Nice shoulders

Someone told me last night, when I was naked, that I had nice shoulders. I was in the middle of a five-man fuck-fest in a suburb I'd never heard of when the host - who had only seen me fully-clothed up to that point - came over and grabbed me by the shoulders and felt me.

I'm like a child; I just can't get enough praise. And especially if it's about something like that, it's always so unexpected. Praise for the grandeur and complexity of my worldview.. that's like water off a duck's back, I know that. But my body..? When I entered my early teens I got chubby and skinny at the same time and stayed like that through my 20s. Early 30s, I somehow got married and started working out, then there was some magical inflexion point where my body got better and other mens' bodies got worse (with age), and so, unbeknownst to me, I started to become hot. It's all relative...

My wife, of course, didn't notice or care. But I was in the habit of from time to time sneaking out and having sex with men. And they said nice things about me, to me. I had a nice body. A nice smile. I seemed like a nice guy etc. Which on the one hand is the sort of thing you do say to someone you want to have sex with, but to me it was a real shock. So I kept doing it more and more - in some ways it wasn't the sex in itself that drove me to do it, it was more the affirmation. And the strange intimacy.

If you're a married man and you feel like having sex with another man it's absurdly easy to find someone, and it's very matter-of-fact. I'd go online, find someone who seemed ok, chat for a few minutes, then arrange to meet up pretty much immediately. We'd meet, then unless either of us got cold feet, we'd fuck (or whatever we'd negotiated - one thing about gay sex is that unlike straight sex it's not obvious who's going to be the fucker and who's the fuckee, for example, so you need to talk). Then, I'd be lying in someone's bed, or living room, with a complete stranger, naked, having just had sex. And there's a lovely intimacy to that, in some ways because the encounter's so random and anonymous you have nothing to lose by revealing yourself.

And as a married man with a gay side I had quite a bit of stuff that I was used to hiding from everyone, so it was incredibly liberating to not have to pretend, even if it was only for a few post-coital minutes in someone's basement. (Hard to pretend you're completely straight, for example, when you're sticky with another man's come.) And when I was in this relaxed state, not hiding, not pretending, I found a part of myself that I really liked. Comfortable, confident, sexy, happy.

This started affecting my marriage, as you'd expect. For one thing, I became much more confident sexually, which pleasantly surprised my wife (although she was also a bit suspicious). I'd always been quite tentative with her but I started to trust my instincts a bit more and was very pleased with the results. It turned out she liked me to push the agenda a bit.

When we were first going out, and having sex a lot as you do with a new relationship, I at point slid my fingers into her cunt. As one does (ladies: men love this. Even if you don't like your genitals, we do, and we'd love nothing more than to play with them all day). She said she didn't like it. So for the next 12 years I never did it again. Then, just before the end, emboldened by my new confidence, and also by the fact that I knew we were near the end, I did it again.

I watched her carefully... she swooned, in a good way. I put more in, slowly turned my hand around and kept watching her. I don't think in the 15 years I knew her I'd ever seen her so aroused, and I had the finest hardon I'd had since I was a teenager. All I could think was "we could have been doing this all these years.."