A Second Chance at Love

This is most personal story I've written to date.

I am not Brian, but our backstories are somewhat similar.

Kelly is also based on a real ex-girlfriend that I find myself thinking more and more about these days, and wishing things had gone differently back then.

So while she'll never see this (god, I hope not!), this one is dedicated to her.

What might have been.

This is a work of fiction that follows the life of a gay man who's re-questioning his sexual orientation, as a middle aged man. If themes of this nature sound like they might offend you, then I encourage you to read no further.

All characters are 18 +

A Second Chance At Love

"Wake up, Brian, I'm leaving in a minute!" Mum shouted from the downstairs in the kitchen.

"Ugh!" I groaned a little as I woke, and stretched my full body out, enjoying the feeling of all my muscles being stretched tight and then relaxing again.

Hey, that was weird. My body felt unusually loose and relaxed for first thing in the morning.

As a man approaching his forties, I was used to feeling more than a little stiff - and not just in my groin - when I woke up in the mornings.

Then I paused, and peeled my sleepy eyes open. I blinked the sleep away and took a look around the room. I realized right away that something wasn't quite right about my current situation, but it took a few more seconds to realize what it was.

Was that my mother who had just woken me up? That absolutely should not have happened. I slept at home last night, as I had done every night for a long time. I can't remember the last time I stayed over at my parents.

I surveyed the bedroom I had just woken up in. it was my bedroom alright, but my childhood bedroom!

What the fuck is going on?

I rubbed my eyes again, just to make sure I wasn't still asleep. But now I was feeling wide awake.

In fact, I hadn't felt this fresh and bursting with energy in years.

I pulled on my pants and wandered into the bathroom to check myself over in the mirror, and found a much younger man staring back at me, his eyes were as wide as mine felt.

He couldn't have been any older than eighteen!

That's it. I've lost my mind and gone insane. Or I've cracked my head on something and now I'm deep in a coma somewhere fantasizing about my teenage years.

I must have been stood there staring at myself in the mirror for quite a while, when my younger brother, Damien, a man who should be well into his thirties, but appearing as his former teenage self again, trudged passed the open bathroom door, and snickered at me.

"You're such a poser!" He teased.

"Fuck off, I told him, but there was no real emotion behind it. I was still bewildered at seeing a younger version of myself in the mirror.

I was struck dumb by just how young I looked. My dark brown hair appeared a little messy and in need of a trim. There were no lines under my eyes or across my forehead, that I had now become familiar with. No five o' clock shadow, either. And my typical pasty Scottish complexion was looking a little tanned at the moment, perhaps wherever, or rather, whenever I was in this delusion, it was still summer time.

My blue-green eyes looked just the same as they always had. So some things hadn't changed, or rather, not everything seemed to vanish with age.

It was about five minutes later when I heard the front door downstairs, shut. My mother had left to take Damien to school. Which meant the house was now empty, except for me, and our golden retriever, Charlie.

Eventually, I made my way back into the bedroom to sit on the edge of my bed and try figure out what the hell was happening to me.

I took a look around my bedroom again, I saw my work uniform hanging up on the pegs fixed to the back of the room door. I noticed that I didn't have any school work scattered throughout my room.

I realized it must late summer, in 2002, just after I turned 18 and had graduated from high school. At this point in time, I was about to start university. And, for a few months, I had worked part time at a local the Co-op, a grocery store that was about a mile's walk from home.

I looked to the side of me and picked up my ancient looking, but now brand new again, Nokia 3310, a mobile phone, that was resting on my bedside table, and browsed through it.

I scanned through the SMS texts and contacts list, which mostly contained the group of friends I hung around with back in 2002. The same group of friends I'd had been involved with since early childhood, but then lost contact with shortly after I'd started university.

I spotted my old desktop computer, with its incredibly slow and loud dial up connection. Broadband was still a couple of years away, at least for the 18 year old version of me.

Whenever I was alone, and with my room door locked, I'd talk to other guys online. And sometimes even watch some gay porn. But the internet speed back then, even just to load up some images on the screen, was ridiculous compared to today's. And it made my quick jerking off sessions a frustrating task.

