Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:35:35 +0100
From: vindacatrix@ntlworld.com
Subject: "Rent - part 1"

Rent - part 1
Copyright C.J. Davies

Standard disclaimer - don't read if you're under 18, easily upset
or have problems (serious or minor) with gay-themed erotic stories.
If your country/area of residence says this is naughty and illegal,
well, I'm afraid I don't have a "get out of jail free" card you
could use.  Please, use your common sense.  This, the first part
of my story, sets an example of the safest sex around - there's no
sex at all - but future parts will have some and, although
characters may or may not use protection, you should.  Not that
you're foolish enough to eschew condoms merely because fictional
characters don't use them, are you.

This story, or any part of it, may not be copied, re-edited, sold,
or molested in any way without my saying it's okay.  I have
specially trained winged-monkeys that are right now watching you,
and they're authorised to attack should they see you disobeying this.
They have sharp teeth, those monkeys.  Re-posting is okay, as long
as you leave this preamble in place and full credit is given where
it's due.  Any comments, criticisms or offers of gifts and/or sexual
favours may be made to vindacatrix@ntlworld.com

If you fancy reading some more of what I've written (it's slightly
less porny, I ought to warn you), you're welcome to check out my
site www.plenaryindulgence.co.uk

Chris


----------------o-n--w-i-t-h--t-h-e--s-h-o-w-----------------------


There are excuses for every indulgence.  Porsche buyers claim
an engineer's appreciation of fine machinery.  Vintage wine
drinkers talk up their delicate palate and discerning nose.
Sometimes the excuses are more topical, like the overweight
scapegoating their metabolisms and the demonic golden double- arch.
Quite often there's a moral quotient, and we name-check
freedom of choice as justification for indulging our more basic of
urges; to fight and to force and to fuck.  The man caught paying a
prostitute points to the currency involved in dating a woman, in
taking her to dinner and buying her jewellery and flowers.  All the
things that oil the way to the bedroom.

I never thought my first time would be with someone whose
attentions I paid for.  At school, online, with friends, we laughed
about the foul, overweight old men who sidled up to gaudily- dressed
hookers and slipped them creased bills for a few minutes
of jerking, spluttering release.  These were men we could point to
and label, the amoral dross who couldn't get a date and wouldn't,
however much cleaning up they might do, ever amount to more
than a grubby raincoat and rheumy, shifty eyes.  And whilst I'm
no Orlando Bloom or Justin Timberlake, I've had enough
grudgingly-accepted compliments to reassure me that I'm not
utterly hideous to look at.  Being gay (or, as my parents chose to
see it, "electing to be" gay) cut me out of the heterosexual race to
lose my virginity before legally allowed; it was okay at eighteen to
be untouched, acceptable at twenty to remain unbroken, but, with
three days to go until my twenty-fourth birthday, I was beginning
to feel the same worldly censure for not yet having gone 'all the
way'.  My friends, ever exasperated at me and my perpetual
singledom, by turns cajoled and berated: I ought to go out more, I
ought to meet more gay men, I ought to start dating.  And whilst
my protests - that I didn't feel the need to bend over in order to
prove my sexuality, that I didn't need to go clubbing each
weekend in order to have fun, and that I didn't want a boyfriend to
salve whatever fears of loneliness I was expected to have -
served to placate them through the teen years and just beyond,
they were rapidly losing their charm.  For them, my bedroom
innocence was a dated shackle to adolescence that I'd be better
to cast off; for me, sex had become something tangibly
forbidding, the final frontier of intimacy that I could not imagine
broaching with anyone I had any semblance of feelings for.  True
I had kissed and sucked, and been kissed and sucked in return,
but the leap from them to anal felt far broader than the simple 1st,
2nd, 3rd, 4th base scale my friends had adopted.

