Going Walkabout

"I hate to do it, Jaime, you're a good worker and know you way around an auto engine—and I like to do my part in helping lads returning from the Falklands. But word's got around and you have a reputation now that's hurting my business, so . . ."

That's what Patrick had said to me at the auto garage in Bishop Cleeve, and I couldn't fault him on that. I had gained a reputation. I couldn't help that. It's what the Navy had let me go for after I'd returned from the Falklands in late spring of the year, 1982. But it had been there, on board the HMS Broadsword, that I had started gaining that reputation, and not just from other sailors but from the older ship's officers as well. I had, in fact, liked it better from the older officers. I hadn't gone looking for it. It's what others had brought me to.

And I had been doing just fine at Oxford, studying creative writing, when the Navy had pulled me out of studies, at twenty, and sent me off to the war with Argentina over islands I'd never heard of. I'd gone willingly. Write what you know and continually expand your experience in what you know, my creative writing tutor had said, so, joining the Navy and learning what was in the South Atlantic was meant to broaden my experience. It just didn't last long and it gave me experience in something else altogether.

After I was bounced out of the Navy, it was right here to the Cotswolds and Bishop Cleeve I'd come, where my father, a village doctor divorced from the mother who had raised me alone, was in the final stages of dying. Caregiving for my father had given me a chance to be doing something useful while I contemplated what to do next in my turned-over life. Perhaps it would be back to Oxford when my father's finances were settled after he died.

It took most of the summer for my dad to die. His house immediately went into receivership, the village having had rights to buy it, and I'd moved to Clyde's farm on the eastern side of the village. Clyde was an older man, a widower, who I had taken up with while taking care of my dad. He wasn't so old that he didn't have the itch anymore, and he was well put together enough to still be attractive to a young man who needed attention. He lived alone and in some isolation. I'd met him at a pub, and there'd been no encumbrance in hooking up. Later, I suppose my dad dying and the village seeing I was now living at Clyde Davies's farm clued them in to what was what, and it was all coming down on me now.

So, here I sat, two months into the summer, and a glorious one it was this year, at a table well away from everyone else, at the Dove and Fox, numbing myself with ale and contemplating the "What next?" I'd rather settled at the farm, helping Clyde with the morning feedings; going into town to work on auto engines, working with engines being a skill I'd picked up on the HMS Broadsword; writing in the evening; and lying under Clyde at night.

"Would you be happy with a bit of company while you drank? I don't like drinking alone and you look like you could use the company."

He was old—at least appreciably older than I was, in his late forties or early fifties—graying hair in profusion, both on his head and in a beard. He was stocky, wearing a peacoat, and looking nautical. "They tell me you were in the Navy, down at the Falklands. I was in the Navy too. I know how it is being spit back out onto the land, your life changed. May I sit? I brought you another one."

And, indeed, he had two mugs in his hands.

"Yes, please, sit with me." I didn't see any reason not to be social. He was a good looker.

He sat, introducing himself as Sid Bailey, just passing through from Plymouth to Liverpool to pick up another merchantman. He still went to sea.

"The sea is a lifestyle all its own, as I think you may have found," he said while we chatted, discussing naval matters and only slightly touching on their current lives. "Things happen at sea to change a man's life. Don't you agree, son?"

"Yes, I certainly can agree with that," I answered. What I had learned at sea, not having even been there long, had changed me completely.

"And a man gets set in his ways and his habits. His needs and his wants."

"Yes, I suppose," I answered. "His needs?" I added, beginning to get the reason why he had approached me.

"It's a long way from Plymouth to Liverpool—a long way to be doing without what he is used to getting on shipboard."

Ah, yes, I was right about what his interests were and why he was expressing them to me. I wondered who in the village had directed him my way.

"Needs," I repeated.

"Yes, needs," the man said. "I am told you are an accommodating young man. That was volunteered when I noted I was a sailor and asked if there were any others about."

"Accommodating?" I asked. But even as I was asking he was placing a small wad of pound notes on the table near my now-empty mug.

