Story of Matt, Part 3 - summer of '83

The summer of 1983 was the hottest on record in Toronto. Matt and I filled our weekend days riding the roads on the outskirts of Toronto, wetting out cycling shirts in fountains and sprinklers along the way to make the scorching heat and humidity bearable. Every week night, after he had finished work and his swim at the local pool, I cycled to his place, or he to mine, to make dinner, make love and lay in each others’ arms.

It took some getting used to. He liked to sleep on his back. I preferred to sleep with my head on his chest but it was so thick that it always gave me a kink in my neck. It was also so hot in the evenings that we could barely tolerate a single sheet over our legs and Matt naturally gave off heat like a wood stove. But I preferred to lay awake in sweaty discomfort over spending a night alone. He felt the same way.

Sex was another imperfect exercise. My first lover, Mike, was a total top. I doubt one could have gotten a pencil into his butt after an hour of rimming. Anal sex had always been difficult for me until I met him, but I was so smitten and he was so talented that I opened up like a flower for him. We used to fall asleep with him spooning me from behind, his arms encircling my chest and his cock still inside me. When I stirred a couple hours later I could feel his cock start to swell again and soon we were making love once more. This was before of days of safe sex, before Mike became positive and died AIDS a few years later.

I came to love being screwed more than anything else, but it was hard to get into sex with anyone else after we broke up. Matt was the first person to drive me crazy with desire since Mike. Besides having the nicest body I had ever been with, Matt also had a lovely, irresistible cock. The thought of him topping me was a great turn-on, but he was a total bottom. I wasn’t going to settle for masturbation so I adapted. After all, I am a Gemini and we are known for our ability to adapt.

In a few weeks I came to see myself as a top instead of a bottom. I remember watching him shave in the nude at his bathroom mirror and lustfully admiring his perfectly round muscular butt. But desire alone didn’t make our sex easy. It would all go fine at first, his big legs in the air draped over my slender shoulders, he masturbating while I humped him as hard as I could. Then he started to come and I was out of the picture, literally. He’d drop his legs on either side of me, and arching his back in ecstasy, he would press his huge thighs together as hard as he could while he pounded his meat like a war drum. I wasn’t big or strong enough to endure the pressure of his thighs. He squeezed me out of him like a watermelon seed every time, cutting me out of the fun.

My love for him grew in leaps and bounds in spite of this. But I knew it would be short-lived. From the moment in June when he confessed his love for me, he was quick to add that it would only be for the summer. Until August the 11th, to be exact. That was the date he had set his sites on for the past year and a half, the day he would leave for England to begin a cycling tour through three continents for an indefinite number of months and possibly years.

It was a beautiful goal, one I would never think of depriving him of, just another of his goals that stoked my admiration of him, but it seemed a cruel stroke of fate that I should meet him scarcely more than two months before he left. They were an intensely happy two months for both of us, but as the end date approached I was silently freaking out inside. I caught glimmers of sadness or thoughtfulness in him too, though they were always very brief and he never wanted to talk about it. His treatment of me became an erratic mix of tenderness and indifference.

One day shortly before his departure, during a board meeting at Marks & Spencer, a colleague of his had a heart attack. He died in Matt’s arms while they waited for the ambulance. He told me this after work in an almost matter-of-fact way. He turned away from me the moment his lips and voice started to tremble, but he composed himself instantly. Except for his quietness and distraction, it was hard to tell that anything out of the ordinary had happened.

I suggested we see a funny movie to keep his mind off darker thoughts. I chose “The Ruling Class”, a British comedy in which Peter O’Toole plays a delusional inmate of a psyche ward who gets released upon inheriting his uncle’s massive countryside estate. O’Toole thinks he’s Jesus, which is a constant embarrassment to his upper class family, so they subject him to electro-shock treatments against his will. Instead of curing him, his delusions change to that of a vengeful punishing God who ends up murdering them all. I left the theatre feeling terrible. I offered my embarrassed apologies. He agreed that it wasn’t the best choice.

I accompanied him to the airport the day he left Canada. Close friends of his, an older gay couple who had known him for a year, drove us there and drove me back. As we said our goodbyes outside of the security gate, he embraced me for an extended period and kissed me on the lips. It shocked me. Neither of us were out and he was not one for public displays of affection. This was still 1983 when there were no gay rights or protections, and little public awareness of gays as equals.

I rode home very much alone in the back seat of his friends’ car, now as empty of his presence as his abandoned apartment that I would never see again. I was feeling raw inside from his kiss. As I sat quietly wondering how I’d make it through the coming evening, one of the couple in the front seat turned to me. “You have made an incredible difference in his life,” he said with a tone of thanks in his voice. I felt hugely grateful for these words. They were a branch to hang onto in the swift emotional current that was dragging me under, but the branch wasn’t attached to the shore any more than Matt was.