Pantomime Cow

I wondered if maybe I had been talking in my sleep. I was almost sure I didn't do that: if I did, my ex-wife would certainly have added to the already expansive list of my shortcomings which she had always been so eager to share with me and anyone else who would lesson. And, in any case, what could I have called out which would have exposed my interest so unequivocally?

I thought of other clues I may have inadvertently left.

He'd picked up on the fact I had been far more sexually active -- albeit solitarily -- recently. But then, how could he know what sort of fantasies were driving my heightened sex drive?

Maybe I had aroused his suspicions with the underwear I'd been buying from e-Bay. But he would have no idea what... how should I put it... 'arrangements' I'd come to with the sellers and, in any case, all of my dealings with them had been via e-mail which needed a password for access.

As the meeting droned on, I wondered if Jake could have noticed me checking out other men's backsides as I so frequently did these days. It was a habit which I had found surprisingly easy to pick up but nigh-on impossible to break. I remembered that he'd thrown me a quizzical look in Tesco when we were shopping there at the weekend, after I'd become distracted almost mid-sentence by the heavenly pair of peach-like buttocks straining against the black trousers of one of the young shop assistants who was stacking the shelves. Jake could hardly have failed to notice my reaction as the lad had bent down to pick up some groceries from his pile of boxes, especially when his blue checked shirt had ridden up to reveal the back of his gaudily coloured underwear which tightly cupped his pert buttocks. Perhaps I'd done more than just stare: perhaps Jake has seen me drooling as I'd fixated on the young guy's gorgeous arse and that I'd had to adjust myself at the thought of what lay just beneath the confining material.

But even that was too much of a long shot. It was one thing for him to notice that his dad had -- for whatever reason -- started eyeing up other men's bums, but it would take a pretty serious leap of imagination for him to guess that I was fantasizing about pressing my face into them.

Later, back at my desk, I began to wonder if Jake could have seen me enjoying occasional physical contact with guys' arses when opportunities were presented. I'd realised early on that I could take advantage of crowded places -- the market in the centre of town on Saturday morning was a particularly good spot -- to squeeze past other men and 'accidentally' rub the palm of my hand against their backsides as I did so. As long as the place was sufficiently busy, they'd rarely even glance in my direction and if they did, a brief "Sorry, mate" was enough to downplay my indiscretion.

More recently, I'd refined my technique to include an upwards flick of my middle finger just as my hand was sweeping from one buttock to the next. Nothing too obvious: just a quick poke into the guy's arse-crack which could be explained as an ill-timed spasmodic twitch if things ever turned nasty. If I could position my hand so that my outstretched fingertips were skirting the crease between his thighs and cheeks and was able to push my finger into him quite deeply, I might get a result.

A few paces on, hopefully out of view of the guy whose arse I'd 'inadvertently' prodded, I'd have a casual sniff of the offending digit.

If my victim had been wearing jeans or chinos, I'd probably get nothing for my troubles, other than perhaps a glare from him (although a couple of times I'd been warmly smiled at and, one occasion, followed). If he'd been in football shorts or tracksuit bottoms, though, my finger would often bear a tantalising trace of the man's rich and earthy scent. And sometimes it was significantly stronger than that: sometimes -- not often, but regularly enough to make the effort worthwhile -- my finger smelled so powerfully of the pungent musk of his backside that it was like having my nose stuck in there. When that happened, I had to quickly dart into a toilet and take full advantage of my prize while it was still fresh.

Could Jake have seen me having a 'flick and sniff'? And even if he had, was he astute enough to realise why such a thing would excite me -- that it wasn't the act of fingering another guy that was turning me on but the fantasy of rimming him? I thought it unlikely; virtually impossible, in fact.

It was towards the end of the day when my 'eureka' moment came. I almost laughed out loud with the simplicity and obviousness of it. There must have been an occasion on which I hadn't deleted my browser history. Perhaps I'd been in a rush or my internet explorations had been unexpectedly interrupted. Whatever had happened, I'd left a trail behind me and my son had dutifully followed it.

He must have thought that the images he had found -- images which must have shocked him in their explicit lewdness -- had been stumbled on by me in error. Or maybe that I had been curious to find out the meaning of a word I had seen written somewhere. He must have assumed that the images didn't depict something I would actually fantasize about doing, something I might actually do...

But he'd wanted to know for sure. So he'd come up with the rather ingenious story about the pantomime cow. Just to see how dad would react.

The sneaky little bugger.

===

A few evenings later, when I was getting ready to go out for an hour to meet up with Adam for a drink, Jake came in the bathroom to have a pee just as I was about to start shaving.

"Have you got a lot of stuff to do for college?" I asked him, squirting a thin snake of shaving gel into my palm and working it into a lather.

"Yeah," he replied glumly and directed a stream of urine noisily into the toilet bowl.

Working the lather onto my face, I thought I would mention the woman I was meeting up with the following week. I'd tried several times to engage Jake in conversation about her -- the first woman I'd had a date with in far too long -- but on each occasion he had chosen not to respond.

"I'm quite looking forward to meeting Debbie," I offered brightly. "She seems quite funny from her e-mails and she's quite nice looking."

Once again, Jake didn't offer any reply but instead just stared down at the toilet.

I got on lathering myself up while he shook himself and tucked himself back away.

After flushing the toilet, he came over and watched me make the few strokes with my razor in the mirror.

"Do you shave with the hair or against it?" he asked, curious to see how I was doing it.

I smiled. "Both. I shave in the direction it grows first and then against it to get the last bit of stubble that's left."

