Hello there. This is a story that is complete. I'll put all the chapters up over the next few weeks if you want to read them all. It is not a pure gay story, although several of the characters are gay. It's a story of life in rural Britain. Let me know if you like it.
Mandijerri
A Man for a Year: a week in June
"Maybe we're going about this all the wrong way." Boy said as he leant over and filled Emma's glass again, and then his own.
They were sat on the rug in front of the television in her flat, wasting away Sunday afternoon.
"So what should we be doing?" Emma asked, taking the glass and emptying half of it in one go. "Making ourselves look voluptuous doesn't work. Going for trashy didn't work. We've been doing desperate for months now, what's left?"
"I'd suggest prostitution." Boy smiled, "But I'm not that short of money this month!"
"Hah!" Emma laughed. "Mr Right..."
"Mr Rights, plural." Boy corrected, "As much as I love you Emm, I'm not sharing..."
"Alright." She agreed, finishing her wine and filling the two glasses again. "Our personal Mr Right is obviously not standing around on a street corner waiting for us to wander past so he can whisk us off to heaven..."
"Sadly." Boy sighed.
"Agreed." Emma said, putting her glass down a little too heavily on the carpet and spilling some of the wine, she ignored it. "So what do we do?"
"I tell you what." Boy said after a moment, swirling the wine around in his glass. "Let's make a pact."
"Exciting." Emma smiled. "But I'm not desperate enough to commit suicide with you... next week if I'm still alone maybe, but not today!"
"Not that sort of pact!" Boy laughed. "Let's stop waiting for him to find us. Let's be a little more proactive..."
"Easy for you to say!" Emma smiled. "I've had half a bottle more than you, remember!"
Boy drained his glass and passed it to her.
"Happy?" He smiled.
"Ecstatic." She said as she rolled over and pulled the last bottle out of the wine rack.
She rolled back to the rug, sat up and unscrewed it, refilling both their glasses.
"So what does your pact involve?"
"I think we are setting our sights too high...No..." He added, interrupting her, "Go with me on this one. Every time we get ourselves a man we have the poor bastard married off and in comfy slippers with grandkids on his lap before he's even out of our bed!
"I thought that's what we were meant to do?" Emma smiled.
"Clearly not." Boy told her, taking a large gulp from his wine. "We need to start them off a little more gently."
"So..." Emma laughed. "Sorry, Boy, I'm pissed now! I lose the thread of our conversations quickly..."
"OK." Boy said. "The pact is this. We go out to find ourselves a good man..."
"One each." Emma clarified.
"One each." Boy agreed. "But instead of planning the wedding on the second date, we limit ourselves to enjoying him for a year..."
"A year?"
"A man for a year, Emma."
"But if I can keep him for a year, I'd want him for longer!"
"Precisely, but if we think any more than that at the start of the relationship all we do is scare them off. So we work on keeping them for a year. After that, then we can plan the weddings!"
"Honestly?"
"Honestly. You in?"
"Yes!" Emma said, pulling herself to her feet, glass in hand. "Come on, stand up!" She told Boy. "We have to toast this one."
"OK." Boy said, pulling himself to his feet.
"Right." Emma said, leaning on him for support. "Here's to finding a man for a year!" She drained her glass then fell into the sofa.
"A man for a year." Boy agreed, also draining his glass and falling onto the sofa next to her.
And so, the story begins.
For the next year we will follow these two characters, chart this simple pact as it twines itself through their lives and loves. First though, first we need some background information. The first of our two friends is Mark, but more usually Boy. He works as a waiter in a large chain of restaurants. This one is the same as every other one like it in every town in every country, in the world. It serves American-style Italian food (whatever that means), with two eating for the price of one Monday through Wednesday (closed Thursdays) and children eating half price with free refills of all non-alcoholic drinks from 10:00am to 14:00pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Saturday nights a pitcher of beer (for four) costs a fiver and on Fridays all cocktails are half price.
You know exactly the type of place I mean, you've probably eaten in one just like it in the last few months. It's the sort of place you go to for a works party, or a cheap meal before the big night out.
This one, Charlie Greens, sits in a row of shops on the edge of a new retail park. One side faces the car park that separates the parade of shops from the main outlets of the retail park, the other side faces the main road into town. The area had been a little rundown before the retail park was opened, but now the place is up and coming. Life had been breathed back into the almost-centre of the town.
The town? Oh, you know, anyplace. The shops here are shops you will find on every high street in Britain, Europe probably. The people dress like people from anywhere in the western world. Kids trying to look like mass murderers and parents like they've just stepped out of a very cheap gym. Trashy, but the look of middle-England, middle-everywhere. For what it's worth, the town is called Aylesbury and sits in the north of Buckinghamshire; leafy, green, suburban Buckinghamshire. If you're really interested it's the county town - not that you are, of course.
