That summer, I had just turned twenty and I should have been having the time of my life.
But I wasn't. I was solitary, I was studying all the time and I was finding it impossible to connect with people. When I wasn't working I was walking the streets, watching couples canoodling with each other and feeling jealous and bitter.
I worked off my excess energy and frustration with exercise. At first I went to the gym, where I obsessively ran on the treadmill and lifted weights, but I'm not all that strong -- I'm on the slender side of average, so weightlifting seemed a bit of a waste of time.
Then I began to go to the pool.
The pool suited me much more than the gym did. The gym was sweaty, ultra-modern, with people doing synchronised exercising and instructors barking commands over loud techno.
The pool, especially in the evenings, was very different. It was old, and the tiled changing rooms had an antique, time-honoured quality that I liked.
Gradually, over a few weeks, my patterns of going to the pool changed. I started out going to the mixed sessions, but I found it too frustrating to be among all those wet girls in swimsuits, so I signed up for a late evening men's session.
When I got there, what I hadn't anticipated was that the fact that it was a men-only session meant that most of the men were swimming naked.
I was startled by this. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly men, often paunchy, balding, not exactly glamorous and buffed. The sight of all those naked men, with their sad bellies hanging over their genitals, was the opposite of arousing. But that suited me.
I didn't swim naked. It wasn't compulsory and anyway I was too inhibited about my own body. But what I found myself doing instead was spending as much time as possible naked in the changing room.
Although I didn't consider myself gay, and my few sexual experiences had all been with girls, I liked to imagine that I was open-minded, and if any of the men had suppressed homosexual urges and were checking me out, I liked the idea that they were eyeing my bottom. It was my most attractive feature, or so I'd always been told; it stuck out at the back and my buttocks were smooth, round and deep. I'd always been too inhibited to tell the girls I'd been to bed with -- all three of them! -- that I was secretly into ass play, so nothing had ever come of it. But in the changing rooms at the pool, I was a different character.
It was all based on fantasy. I had a routine. I went to the pool late in the evening, after dinner, and I changed into my swim trunks. Often, I'd be the only guy there who was wearing any sort of swimming costume at all.
I swam a few dozen lengths. Then, I got out and went to my locker and got my towel and took off my trunks and went for a shower.
I had a long and blissful shower, washing myself all over and not being shy about washing my ass and cock. My cock would quite often be semi-erect, just from my knowing that I was the youngest guy in the room. The other men could hardly fail to notice me, even if they were too inhibited to do anything about it. If anyone's gaze did intersect mine I'd smile at them, enjoying the hint that I was potentially available, even though I didn't consider myself to be anything of the kind. I just enjoyed the feeling of being naked among these complete strangers. I liked the idea that at least one of them might go home and jerk off to the memory of the young guy who showered naked at the pool and who always smiled as though he were enjoying the attention.
I lathered myself all over, much more than I had to, letting the suds flow over my naked body, and I'd shampoo my cropped head lavishly and close my eyes and let the shampoo froth flow over my face. Sometimes I'd make little noises of private pleasure as it did so. I slowly massaged my nude body, rubbing the soap into every nook and cranny, letting my fingers touch me everywhere, ensuring that every last part of me was clean, from my head and ears and nose and armpits and torso and arms down to my groin and ass crack and my taint. I gave those older men a proper eyeful. I would quietly enjoy my own body, exposing myself utterly to them, giving each one of them my tacit permission to go home to his wife and fantasise about what it would be like to take a young man like me to bed and do whatever he wanted to me.
It was all fantasy, of course. I was attracted to the fantasy of being available, but none of the men turned me on. What turned me on more than anything else was the idea of me being naked among them and the idea of being looked at with desire. If women weren't going to look at me with desire, then I figured men might as well.
Then, after I'd finished showering, I'd go back to my locker and carry out personal grooming, still naked, checking myself out in the mirror inside my locker door.
Eventually, after a good twenty minutes of being naked, I would reluctantly dress and go home. At home, I would sit up late and have a couple of drinks and eventually go to bed. I'd strip off to go to bed and masturbate naked, sometimes thinking about girls, sometimes -- rather furtively -- imagining men. Afterwards I'd lie there naked and go to sleep, hoping that I'd have an erotic dream.
I never dreamed of the effect my behaviour had on the other men.
I certainly never dreamed that it was something which would soon rebound on me.
***
It started one Friday night. I went a little later than usual, eight p.m. instead of seven-thirty, and once I was in the changing rooms I stripped off, as usual, and unhurriedly got into my swimming trunks.
I walked to the pool and found that, as usual, there were plenty of older men and a couple of guys closer to my age, and they were all doggedly swimming up and down, naked. The atmosphere wasn't exactly a cauldron of homoerotic tension, but I got in and swam my sixty lengths. I then swam another twenty and, deliciously tired, climbed out and went back into the changing rooms.
The only other man in there was a middle-aged man in his fifties, I guessed; balding, with a pronounced belly. He was showering naked. I walked to my locker and took off my trunks and put them inside, then I took my shampoo and soap and returned to the shower area.
I took a shower stall two spaces down from the guy. That alone was a bit provocative. The natural male thing to do would have been to take the one furthest away from him. But I didn't. I turned the water on and got under it, and sighed happily as I felt its lukewarm cascade over my body. The shower water at the pool was never hotter than lukewarm. I liked that. The colder the water, the more arousing it was, even if water that was actually cold was a turn-off.
I had been washing myself for some minutes when, to my surprise, the guy spoke.
"Why do you wear your swim trunks in the pool?"
I glanced at him, startled.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Why do you wear your swim trunks in the pool?" he said. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly.
"Oh," I said. "Um. Shy, I guess."
"You don't wear them in here," he said.
"No," I admitted.
"So there's no reason to wear them out there," he said. "That's the point of men's nights. No need to feel shy."
"Well," I said, feeling that he was getting at me slightly, "is that a rule?"
"No, it's not a rule," he said. "It's about the way people do things. If you wear them out there, it can make people feel self-conscious."
"Oh," I said. "Well, I don't want to make anyone feel awkward."
"Don't you?" he said, looking directly at me.
For the first time since I'd been going to the pool, I felt shy.
"No," I said.
"Maybe you don't make people feel awkward," he said, "but you certainly make them feel something."
He pointedly looked me up and down. I felt myself blushing, and was perplexed and nervous, the more so because I didn't find him attractive at all.
"I just like to feel free in here," I said.
"Well," he said, "I always like it when you show up."
"Thank you," I said, more confused and more nervous than ever. He was of my dad's generation, powerfully masculine and paunchy. He was washing himself with a tiny sliver of soap.
"What," he said, with an edge of lazy, sardonic amusement. "You seem a bit confused."
