I was feeling—alive and totally taken—raced through my mind as he fucked me.

* * * *

We stopped for lunch at the Whistling Hen pub in Broadway. We took our plowman’s sandwiches and mugs of ale out into the pub’s garden. It was a beautiful late summer’s day. I was on top of the world. I hadn’t thought about my circumstance—what had brought me on this walkabout—for over a day, having become obsessed with both the mystery of a man following me and then with what he did with and to me when he had captured me.

I kept looking around at other people in the garden, thinking, Don’t you know that this is the man who owns me, the man who beat and totally fucked me, the man who is my master and I his sex slave? But, of course, they knew no such thing about us.

“You left Bishop Cleeve abruptly,” Adams said, as we sat under the sun and ate our lunch. The sex had given me quite an appetite. It also had made me feel tingly all over, sensitive to the touch of the sun and of Adams and had me blushing as well when a stout man sitting at another table gave me a lascivious look and popped his tongue in his mouth. Did he know what I’d just been doing with Adams—what I’d let the man do to me and had reveled in it? Adams noticed the man ogling me. He laughed, cupped the back of my head with a hand and brought our faces together for a deep kiss. When he pulled away, I saw the man’s eyes bugging out. He hadn’t turned away; he obviously was aroused. Adams’s touching and kissing had told him what I would do for an older man. And he was interested.

“If you went with that man, a stranger, and did for him whatever he wanted without knowing more than that he’s showing he wants you, you could write a smashing story,” Adams said.

“He’s not much to look at,” I said, skeptically.

“That’s the major point,” Adams said. “It’s easy enough to write about going under a handsome man, but consider the thought that has to go into seeing an obsession that is needed for a handsome young man like you to willingly put himself into the controlling hands of a cruel, ogrish fellow and give him all he demands. And this man here isn’t exactly an ogre. He just isn’t in your league. He shouldn’t expect to be able to use you like you could let him do. Look at him. Imagine him binding you and whipping you and then fucking you.”

“Yes, I see that now,” I answered. I gave the man a smile and he almost dropped his teeth. He wasn’t an ugly man; he was just a bit squat and carrying too much poundage.

“I had come out to the farm you’re living at to make contact with you,” Adams then said. “And I saw you leave and go up to the hill and then observe those two young men having sex. You seem to be in some sort of crisis. I also saw you go with the two men at the pub in Bishop Cleeve the day before. I’d tracked you down there to return your manuscript and talk to you about it. And now you abruptly are going on a long walkabout. You seem to be in some sort of sexual turmoil.”

“I guess I am,” I answered.

“Perhaps I could help you with that.”

“You already have—you are,” I answered.

“By having sex with you? By taking my pleasure on you?”

“Yes.”

“So, it’s not just having the sex with another man—even an older stranger—that is giving you pause.”

We both looked at the man at the other table. He had turned sideways toward us, and dropped his hand to in front of his crotch. I almost laughed. In the Navy that had been a sure come-on sign. I wondered if this man had once been a sailor.

“No. I guess would has my life paused is in having the whole village know I am like this and what I will do—what I seem to need to do. And, I guess, the situation at the farm—with Clyde. I don’t see that going much of anywhere.”

“And the village just knows that you take cock, not that you crave to take it roughly,” Adams said.

“Yes, I guess that’s so.”

“You are just in Bishop Cleeve to settle on your father, aren’t you? And now he’s gone. You aren’t wedded to that village in any way. You could go wherever you like. You were pulled out of Oxford to go the Navy and the Falklands, weren’t you? You could return there and resume your studies. You have writing talent. You may have other interests too.”

“I learned engine maintenance in the Navy,” I said. “But I worry that that—”

“There’s nothing demeaning in being an auto engine mechanic, Jaime. And you have the writing interest to go with that. All you need is to gather experiences to write about.”

“I’ve certainly been gathering those in the last few days,” I said, with a laugh.

“Yes, you have. And they are valuable experiences for writing. You could use more casual and impromptu experiences. Like that man over there.”

We both smiled at him again and he smiled back.

“I was going walkabout to decide what to do now,” I said. “My father’s estate isn’t settled. I have no means of support until it is. I don’t think I can live off Clyde much longer, and I’ve lost my job—and the whole village is opposing me.”

“Not the whole village,” Adams said. “I heard the barman at the Dove and Fox tell you that there is a big enough trade in Bishop Cleeve—men who don’t censure what you’ll do for them—to keep you in business. You could do that until your father’s estate comes in. Or you have another option.”

“What is that?”

“I live near Oxford. You could go back to the village and settle out there for now. You have your father’s house to live in. You could leave Clyde. But you could just gather your things up and come live with me in Oxford until you gain your father’s estate. Then you could do as you please. You could even work in an auto garage in Oxford as you wish. And you could return to your studies. Living with me, I could mentor you in your writing.”

“Would that really do me any good?” I asked. “You have shown how easily I go under a man’s control. Would going with you be any different than staying with Clyde?”

“What is your fear with staying with Clyde when there are other men in the village after you and getting you too? It’s that he will find out and just chuck you out, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“And you are afraid that I would jealously control and monopolize you too?”

“Yes, I guess.”

“Going with men for money isn’t your problem, is it? Encounters with strangers? Cruel and demanding strangers. That actually excites and arouses you?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

“Just a minute then,” Adams said. He rose from the table and went to the man who had been ogling me and spoke with him. The man smiled and pulled out his wallet and produced a wad of pound notes. Adams came back to our table. “If you came with me to Oxford, I would cover you regularly, yes, but I would not stand in the way of who else you wanted to lie under. I wouldn’t be jealous. I like to watch. This man will take you upstairs and you will be his paid whore. And I will be happy to watch. If you come to Oxford with me, and you have an itch to go with a stranger for pay, I will help you hook up with strangers who will pay you for sex.”

And that’s what happened. The man already had rented a room at the Whistling Hen. We went to it and I lay on my back, naked, and I opened my legs to him as he ran his hands up my inner thighs. And I turned my face to the man sitting in a chair with his cock out, stroking it and smiling at me—the man I would go to Oxford with and who would mentor me in my writing. And while I watched Forrest Adams and Forrest Adams watched me, the stocky man, a stranger I didn’t even know the name of but who was paying me for my body, nudged in between my thighs, mounted, penetrated, and fucked me. I was being a male whore for a stranger for pay—and that was quite fine with me.

And it was all good. I hadn’t really had to use this walkabout to come up with a solution to my future—the solution had come to me.

“Were you in the Navy?” I asked him as he was preparing to mount me.

“Why, yes, yes I was,” he said.

“Can you be as cruel as a sailor? Do you know the Flying Dutchman position?”

He smiled. He was cruel, and he did know that demanding position.