"I hope I haven't heard wrong," he said. His other hand had gone under the table and gripped my knee. When I didn't flinch away from that, the hand moved inward, between my legs on the thigh, just above the knee. I let my legs go slack. I'd already become aroused by the man while we were talking. Clyde wasn't my whole world. He smiled and moved his hand higher on the inner thigh. My legs spread even more.

"You will need to be direct," I said. "It won't do here to make wrong assumptions. We aren't the big city here."

"I was told you took cock," he said. "Is that direct enough for you? It's been a long haul from one port to the next for me. I'm randy as hell. You're a right handsome young man. I allow as you must have learned to go under sailors like me during your float down in the South Atlantic. The man who told me you took cock was right scandalized by it. But I wasn't. I saw it as a stanching of my need. So, what say you? Do I order you another drink and we just say we didn't click and I walk away, or do you take up that money and we go up to the room I've booked here for the night?"

I'd just lost my job and it was over what everyone here in Bishop Cleeve seemed to think I was willing to do for a man. My dad was dead now and I'd done what I'd come to do in Bishop Cleeve. And I'd lost my job and would be completely dependent on a farmer with rough hands who took what he wanted quickly and roughly and then rolled over and started snoring. I'd already contemplated going walkabout. If I did, I'd need some wherewithal to do it. And I'd just lost my job.

His hand under the table had reached my crotch. A finger had run down the line of my shaft through the material of my jeans and had found and was rubbing its cap.

"Need I pull away?" he asked.

"Not unless you wish to," I answered.

I was hard and he knew I was. I wasn't pulling away. I was slouched down in the chair, legs spread, vulnerable and nonresisting. He could see that I was slightly trembling. His eyes were boring into mine, dominating and commanding me. He had gauged me for a needy submissive, and he wasn't wrong. I disengaged eye contact and turned my gaze down to the surface of the table, an act of surrender and we both understood it as such.

"I must tell you that I'm not a whore," I said, fighting for whatever dignity I could get. "I don't have a regular or smooth way of approaching this."

"If you take the money, you're a whore," Bailey said. "It's just for an hour. This isn't romance or a commitment. I just want to use your body for an hour. You have a very desirable body for use. A whore is what I want. I don't want to marry you; I just want to fuck you once. I can feel that you want me—you want a man, a sailor, inside you. You want to be used by a sailor again. You don't have to take the money. You could just come upstairs with me and we could use each other for an hour. But there's no reason for you not to take the money. You've already decided to come upstairs with me. It's just a matter now if you take money for it or not."

Shuddering, I stood from the table, picking up the wad of money as I did so. "So, where is this room you've booked?" I said.

In the upstairs room, Bailey took off his peacoat and tossed it aside. He wasn't looking at me when he said, "Strip down, Laddie, and let's see what we have to work with." As I stood just inside the door and stripped down, he pulled a Henley shirt over his head and sat down on the end of the bed. "Nice, very nice," he said when he looked at me standing by the door, naked. "Turn and bend over. Spread your cheeks and let's have a look at your hole. Yes, yes, good. You've been well used haven't you? Now, come over and go down on your knees to me."

"I'm not a prostitute," I murmured.

"I don't really care what you call yourself as long as you bend over and take my cock," he answered. "This isn't any sort of love affair we're having, Laddie. You don't have to do anything special for me. Just suck my cock and then lay there and give me your hole."

He unbuckled himself, pulling the thick leather belt out of his trousers and unbuttoned his fly as I turned, walked over to him, and went down on my knees between his spread legs. He was a compact, muscular man, with a thick matting of salt-and-pepper hair covering his torso and arms and legs. Under the matting was considerable black and blue tattooing on his torso. An engorged, up-curved, thick, but not terribly long shaft pushed up through thick pubic hair. He grasped my head between his hands and forced my face down to his groin, I took his cock into my throat and gave him deep head as I had been taught to do aboard the HMS Broadsword. He grunted his approval and moved my head on and off the cock with the control of his beefy hands.

"There, the Navy taught you to blow a man well," he said.

Before I could bring him off, he had risen, turned me belly down on the bed but standing on the floor, and was crouched behind me, fondling my cock and balls, milking them, and tonguing my hole. He stroked me and squeezed my balls, with me moaning and writhing under him until I shot my load, which didn't take long as keyed up as I was by the situation.

