Simon Sheppard: Best Gay Erotica 2012

I said I had no problem with it, and I didn’t. When a drink is free a drink is free, and in my room I had nothing of an alcoholic nature to offer at all. We left it at one glass each (it was nearly as sweet as cough syrup) and I returned to my own room next door for the night. I didn’t leave him completely though, or perhaps it’s truer to say that he didn’t leave me. I christened my new room, and my new bed in it, by rubbing my little self to a state of sticky wetness against the bottom sheet. I found myself thinking of Luke while this was going on and—unlike a year ago when, if I’d found myself thinking of him or any other boy, I would probably have tried to push the thought away—indulged the idea without qualm all the way through to the exercise’s inevitable, enjoyable, explosive conclusion.

Presumably as a result of what—or who—my fantasies were feeding on, I pretty well flooded the bed. Surveying the damage the next morning I wondered whether the jam-jar expedient might be called for in future, after all. More practically, pragmatically, I took to laying a small towel across the middle section of the sheet from then on.

Over the next few days Luke and I saw plenty of each other. Living in adjacent rooms as we did, it was the most natural thing in the world to look in on each other on returning from a lecture, say, and drink a coffee together, idling away bits of day, or evening, when we should in theory have been researching our essays, reading books or even—heaven help us—getting words down on paper: essays to be handed in. We went out to pubs together, the Yellow Carvel perhaps, or Ryrie’s Bar, sometimes with other friends but often just the two of us: we found we were quite content with each other’s company. Before bed we’d sometimes have a late-night drink in either my bedroom or Luke’s. (The Dubonnet was finished, mercifully; we had both stocked up with a proper bottle of scotch.) We’d put the world to rights on those evenings, talking politics and world affairs (I was reading politics, Luke geography: we had plenty to say.) We also talked about ourselves, our hopes, our tastes in books and films, all those normal topics. One subject was noticeably absent from our discussions, though: the subject of girls, and sex.

Whenever I went back to my room after one of our late whiskey talks I always made myself come, once I’d got to bed, in my tried and tested way. But now it was a more regular thing, an essential part of my routine, and always, always, now it was with thoughts of Luke. I sometimes wondered if Luke was doing something similar next door. In fact I was pretty sure he was, since it was something all boys did and he certainly had no girlfriend. I presumed he used his elfin hand for the purpose, and managed quite easily to picture him doing this. What I didn’t dare to imagine was that he might be thinking of me, strapping red-haired Rufus, as he stroked himself. That would have been a narcissistic step too far. Even so, I knew he liked me, as much as I liked him, and was growing to like me even better by the day. But in that way? I didn’t allow myself to imagine that.

Sometimes even Edinburgh can deliver an autumn day that is positively hot. One of those days occurred in the second week of that term. After breakfast I had some reading to do, but before settling down to it I decided I would change into a pair of shorts. I hadn’t brought rugby shorts up with me for the start of this second year. I knew that I didn’t want to play again, and having no kit to wear would be quite a good answer to anyone who tried to wheedle me back onto the team. I had, though, the lightweight, brief white pair of shorts that I’d used back in schooldays for gym. I stopped for a moment before I put them on, and decided, just for the hell of it, to take my underpants off first. I liked the feeling of my cock and balls inside nothing except those lightweight shorts, half free but half confined. As I said, the day was hot. And then I got down to what I was supposed to be doing, sitting reading at my desk and making notes, dressed in those shorts, a very skimpy short-sleeved blue shirt that I didn’t bother to do up and nothing else. No socks, no shoes.

After a couple of hours of reading I began to feel, well—ready to do something with my cock, rub it against the wall perhaps, encouraged by my semi-undressed state. I was just beginning to think about doing this when I heard my neighbor’s door open and then shut again. Luke had returned from a lecture. I sat still, trying to imagine what Luke was doing now in the privacy of the room next door. Not rubbing his cock up and down against the wall, I guessed, but then, you never knew. I decided to call on him. There was nothing new in that by now. The only different thing was the way I was dressed.

And the way he was, I quickly discovered. I’d knocked at his door and walked right in, without waiting for an invitation, as he and I now always did. And there he stood, in the middle of the room, having just emerged from his bathroom, I think, wearing similar white gym shorts and nothing else, not even a shirt. I couldn’t speak. He looked so stunning that words were temporarily strangers to my mouth.

Then he grinned, said, “Have a coffee,” and I said, “Yes.” We made no reference to the exceptional way in which we were both dressed, or what a coincidence it was that we were both attired this way, or even to the unseasonable warmth of the day. We sat opposite each other in his two armchairs, drinking our milky brew, talking about inconsequential nothings that we wouldn’t remember even five minutes afterward, and looking at each other. We didn’t try to hide that, at least. We just looked, and looked.

Luke was small, about five foot three, but in his own small way as muscular as me, with neat, nicely developed pecs, biceps and thighs, hard calves and a stomach as flat as a board. Two fans of dark hair spread across his chest. They met at the bottom of his rib cage and spindled to a single line of hair, very neat and, except for a tiny detour round his navel, very straight. Finally that line of hair dived teasingly behind the waistband of his shorts, leading to… Well, perhaps I would never know.

“No wonder you’re called Rufus,” Luke said. He too was seeing my chest hair for the first time. Like the hair on my head it resembles, in color at any rate, a copper wire brush that is spanking clean and new.

“My parents didn’t call me that,” I said. You’d have to be pretty prescient to guess what color a newborn baby’s hair is going to be. “I’m really William, but I’ve almost forgotten the fact, I suppose. There was a king of England called William Rufus, wasn’t there?” We’re a bit hazy on English kings up here in Scotland. They teach us all the Scottish ones, but they whiz through the ones south of the border a bit quickly until 1603.

We were sitting with our legs spread ostentatiously wide apart. I felt pretty sure by now that Luke was feeling as sexually charged up as I was, but I still couldn’t be certain enough to take any appropriate action. Anyway, what action would be appropriate? I had no experience of this kind of situation at all. No experience of sex, full stop. I scanned his crotch for signs of an erection, but couldn’t make one out. His shorts were very tight, of course. They might have been his gym shorts at age fourteen. Then I saw it, a dark spot on those white shorts, an inch to the right of his fly. A drop of something had slipped out of his penis and into his shorts. It wasn’t pee. If you forget to go, and then find you’ve accidentally spurted a drop into your trousers, it makes a bigger splash than that, however quickly you clamp the apparatus shut. I know. And Luke clearly hadn’t ejaculated either: his body would have given off telltale signs. There was only one possibility. Luke’s unseen cock was emitting that clear, sticky, shiny stuff that comes before you come. That happens without your knowing it. You know if you shoot, or if you pee on yourself, but precome seeps out unperceived. You don’t know it’s there until you’ve felt it with a finger or, later on, examined the inside of your pants. The only thing you do know when this gentle dew is creeping out is that you’re in a pretty sex-ready state.