At the beginning of the day, when we do get out of bed -  there are days when, just out of inertia, we are up and at it as soon as the alarm goes off – we are hopeful. We’ve forgotten that only a week ago we considered killing ourselves. Suicide as a way to let people know they could have helped, could have done something, that we didn’t kill ourselves solely as a cry for help but as a way of saying: Why the fuck didn’t you do anything while I was around? Weren’t you listening? We wake up with a degree of hope because we’ve forgotten that only a few days ago we’d thought of disappearing. We’d thought of taking our passports, emptying out the cash still available in our overdrawn accounts, and cycling to Spain, or France. We had this fantasy – we did – in which wrote an email to everyone and told them this is the last email they’ll receive from us. Consider me dead, we wrote.

We struggled through our twenties, but never imagined the struggle would continue into our thirties, and beyond? Isn’t the nature of pain, we thought, to subside? Eventually. But some pain is chronic.

We don’t always like ourselves, and then we meet a man and we like him. There is a lot to like about him. If it were possible, we would put all our liking into him. This man would be the focus of all the love we have to give. He is beautiful and slim and he plays the piano, or the guitar, or he sings really well, or he is good at business – yes, he’s a consultant, travelling the world, working for some oil company in the North Sea.

“That’s very butch,” we joke.

And he says something like: “It can be.” Or he says: “It has its moments.”

We are so happy to meet someone like him and we don’t spend too much time pondering whether we do actually like him. Are we bothered that he’s a bit sissyphobic, that he makes some odd remark about our earrings, our tattoos? We like him. We like him and we want him to like us. We want him to like us more than we’ll ever be able to like ourselves. We lie in bed naked with him and we want nothing more in our lives than for this moment to stretch on into eternity. If he does want to get up, if he does need to go to work, well, then, we’ll keep lying here naked until he comes home to us in the evening.

But by the time we get to the end of the day, things are worse. We haven’t done much work. We haven’t written or painted or sold anything. Late afternoon, we texted some other man who liked us a lot and he texted us back – immediately, yes, right away – with some inane response, devoid of genuine enthusiasm. So we ask ourselves if we’re just being paranoid, but we know deep down that we’re not, that we’ve encountered this before, men who’ve been enthusiastic at the outset, because we’re good in bed, we know how to fuck and kiss and make them feel special, but then they cool off. And to be honest, we’re not really sure why. Can they tell we’re needy? Can they tell we don’t really like ourselves? Do they get tired of being the centre of our attention, the subject of our curiosity, the reason for our existence, our source of oxygen. Do they need some space to hate themselves?

Sometimes we ask ourselves rhetorical questions.

We try to keep it light. We try not to wallow. We go out. We leave the house and go out for sex. We’re not feeling desirable, but we figure that if we can find someone to touch us, we’ll feel much better. Human contact helps. We come home disappointed. In a city that is usually very generous in providing us with men who are happy to get naked, we have returned empty-handed. Yet, as we’re opening the door to our building, trying to manoeuver our bicycle up the stair to lock it in the little room, one of our neighbours comes home – she is returning from the Brit Awards, smelling wonderfully of alcohol and perfume, beautiful in a black dress and black tights and black high-heeled shoes and a new haircut that makes her look even younger, even more glamorous than she usually looks, and she asks how our day has been and we say fine and she says are you sure?

“I’ve had better days,” we say, because what else can we say?

And we stand there in the entrance to our building, the neighbour and us, and we talk about the Awards and about her job (she’s a banker) and about the price we pay for the paths we choose.

“What’s wrong,” we say to her, “with selling your soul to the devil? At least you have money in the bank and go on holidays to warm places.”

We have no doubts whatsoever that we would so sell our souls to the devil for those two things.

We talk for ten minutes, fifteen perhaps, about her new boyfriend, about the maintenance that needs to be done in the building, about the other people in the block, the old hippies and the new hippies, and how nothing will ever get done with them around. Then we lean in and hug each other, kiss each other on the cheek. We are worlds apart but for that moment there is nothing separating us. All we want is for the other to have a good night and a good day and be happy.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love” he says. “How do you know if you’re in love.”