And then I saw a T shirt folded over the desk chair. It was a birthday gift from Kelly, my current girlfriend at the time. My only real girlfriend. Although it might be stretching it a little, to call what we had together, real.

As a thirty-something man, I often looked back on our relationship with regret now because of the way I treated her at the time. She was mostly just a "beard" for me, although she never knew that herself. I was still in the closet and I was afraid of coming out.

In the UK, in the early noughties, things were improving for LGBT people. It wasn't like some of the really hostile places and countries you hear about in conversations, or watch on the news. This wasn't somewhere in the deep south, like Alabama in the US. Or, god forbid, Iran where same-sex activity could get you thrown from the top of a building by a baying mob, or religious police.

Most people in the UK weren't religious at all. Although old fashioned stereotypes about "being a man" whatever that meant, still prevailed a little, unfortunately.

Back then I had a girlfriend just because I was expected to. If you didn't have a girlfriend, or at least put on a show about not being able to find one, people started asking uncomfortable questions about you.

So Kelly was my beard to protect myself from questions I wasn't ready to answer. I treated her politely, and played my part as an attentive boyfriend, but there was never really any passion on my part. I never felt a physical or emotional connection with her. She was such a sweet girl. But ideally, she'd only be a friend. And one of the random cute boys I was hooking up with in secret, would be dating me instead.

As I've grown older, my attitude towards her, and towards women in general, has had quite a transformation. When I was 18 I was firmly in the gay camp. I wasn't remotely interested in women. Even though I was constantly horny as a teenager, whenever I was with Kelly, I didn't feel any fluttering butterflies in my stomach when we held hands and kissed. Nor did I feel a stirring in my pants when we went a little further.

If I had been straight, I would be having completely different responses. She was an attractive young woman.

Kelly was tall, blonde, and she had large double D breasts. And despite living in sun-shy Scotland, her complexion had a little more of a natural tan than mine did. She was a lot like the type of woman I am finding myself attracted to these days, except I think I prefer brunettes to blondes.

The first time we tried to have sex together, it was a massive flop, both figuratively and literally. Even though I wasn't interested in Kelly sexually, I still cared a lot about her as a friend, and I felt quite embarrassed when I couldn't stay hard long enough to be able to penetrate her. I put that down to the lack of experience in us both, as my nerves, and the pressure to perform when my heart - and my cock - just wasn't in it.

And, I got no help at all from Kelly to help me get ready to perform. I think she was just as nervous about the whole thing as I was. Maybe if she had been a little more engaging with me, instead of just lying back and waiting for me to mount her, it might have helped.

But I don't blame Kelly. If I had been straight, or interested in her at all, as an horny 18 year old, I probably wouldn't have needed any help getting ready. I certainly never had with the guys I hooked up with.

A few days later we tried it again, and after a few awkward moments of us grabbing and poking around, the mission was a success.

I had finally managed to penetrate her without going soft beforehand, and, I have to say, it was a surprisingly pleasurable experience.

While it's true that I wasn't sexually attracted to Kelly in the slightest, my cock apparently felt quite differently, and it knew just what nature had intended as our bodies came together. She said she was on the pill and so I didn't need to wear a condom, and perhaps a little foolishly, I listened to her. Although I almost always wore one when I was with a guy.

By that time, I had been having regular sex with other guys. I was always a top, apart for one time when I tried bottoming and I didn't enjoy it, so I was well used to penetrating a nice, warm, welcoming body. I topped a guy for the first time when I was 13, and had been with several more guys between then and my first time with Kelly.

The feeling of my cock being submerged inside Kelly's warm, moist crevice for the first time, felt completely different to anything I'd felt when I was topping a guy. Different in a very good way.

Not to say it hasn't always been a pleasing experience when I'm fucking a guy, but being inside Kelly's warm pussy was like something else entirely. I remember barely being able to compose myself, and couldn't last more than a few minutes inside her. Meanwhile, I could pretty much control myself until I was ready to come, whenever I was fucking a guy.