Ironically, it's not as though I consider my ass off-limits.  I'm well
aware - through toys and digits - of the pleasure it can create,
and the gilding it can offer to such mundanities as masturbation.
If I were active, I would consider myself versatile bordering on
passive; the metaphor of the 'hungry ass' is so cliched as to be
inescapably wretched, but in my darker, more sluttish moods I
might profess to being so.  What I fear is the familiarity necessary
for sodomy, that willingness to bare one's dark and dirty (in a
moral sense, rather than a hygiene one) places for someone
else's judgement.  I'm tortured by the thought of farting or shitting
or being somehow less clean internally than a partner - transient
or long-term - might hope for or expect.  I agonise about the pain
and the appearance.

"But everyone is nervous about those things!" I hear you mutter.
Don't worry, I've heard it before.  And yes, you're right, I don't
presume to be the only gay lad who's stressed about their first
deflowering.  But what were once normal, adequately-in- perspective
fears have now grown to be this massive block to any
kind of anal intimacy and, in fact, to intimacy in general.
Boyfriends generally do want sex, I know, and a frigid fairy is not
the man to give it to them.

As I said, I was content to let it slide and keep plodding through
life both single and relatively untouched - in part believing that
time would salve my paranoia, whilst always knowing that every
day I left it be would be another day for that paranoia to build, and
for my already-lax self-confidence to shrivel.  I knew I was
"missing out" but I was too afraid to change that.  Anyway, even if
I did decide to broaden my horizons (and my bottom), who would
take a twenty-three year old neurotic virgin seriously?  In the
darker hours of my self-deprecation, I slated myself: you'd have
to pay someone to sleep with you.  And so I did.

Lest you think it so calculated, I didn't go out intending to score
some rent.  Neither did I kerb-crawl the back streets, squinting to
see male faces half-hidden in the lamplight.  It was, to be honest,
an accident that I met him; a coincidence that he was in a lull
between tricks whilst I had been dragged out by friends
despairing at my dwindling social life.  I can remember being a
sack of churning nerves at a table in a gay pub, recoiling from the
bustle and the noise that, to my gregarious friends, ranked
basement-low compared to the clubs they were used to.  I can
just about remember gulping anxiously at my second G&T, the
first having succumbed a little more promptly than is ladylike.  I
can definitely remember the light-headed, eye-opening lust I felt
when I first saw him, slumped languidly in the abutment where
bar meets wall, arm hooked casually over the payphone, nursing
a tall glass of what could've been vodka & orange or maybe
simply orange.  I can remember how the stereotyped pendant
bar-lights over him cast sharp shadows from his cheekbones,
how his part-buttoned shirt gaped open to show the tight black
tee underneath, and how his legs lolled unperceivable in the
ballooned swathes of his many-pocketed combats.  Thin but not
skinny, pale but not sickly-looking, his hair was chopped short
and gelled into dirty-blonde spikes, the colour obviously from a
bottle, crowning a head of delicate, pronounced features and lips
fuller than you might expect.  Spellbound, I let my eyes drizzle
down from face, 'cross torso and legs down to his scuffed Vans,
before beginning the journey back up, only to find I had been
spotted.  Chocolate-brown eyes met mine, and I found myself
jerking my face away before I could mask my interest with a
casual sweep of the room.  Dismayed, I blushed, cursing to
punctuate my shame.

Inevitably my friends demanded to know why I was suddenly
beetroot-red and muttering the type of obscenities that would see
me excommunicated from the church (if I were a member, that
is).  Still kicking myself - mentally and literally - I tried to explain,
hoping that they'd resist the temptation to simultaneously turn and
stare at the youth who had so monopolised my attentions.
Thankfully my friends have more refined social graces and, with
the most subtle of glances, managed to piece together the reason
for my abrupt panic.  Their subsequent laughter, however, I didn't
consider all that graceful or subtle.

"What's so fucking funny?!" I demanded, hideously aware that the
beautiful boy was probably - like so many other people present -
looking over in bemused interest at our table.  It took them some
time to calm down enough to tell me.
"He's rent, Tom!" and, seeing the confused look on my face,
further explained "he's a rent-boy, a prostitute... y'know, for sale!"
Suddenly my humiliation was doubled - everyone in the room
seemed to know this fact but me, meaning that everyone in the
room probably knew that moments earlier I had, however naively,
been eyeing up a hustler.