We’re lying in bed after sex, after good sex – we always have good sex, which mainly involves me fucking him, but also a lot of kissing and rimming and cocksucking (he likes to force his cock down my throat) – so we’re lying there under the duvet, him on his back, my arm across his chest. He tells me his friends say he’s built a wall around him, a wall so high no one can climb over it. He’s adamant he’ll never love again.

“It has to do with light,” I say. “With the amount of light the other person brings into the room.”

“Yes,” he says. “But what if the lights are on already?”

“Have you ever seen your father cry?” I say, unfazed by cynicism, going deeper, to the heart of something, perhaps.

“Never,” he says, adding that he can’t even remember the last time he cried.

But then he does. Six years ago when he went to see his boyfriend in Vegas and discovered that the guy was cheating on him.

“I cried like a baby,” he says.

I tell him hardly a week goes by that I don’t cry: movies, books, the news, listening to writers read stories on the New Yorker’s Fiction Podcasts, especially Aleksander Hemon reading that Bernard Malamud story. It kills me every time. I’m in love with Aleksander Hemon’s voice. I remember the first time I heard him read. I cried tears of joy, I really did.

“You’re lucky,” Stefan says, though he says it in a way that is entirely unconvincing. You can tell he does not want to be the kind of person who cries once a week, to be vulnerable like that, sentimental. He’s the kind of person who’s happy to meet up and get fucked once a week, and then leave after minimal conversation, minimal cuddling, minimal sharing of personal details.

That was almost three weeks ago.

Not long after that night (we haven’t seen each other since then; he’s been in bed with pneumonia) I met someone else. I met someone and I almost fell in love. I don’t think I did fall in love, but I certainly wanted to. He was the kind of guy I’d want to fall in love with. Not since October, not since Tariq, have I felt that kind of about-to-fall-in-love feeling. With Tariq I did fall in love. The new guy, Jacob, would be easy to fall in love with. He’s tall and skinny and plays the guitar and sings (like Jay Brannan, but better) and he kisses in a way I’ve not encountered before, in a way that might have turned me off if it had been someone else.

Jacob’s tongue is a thing of wonder. He licks. His tongue feels big, like a cat’s tongue, rough and comforting. He likes to lick and kiss and for the first time in a long time, we were having foreplay. When you have sex in saunas and sex-clubs, foreplay is very hard to come by. It’s anathema to the context. I want to finish this blog before midnight, before the Day of Love is over, even though I know that in some parts of the world – like New York, like LA – Valentine’s Day is in full swing. So I will conjure up three images of Jacob, who is now in Paris for the week with some music friends.

1. Jacob comes round late in the evening with his guitar that he’s just picked up from a friend’s flat in South London where it’s been in storage. He hasn’t played for a while. I run a bath before he comes and while I sit in the bath, he sits on the toilet seat, naked, and plays and sings. I watch his fingers move across the strings, along the neck of the guitar. I watch his mouth. I close my eyes. I think: My dad would love listening to this. I miss my dad.

2. We manoeuver around the kitchen eating breakfast. We eat bagels with jam. We drink coffee. We touch each other and kiss. He’s wearing jeans, nothing else; I’m in a T-shirt, nothing else. We stroke each other. I sit at the table by the kitchen eating cereal. He stands at the window smoking a roll-up. I want our conversation to be easy, effortless, but it is not. We are 15 years apart. I am not used to waking up with other men. He comes to sit and the table and picks up his guitar and plays something. It is gentle and mournful and beautiful. A sticker on his guitar says Please Don’t Smoke.

3. We sit on the sofa and make out.

* I don’t remember whose tumblr I got these images from. If you know, please let me know so I can put up a link.

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This is how it happened: I went to the sauna out of a compulsion. I was compelled to go. It was one of those times when the voices say go! go! and one must obey. I’m not usually a fan of the sauna on Sundays – too many men walking around hoping for Mr Right, too much desperation and coming-down-from-drugs in the air – but I went anyway. I’m glad I did. I must stop being so dogmatic about things. The sauna was packed. When I got to the reception cage, there weren’t even any available locker keys so I had to wait until someone left. Someone is always leaving, so I on;ly had to wait a few minutes. And then I was in. It’s a nice moment that moment when you pass the door and walk down that corridor to the lockers. Everything from that moment on is possible. Love, passion, surprise. I am always optimistic when I walk down that corridor. It’s one of the few places I am.