Kelly's tight, wet pussy molded itself comfortably around my shaft while I penetrated her. The feeling of her heat surrounding me was exhilarating. I knew she was really getting into it too, pulling my body harder into hers, flexing her hips against my thrusts. The feeling of her big soft tits pressing up against my chest, hearing her making low pleasing moans as she breathed hot air into my ear, I couldn't help but feel the burning urge to fuck her even harder and faster. There was no way I was going last long in that state.

My mind and cock were lost in this surprising wave of pleasure, as I fucked her pussy. But it was over almost before it began. I was a little embarrassed, when I came inside her way too quickly. It had never happened to me before or since.

That was the first and only time Kelly and I had full sex. It wasn't meant to be. Despite that incredible physical experience, I didn't find myself feeling any more attracted to her, and my heart just wasn't in our relationship. We never really had dramatic break up or anything. We split up rather amicably. We hadn't seen each other for almost two weeks before we agreed on the phone that things just weren't working out between us.

We agreed to stay friends, but we drifted apart, naturally, shortly after the break up. And by the following year, I didn't see that much of my old gang of friends including Kelly, anymore. Our paths were diverging in different directions. I made some new friends while I was at university, and I finally started dating guys out in the open. My days of having a girlfriend were now in the past. I only saw Kelly one more time after we broke up, and our encounter was a brief, but friendly one. She was seeing some other guy by then, and I was in between boyfriends.

Back in the present - or is it my past? I don't know. I'm not even sure which tenses I should be using, anymore - I wasn't sure what to do about this ridiculous situation I now found myself in. The only thing I could think of to do was to just go about my regular routine here while I tried to figure things out, if there was even anything I could do about this. I certainly couldn't talk to anyone about it. They'd think I'd completely lost my mind.

I wasn't sure if this was a surreal dream, some form of Scrooge's Ghost of Christmas Past paying me a visit, or possibly a coma I was stuck in, but I was hoping whatever it was, things would resolve themselves quickly. In the mean time I was stuck in 2002, again. Back in a time when Tony Blair was still the Prime Minister, Oasis's new single "Stop Crying Your Heart Out", was riding high in the charts, and I still had a full head of hair.

So, after a quick shower and a bite to eat, I decided to go do my part-time shift at work just like I had done on that day, originally. And, because some part of me had been wanting to for a long time, I decided I would go and see Kelly in the evening, after work.

I never appreciated just how lucky I had been the first time around. She was a lovely girl, and she was very keen on me for some reason.

Only in recent years have I started developing strong desires for the opposite sex. They now even surpass the desires I feel for guys, to the point where I have recently been giving some serious thought about finding a nice woman to date. It was quite a shock at first, and I was worried I was losing something important about my identity. Something I had worked hard to accept and protect. I thought I'd had things all figured out, but as it were, that was not the case.

More recently I have just come to accept my shifting sexuality. Gay, straight or anything in between, it doesn't really matter to me who or what I am attracted to, as long as I am happy and true to who I am, instead of being in denial about it.

The irony now though, is that I as a middle aged guy I was back in the closet again, but this time, with my secret budding heterosexuality.

On the other hand, while I was here, I was technically an 18 year old lad who was in the closet as a gay teen. It was a very confusing situation that I found myself in.

If I'd felt these "latent heterosexual urges" back when I was 18 the first time around, and had felt them towards Kelly, who knows where we might have been today? Would we have been married with Children?

It is true that most teenage relationships fizzle out after a short while. And even then, with those who go on to marry, roughly half of those marriages ended in divorce.

However, there's also chance Kelly and I might have become soulmates.

Maybe we still could be?

I thought about this while I was working the cash register, and stacking the shelves at Co-op. I wasn't even sure what I intended to do about my relationship with Kelly, yet.

All I knew was that while I was still in a relationship with her, this time around, I'd treat her the way she always deserved to be.

