Medical History

"Don't you think it's more likely that I'm excited by doing something that I see as 'wrong'?" I insisted. "I mean, rimming in itself has so many negative connotations attached to it, and so for me to compound that by wanting the act to be homosexual as well as sordid --"

"I'll stop you there," James interjected. "That's exactly my point: I don't think rimming is in any way 'sordid'. Not too long ago, straightforward oral sex was seen as a perversion -- it was actually illegal for husbands and wives to do it together in some US states. Since then, it has been largely accepted as a normal part of a sexual relationship. I think, given time, rimming will be similarly brought in from the dark ages. There shouldn't be any shame associated with any sexual act as long as it's not hurting anyone."

I nodded. "I suppose you're right... it just seems such a... I don't know... a really base thing to want to do to someone..."

James smiled. He had a nice smile; a little tired, no doubt from the long hours of his job, but warm and genuine.

"I'll tell you a story," he said. "I wasn't going to mention this because... well... it's kind of personal and it involves someone who used to work here, but if you'd be happy to hear me out, you might find it interesting."

"Of course," I assented, curious as to what he was going to tell me. I grabbed my other shoe and pushed my foot into it.

"It was a few years ago, just after I'd taken up the position here and moved down from Sheffield with my wife and our daughters. One of the doctors here -- a young guy who I won't name -- had been sponsored to grow his beard for some charity or other and had come to the point of shaving it off. He'd grown it for about a year, I think, and it was getting quite big and curly. I got the feeling that it was, quite literally, starting to come between him and his girlfriend.

"Someone had the idea that he could raise more money by shaving not only his beard but his whole body. He was a hairy guy -- you could see his chest hair bristling over the top of his shirt and tie -- and it seemed like it would be quite a fun thing for him to do. As it turned out, he got more sponsorship money for agreeing to get 'sheered', as he put it, than he did for growing his beard.

"On the day of the sheering, we decided we'd need some 'before' and 'after' photos of him to satisfy people that he'd gone through with it. He was going to shave himself in one of the examination rooms which has a shower and, for some reason which I can't remember, I was volunteered to take the photos."

James chuckled at the memory and I smiled uncertainly at him, trying to figure out where this was leading.

"We got a few 'before' photos with him stripped to his underwear. If I'd have been getting photo'd in my next-to-nothings, I'd have worn the baggiest pair of boxer shorts I could find. Not this guy! He was wearing the skimpiest, tightest pair of briefs you could imagine. Everything else was in the laundry bag, he said. 'Yeah, right,' I thought -- it was pretty obvious that the guy clearly loved showing himself off."

"Who was going to see these photos?" I asked.

"Anyone who happened to look over at the noticeboard in reception," James said with a smirk. "He knew full well we were going to make a poster but I think he quite liked the idea of all of the old grannies who fussed over him when they came in for their haemorrhoid treatments seeing him stripped down to a pair of skivvies which left nothing to the imagination."

I suggested that maybe he liked showing off his hairy chest. (If I'd had a hairy chest, I would have been rather pleased to have had it photo'd and plastered all over a noticeboard -- though not if I'd had to strip down to my underwear, of course.)

"There was certainly plenty of hair to show off," chuckled James. "Not just on his chest, but his arms and legs were as furry as a gorilla's!"

I smiled. This guy sounded very interesting; it was a pity he'd moved on to a different surgery.

"Once I'd taken a few 'before' shots, he got to work shaving his chest. I went off to do something, maybe some paperwork or something, while he finished off shaving. When I returned, most of his body, arms and legs were looking smooth. He was covered in smears of shaving foam mixed with stubble from where he hadn't yet showered, but even so, the transformation was breath-taking -- he looked more naked, perhaps... but also more vulnerable, if that makes sense.

"He turned to me and grinned and I burst out laughing. The problem was that he hadn't shaved his crotch and the hair was bristling out from his briefs, looking utterly ridiculous now that the skin around them had been shaved.

"'I'm not shaving down there!' he said. 'I've got to draw the line somewhere!'

"'But it looks really silly,' I laughed. 'Like you need an emergency bikini wax!'

