TELEPHONE RECEIVER
By Sebastian Wallace

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E-mail: sebastian_wallace@yahoo.co.uk

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Just after I first moved to Leeds, a mate of mine from Southampton came to stay with me for a few nights. The bedsit I was renting back then was fairly cramped and basic but Rob and I had known each other for three or four years and weren’t too hung up about seeing each other in varying states of undress. The fact there was only one single bed also wasn’t an issue because Rob said he didn’t mind sleeping on the couch.

At that time, Rob was getting pretty serious with a girl called Ashlene in Southampton and it was pretty clear, from the way he tried to casually bring her name into just about every conversation we had, that his visit was causing him to miss her enormously. I appreciated him forgoing a few days with her to be with me, because he knew I was finding it difficult to find my feet in a new city and was struggling to meet new friends.

Rob has always had a reputation for being constantly horny and his visit to Leeds proved to be no exception. The guy seemed to have a permanent hard-on making a rod in his boxer-briefs, from first thing in the morning making coffee (“You gonna put cream in my coffee with that, mate?”) to last thing at night. I made a comment about him needing to play with it, rather hoping we might do it together because I’ve always enjoyed the extra dimension of intimacy mutual masturbation brings to a friendship between two straight men, but he flatly refused. He said he’d always believed that wanking is for guys without girlfriends; guys in a relationship should devote their sexual energies to their partners.

“But what if she happens to have a headache or something?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Well, yeah, I suppose that’s okay. As long as I’m with her when I’m doing it and focusing on her.”

I smiled. “I’ve never had any issues with wanking, in or out of a relationship.”

“Yeah. I heard you giving yourself a quiet once over last night, mate.” He grinned at my self-conscious blush. “I wasn’t gonna say anything about it, you know...”

“Sorry. I just kind of felt the urge.” I had thought I was being very discrete about it.

He laughed. “I don’t have a problem with it, Seb. It’s just that I don’t feel right about doing it if I’m supposed to be being faithful to a girl.”

“So you live with a constant hard-on?”

“They’re not quite constant,” he chuckled. “And they’re a sort of reminder of what’s waiting for me when I get back to Southampton.”

The last night Rob stayed with me was partly spent trying to rig up my old and battered mobile phone to make a call to Ashlene. He’d forgotten to bring his charger with him and his phone had finally given up and died while he’d been talking to her the previous evening. I’d been meaning to buy a new phone for about a year, but had never found the time to.

“It’s got loads of credit on it,” I explained to him as I tried to find it among the boxes of stuff I’d brought up with me from Southampton. “It’s just that – well, I guess I must