So.... where was I? Oh yes, Mark.
Mark is a waiter at Charlie Green's. He has worked there for almost a year and that, of course, means he is not just any waiter but also the assistant manager of the whole restaurant. Now, don't get me wrong, Mark is not doing this job because he has to, he's doing it because he really can't be bothered to do anything better either with his work, or his life.
It's his age, you see. Just turned twenty-four and not a clue as to what he wants to do with his life and fairly little motivation to actually find out what it is he should be doing anyway.
He went to school, did quite well, to be honest. 4 A levels and an assorted number of supporting qualifications. Grades quite good too. He had intended to take a gap year after school and then go to university, working on the principle that the longer you stay in education, the longer you don't have to work, but then he made the dual discovery of alcohol and good sex. Student grants, while useful, did not run to much of either and, while this job didn't pay top dollar, it paid better than any other job he'd had to date.
He rents a small flat just up the road, and can drink and fuck as much as he wants - at least until the money runs out, which is usually around week three of any given month. Week two if it is a particularly party-rich month.
Still, one of the handy things about working in a restaurant is that you eat for free, and your boss doesn't really understand the nuances of motivation. She thinks you come into work for extra hours the last week of every month just to help her get through the tricky month end, when really it's just because you can't afford to eat or go out and at least here you get to eat some and drink (a little) for free!
There are other benefits of working in the catering industry as well, the main one being you get to sleep with the clientele. Not on the floor of the restaurant or across one of the dining tables, that (although forever a fantasy) is wrong, and Mark knows this.
No, clients get food, clients get comfortable, clients buy many drinks, clients get drunk, clients tip the best waiter they've ever had, and tip more the waiter who had to put up with them and often, more often than you would think, slipped in among the tips is a little piece of paper with a telephone number on it.
The number of promised (and occasionally requited) fun, and again, more often than you would think, Mark has called those hastily scribbled numbers and taken up the offer of fun(requited or otherwise) - especially in the last week or so of the month when money was scarce... but I've already explained that, haven't I?
So back to Mark.
I hate character descriptions, you know, they're so prescriptive. What would you like him to look like? I tell you what, I'll lay down the outline, you can fill in the details. He is just under 2 metres tall, his hair is dark and cut very short - more because it saves on hair cuts than for any medical need (his father still sports a full mullet much to Mark's embarrassment).
Is he hench?
It depends on your tastes really. He's not a gym-bunny, but he does go to the gym once or twice a week (it's a perk for working in the restaurant most nights and having bugger-all else to do during the day).
He's not ripped, let's put it that way, neither is he over weight. He's just right, as some star-struck girl once said in a nursery rhyme.
He also has two eyes, both coloured, two ears, a mouth and a nose and all his own fingers and toes and, as he's in the middle of being twenty-something, he has a dick and two balls, and they are working fine as well, thank you very much. And as he is a man of his times, he keeps the hair on his head short (for reasons I have already been into), his chest smooth and his pubes firmly under control.
He has a favourite colour, and a lucky number, doesn't like cats but used to have a dog as a child. He has one sister and one brother, both older, and both his parents are alive and well and living in Southampton about 160 kilometres away. He is as popular as he needs to be but is also quite happy with his own company if pressed.
He likes people which is why, I suppose, he gravitated towards the hospitality industry in the first place.
His friends and family call him 'Boy' rather than Mark, for reasons that no-one can really remember anymore. Something to do with being the youngest and looking androgynous for most of his life! He drives but doesn't own a car and, as I think I mentioned already, he rents a flat just along the road and around the first corner on the left, from where he works (Stirling avenue).
So to the second of our two friends, around whom this story gyrates.
Emma is, well a girl.
Fairly obvious, but it does draw a line under the testosterone-filled character I have just described, don't you think?
Also twenty-four, she is a friend of Boys (but he is not her boyfriend, if you understand) and she lives in the same block of flats as he does.
He rents, but she owns.
That's something I've noticed with girls, you know. No matter how reckless the majority of them appear to be on the outside with their money and their lives, they are all like squirrels on the inside. Emma, like nearly all her friends of her age, owns property and she manages to live a life as well.
So Emma, twenty something and holding down an OK job.
She had started as a temp many years ago in a small local company that provided property services to other small local businesses. They took her on permanently after six months (she had been covering maternity leave but the girl never came back to work). So she started work on the phones ( a call-girl she laughingly described herself as) connecting clients with property maintenance issues to tradesmen that could repair them.
