Bedtime Stories

I did a left turn onto Great Bowden Road, feeling annoyed by Jake's apparent ease at believing that his father would have opportunistic anal sex with another man who he hardly knew. The fact that Guy and I had indeed had sex together – and that what we'd done had in many ways been far more intimate – added to my discomfort.

I was going to let the subject drop but after driving a few blocks I said, more calmly, "I can't believe you would think I'd done that, Jake."

"Well... you know... it's no biggie, dad. You told me guys like to play around together sometimes even though they're not gay. So I figured that's what you were doing."

He had a point. I had told him a while ago that it was normal for some boys go through a period of being interested in other boys and that he should not feel ashamed about experimenting with his friends in sexual ways. He'd been both amused and repulsed by the suggestion and had asked, laughing, if that meant I'd be okay if I found him 'doing it' with his friend Craig in his bedroom (I think he'd subconsciously plucked Craig's name out of the air because he is the most effeminate of Jake's friends and can, in my view, sometimes be a bit flirty with him). I'd smiled and said I'd obviously prefer not to walk in on my son 'doing it' with anyone – girl or boy – but that if it happened I'd see it as a natural expression of his sexual curiosity.

So I suppose, in Jake's eyes, whatever I'd been doing with Guy had simply been my way of leading by example.

Perhaps seeing from my softening expression that I was tacitly accepting his argument, he added, "I wouldn't mind if the two of you were doing stuff."

I smiled at how permissive he was trying to be about it and how our roles had been reversed.

"Well, that's good to hear. But what Simon's dad said was just a joke – in pretty poor taste and using a word I don't like, but a joke nonetheless."

He nodded. "Well I thought that. But then there were those noises and... well..."

"What noises?"

He shrugged. "You know. Sexual noises."

"What kind of sexual noises?"

He looked out of the window, uncomfortable at being questioned about such matters. "The sort of noises a bed makes when people... you know. And Simon's dad calling out stuff..."

I felt my face flush, stunned by what I was hearing, but I had to know, "What sort of stuff?"

He kept staring out of the window watching the houses go by. "I dunno. 'Give it to me'... that kind of stuff. Like you were... well... on top of him... doing it to him."

While I was shocked that my son had envisioned me mounting another man, for some reason I found it slightly less embarrassing that he had assumed I'd been the dominant participant. It would have seemed inexplicably worse to have him think it was my bum being humped.

He went on, "And there were... sort of... slapping sounds."

I cursed the thin walls of cheap hotels.

Struggling to think of a way out of this, I contemplated using Guy's ploy about it being a joke we had played on our sons to see if they were gullible enough to buy it, but the story sounded so lame in my head that I couldn't even bring myself to try it.

I decided instead to take advantage of the sense of openness I'd always shared with Jake about matters of sex.

I said, as sincerely as I could, "Okay, Jake. I'll be honest with you. But this stays between the two of us, okay?"

He peered over at me, no doubt intrigued by my apparent frankness.

I told him flatly, "We were masturbating."

His eyes widened in surprise. "Yeah?"

I nodded. "We had a couple of drinks, found we couldn't sleep in the hotel beds. So we masturbated to tire ourselves out. And after that we slept."

During his GCSE exams when he was getting stressed out, I'd told Jake that masturbation could sometimes be a good cure for insomnia, even if you didn't feel particularly sexy. I've no idea if he tried it – our openness has its limits – but it came in handy now to make my story sound more plausible.

Jake seemed intrigued. "But you hardly knew Simon's dad. Do guys your age do that together, even strangers?"

"Sometimes. But it's not something that we talk about. This goes no further. Okay?"

I really didn't want his mother getting wind of this; not to mention Simon.

He nodded. "Yeah, sure. No biggie." Then he added, with a mischievous smirk, "So what was his willy like? Was it as big as yours?"

I glanced over at him, unable to stop myself smiling. "I don't know, Jake. I didn't get a look at it. We were in our own beds and the light was off."

I turned right to pull into the sports ground car park and Jake asked, "So why was Simon's dad calling out stuff when he was masturbating?"

I shrugged. "I guess some guys like to be noisy when they do it. Make a song and dance of it, you know."

Jake chuckled and I smiled over at him, pleased that he was buying my story.

As I pulled into a space to drop him off, he said, "I told Simon that's what you guys were doing. I said it couldn't be that you were... you know..."

"He was listening too?"

"Yeah. We both were. And..." He paused for a moment, perhaps feeling rather manly about what he was going to say. "We were doing it, too."

I turned to face him, horrified.

Jake smiled. "Yeah. We couldn't sleep either. And... you know... hearing you guys enjoying yourselves... we joined in."

I stared at him, incredulous.

As if it wasn't bad enough that Guy and I had been overheard by our sons, I now had to contend with the fact they had been jerking off while they'd listened to us. I could almost picture them in their beds, grinning at each other while they stroked themselves at the sounds of their dads having a noisy and rather drunken homosexual encounter. Discussing what they thought the rhythmic slapping sounds might be; their imaginations thankfully too limited to recognise the sounds of Simon's dad's arse hammering down onto my eager face.

I felt mortified.

Perhaps misinterpreting my stunned expression, Jake added, reassuringly, "We didn't touch each other or anything. It wasn't like that."

I said, trying to regain a sense of normality, "It's okay, Jake. Whatever you and Simon did was okay. You know that."

He nodded and then picked up his gear. "Well I'd better go. I'll be late for practice."

As he got out of the car he grinned back at me. "It was pretty sweet though, wasn't it? The four of us doing it together, kind of..."

I tried my best to smile. "Yeah, Jake. It was sweet."

He threw me a thumbs-up and set off into the sports centre.

I wanted to sit for a few seconds and recompose myself after Jake's revelation but other cars were arriving and I had to vacate my space.

He'd seemed convinced by my story – that was something – but the fact remained that he had heard me having sex with another man and I was extremely uncomfortable about that.

As I drove home, I tried to figure out why.

It wasn't simply the fact that my son had heard me having sex. If his mother still lived with us and we were still sleeping together, no doubt he'd hear us occasionally as his room was right next to mine. And that wouldn't bother me; it was a natural part of living with your parents.

It was obviously the homosexual element which was bugging me but the reason for that wasn't immediately apparent. Jake had made it clear that he didn't mind if I wanted to experiment with other men – just as I had told him on many occasions that I would support him no matter what his own sexual orientation turned out to be – and seemed to have accepted that such encounters might arise from my prolonged loneliness in the bedroom. He'd actually been very mature about it and I should really be thankful for that rather than be feeling so troubled.

I realised, as I headed down Leicester Road to avoid the road-works which I'd got stuck in earlier, that I had assumed that whatever journey I was on sexually, wherever this was taking me, I was going it alone. To discover that I might be taking my son along with me – that he was, in some small way, aware of the changes I was going through – was, at that time, too big a development for me to easily accept.

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Next story: Work and Play

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