I saw him as soon as I got to my locker. He was already in a towel, standing by his locker. Later I’d find out that he was sipping from his can of Red Bull, snorting tiny spoons of coke. But I didn’t know that then, and even when I did know, when we were making out in a cabin, it didn’t really bother me. I’ve never snorted coke, but for a moment I was tempted, for a brief flash I thought, why not, isn’t it time you did stuff like that. Everyone else is. Why must you keep yourself so aloof from the herd? Etc, etc.

He was just what I like. Tall and very skinny and smooth. He was sculpted. His skin was brown. He looked something like the guy in the picture, only skinnier, and darker. But the face was similar, the look in the eyes, that slightly lost gaze, almost innocent, and the mouth, made for kissing.

We passed each other upstairs and our eyes were on each other and when I brushed my hand against his side he turned and looked and followed. The room was at the end of the upstairs passageway, a large space, darker than the cubicles. I leaned against the wall and he was right there, standing in front of me. We bowed our heads towards each other, our hands already on nipples, our backs, gently touching. In some settings – a beach, a cafe, the bedroom – this would be almost romantic, two men about to kiss, exploring each other with profound tenderness. Licking first, brushing lips, breathing, turning away, soft halting breaths. I love the beginning of something, tasting each other, testing.

“What’s your name?” I say, my mouth close to his ear, wondering if it’s too early for that.

Brian. He was hungry for cock. A need so all-consuming that he eventually led us to a cubicle where he could express that hunger fully. On his knees with his legs spread and his arse-cheeks at the foot of the slope of his back like two globes of… what? Like globules. Glutes. All those words. Perfectness. And for a moment I was Robert Mapplethorpe. I wanted to photograph him. Capture him. Hold that picture of him feasting on my cock. Sucking and sucking and sucking. He positioned me on the raised bed, my legs hanging over the side – a bit like a child about to have its knee bandaged – and he just kept sucking, doing this thing with his head, a kind of nodding gesture, like he was scooping my cock, over and over, into his mouth. If I hadn’t lifted his head for a kiss, I had a feeling he would never come up for air.

“Do you want to take a break?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“I want to play with you some more,” he said.

“We can do that,” I said.

“We’ll meet up later, yeah?” he said. “I want you to come in my mouth.”

“I can do that,” I said.

During our break – because we did meet up again later – I went to sit in the sauna cabin, the air hot and dry, penetrating the skin, heating the bones. There was a guy sitting opposite me who seemed cute. Pale, smooth, and because I didn’t have my glasses on it was hard to make out how slim he was. He seemed okay. The pale smoothness of him in the half-dark of the sauna cabin was nice to behold. I sat with one leg up on the wooden ledge, then he did the same. I massaged my neck; he copied me. I leaned over and rested my elbows on my knees; after I slight pause, he was in the same position.

Hey, I can read a sign!

There was just enough room to sit on the ledge to his left, and that’s where I went to sit. I reached out first, stroked his chest, played with his nipple, massaged his skull. He more or less followed suit. It was kind of sexy, and probably would have been more so if he was slimmer, and I was feeling more predatory. Thoughts of the skinny sculpted guy still lingered. This guy couldn’t compare. He laughed.

“What’s funny?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “This.”

“This?” I said.

“Life,” he said.

“Which bits?” I said.

He laughed again, put his hand on my thigh, moved in closer.

“Do you mean the homosexual bits?” I said.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the sauna cabin, the men who were sitting, other standing, some leaving, others peering in through the glass window in the door.

“You mean like the way you were copying my movements and I had to come over like some wild animal who wants you to roll over onto your back and put your legs in the air?”

“Oh,” he said. “So you noticed?”

“It’s an animal instinct,” I said.

“Is that what we are?” he said. “Surely we’ve moved on from that.”

“I hope not,” I said. “Have you?”

“I think I have,” he said.

“You must have a properer job then,” I said. “Nine to five, an office.”

“How did you know?” he said.