"He tried to tuck his bush into his underpants but it kept poking out, like it was re-sprouting, which made me laugh even more.

"'Look,' I told him, 'you said you were going to shave off all of your hair -- surely that means all of it. Every last whisker.'

"Eventually, after some persuasion, he agreed, and I went off again, while he took off his pants and started shaving his pubes. When I returned after a short while, his front was completely hairless. It was strange to see him like that -- with his genitals completely hairless."

"I suppose it's odd to see a grown man looking as hairless as a little kid," I suggested.

James smiled but shook his head. "That would probably be true for you, but for me it just looked as if he was prepped for surgery. Like he was waiting for me to give him a vasectomy or something."

"That would make an interesting fundraising idea!"

James chuckled.

"He turned around and asked me to finish off his back for him. He'd managed to shave around his shoulders, but most of his back was still covered in hair. Like I said, he was a very hairy bloke. His backside, and particularly between his cheeks, was especially... shall we say... hirsute."

I finally started to realise where this was headed and leaned forwards a little, eager for him to continue.

"I carefully shaved his back for him, sloshing the razor around in a beaker of water to get rid of the thick clumps of hair I was removing. I asked him if he wanted to me to do his backside, figuring he might want to sort out that part for himself, and he said it would be easier if I did it. So I knelt down behind him and he bent forwards, supporting himself against the back of a chair."

James stopped, as if unsure as to how to continue, and threw me another of his smiles.

I smiled back expectantly. After a moment or so, I ventured, "And then?"

"Well..." he began carefully. "Let's just say I can empathise with your attraction for that area. There was something about kneeling behind another guy... being so close to his bum... that I found quite -- I don't know how best to describe it -- perhaps 'intriguing' might cover it..."

"Okay," I said nodding, disappointed that he seemed to have bottled-out at the best part. "Let's just take it back a few steps. You knelt down behind him and you did what, exactly?"

James smiled more broadly and nodded, throwing me look which seemed to acknowledge that he'd short-changed me.

"I shaved his buttocks quite quickly, all the time becoming aware that his backside had a certain smell to it which was... well... not unappealing... very much along the lines of what you described."

"Didn't the smell of the shaving foam overwhelm everything else?" I asked. The stuff I used always smelt cloyingly of artificial lemon.

He shook his head. "It was unperfumed NHS stuff -- the type we use in minor surgery."

"So what was his smell like?" I asked, wondering if for the first time I had found someone in person who had shared, to some extent, my experience. "Did you like it?"

"Yes, I did," he agreed. "It wasn't... you know... as you might expect..."

I nodded. "I know exactly what you mean."

"It was a bit sweaty, a bit skunky," he went on, "But something about it caught my attention... it was, maybe on some deeply buried level of consciousness, quite fascinating..."

"Surely you'd had a face around guys' backsides before? When you were taking samples, inserting suppositories, that kind of stuff..."

"It's standard practice to wear surgical mask if you need to get up close," he said. "Nothing gets through those things."

I nodded. "Ah. So what was it about it that you liked?"

He chuckled. "I think, Rob, you could probably describe its appeal better than me. Suffice to say that, in spite of its place of origin, the scent was undeniably sexual and had quite a potent effect on me. Perhaps there was a pheromonal component, I don't know."

"So you developed an erection?" I asked, rather without thinking.

"I think that's a little personal," he retorted, throwing me a frosty look of reproof.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I was just trying to parallel your experience with my own. The first time I did it, it had a very dramatic effect on me -- both mentally and physically. Having said that," I said, trying to lighten the mood with a smile, "as you saw, it doesn't take very much to trigger a response from me."

His expression softened slightly and he nodded. "Okay... fair point. Yes, I became aroused. And, as you say, very dramatically so."

"So what happened next?" I asked, resolving to keep my line of questioning more open-ended.

"Having shaved his buttocks, I asked him to bend further forwards so I could get the razor between them. That was when I really became aware of how... intoxicating his scent back there really was.