I offered him some of my shaving gel and a clean razor from my pack. "Here, have a go. You've got quite a bit of growth there."

He rubbed his chin, feeling the light fuzz of fine hair which had only recently started to become noticeable in between his occasional shaves. "It's not much. Hardly worth it."

"Go on, Jake. It'll be good practice. Let your old dad teach you a thing or two."

He smiled and took a squirt of gel and rubbed it into a white beard shape on his face.

"Looks like Christmas has come early," I said and he smiled more broadly. His teeth looked unusually yellow in contrast with the stark whiteness of the foam.

He took the razor and said, "Normally I shave the moustache first, but where do you start?"

"It's probably best to start on your neck. Make upward strokes, gently pressing the razor into your skin."

He laughed. "I don't want to slit my throat, dad!"

I smiled back. "You won't do that. Not if you move the razor like I show you."

I demonstrated to him how I shaved my neck and he followed my lead, taking care not to snick his bulging Adam's apple which had made his voice drop about an octave in the last couple of years. Then he moved up to his cheeks, first shaving in one direction and then the other as I was. He was getting very little hair off his face but the practice was good for him. I'd been meaning to do this for a while, actually.

As he continued following what I was doing, I said, "There's no cow in your college pantomime, is there?"

He stopped shaving and stared at me through the mirror, his eyes full of surprise.

I smiled. "I'm not going to have a go at you for lying, Jake. I think it was a very clever way of finding out what you needed to know."

He asked, "Who told you?"

I walked over to the sink and rinsed my razor, and then back to the mirror to start on my chin. "You obviously saw how keen I was to... well... get involved. So I phoned Mr Roberts and asked him to keep me in mind if that other guy, the one who you said got the part, had to drop out."

Jake nodded.

Carefully getting to work on my chin, and after warning Jake that this was an area where you were likely to cut yourself, I went on, "I'm guessing I didn't delete my browser history after a session on the internet...?"

He became defensive. "I wasn't trying to spy on you, dad. I just found a good website about my biology assignment -- some stuff about bottom feeders -- and then the next night I couldn't find it again. So I looked in the history and then... well, I found..."

I smiled again, trying to keep things friendly between us. I really didn't want this to turn into a confrontation. After all, I was the one who was more in the wrong.

"I'm sorry you found that, Jake. At your age you shouldn't have seen that kind of --"

"I'm not a little kid, dad," he cut in defensively. "I am eighteen!"

He had a point: I often did have to remind myself that he'd be going to university next year. I supposed that to some part of my brain he would always be little Jakey -- the name his mother and I used to call him when he was small until he'd abruptly decided, perhaps after being teased at school, that he'd outgrown it and we'd had to adapt, with considerable difficulty, to calling him plain old Jake.

"Well, regardless of that," I went on, "I should have been more careful."

He looked at me with puzzlement. "But, dad... what those men were doing... do you actually like that stuff?"

I nodded, feeling disgraced.

"And does it... you know... make you excited when look at it? Do you jerk off?"

I was surprised by his candour but I thought it best to be honest with him.

I said, blushing a little, "I do, Jake. Yes."

"And do you want to do it with another guy? Put your mouth on... well... his butthole?"

He looked incredulous at the prospect that I could want to do something like that, but I nodded. I said, my voice betraying my shame, "It probably seems disgusting to you."

He shook his head. "It's not that. I mean, it's not my thing, but if that's what you like... I just can't understand why you're getting ready to meet up with this woman... Debbie? You're not being fair to her... you're not telling her that you're gay..."

I finally understood why Jake was being so weird about Debbie. I suppose it should have been obvious as soon as I'd realised that he knew about my fetish. Sometimes I could be so stupid.

I said, "I'm not gay, Jake. I still fancy women and I still want a girlfriend. I certainly don't want to hook up with a guy, but for some reason -- and I don't really understand why myself -- I really want to do that with another man."

Jake nodded. "I wouldn't mind if you were gay, you know."

I smiled and gave his arm an affectionate pat. "Yeah, I know. But I'm not."

I started shaving my moustache, showing Jake how to be careful not to let the blade nick his lips and how to angle his razor to get at the awkward hairs at the base of each nostril.

"Maybe you're a 'metrosexual'?" he ventured, more brightly, as he tried to follow my lead.

"What's a 'metrosexual'?"

"I dunno... I just heard it somewhere. It sounds kinda cool, though."

I smiled. "Cool or not, I think I'd want to know what it entailed before I stick a label on myself, Jake."

When he'd made a good job of shaving what had been a fairly wispy moustache, he asked, "How can you want to lick another man's... you know...?" He made a disgusted face to finish his sentence.

I shrugged, turning to shave my left cheek. "I don't know. But I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy it."

"But it's his bum, dad! I mean, he shits through it!"

"Well, that has occurred to me, Jake. But it doesn't really bother me. Not enough to put me off." I thought it best not to tell him that the fact it was such a base and taboo area of the body was a significant part of its intoxicating allure.

He asked, "And would you want him to do the same thing to you? Put his mouth on your backside?"

"If he wanted to, yes."

"And would the two of you do other stuff? Get on top of each other and... you know...?"

"I don't really know, Jake. I haven't got it all worked out in my own head yet, to be honest. This is still pretty new for me."

I smiled at him, wiping the excess smears of foam from my face with a cloth. "I really didn't want to be having this conversation with you."

He nodded. "I just needed to know, dad. I couldn't figure it out what was going on."

I chuckled. "Join the club."

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Next story: The Right Trousers

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