As you'll surely understand, my initial reaction was to run run run
away as fast as humanly possible, possibly allowing myself
enough time to grab my coat and open the door, possibly just
running through the wall and leaving a Tom-shaped hole like the
coyote in Warner Brothers cartoons.  But my friends, who I was
beginning to see as deeply sadistic, refused to let me go; instead,
I drowned my sorrows with another drink (or, okay, another few
drinks) that I refused to go and buy myself, for fear that he'd think
I was approaching him to make an... ahem... transaction.  The
evening trickled past like treacle, punctuated at times by my
awareness that he occasionally looked my way; his gaze boiled
my skin and brought the blush screaming back to the surface,
and it was growing tedious to have to scold my friends for their
ensuing giggles.

Time, however, heals well, and when it reached double-figures
and the bar was close to closing I had managed to suppress what
remained of my embarrassment and self-consciousness.
Socially-inexperienced I might be, but I knew I good time when I
had one, and - ogling hookers aside - I had definitely had one.
My friends managed to extract promises from me that we'd "do it
again", and I reassured them several times that I'd enjoyed
myself.  In fact, if anything I should've known better than to make
my assurances so convincing, because they sprung on me an
invitation to go clubbing.  My heart chilled, and I felt myself
frantically scrambling for an excuse... a doctors appointment the
next day, a lack of cash, anything that might get me out of such a
hellish prospect.  If I had been eighteen still, I think, I would've
spun some lengthy, unbelievable yarn about why I couldn't do it,
leaving nobody in any doubt that I was blowing them off and
hadn't the balls to tell them straight; at twenty-three I managed to
collect together enough self-respect to politely decline.  Still
taking some convincing, they finally conceded and left me to the
solitary company of my mobile and the number for a local taxi
firm.

Before thumbing the keypad, I took a glance around the now- quiet pub.
Many of its brightly-clothed patrons had left, filtering
out to clubs and bars, and the remaining close cliques each
existed, distinct, in a bubble of their own conversation.  A part of
me observed that the instrument of my embarrassment had
similarly departed, his spot by the wall empty, and whilst I was
glad to have avoided any end-of-night eye-contact, at the same
time I found myself wishing I could see him one last time, to
somehow permanently record an image of his artfully-constructed
casualness (as by then I saw it) as if doing so would protect me
from making a similar mistake again.  I shrugged off the urge,
called myself a wanker under my breath, and began to dial the
number.

"The number you have dialled is busy, please hang up and..."  I
pressed 'end' and weighed the phone thoughtfully in my hand.
Three times it had rung engaged; possibly I should've thought
ahead and booked a taxi home, rather than ingenuously
imagining I could instantly summon one at throwing-out time.  I
called myself a wanker again - it seemed appropriate.  For a
while I sat back and let the music distract me, before casual
inspiration struck and I hurried to the payphone; surely there
would be a taxi card stuck there?  As I scanned the various
adverts for XXX numbers and "earn extra cash" promises, I felt a
hand lightly brush my shoulder; I turned, to see...
"What are you wanting?"
...the boy from before, the rent boy, with his eyes reflecting bar-
light and a smudge of a smile on his lips, standing, one hip
dropped, in front of me.  And of course I panicked.
"No!  I don't!  I mean... no, what I mean is, I'm sorry, because you
see... well, I didn't know... what I mean to say is I didn't know
what, sorry... who you are... and I'm not looking for... well, I don't
want... sorry... no sex!"  The look of abstract confusion
threatening to subside his half-smile finally stopped my
spluttering.  We stood there, he watching me as if I were some
escaped mental patient with acute verbal diarrhoea, me watching
him as if at any moment he'd lunge, sexually-ravenous, at me,
before equally-quickly presenting me with a bill for services- rendered.
"Erm... I was just wondering what number you were looking
for...?"