He moved on to pleasing himself and using me. He held my head down into the mattress with a grip on the back of my neck with one hand, and he strapped me with the belt on my buttocks, back, and thighs with the other as sailors had often done on HMS Broadsword, his grunts harmonizing with my groans. When I became more vocal from that, he stuffed my smalls in my mouth to keep me quiet, covered me from behind, mounted and penetrated me, and, gripping my wrists in his hands to hold me to the bed, arms over my head, he fucked me hard.

I felt I was in the embrace of a furry beast, and I relaxed in his embrace, concentrating on the sliding of his shaft—not the biggest I'd taken nor as thick as Clyde's was, but gloriously stretching and taxing anyway—inside my passage. He freed my right hand, which I moved under my belly, working on matching the stroking of my cock with it to the thrusts inside me of his. I came again under my own hand.

He jerked and grunted and filled me, deep with a load of cum. When he'd done so and I'd felt the tension drain out of him, he took up his clothes and went into the small bathroom attached to the room and cleaned himself up. I lay there, panting, regretting the loss of the feel of being enveloped by his muscular, hairy body. When he came out, he was dressed and told me I could use the bathroom and instructed me, "Then leave. We're done here." At the door, though, he turned and said, "It was a good lay. It should hold me to Liverpool."

I had taken the money. He'd made me a rent-boy on land. I'd taken money from a few on the HSM Broadsword, although not many, but this was the first time I'd taken money for sex on land. And that was despite whatever rumors about me floated around in the village.

When I went downstairs, he was in the pub, sitting alone at a table, nursing a mug of ale. He didn't look up when I passed him and I made no effort to connect with him. I felt slightly ashamed—but only slightly. He'd given me more attention than Clyde did at the farm. If the whole village was going to know about me and censor me for the life I now led, I might as well enjoy it. Even the strapping had made me feel more alive then ever before on dry land.

The barkeep, Archie, called me over to the bar before I could reach the outer door and I assumed he knew what had happened upstairs in his inn and that I was going to be banished from the pub. But that wasn't the case at all.

"If you be wanting to take another one on, he's waiting over by the stairs and I've told him what room to use," Archie said. "You'd be doing it for half of this." He opened his palm to show a wad of pound notes.

"Do another one?" I asked, confused and not keeping up with him.

"Aye, I know what you'll do for a man. We haven't had male whore here at the inn for some time—only the girls—but if you wish to be in the business, we have business here for you. We have soldiers and sailors aplenty going through here, and many of them have been trained to want their own by the circumstance of their service."

It looked like a lot of money, even getting only half of it. The village had already marked me as a male whore and I'd just come downstairs from being a paid whore. I'd lost my job today. I needed the money. It was past time when I could say I wouldn't be a paid whore for a man.

The man was tall and gaunt. He was maybe in his late forties, balding and gangly looking. He was dressed like a farmer coming in to the village to deliver his produce. His eyes were already undressing me. His need must be great to so openly ogle me and to have the money to spare to fuck me.

His cock was long and this thrust was hard and deep as I lay on my back on the bed and he gripped my legs under my knees, raising and spreading them and rowing them back and forth like the oars on a rowboat in a rhythm that matched the thrusts of his shaft. I took my cock in my hand and worked on coming with him. I was in male whore mode.

Before he left, he told me he'd been a soldier and that had taught him what sort of lay he wanted. So, the barkeep was right about soldiers and sailors.

* * * *

I was lying on my side, my left knee drawn up into my chest, my right hand between my legs, inside the pouch of the jock strap I'd worn to bed, fondling and stroking my cock, while Clyde's heavy body rode over mine from in back. A muscular arm embraced my chest. His left leg pinned my bent one down, his face was buried in my throat, kissing me there. His thick cock was inside me, languidly stroking, filling and stretching me. I panted and whimpered, filled to full stretch by him. His sex slave. He was old and sour and not much to look like, but when he got me into this position, he was God.