Several years and a couple of mergers and acquisitions later, she now works in the same office, but this time for a multi-national group that offers facilities management services as well as consultancy to a broad range of clients across most of the decent (and by decent I mean decently rich) world. Once her company had been the proud owner of a real name. Now it is called simply: FPS.
FPS obviously stands for something, Facility and Property Services if you have to know, but for all she knew it meant Fucking Puke and Shit instead! Still, whatever it stood for, FPS paid her salary now and, as a senior account manager, that meant she got paid rather well indeed.
As long as she is bitchy to the girls she is meant to be bitchy to and friends with the girls she is meant to be friends with life will carry on being fine.
Don't get me wrong, there are men working in FPS as well, but they didn't really count politically. This branch of the company is run by its female staff and the men are there at their bequest - no matter how important they are. Of course, the men don't see it that way, but that's because the women want them to think like that.
Anyway, if you asked anyone at FPS this week what they thought of Emma, they would say she was either 'nice', 'lovely' or a 'real treasure'. And her position in the local branch means that she only has to be really nice to the four people above her, and her friends, of course.
So, now you know she is ambitious, it is in fact one of her defining character traits.
Strange, then, that she should be such good friends with Boy. But then, that is the way of friendships. They have known each other since they were small kids. Had a fling when they were teenagers and been friends ever since.
He is the foil to her drive, teaching her how to relax and enjoy herself every now and then, and she is the verve behind his recent promotional streak now that his mother has all but given up on his career as a chemist.
Currently single but only recently. Her previous relationship (Kyle, or Kyle the Bastard, depending on the day of the week) is still total taboo as far as topics of conversation go. Emma is, in fact, living a sort of charmed life at the moment. Earning a decent salary out in the sticks of Buckinghamshire gives you money to burn. And Emma knows how to burn it (after paying the mortgage, bills and putting some away, of course).
Emma is a party girl and the party has to start on a Friday night and finish sometime around Sunday lunch. Fairly drastic, I have to admit, but then she is only twenty four. Skin still full of collagen, lips need not much more than a brush of gloss, face still glows at any time of the day or night, body still bounds back on a Monday morning as if she has spent the past forty-eight hours at home in front of the television with her face in a steam bath.
Oh for the fripperies of youth....
Emma herself, when she remembers she has them, visits her parents at least four times each month. They live in a village just north of Aylesbury and as an only child, they lavish everything they have on her - after the dogs, the horses and themselves, of course.
Emma is ambitious and practical, both traits she inherited from her parents. When she left home after a stint at the local college, so they moved into their own dream cottage out of Aylesbury. As she became more and more financially independent, so they devoted more and more of their money on their own pleasures.
It works for all of them, really, it does.
So, it's time for the description thing again, I suppose. I'll try and be a little more sensible this time.
Emma is about 1.5 metres tall with shoulder length light brown (chestnut according to the box) hair which is currently cut into a sort of wild 'bob'. A cross between Jennifer Aniston at the start of the noughties and Whitney in her cocaine phase.
You know the style.
Her eyes are a pale, almost grey-blue and, yes, she has the agreeable number of bodily appendages. Breasts (two) not too big, not too small, legs long enough to make men notice when she wants and to make her friends envious all the rest of the time. Her feet are not too dainty, but not so big she needs to go to specialist internet shops for her shoes, and her clothes size is on the fashionable side of average.
She isn't stick thin and she doesn't need to refer to herself as curvaceous.
She also goes to the gym, not the one Boy uses, though, but the plush chain-gym for women that had opened recently in the centre of town (in the old Woolworths store). The rest of the store, funnily enough, was a large cafe-bakery that made the most delicious cakes.
Heaven and Hell she and her girlfriends called the place and it was often the main subject of conversation in the afternoon as to which one they should visit first before going to the other one after.
She is not as gregarious as Boy, but also she is no wallflower. Very early on she learned that only the interesting girls got dates and interesting did not, despite what the books, magazines and television shows of the time said, mean sitting demurely in a library waiting for some hunky geek to whip of his glasses and take you over the book trolley.
Although, in truth, that had been a fantasy of hers for a while, but fifteen year old geeky boys are just that, I'm afraid, fifteen years old and geeky. They've learned the words of sex, maybe even seen a few pictures, but they certainly haven't worked out what to do with it all. And you can bet they didn't believe half the pictures they were seeing either!
The interesting (and by interesting I mean dirty) boys were the ones in the playground smoking something illicit on the football pitch. They were rough, edgy, still crap in the sex department, but at least they knew what to do with it all, and that was all that was important when you were fifteen too.