I just about died on my feet - talk about sex-obsessed, it was me
who seemingly had it on the brain!  All he wanted to do was help
me find a taxi... no, even simpler than that, help me find the
number for a taxi firm... and I start blathering about not looking
for sex and all but accusing him of soliciting me.  Christ, I knew
why I didn't go out much - I couldn't be trusted in public!  I
couldn't trust myself to open my mouth and apologise, and so for
a few seconds he had only the bulge of my wide eyes and tightly
clamped lips to demonstrate my horror.
"Sorry!" I finally bleated, and in the ensuing silence I became
painfully, overwhelmingly aware of his hand on my elbow, where
he had put it in some faint expression of restraint when I had
spun round moments earlier.  His palm felt hot through my shirt
sleeve, and I found myself drawing in my arms part-protectively
and part-fearfully.  Suddenly his smile returned, sweeping the
look of confusion from his - at close quarters, effortlessly
beautiful - face.
"That's no problem, I shouldn't have startled you."
His voice was on the deep side of broken, honeyed and smooth,
and whilst he had never spoken in much above a light
conversational tone, the strength incumbent was obvious.  I
realised I had been holding my breath, and began to slowly
exhale, taking the slightly-less-loaded pause to quickly examine
his features and guesstimate his age.  He had the smooth skin of
an adolescent, but something unwordable made me peg him at
eighteen or nineteen.  Suddenly I became aware of how obvious
my interest must seem and, fearful that he might take it as
'window shopping', I dropped my eyes and studiously examined
the floor.  The legs of his trousers pooled around his trainers, with
only the broad, blunt toe emerging.  I felt the need to explain
myself, to convince him that the combined absurdity of the
evening had been a catalogue of cock-ups on my part, and that I
was in no way interested in his professional services... and yet to
raise the topic of his employment seemed rude and
presumptuous, and my middle-class upbringing flinched at the
thought of it.

Eloquently, I settled for "I wasn't trying to... pick you up" and died
another dozen deaths inside.  Darting glances upwards told me
that he was studying me appraisingly, and whilst I dreaded his
reply to my clumsy slab of an apology I also found the silence
hideous.  Finally he replied.
"I wouldn't have thought you were.  You're not my usual type."
And with that, he had me hooked.  My biggest weakness is my
irrepressible curiosity, I admit it, and so to have the chance for
some insight into a lifestyle that intrigued me through my own
ignorance to it... well, questions surged through me.
"I'm not?"
He smiled, obviously used to expressions of interest from people
when they found out how he earned his living.  "No, you're
younger for a start... and cuter."  His flattery brought my
embarrassment streaming back, and my cheeks burned.  "I doubt
you need to pay to get some company."  I couldn't help but laugh
aloud, momentarily swamped by thoughts of my perpetual
singleness, until I realised that his confused look had returned.
"Trust me, I'm always single.  Maybe I should be asking for your
price list!" I muttered wryly, social morays shortly forgotten
through my bile.
"Normally a hundred an hour, mate, but for you I'd take seventy."
His matter-of-fact response to my attempt at black humour
brought me up sharp, and I looked at him with hunted-deer eyes.
His smile, freshly back on his face, never slipped, and the hook of
his raised eyebrow seemed to wait keenly for my response.  The
polite decline I expected to hear myself say for some reason
never appeared; instead, his terms hung promisingly in the air
between us, with each advancing second of my reticence fleshing
out and colouring the desire for him we both knew I felt.  In the
end, it was my hand that betrayed me, awkwardly reaching out
between us and allowing him to take it and, gently, as if I were
some sleepwalker in a fragile dream, leading me from the pub
and into the warm summer night outside.



End of part 1 - part 2 is written and is to follow shortly.

Like it?  Hate it?  Want a winged-monkey?  Mail me at
vindacatrix@ntlworld.com

Oh, and please, check out my site, www.plenaryindulgence.co.uk