This was very clearly not a kiss, but it also wasn’t the opposite of a kiss. I found if I opened my mouth obediently for each new gulp Ray kept his tongue well back, and I didn’t dare to do any exploring of my own. But if I resisted a little, his tongue would play against my mouth until I gave in. Once or twice I was able to taste his tongue, and feel again its warmth through the coldness of the beer.
Watching kissing done in films, I’d always been puzzled that people seemed to close their eyes the moment anything happened. Wasn’t the whole point of the exercise that you could gaze into your lover’s eyes? Now, blindfolded in the middle of my first real drink, something I didn’t want, and the near-kiss I wanted more than anything, I realised that gazing didn’t come into it.
After ten minutes of this I was fainting with pleasure and frustration, and also fairly sloshed. Ray left at one point, it must have been to get another can of beer, and already I was unsure of my whereabouts in space — where the door and windows of the room were. Ray was trying to orient me by touch and taste, in the world of my less developed senses. He was also making me relax, whether I wanted to or not. Obviously I can’t tell how much of the beer went down his throat instead of mine, but I think he only drank enough to keep me company.
There was a time when the small ads in gay papers were very indirect in their suggestions — very circumspect. Now of course you can say absolutely bloody anything. But in between, when you could say so much and no more, there was a time when people referred to O-Levels and A-Levels. Of course they meant Oral and Anal, but when I first saw those ads I honestly thought they were talking about qualifications. It’s a sore point with me. I left school at fifteen, and I’ve got O-levels, and I know I’m not stupid. But it’s not difficult to make me feel as if I am. I didn’t leave school because I’d learned all I wanted to know. I left school because I was short and fat and tired of being bullied.
I’m passionate about education. It’s really important to me, and it’s not something I ever take for granted. When I have a class, my workmates help me out by organising their shifts to fit in. They’re very good about it. They tease me a bit about using long words and always taking a book with me into the cab, but I don’t mind that. My job nickname is Brainiac. It’s fine being teased by people who know you and like you, it’s almost the opposite of the other kind of teasing, the deadly kind you get at school.
Anyway, Ray got me to revise my O-levels for a few minutes, and then he decided it was time for my sexual education to get advanced. He pulled me to my feet and half-dragged, half-lifted me across to the bed. If he’d told me where we were going, I could have made the short trip less awkwardly, but I suppose he wanted me a bit confused, to make me stumble as he used his strength to get me where I was meant to be.
From the moment he shut the door of his flat behind us Ray hadn’t been communicating with me, in the way that people normally communicate. Small talk, big talk, talk that’s in between. He had hardly said a word. You could say, though, that he was teaching me a different, specialised way of communicating. Until now he had been gentle enough, without being exactly considerate. But now there was a change. There was none of the patience he had showed when he was using my mouth.
He chucked me down on the bed. The body I had experienced as decisiveness and strength I now suffered as sheer weight and invasion. He pinned me down. And what had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape. I’d said he could do anything with me. I know that. But some things can’t be consented to. Drunk or sober, no-one could agree to being opened up so fiercely. If he used any lubricant at all he was sparing with it, but I don’t think he did. I wasn’t even entitled to a smear of the candle-grease that his leathers benefited from. He didn’t let me adjust to the insult of his cock, or the rhythm of its hurting.
At some stage I found there was a belt in my mouth. Ray didn’t mean it as a gag — if he’d wanted to silence me he was well able to do it. I bit down on the belt, but it didn’t exactly keep me quiet. Belt or no belt, I made a lot of noise. The next time I saw the dentist, it turned out I’d chipped a tooth, but that could have happened in a number of ways. Eating a peach and crunching the stone by mistake. Gnawing too greedily on the bones when Mum cooked lamb chops.
At least he was quick — and I don’t think he was doing it for pleasure. He made me suffer, but he didn’t feed on my suffering. The way he had been earlier on was much more in character, implacable but not cruel. It’s just that I think this was a special occasion for him. For both of us.
Of course there’s an unromantic part of me that still can’t accept how different he was when he was teaching me to suck cock, and it’s a part that whispers in my ear: If you had a set of teeth up your arse, he’d be gentle there too. But I think it was a sort of ceremony for him. He wasn’t doing it for fun, exactly. There was a reason. He was taking possession.
I’d thought he was going to kill me with his cock, but when I found he hadn’t, after a while I started to cheer up, and to think it hadn’t been too bad, all in all. I’d never looked forward to being fucked, not ever. I’d thought it was all going to be much worse.
Meanwhile Ray had other things in store for me. Before I was allowed to sleep I lost some virginities I didn’t even know I had. He had me doing things I’d never thought of doing, so I’d never thought of myself as someone who hadn’t done them. I licked a boot for the first time, I licked a man’s arse. I was far too surprised to feel any shame. It had never occurred to me that doing these things could be made to mean something.
One thing I really appreciated about Ray’s way of doing things, that night and afterwards, was that he didn’t touch my cock or expect me to play with it. I was glad of that. I’m not a big boy down there, and there’s another thing, which is that my stiffies don’t turn up on any particular schedule. They show up when they want to, usually when there’s no-one around. If I’m shy as a whole person, then my cock is the shyest part of me by far, as well as the part of me that I’m shyest about. It was a relief that Ray treated my cock pretty much as if it didn’t exist.
It sounds incredible, and maybe my memory isn’t up to scratch, but I seem to remember that Ray fucked me again before we slept. The second time may not have come so soon, I don’t see how it could have, but whenever it happened, he took his time and I enjoyed it. The pain had a rhythm and the rhythm was pleasure. Ray never hurt me again. The hurting and the kissing were both over by the end of that first night.
When Ray had gone to sleep, it was already getting light and birds were singing. I could see the belt I’d bitten and the hanky that had covered my eyes on the pillow between us. Ray had black sheets and pillowcases, another thing I’d never seen. If I rolled the sheet down a bit I could also sneak a look at his midsection and compare it to mine. It was hard to believe that they were equivalent parts of similar creatures, from a strict anatomical point of view. The flat curve of his belly. I could even stroke it, softly. The beauty of his breathing and being alive. I could lull myself to sleep by counting the number of sit-ups that would work the miracle and turn my tummy into his, counting down from a billion.