Luke at University Pt. 04

It would have been the sort of event to feature in glossy social magazines if it had not been for Pop's blanket ban on media publicity. However, we were our own paparazzi, and produced a number of excellent pictures. As befitted the venue, the food was excellent and although the event was very expensive, my beloved Tom was worth every penny. I footed the bill personally, my parents did not contribute anything except their presence. We were in a private room, equipped with a grand piano for later in the evening. There were no speeches, and no toasts, because it was a family celebration.

When we had finally finished the seven-course 'menu surprise' and were drinking coffee, Brian got up and went to the piano. Dad sang the Brindisi from 'La Traviata,' 'Libiamo, libiamo ne'lieti calici' and Mozart's 'Panis vivus.' Tom and Margaret nearly made their hands sore with clapping. Then I nodded to Brian and went up to Tom. "Stand up, Tom," I said "It's your turn to sing. You're going to sing Dad's favourite, 'Dear pretty, pretty youth.'

Tom looked dismayed, but Dad came over and said, "Go on, Tom, you are not going to make a fool of yourself. You can sing perfectly well!" So Tom sang Dad's gay anthem, and made a very good job of it, with Brian accompanying him on the piano. We all gave him enormous applause, and he turned bright red and sat down hastily.

"Bravo, my love," I said, "don't forget to ask Margaret to arrange an audition for you for the Bach Choir. I'll speak to her myself about it." And I did, there and then.

In fact I spent the next half hour talking to her. I told her what a fool Tom had been in not revealing to her the fact that he was gay. She replied, "But I didn't tell him that I was gay too!"

"But if you thought that Tom was gay, there was no reason not to tell him that you were gay as well."

"Well, I might have been wrong. All I knew was that you thought that he was yours. He might have been bi."

"But if he had fancied you sexually, how would your girlfriend have reacted? I was eaten up with jealousy when he started going out with you, jealousy that was totally stupid, because he made no secret that you were going out together. If he'd wanted to bed you, he wouldn't have been so open with me. Did you tell your girlfriend that you were going out with Tom?"

"Yes, I had to really, because she knew how much classical music meant to me."

"It might be nice for the four of us to do something together, even if only a film or something. Would you like that? I'm hoping that you will be able to keep an eye on Tom while I'm in Italy next year. Even with mobile phones and E-mail, there's no guarantee that he will tell me if anything is the matter with him. You must think that I'm a fool for being so besotted with him. After all, he's not very extrovert."

"I can entirely understand how you feel. He's sweet. He never makes a pass at me, he never says anything suggestive, he's thoughtful and gentlemanly. Everything that a gay girl could wish for!"

"And everything that a gay boy could wish for as well!" I replied with a grin. "Although I guess that I'm not looking for the same things as you are!"

"It will be nice to get him into the Bach Choir. I'm sure he will pass the audition."

"I hope so. He needs to get out more and do more things."

We fixed that the four of us should meet for a drink in the Lion pub the following week. At the end of the evening, I gave Tom my present. Brian and his daughter left early to get back to Fitchey, followed shortly after by Edward and his wife. After a few more cups of coffee and petit fours, Cathy and my parents left for Fountain Street, and I paid the bill, leaving a generous tip and taking care NOT to let Tom see it, and we then escorted Margaret to St Etheldreda's, her college, before returning slowly on foot to Buckingham. I said to Tom, "I guess that you want your other birthday present now!"

"No," he replied, "I've eaten and drunk too much. Let's go to bed and if I feel like it in the night, I'll waken you up!" We undressed from our formal clothing and hung the suits up carefully. I washed, cleaned my teeth, said my prayers and got into bed...

About 4 am, I awoke to find Tom kneeling stark naked beside my bed and kissing me. "I'm ready for my present now!" he said, carefully laying an unwrapped condom on my bed table with a tube of K-Y gel. I pushed back the bed covers and he climbed on top of me, his rock-hard dick sticking out in front of him. "'How can you, can you sleep, when I, when I am by?'" he giggled. I got hold of the condom and rolled it onto his tool. I spread my legs so that he could lube me up and in no time at all he was inside me, and simultaneously bending and kissing my chest and neck. It was wonderful to feel the warmth of his body. I couldn't see much of course, as it was still well before dawn. Gently but persistently he fucked me until the male miracle happened. When he had had his way with me, I kissed him and whispered that I did not need relief. I was too sleepy to get excited. He just kissed me gratefully, removed and tied up the rubber and pushed me against the wall, lay down beside me and pulled me, face upwards, on top of him and clasped me in his arms. Then he pulled the bedclothes back on top of us and the two of us fell asleep, as Tom murmured "'I'll hug you, hug you close and keep you warm.'"