"I had to ease his cheeks apart so that I could shave his cleft, rinsing the razor off with water as I did so, and all the time I was growing more and more aroused by the intensifying smell of him... that exciting and slightly crass, but incredibly masculine, odour. Inside the confines of my clothing, things were getting somewhat painful."

I wondered if that meant he was, like me, rather a grower.

"Could he see, do you think, how aroused you were?"

He shook his head. "I was kneeling down, remember, so my... er... excitement was hidden among the folds. I was more concerned that the wet patch it was making on my underwear was seeping through to my trousers, to be honest."

He chuckled and I smiled back at him, surprised that, while he'd been reticent about telling me he had an erection, he had no qualms about letting me know how much it oozed. Perhaps he thought all men dribbled precum so profusely when they were aroused.

"So what did you do next?" I asked.

"Like you, I confess that I was drawn to press my face close to him and I guess I must have moved in too close. He called back to me, in a joking way, 'Get your face out of there, man!' But there was an unmistakeable edge to his voice -- as if I was invading a very personal part of his body space... which, obviously I was."

"If he hadn't been so... er... disobliging, do you think you'd have gone further?"

"Maybe... but I don't think so," he replied. "I was certainly fantasizing about what I might like to do, and my thoughts were straying into areas which I knew they shouldn't."

Then he added with a mischievous smirk: "Areas not really befitting a happily married man..."

I smiled back, keen to know exactly where those naughty thoughts of his had strayed to. Had he fantasised about actually rimming the other man; of leaning forwards and exploring with his tongue the part that smelled so tempting? 'Just putting a bit of spit back there, mate! Helping to lubricate the razor!'

As if that possibility wasn't fascinating enough, was it conceivable that his thoughts could have been driven by the more pressing needs of his "painful" erection? Was he contemplating, while he was crouching there behind his naked friend, getting to his feet and unzipping himself; pushing himself forwards so he could ease his wet, sticky cock into the part which was so arousing him? Would young Dr Courtney, who seemed outwardly so innocuous, really have mentally plumped straight for the full-on butt-fuck, sidestepping the more circuitous route along which my fantasies had sauntered?

Perhaps his heterosexual experiences had, unlike mine, been peppered with regular doses of anal intercourse. If he enjoyed that particular variant of straight sex, it was quite possible that, on finding himself excited with his face poised over the male version of the same hole, his first impulse would be to use his cock to probe that area rather than his tongue.

I smiled to think of the good doctor imagining doing the dirty with his younger colleague. Bending the other man over, grabbing him by the hips and pleasuring himself in his freshly-shaven arse. I wondered if he'd played out the scenario again that night with his wife, or if he'd surreptitiously masturbated in the bathroom with it at the forefront of his mental imagery.

Whether he might even have used his fingers on his own bum to experience a second time a whiff of the smell that had so aroused him.

Whether the smell of mine, subtle but unmistakable in the air just moments earlier, had caused his cock to grow and dribble a little more.

Before I could think of a way I could phrase a question to discreetly delve into such matters, James sought to draw the discussion back to my own situation: "My reason for telling you this is to give a first-hand example of the point I made earlier. Namely, that the anus is a surprisingly sexual area and being in close proximity to such an intimate area of another person can elicit unexpected reactions."

"So what happened next between you two guys?" I asked, hoping to draw him back to the action, such as it was.

James smiled, no doubt seeing straight through my question. "What's left to say? I finished off shaving him and he got in the shower to wash off all the gunge and the stubble. Then he pulled his underwear back on and I took the 'after' shots with him looking smooth and sleek. By then, the feeling I'd had -- the sudden urge to get physical with him -- had passed and I couldn't, to be honest, understand what had come over me. He was just another guy -- albeit a scantily-dressed one -- and of no sexual interest to me at all."

"Have you thought of it since? About how you felt when you were so close to him?"

An image of him locked away in his bathroom feverishly enjoying the memory with that copiously oozing cock of his flashed into my mind.

"Not really," he said, disappointingly. "Not until you told me about what had happened to you. Perhaps what I experienced was completely different from what you did, but feel free draw any similarities which might prove useful when you're trying to figure it out."