I said I could tell, that I could see he had lost touch with his animal instincts. It was fun making him laugh, easy, and that was pleasurable, a turn-on in itself, even though nothing else about him turned me on. We played him guessing what I did, and the first thing he said was: Artist.

“I am,” I said, enjoying being called that in a room full of strangers.

He ran his hand over my chest, his mouth almost on my nipple, like he was inspecting something, or admiring.

“It’s trimmed,” I said, referring to the little spikes on my chest. Just that afternoon I’d clippered the hair. “I’m curbing the animal instinct.”

“Not all animals get together just to fuck,” he said, and puts his head on my shoulder, nestled closer to me, whimpered.

“Did you just whimper,” I said.

“Whimper?” he said, the smile audible in his voice. “It’s very likely.”

“I think we’ve spoken before,” I said. “I recognise something.”

“Are you the guy with the blog,” he said, as if he’d known all along, as if he, too, had intuited our history.

“The blog?” I said.

“The one who has sex with guys and then writes about it?” he said.

I told him I’d turned some of it into a book, but – I apologised – I couldn’t remember what we’d done last time. To be honest, I found it hard to believe we’d had sex at all, but he remembered things like how sensitive my nipples were, and that I had a bike, so I guess we must have done it. Jim – that was his name – made a joke along the lines of, what does a guy have to do to get me to write about him. I said there has to be something that moves me to tell a story, something out of the ordinary, something that is more than just about the sex itself, that the sex has to have an existential quality to it, to inspire an insight into something, or feel metaphorical, representative of something bigger, more profound, or more basic. I said it’s not just about sex but about a connection, a touch, a breath, a feel of the skin, the way a man kisses, a new type of touch, a new kind of body, a bit like it was – but I don’t say this to him – with Brian, the Mapplethorpe model, the man, young, from Birmingham, new to London, revelling in his sluthood, who’d keep sucking on cocks, swallowing more and more cum, until his hunger was sated, until he’d gone beyond his true calling, beyond his animal insitincts and found a proper job.

For the duration of the massage the pain was relieved. I had that feeling with her that I often have with other masseurs, that they approach my body as a challenge, a test to see if they can soften the tension. I’m sure they can’t help thinking about the psychological tension that must be the cause of such taut flesh. When our fifteen minutes were up, we shook hands, I said shei-shei and promised to come back soon.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, knowing there was no maybe about it.

When I got to the restaurant, the others had just finished their meal and were chatting over small cups of jasmine tea. I ordered the hot and sour chicken soup and a bowl of rice and we talked about writing and about the tutor, who was encouraging us to write more freely, to discover the stories hidden in our subconscious (or unconscious), to get rid of the internal critic, to write the thing we wouldn’t usually write, the stories that would rock our world, shake them up. In a weird way, we were enjoying her direction – I know I was. Then I told them about Mai Li and how brilliant she was and that I would definitely go back the next day, this time for longer. Someone said they’d be nervous to go into one of those places.

“Me, too,” I said. “But she’s totally legit.”

“Did she make a difference?” the person said.

“Some,” I said.

But I didn’t wait for the next day. I went back to Mai Li as soon as the afternoon writing session was over. I paid my £25 for 35 minutes and was taken downstairs to where the little rooms with the massage tables were, small dimly-lit rooms with white towels and dark walls and a little fan and heater in each room (from what I could make out). I’d seen the rooms earlier that day when I’d gone downstairs to pee before the chair massage. I was looking forward to 35 minutes of the same kind of pummeling.

Mai Li ushered me into the room and then stepped outside for a while. It was a room just big enough to contain a massage table and space for her to move around in, and a chair for me to put my clothes on, though I wasn’t sure how much of them to take off. Maybe she’d just gone to get something: more oil? fresh towels? I didn’t want the embarrassment of her coming back in and me being naked when I wasn’t supposed to be. I’m never sure about the etiquette of things unless the rules are made explicit to me. Stripping and tipping are the two big questions!

She came back with a glass of water. I gestured to my clothes.

“Everything?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “All.”