Our meeting with Margaret and her girlfriend was a great success. The partner was called Sarah, and to our surprise she was not in the slightest way butch. "That will teach us the think in stereotypes!" said Tom. No-one would have thought that the two girls were gay, until one noticed the way that they looked at each other. We all four felt that there was scope for us to go out together sometimes, to see a film or drink in a pub. We felt that if we all got to know one anther, the possibilities of jealousy and suspicion were greatly reduced.

Chapter 57

After the exams

I did my last French exam on the Wednesday afternoon after the end of term. At 5 pm I came out of the Examination Schools, to find Tom, among several others, sitting on the steps holding a bottle of Prosecco and two plastic glasses. In total surprise, and oblivious of anyone else, I kissed him gratefully. "My sweet boy, how nice of you," I said. Having opened the bottle with a "pop", he poured us each a glass. No silly shaking and squirting of good wine by my careful Yorkshireman!

It was a nice afternoon and we sat there in the sun, with countless idiotic young men and women throwing champagne at one another. "When we've finished this," said Tom, "we are going to the Fitness Centre to swim twenty lengths each with Alex and Steve, and then we are all going to the bar there, where we will have a couple of pints and then go to eat at the Hang Zhou." (There was no dinner service in Hall out of term). "We're celebrating the end of your exams in a different way! When do you get the results?"

"Early in August," I said. "I've arranged to see my French tutor the day after the results, to get some feedback. He can say things face to face that he could not put into an E-mail. While the exam is strictly a pass/fail exam without any classification, it counts towards my final exam in two years time, so I need to know how the marks will affect my performance then."

"I'll be working at the Fitness Centre when your results come out," Tom said, "so we'll have to celebrate when I'm on a day shift."

I was sure that I was not the first person ever to turn up at the Fitness Centre still clad in examination sub-fusc and wearing a gown! Tom had brought my sports bag and swimming trunks so that I had no need to return to college. The swimming was not a race, and we tried to keep reasonably together, so that we would all finish at roughly the same time. Then we adjourned to the showers to wash off the chlorine from our bodies. It was interesting to see the other two boys naked. Both were a lot less hairy than Tom. Alex had light brown hair, whereas Steve was very dark, like me. Both were slim and fit with decent, though not obtrusive, muscularity and flat bellies. I also inspected, as unobtrusively as possible, as I did not want to get an erection, their genitals. They were both reasonably well hung. Tom noticed me looking and grinned. I guess he felt confident that his equipment was as good, and possibly better, than theirs! They had not discovered Storing pour Homme, which is not surprising, as most of those who used it when it was the height of gay fashion, were now elderly queens! Although it costs the earth, I let them both try the shampoo, but not the shower gel.

Tom had remembered to bring a T-shirt and jeans as well as my swimwear, so I could pack suit, tie and gown into the sports bag. We then adjourned to the bar. It had been an insistence of Pop's that the Fitness Centre bar should always stock at least two cask-conditioned beers, and this had proved a major attraction among the clientèle. It was an essential philosophy of the centre that it was for all men, and that while it was gay-friendly, all men concerned about bodily fitness and a place where they could relax away from women were welcome. That meant that the bar had to stock 'fairy drinks' (cocktails and alcopops), even if there was not much call for them.