"I don't think it was so different -- in fact, what you've described makes me feel like maybe I'm not so weird after all. Thank you for telling me."

I did appreciate his honesty and trust. He was married man with two kids and I was sure he wouldn't want it to become common knowledge that he got off, like I did, by having his face pressed up against other men's arses.

He handed me the leaflet which he said was more to inform me about the physical aspects of rimming rather than to answer my more pressing questions about the reasons I was having such feelings, and we stood up together as I made to leave.

"Does your son know about what you're going through?" he asked. James knew Jake quite well and was aware of some of the struggles I'd had trying to single-handedly guide my son -- often by the scruff of his neck -- through his turbulent teens.

"No," I replied, surprised at the question. "I wouldn't him want to know that I'm... well..."

"...human?" he suggested.

I thought for a moment and nodded. "I suppose..."

For some reason, we both felt compelled to shake hands as he saw me out of the room. Perhaps it was a way of acknowledging the peculiar connection we'd identified with one another, or perhaps we were silently agreeing that what we had both said in the room would remain strictly between the two of us.

As I left the building, I wondered if maybe James was right that my interest in rimming other men had emerged as some kind of manifestation of a problem I'd experienced in my youth, whether it was a throwback to the adversarial relationship I'd had with my brother or something else. Perhaps if I rooted through my past enough, I might find the reason for what I was going through and, if I did, it might make these feelings which were welling up in me, subside and go away.

Walking across the car park, I asked myself if I really wanted to be free of these thoughts and to return to seeing other men in a completely asexual light. How pleasant would it be to have this new aspect to my sexuality simply fade away like the fragments of an interesting dream on waking? Would it be a relief, or would I miss them? I wasn't sure that wanted to find out.

I felt like I'd been re-energised by what had happened to me with Guy and during the months since. My life had acquired new meaning: every day seemed to reveal some novel twist on things I had previously taken for granted; I was endlessly astonished at how what had only recently appeared drearily familiar could be transformed into something so exciting and stimulating.

No -- I didn't want these feelings just to die away. I wanted to embrace them and enjoy them; I wanted them to continue to surprise and revitalise me.

Back in my car, before I started the engine, I looked at the leaflet which James had given me. On the front of it was a picture of an aggressive-looking short-haired youth taken from behind. He was bending forwards slightly with his scruffy jeans yanked down to reveal a rather delicious-looking pair of pale buttocks. The caption underneath read: "If you rim him, you rim every other guy who's rimmed him." Now there was an enticing thought! Talk about all your Christmases coming at once.

Inside, the leaflet was disappointingly wordy and devoid of any more pictures of other young men showing off their backsides. The text described some of the diseases which could be picked up by two men -- and there seemed to be an implicit assumption that they would be gay -- during rimming. I was surprised that it said HIV was not a significant risk, but it listed a number of scary-sounding conditions which could be transmitted by the arse-to-mouth route. It warned against the dangers of rimming a guy straight after brushing or flossing one's teeth because this could leave small scratches on the inside of the lips and cheeks which microbes could exploit. It also recommended using a sheet of latex called a dental dam when rimming a guy which struck me as defeating the whole point of the activity.

I decided that I'd do what I could to minimise the risks, but ultimately I'd have to take the rough with the smooth. Rough bums and smooth bums... so many choices...

On the back of the leaflet there was a large white rectangle into which someone had, probably a long while ago, stamped the details of a weekly meeting which took place up near Leicester. The group went under the rather vague banner of "Men's Sexual Health Issues" and it ran on Monday evenings at an adult learning centre, led by a "fully trained male counsellor". Anonymity was most categorically assured. I wondered if it still took place and whether, perhaps, some of the answers I was seeking might be found there.

Stashing the leaflet into my jacket pocket and starting up the car, I decided that, if I could remember what I had to do to withhold my phone number before calling someone, I would give the centre a ring. Leicester was a long way away and it was unlikely I'd know anyone at the meeting. And even if I did, I could quickly leave, claiming I'd wandered in by mistake and was really looking for the pottery class or something.