I left on my briefs and lay down on my stomach, my head in the hole at the top end of the table. There have been brief moments in my life – sometimes days, but often just an hour or two here and there – when I have liked my body, when it has not been a thing of shame or anxiety. Women have taught me to hate my body. My sisters, my mother, and one or two lovers in the past have made me feel that my body is a thing to hide, to be ashamed of. It is not an easy thing for me to lie naked (even with my briefs on) before a woman, vulnerable, my back and arse exposed. Granted, men have ridiculed me, bullied me, but from an early age (maybe even too early) I have known that I was desirable to them.

Even before Mai Li rolled back the rubber band of my briefs, I knew this was not going to be a regular kind of massage. She had intentions. My cock was stirring in response to these intentions. I wouldn’t be far off if I said it’s been almost 15 years since my genitals have responded affirmatively to the touch of a woman. Suddenly, I was looking forward to seeing what would happen when I turned onto my back, but that was still a while away. There was still my arse to deal with.

I usually make sure that my crack is clean before a massage. Whether it’s at the sauna or with the regular guy who comes to my flat, I always get massaged in the nude, and I don’t want to deal with nastiness. I hadn’t planned on getting naked in this; my briefs were meant to stay on. I never imagined I’d be exposing myself like this, definitely not crouching down on the table in a massage parlour in Chinatown, trying to get my underwear off in an elegant fashion, prompted by the forceful suggestion of the masseuse.

“It’s better,” she said, adding something about the oil and that it’s easier to do what she’s doing without the obstruction of the underwear.

What she was doing, though, was getting uncomfortably close to my arsehole, which was not as clean as I would have liked it to be. I clenched a lot, which was not relaxing. My shoulder ached.

A while later, when I turned onto my back – did she just call me darling? – my cock was already semi-hard. It probably had the kind of plumpness that encouraged her to say, as she gave it a light touch with her fingers: “You want me massage here?”

“No, thanks,” I said. It’s okay.”

“Okay,” she said. “No problem. It’s okay.”

Both of us reassuring the other: don’t feel bad about asking, was my subtext; don’t feel bad about refusing, was hers.

And so we continued, me lying there with a hard-on, hoping she might ignore my initial refusal and touch my cock. Did she become less friendly after that? Was she irritated that there’d be no extra tip? Or was she relieved not to have to deal with yet another heavy-breathing gweilo in her small warm room.

Maybe if I hadn’t had plans to meet the German that evening I would have said yes, been intrigued about how far I – or she – would go. Would there have been more on offer than just a hand-job? How much do things like this cost? Who do you give the money to? Was the woman upstairs the madam of the brothel?

I left feeling slightly elated and very horny. I liked being turned on by a woman. I liked that sex with her felt like something I’d be able to do.  I like that she touched my body and thought it sexy. I believed her. I believed her because I have known several men from that part of the world who have been turned on by my body, my hairy chest. I like to think that I might go back, if not to Mai Li, then to someone else, to go back to being a teenager taken by an uncle to see a prostitute for his first sexual experience, for her to teach him how to make love to a woman.

Him and I only meet for sex, but we’ve been meeting for a while and he knows that one of the things I like is his reliability. This may have been his way of telling me that he was not always reliable. It could have been a test to see how much leeway I would give him, how much I would tolerate (isn’t that what kids do?). To check how much rope I would give him. I am not a forgiving man. I was upset, and in the spirit of my New Year’s resolution of honesty and saying what I want, I texted back and said this wasn’t making me feel good and could we stick to the plan next time. I wasn’t pleased with the sticking to the plan bit of my text, but my therapist had said something about saying what I want. Say what you feel, then say what you want. What I really wanted was for him to come over as planned, but he chose the dinner with his friends over me, even though it was him who suggested we meet at seven. A friend of mine said, when I told her what had happened, no, no, no, this guy needs to prioritise.

The following day he texted again to see if I wanted him to come over. I had other plans – I really did – so I said so. I said maybe we could meet later in the week, though I knew I wasn’t going to be available for most of the week. I am trying to write all this in the style of Lydia Davis, who I am reading at the moment, and who I am listening to on my iPad. It’s not working. My sentences want to go on for too long. My thoughts don’t want to break down into bullets. Too much emotion is leaking in. Lydia Davis’ prose does not leak. Lydia Davis looks like the kind of person who does not leak. She claims to be verbose, but even in her verbosity she is airtight. Lydia Davis is efficient.