Quite a lot of the Buckingham 'hearties' frequented the Centre. Alex and Steve were also regulars. Tom and I had always preferred the college beer cellar, or pubs, because the Centre bar seemed always to be full of people talking about soccer or rugby. But because most undergraduates had gone home by now, the place was very quiet, and I was able to take the opportunity, when Tom had slipped out to the toilet, to ask Alex and Steve to keep an eye on him in the following year. If they noticed an absence from meals, or him not turning up to choir practice, I asked them to let me know without delay. While it was easy to keep in touch, it was not practicable for the two of us to talk every day, and indeed would be counter-productive. We needed to be able to concentrate on our day-to-day activities, especially Tom, who had his major exams at the end of his third year. Fortunately, he had passed the audition for the Bach Choir, and that would get him out of college for one evening a week, and I was going to arrange with Dad to see that Tom came round once every couple of weeks during term. During the vacations of course, Tom would be at Rockwell's Barn.

We then moved on to the Hang Zhou Chinese restaurant, where we had an excellent meal. Steve and Alex were leaving the following day for their respective homes, and Tom and I were getting ready to move to Rockwell's Barn, where we would stay until Tom had to start work at the Fitness Centre.

Chapter 58

A Welsh interlude

There were about three weeks before Tom was due to start work and Dad asked us if we would like to come with him for a few days to Llandewi Mawr in mid-Wales, where he had accepted an invitation to be a judge at the Llandewi Mawr International Singing Competition. Llandewi Mawr is a small town set in beautiful countryside with excellent walking, totally neglected by tourists except once every five years when the Festival was held, which filled the pubs of the town and the few hotels, also all the camp sites for miles around. However, Dad knew a small village called Llanmerthyr Fach some way out of the town with an excellent pub with rooms, where he had stayed years before, and which still remained unknown to most visitors. He had managed to secure a couple of rooms at the Fiddler's Arm there for a week's stay, and we accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. "You don't need to come to the Festival every day. There are several beautiful walks round Llanmerthyr Fach. You could take a picnic lunch and be out all day. There are lots of easy hills to climb, and even if it rains, it's healthy to be in the open air. The food at the pub is excellent. The pub holds great sentimental interest for me, because we stayed there back in the nineteen-eighties when I won the competition, which was in effect the beginning of my professional career. I've never had time to go back there since. They have women's voices in the competition now. In my day it was male voices only!"

We drove to mid-Wales on a beautiful warm July day and checked in at the pub late in the afternoon. There was just time for a shower and a change of clothes before dinner. We agreed with Dad that we would attend the festival for two days, the day that the tenor class was held, and the day of the final, when the overall champion would be decided. The other days, Tom and I would be walking.

There were only a dozen guests in the hotel that day. It only had six letting rooms, and except during the festival itself, which started the following day, they were not fully booked. At the next table was a pair of attractive girls, and when we went for coffee in the bar after dinner, we got into conversation with them. They were from Cardiff and I guessed their age to be about twenty-four or thereabouts. Like us, they were combining a visit to the festival with a walking holiday. They had already been there a couple of days and done a few walks. We asked them which were the best walks for a full day's walking, and they told us a couple and showed us them on our map. We bought them some drinks and had a very pleasant evening chatting to them. Dad had gone to his room to look at the names, CVs, and listen to short .mp3 excerpts of the voices of the competition entrants, particularly of those for the next day.

The next day, the weather was good and taking a packed lunch that we had ordered from the hotel, we set off uphill though fields of sheep and beautiful woodland. We found an ideal spot for lunch: a hillside with large overhanging rocks where we could sit and eat. We sat close together beneath the shadow of the rock and I could not resist the temptation, even when we were eating, to put my arm round Tom. However kissing someone with your mouth full of sandwich is not to be recommended!

When we had finished eating and drinking, we both started to feel one another. The sun was warm and we removed each other's shirts. Then we started undoing our belts and reaching into each other's jeans and getting hold of the other's tool. It was the first time that we had ever made love in the open air, and we were reluctant to get fully undressed. We were sitting on a waterproof sheet, which protected us from spiky plants, twigs and to some extent, stones. Tom lay back and muttered invitingly, "Suck my dick please, fag-boy!" I pulled his jeans and underpants down to his knees, lay on my side and set to work on his cock with my mouth. I spent the next few minutes nibbling Tom's foreskin and suddenly recalled the vision of the holy thirteenth-century Austrian bagijn, Agnes Blannbekin, whom I regard as the patron saint of fellatio. My father, who holds vigorous views about how the presence of God can only be recognized via the emotions and the senses, and that His love can only be perceived in the same way that human love is perceived, had told me the story of Agnes when I was about sixteen. I had not really believed him, and had to have the story confirmed by Uncle Edward. Because my mouth was otherwise engaged, I decided that when I had Tom in a receptive mood, I would tell him the Agnes story.