Mutual masturbation was all it was about really. She hadn't even had her first orgasm until she was eighteen, and that had not been caused by a man at all, but rather a small rabbit she bought for a laugh at a sex party one night.
Emma is not promiscuous - well not in the modern sense. She just knows what she needs and when she needs it she goes out and gets it, and if the real thing is too drunk or too dumb to pick up on the signs, there is always this year's rabbit waiting at home to end the evening off perfectly.
I feel I have to apologise here. I've just given you a complete description of Emma, including her sex life and didn't do anything of the sort for Boy at all. I mentioned he had bits that worked, but that was it.
Once again, I apologise. Subconscious sexism creeping into the story already. So, to redress the balance, I take you back to Mark, to Boy.
When he and Emma had been an item, he was 16 and she was just 4 months younger. He was not a geek, nor was he rough either. Instead he fell into the 'good looking, boy-next-door' category. Funny, intelligent - and still crap in the bedroom department - come on, he was only 16 himself. Everything worked, and needed working often, but it hadn't all come together as one flowing act yet.
So Emma and he were a fumble they laughed about now. Summer camp underneath an upturned canoe while the teachers smoked dope and got drunk not 10 metres away. "Our little show and tell" they called this moment when they remembered it now. Emma had shown him hers, and he had shown her his and, like two love-struck birds, they rubbed against each other for a while, had a quick penetration, then fell asleep in each other's arms.
After Emma then, Jane.
She had been a year older than him and worked in the shop he had a Saturday job in. It was a men's clothes shop and she was the weekend sales person - de facto shop manager on a Saturday and Sunday. It was winter, it was cold, the town was empty and the changing room called to them. Fumbles of belts, buckles, zips and cloth (mostly cotton) and they managed to christen three of the four changing rooms in one weekend, with the fourth falling victim on the following Saturday.
Jane had been a revelation to him.
Sex that is real is a powerful thing when you are young. His balls had ached that first weekend, a sign that he always regarded as one meaning he had had a good 'session' now. And then everything changed.
Jane got sacked (apparently she had been bolstering her salary straight out of the till), and for a while he had been the weekend manager of the store. They didn't replace Jane for about a month and that meant he did everything. He restocked the shelves, put back all the clothes from the (now christened) changing rooms, and sold the goods to the customers.
The shop was the closest thing Aylesbury had to a fashion store for guys, so despite the weather, it was always busy it seemed. And then...
He couldn't tell where it had began really.
There had been the poster, of course. Some guy with cheekbones you could cut paper on and a body that had more muscles in it than seemed right somehow. Anyway, he was wearing nothing but his tighties (white of course) and draped, for some reason known only to him and the photographer, over a pile of old tractor tyres.
The poster got into Boy's dreams, and then into his head.
He found himself watching the customers as they slipped into the changing rooms, finding excuses to go over to the rails where the changing clothes were hung after they were tried on and catching a glimpse of flesh through the chinks in the curtains.
He found himself wondering what different men that came into the shop looked like under their clothes; out of their clothes.
It didn't seem wrong and, never having been exposed to gay (even at school surprisingly) he didn't think of it as being wrong, just interesting and something worth exploring. Chance arrived the next Summer.
A tall lanky guy came into the shop laden with what seemed like hundreds of bags. He grabbed some jeans of the rack and almost fell into one of the changing rooms. Boy went to help, taking bags out of the room and steadying the man as he fell against the wall.
He leaned against the wall in nothing but a pair of very full boxers, winked at Boy and then got into the jeans he wanted to buy. A few minutes later and he had convinced Boy to meet him that night at a local pub. Just seventeen (and still underage) Boy agreed and ended up that night back in the guy's hotel room.
He worked for someone or other and had to stay over in Aylesbury tonight. Wouldn't be back this way for sometime or other. To tell the truth Boy could remember none of the personal details, not even the guy's name.
When he tells the story now he calls him Guy, but he knows that's not right - but to tell your friends that you can't remember the name of your first gay lover - they would be horrified - and would also have all their little myths about the whole gay love thing swiftly confirmed, something Boy was determined he would not do.
So, Guy showed him the way.
It was, interesting, seemed to hold a lot more promise than straight sex and that was it. There were no fanfares, no glories of angels and, equally, no demons or vengeful Gods. He was gay - a fact he announced to Emma the next day and his parents the day after.
They took it well, told him they had always known (even though he himself hadn't) and that was that.
So, the balance has been redressed. You now know as much about Boy as you do about Emma.
Let the story begin....