There was something else strange going on, too, while I was busy carrying out my work at the store, I found myself slipping back into the same old routine, with the same sorts of thoughts and concerns that took up my thinking time the first time I was 18. The more the day drew on, the more the original version seemed to slip back over me like an old, familiar glove.

Things, small things I had long ago forgotten, like details about my old friends, stuff to do with Kelly, some recent events I had been involved in, the things that 18-year old me had done yesterday, and the plans I'd had for the following week, all started resurfacing in my memories.

At the same time, my recollection of the things I had done yesterday, as the nearing middle aged man I was, was beginning to fade just a little. Maybe whatever was happening to me, should be worrying me a lot more than it seemed to be, but it just wasn't.

Normally, the original 18 year-old me would be a little excited to see my friends in the evening after I'd finished work. Happy to have them around so that things between Kelly and me wouldn't turn too intimate. But today, I sent a text to all my friends, letting them all know I was going to be busy tonight, that they should make plans without me and Kelly.

Then I text Kelly and told her I'd be over after dinner. The few times that Kelly and I had spent some time alone together, when I couldn't make an excuse to avoid it, we'd stay over at her place. She lived close by. Her mother was a single parent, who worked night shifts at a factory called Fox's Biscuits, where they made savory snacks. Kelly's father had long since disappeared out of their lives. She was the youngest of the brood, and her other siblings had already flown the nest.

When I arrived at hers, it was just after seven in the evening. We had pretty much the entire night to ourselves.

I knocked on the door, and met her with an deep kiss once she'd let me inside.

Instead of drinking alcohol, something Kelly wasn't really keen on because it usually made her feel sluggish, we smoked some weed together. After sharing a few joints, we snuggled up together on the couch, while the comedy movie 'Airplane' was showing on the TV.

Kelly's TV was something else! I'd grown used to the modern flat screen displays over the years. Kelly's TV was produced in the late 1990s, and so it had a smaller screen, about 32 inches, and a much more square-shaped base than what was now common in the modern era.

Having Kelly in my arms again after so long, and having gone through another crisis of identity along the way, felt both new and overwhelming at the same time. It's a little hard to put into words how it felt to really miss something only after you've lost it.

With her head resting against my chest, and her hand resting on the top of my thigh, I breathed in the fresh, minty scent of her hair. Her hair was still a little damp from the shower she'd taken before I arrived.

I leaned down a little and kissed the top of her head, and told her that I'd missed her. She had no idea how convoluted those words were.

I had been missing her, but only long after we'd broken up. Never really caring about her as a boyfriend ought to do while we were dating. She was finally back in my arms again, and it felt wonderful having the back of her warm body pressed against mine as we snuggled and laughed at Leslie Nielsen's slapstick foolishness on TV.

Kelly leaned back a little to take a look at me. "You seem unusually cheerful, has it been a good day for you?"

"No," I lied and smiled at her. "I'm just really happy to be here with you."

There's no way I could tell her about everything. How I'd woken up this morning back in my much younger body, and almost twenty years in the past. I also decided I wasn't going to mention my sexuality, since I don't think that was going to be a problem for us anymore. I wasn't going to apologize for my lack of interest, in the past, either. I didn't want to put a spotlight on it and risk complicating things further.

I just wanted to make things right with her from now on - at least until I woke up from this insane episode of The Twilight Zone I found myself in.

The truth was, I haven't been truly happy for a long time. My dates with guys, whenever they did come by, were becoming less frequent. And they just weren't fulfilling to me like they once were. I'd become jaded, and even a little bitter in recent years. While at the same time, I was finding myself more and more feeling the urge to have a soft, feminine body in between my arms. Just like, through some sort of miracle or freakish delusion, I had between my arms, right now.

Kelly pressed the mute button on the remote, and then twisted her body to look at me, and I leaned down to kiss her again. I kissed the tip of her cute button nose, and then I pressed my lips firmly against hers.

It wasn't long before Kelly was tugging my shirt lose, and then quickly pulling her own over her head. Perhaps she was taking advantage of my own eagerness at the moment. Something she probably wasn't used to.