I spent some time licking the sides of his shaft and nibbling the hair on his scrotum. He lay there kissing my hair gently from time to time and stroking my shoulders. I then took his cock into my mouth and started to use my jaws as well as my lips and tongue. Tom started to moan with pleasure. Only a man can understand what a joyful experience this form of lovemaking can be. I knew exactly how my darling boy was feeling. Oral sex is the deepest expression of trust and tenderness that can occur between human beings. Within a few minutes the miracle happened. Tom shot his load into my willing and receptive mouth and I swallowed it eagerly and greedily.

With his jism still on my lips, I kissed his lips and his cheeks and worked my way down his neck and chest to reach his belly-button, where I stopped and gazed close at hand at his slowly shrinking manhood with the last few drops of life-juice dripping from the tip. Suddenly Tom spoke. "My precious boy, my own sweet love, will you be my partner for life?" I was so startled that I shot upright and stared at him. I had not expected a proposal under a rock halfway up a Welsh hill! "I've now got money of my own, not enough to buy a house for us, but enough to mean that I'm independent. I've no idea if your grandmother intended the money for this purpose, and it's not enough to keep you in the style to which you are accustomed, but it's enough to make me feel able to ask you to be mine for good."

I scarcely knew what to say, my surprise was so great, but I did not hesitate in replying. "Yes, YES, of course I will, stud-boy!" And I turned round, threw myself on top of him, clutched him round the shoulders and kissed him as hard as I could. We both got pretty rough as we embraced. When men get passionate, they are not very tender. Breathlessly I whispered, "Are you going to let me take a turn?"

"Now that you're mine, you can have me at any time that you want. Just get your dick out, and my mouth will be open!" In great haste, I unzipped my jeans and pulled them and my underpants down. After the close encounter of a few minutes before, I was as hard as nails. Tom pushed me onto my back and started to kiss my belly-button before working slowly along my treasure-trail. When he reached my pubes, he started to chew the hair before moving on to my bollocks. As usual, his lovemaking was unbelievably delicious. I really have run out of words to describe the pleasure that he could give me every time that we shagged. I knew that I could not imagine a life without this wonderful man. Without him, I think that I would consider permanent celibacy. No woman could ever offer me what Tom could give.

"When we get back to Camford, we'll need to get engagement rings," I said.

"Just shut up for a while, garrulous!" said Tom, "my mouth has other things to do at present!" and he slid along the shaft of my tool and engulfed the glans in his mouth. The next few minutes were paradise on earth. It still baffles me even many years later as to how he became so skilful at giving head. He claimed to have no sexual experience before we met, so I can only conclude that some chemistry between us enabled him to press the right buttons as far as my sexual response was concerned. He sucked, chewed and licked my male organ and I nearly swooned with delight, and after several minutes of pleasure I came violently and emptied myself into his welcoming mouth. He smiled happily as he swallowed my seed.

"You're my fiancé, now!" I told him. "We're together for life. And unlike my parents, we won't have to wait twenty years to tie the knot!"

The rest of the walking that day has left no impression at all in my memory. My thoughts were centred on my stud-boy and the fact that we would be buying drinks for Dad that evening. We thought that we might even look in a few jeweller's shops in Llandewi when we went to hear the tenors compete the following day. We covered another 10 km or so in the afternoon, stopping every mile or so to embrace, before we were back at the Fiddler's Arms.

By the time that Dad came in from the Singing Competition, we were already in the bar celebrating our engagement. We bought him a pint and excitedly broke our news to him. There in the bar, he could not kiss us, but he shook both our hands warmly and said to Tom, "Welcome to the family, son-in-law-to-be! So from what you say, my difficult mother-in-law has done the pair of you a big service! She will be pleased to find that she has been useful in her old age! My own parents will be delighted. In celebration, we'll have some Champagne tonight, and the most expensive dishes on the menu!"