This man had proven to be someone who leaks. He is not efficient, and definitely not as reliable as I’d built him up to be. What can one expect of a man who comes over for the sole purpose of having your cock up his arse. Oh, he likes the way you kiss, and he says you’re a nice guy (“I like you very much, Michael” – Fuck off! – I call him babe; he calls me by my full name), and he gives you a high score out of ten, based mainly on the way you fuck. In fact, when he adds up all the points – for your bed manner and your niceness and some other things that you can’t be bothered to remember right now – it all adds up to ten. He gives you ten out of ten. When you do the same for him – ah yes, now you remember, he gave you a couple of points for your sense of humour – but when you add up the points in his favour, you get side-tracked by his statement that you don’t even like him, that you’re not even giving him points for being a nice guy. Your points were for his arse, his skin, his tits, and for always doing what he says he’ll do. For failing to adhere to the latter, points have now been deducted.

It’s a shame to let him go. But I have a feeling I won’t see him again.

Some time ago I came across a video on x-Tube of a guy who fists himself. The clip opens with him naked, outdoors, leaning against a wooden fence on a country lane. That sort of scene. The setting was rural, though what he did next – bent over and shoved his arm up his own backside as if he was helping to inseminate a cow – seemed anything but a snapshot from a pastoral idyll. I’m often shocked by the things men do to/with their bodies. And by men I mean gay men; by men I do not mean, not in this instance, human beings in general. (Am I just more aware of gay men doing these things because gay men hide it less? Have we learnt over centuries to eroticise the pain inflicted on us? Am I being judgemental? Should I be looking in other places for the diverse/perverse things everyone does to their bodies in the name of pleasure and sexual gratification?)

The guy was German, or he may have been Swiss – him and the landscape had that look. He was blonde, bronzed, slim, hairless. He was not an attractive man. He looked as if he’d stuck his arm up his arse and ripped his soul from its vessel. Meditate on that! To watch him was terrifying, deeply unsettling. It was like he’d gone past the point of no return, like he’d killed himself once, but would keep doing it over and over again. I think I might have revisited the video a couple of weeks after that first time, but no more after that. Every once in a while I remember the scene, but I am not tempted to go back.

Last week my neck went into spasm and the pain that ensued has been so extreme that I have lost my appetite, I feel nauseous, and at times I’ve found it hard to breathe. I say to people it’s because of cycling, or I tell them that I just don’t know what it is, that it happens every six months or so. But that’s a lie.

After the guy in the fisting video has bent over and inserted his arm into his rectum, effortlessly, his arsehole as floppy and loose as if you were putting your hand into a top hat with no top, or a wide pipe. Nothing. No resistance. So after he does this for the camera, the scene shifts to him naked on a single bed. He is supple, agile, and he repeats his party trick. I can’t remember if he was smiling. Grinning, perhaps? My question, besides the puzzle of how, devoid of sphincter muscles, this guy can shit, is whether the body ever heals from such an invasion, such an alteration.

Someone who recently read my book emailed to ask if the stories actually happened or are they fictional. I said they were real, that everything in the book actually happened, that the only things I changed were the names of people and where they’d come from. Sometimes I changed their professions. But although everything I put down might be the facts (the Truth!!) there are things that I don’t record, don’t confess. Can we ever confess to everything, tell everything. Each moment is an impossibility to recount. Every moment is like a dream: a multiplicity of things happened simultaneously. I want to be truthful, to be honest, to make this a true confession. It’s not just about self-exposure – what is the confession box but a way to expose our souls to another in the hope that we will continue to be loved – so, yes, not just self-exposure, but a genuine desire, and that desire keeps growing (though at some points it disappears altogether) to get to the bottom of what I do, to understand, to make sense. To change.

Now, as I type, the pain is there. A throbbing. A ripping. My osteopath (or is he a chiropractor – I always forget) says it’s a trapped nerve and in time it will become untrapped. But I have an ex who had a trapped nerve in his face and even now, four years later, it is not fully untrapped, unpinched. He is not, and never was in pain. My body is telling me something.