His thrusts were slowing down rather than speeding up. He'd had a tiring day on the farm. I'd avoided him. He'd been too tired and concerned about a cow close to birthing but having complications to speak at supper. I'd thought he would forego sex when we went to bed. But I'd been wrong. It was a question now, though, what would come quickest with him—an ejaculation or sleep.

We'd hardly spoken to each other, each of us possessed by our own cares. I thought for the hundredth time of leaving him. He was just an old, sour, man. We'd sleep separately that night, I decided. I'd just let him stew in his own juices. But as I walked back toward the bedrooms, he hand clamped down on my wrist and he guided me to his bed. And he put me down on the bed, pulling my clothes off me. And he'd held me down on the bed with his powerful body, penetrated me, and fucked me.

I came in the pouch of my jock strap and, with a grunt and a jerk, Clyde came in my ass channel too. He was asleep and snoring less than a minute later, still inside me.

I woke at the usual time in the morning. It was still dark outside and would be for another hour. But Clyde was already up and gone, early even for him. I knew he was fretting about the cow and had called a vet. I didn't know if that was the only thing he was fretting over, though. Other than the sex last night, performed to silence, he had avoided me as much as I had him. Had he heard already that I'd done it for money for two men at the Dove and the Fox? He'd surely learn of it, though. Would he throw me out when he learned I'd been not just a lay for men in the village but a paid whore for them as well?

He barebacked me. Would that, at least, change when he knew I was doing it for money at the Dove and the Fox?

I hadn't struck any sort of a deal with Archie. After the second man, he'd asked me about doing it on a regular basis. "There are men enough around who would be interested in fucking a strapping young man like you," he said, "and we get pass-through trade with the itch for it too. You're a handsome young man. There will be trade enough of men wanting to ride you."

I couldn't see Clyde putting up with that or my having any sort of welcome in Bishop Cleeve if I did that, though. I didn't give Archie an answer. I didn't really think this was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write and I enjoyed the engine mechanics. When my dad's estate was settled, I could go back to the university—someplace that didn't know me as the village male whore. But until then . . .

When I went to the kitchen, I saw that Clyde already had had his breakfast. The sound of an approaching vehicle pulled me to the window and I saw that the vet had arrived. He spoke with Clyde beside the cow shed for a few minutes while I chewed my toast and drank coffee at the window, and then they went inside. I was itching to get outside but I didn't want to encounter Clyde, especially if the vet was there. The vet was a very conservative man too, so I didn't want him see Clyde and me together at all. Clyde didn't mind my living with him and him getting his sex off me regularly, but I knew he was sensitive to what those in the village, including the vet, had to say about that.

I left the house and headed in the other direction, deciding to take a short walkabout that would help me clear my head and prepare myself for near-term decisions. The late summer weather was glorious, every direction I looked in returned a painting of beauty. If Clyde threw me out, I guess that settled what I'd tell Archie at the Dove and Fox to hold me until my dad's estate was settled. Archie had said I could work and room at the pub as well as service men if I needed a place to stay.

I was beginning to wonder if Archie wanted me too, and just didn't know how to ask. If it came to where the Dove and the Fox was my best option until my dad's estate settled, I guess I could go under Archie. Did that make me a common whore? I didn't really want to answer that.

My walk took me up to the top of nearby Cleeve Hill, the highest point both of the Cotswolds hill range and of the county of Gloucestershire, from which I could look down into the surrounding countryside. The late summer weather was warm. The views were breathtaking. As I stood up there, two young men, outfitted as hikers, came up to stand near me to enjoy the view. They were both handsome and fit young men of about my age and they nodded and smiled at me. I smiled back. I wasn't surprised to see hikers here. A couple of walking tour journeys had been established for hikers to enjoy the Cotswolds at their leisure. Bishops Cleeve was on a section know as the northern section of Cotswold Way, and Cleeve Hill was a feature of that walk.

The way the two young men related to each other and touched told me that they were lovers, which was fine with me. I didn't feel so alone in the world. I briefly thought of how lucky they were to be on this hike together and enjoying the Cotswolds and each other. I was envious. They were being more comfortable with their relationship than I was with the same lifestyle. They didn't seem to care if I knew they were lovers or not. Something in the way we smiled at each other seemed to make them comfortable with who and what I was.