In other videos I have seen men fill their balls with saline liquid and cum, as they say, buckets. I have seen men take load after load of cum in their arses. I have seen men punched, kicked, slapped and spat on, the looks on their faces: sublime submission. Homophobic bullying transformed into erotic delight. I knew a man once, a black man from South Africa, who loved going to the sex clubs in London and having men fuck him while they said things like take my white cock, nigger, or you love that, don’t you, nigger. He laughed when he told me this, as if triumphant. Back then I was shocked, though I can understand his desire more now. In all my years of phone sex, that has never been one of my scenarios. Racism has never been sexy to me, even the subversion of it not. Being spat on, slapped and choked is something I do like.

There have been moments with The German when I have wanted to bring The War into our sexplay, especially when he has told me to do this or that (eat my arse, suck my cock) or had his hand around my throat. But I have kept that to myself, not so much because I am afraid to say those things, but because I am afraid to witness his willingness to play along.

I have injured my neck because of too much phone sex.

So the one voice says: Well, buy a different type of phone, then. The other voice says: Stop. Enough.

No, he’ll say, I don’t want to do that. Or: Ask me to… Tell me you want me to… Sit there, stand there, do that.

His people have given orders to my people before, and nothing good came of that.

Part of me’s thinking: Well, isn’t it enough that we have great sex about once a week. We kiss well, play well with each other’s tits, he likes the way I rim, I like the way he sucks cock, and he likes sucking cock, and we both like very much the way my cock feels in his arse. Now he wants roleplay. The thing is, so do I. I’ve been wanting to for a while, but I kind of know what his response will be when I tell him to put on the cute summer dress from Esprit that I bought a couple of years ago for some other slim smooth guy.

The main guy in a very cute film by François Ozon called “Une Robe d’été” (“Summer Dress”) lands up wearing a summer frock. The German guy has the same kind of body as the guy in the short film, so I know he’ll look good in the dress. But the scenario isn’t his thing and I’m almost certain he won’t get into it just for me. At the moment, to be honest, I’d much rather put the emphasis on foreplay than roleplay. But the interview scene could be fun. I’ve never been good at improv, although on the phone I am; I’m good on the phone, sometimes so good that it scares me how I disappear into a character, a fantasy. That’s what I need to channel. To enjoy the game, to allow myself to become the character. In a way, that’s what scares me about fiction. I’d much rather write about myself, stay close to home. Fiction takes you to darker places, to the subconscious, the unconscious, the id. Autobiography stays closer to the super-ego: society’s voice is never far away.

Foreplay seems to be a thing of the past. Extended foreplay, I mean. Hours of it. Foreplay has all but disappeared from my life. I wouldn’t be too far off if I said that it’s been about ten years since I experienced the kind of foreplay I used to have in my twenties. Foreplay was fun. Our bodies were fun. It’s like we were just discovering something. Do couples have more foreplay, couples who live together and have a bit of time on their hands? Once you’re inside someone, does that mean that foreplay is over. Is foreplay whatever comes before penetration? I remember for the brief few months that I lived with someone a few years ago, I thought that everything was part of foreplay. Everything we did in each other’s company was part of the build-up to fucking.

The dictionary says that foreplay is “mutual sexual stimulation preceding sexual intercourse ” and that it started out in the late 1800s as a theatrical term. Wikipedia says that it’s supposed to increase desire and make us feel more comfortable with each other. So, then, is roleplay foreplay? Is the job interview scenario part of our foreplay? Is the German guy saying he wants to play, he wants more build-up to our fucking, he wants to draw this out?

The writer in me thinks this is a great device for fiction, a way of learning more about the character. Questions like: Tell us why you’re best suited to the job. Tell us what you’d do in the first three months of the job. Or just the simple question: Tell us a bit about yourself. The interesting thing would be – in reality and in the fictional version – how do we play the game, but still remain slightly unknown to each other. Not so much mystery, but rather the tentativeness that is part of being fuck buddies. But is it? Can’t we enjoy fucking and know a fair bit about each other, and still not get into a relationship. I mean a relationship relationship. Arundhati Roy says “To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.” So let’s keep it simple. Writing about it removes our story from the Realm of Simple. So maybe it’s best to just shut up and play.

Have I mentioned that my Tenga arrived in the post? What can I say? Oh. My. God. A trip.