13 Reasons Why/Tape 5: Cheater

To some, this series might seem little more like the venting of a crabby old man stood up by one trick too many. From my perspective, the truth is a little more complex. I’ve been exploring (exorcising might be a better word, really) the ways in which some of my readers have actively shut me down as a sex blogger. I used to post multiple times a week. Now I find it an effort to muster any enthusiasm about posting at all. By definition, my fans are supposed to be supportive and enthusiastic about my creative efforts. Yet there are a handful of them who have behaved so appallingly, or disappointed me so deeply, that I’ve found myself muted, without words.

After a few posts about readers who were just clueless, I’d now like to turn to a different type—a reader who intentionally exploited what he knew about me for his own personal ends. I’ve talked about this incident with a few close friends, but have never before discussed the details publicly.

So hey there, Cheater. Are you still stalking me? Welcome to your tape.

I met a man online early in 2013. A local guy, five exits down the freeway. The photos he sent were so blurry it was difficult to make out anything other than the fact he was vaguely slender and in decent shape for his age, which was a half-decade more than mine. He was looking for a regular top, he told me. His husband didn’t keep him satisfied; he loved the thrill of fucking around. Cheating made him harder than anything.

I’m married too, I wrote back. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.

I started having sex at a young age in restrooms and parks, he told me. My horny hole knows how to keep a big-dicked top like you satisfied for hours.

Hey, I wrote back. I started at a young age myself, also in cruisy tearooms and parks.

Wow, I guess we have something in common, then, he told me.

It really seemed we had a hell of a lot of things in common, the more we chatted. He told me he had a fetish for wearing jocks while being fucked, because he liked the way they framed his ass. He confided that he liked calling a man dad during sex because it took him back to his early days of being used. He really liked to be fisted, but only if the fisting top took his time and made the experience slow and sensual.

After all these things I would thrill with delight as we seemed more and more compatible. I peppered my replies with multiple exclamation points. I love jocks for the very same reason! I love being called dad!! That’s exactly the way I like to fist a guy!!! This is perfect!!!!

Finally, he reeled me in with one of his later texts. This is kind of weird and you might not be into it, he said. But I have this fantasy of being a dominant bottom with a top. Telling him what to do. Even tying him up and using his cock for my pleasure, or teaming up with another bottom and both of us using him.

I nearly passed out. As I’ve said on these pages a few times before, being used and even restrained by a dominant bottom (or several bottoms) has been a fantasy of mine for years. (Sadly unfulfilled, still.) I was already half-infatuated with Cheater for seeing eye to eye with me in so many ways. The fact he wanted to bring to fruition one of my deepest desires made me determined to meet him and make it work.

We fucked twice that week in a seedy by-the-hour motel down the freeway. Cheater turned out to be a handsome older gentleman, a preppy Westchester conservative in Dockers and a button-down Oxford shirt. Yet, as I hoped, once those slacks hit the floor, he turned into a nasty little fuck. He kissed well, he sucked well, he begged for my dick and my cum, and his stamina was nearly as good as my own.

I can’t overemphasize, here, what a hot fuck Cheater was. He seemed to know everything he could do to drive me wild for him. He chewed on my nipples in exactly the right way, kissed me deeply when I needed to be kissed. Sometimes, in the middle of me driving my cock deep into his guts, he’d cup his hand around the back of my head, look at me with liquid eyes, and whisper, “I love what you do to me, Sir.” He knew when to keep quiet, and when to speak—and when he spoke, he almost always said the right thing. After I’d shoot, he’d often turn me around, hold me in his arms, and sweetly kiss the back of my neck. It was as if, at some point I didn’t recall, I’d handed him a map to all my erogenous zones. I didn’t have to tell him what I liked. He somehow knew how to make me melt with a touch, or a word.

He arranged for us to fuck at a business he owned . . . a florist’s shop. Now, longtime readers will remember that I had a pretty significant encounter in my early life when I topped a man for the very first time ever in the rear room of a florist’s. I hadn’t been inside one (that is, either a rear room or the rear of a florist) since. So imagine my reaction when, as instructed, I walked through the shop’s back door and saw Cheater lying on top of a metal florist’s table, naked, legs up, hole exposed, in the exact same position that had convinced me to switch from adolescent hole to bareback top man.

“This is fucking crazy,” I said. “Something like this happened to me a million years ago in a shop just like this one.”

“Tell me later,” he ordered. “Fuck me now.”

Well, I obeyed, all right. I raped the shit out of him, and the greedy little pig loved it.

The sex that Cheater and I had was dirty. Nasty. There were tender moments, but then he’d do or say something was so similar to men I’d known and treasured in the past that he’d have my erection raging again. We had sex in the dirty motel. We fucked in his shop. He bought an over-the-door sling so that I could bang him in the back room. We fucked outdoors in a cold and snowy park.

Every time I’d shove myself inside those sweet lips, he’d howl and beg for my slick inches. I’d grunt and rut in his slimy, cum-filled hole and make him tell me I fucked him better than his husband. He’d howl how much more he needed me, how much more I meant to him. For six weeks we fucked like this, several times a week, making time for each other as much as possible. Sneaking around. We’d go home stinking like the other.

And I loved it.

I was so blindly infatuated with the guy that it took a while for me to notice that he had a few . . . well, odd ways to get thrills. For example, one evening I’d gone out to a bar for karaoke with a couple of close friends of mine. Half an hour in, he strolled in through the doors, looked around, met my eyes, smiled, and kept moving across the room. He had a man in tow with him—the husband he cheated on, I presumed (correctly), a dull-looking lump who seemed to be wishing he were anywhere else.

Now, I’d mentioned to Cheater that I was going to out that evening, and I’d casually told him where I planned to be, but I certainly hadn’t invited him to join me—much less to invite his husband. Cheater strolled on by, however, seeming to take no notice of me while smiling to himself as if enjoying a private joke. Then he positioned himself at the bar’s far end with his husband, directly in my line of sight. We didn’t interact all evening, but he stared at me, clapped and whooped when I sang karaoke, and once, when his husband was looking away and my friends were otherwise engaged, shared with me a conspiratorial wink.

In the back room of his shop, the next day, I banged him mercilessly. “That was a fucking stupid thing to do, bringing him with you,” I growled, thrusting hard enough that I hoped it hurt.

“It made you hot though, seeing the man I’m cheating on,” he taunted. His ass ground down on my dick, just as eager.

Honestly? Yeah, it riled me up. Fucker was taking a risk, parading his husband in front of me. Or was he parading me in front of his husband? Either way, it was wrong, and it was hot.

But it was still a little weird.

I was so overwhelmed and turned on by the scorching sex we had, time after time, that I was initially willing to overlook a few other little oddities as well. For example: about six weeks into the relationship, one morning I’d taken my Monday jaunt to Fairway for the weekly groceries. Halfway through my shopping trip, my phone vibrated. Don’t forget to pick up spaghetti, read a text from Cheater.

That’s crazy, I texted back. Did I tell you I was doing groceries this morning? I didn’t think I had.
Ha-ha-ha, was all he said back.

The thing was that when I’d gotten the text, I’d been in the pasta aisle.

Funny, right? Ha-ha-ha.

A few days later I was at the barber, sitting in the chair, when my phone buzzed again. I couldn’t get it out of my pocket until after the barber had finished cutting and brushing and blowing away the stray hairs. After I’d paid the cashier and exited the shop, I activated the screen and read, Just a little off the top, okay?

Ha-ha-ha. Funny again. Right? Was I wrong to feel paranoid about these texts? After all, we did live in the same vicinity. Maybe I'd even said something to let him know where I'd be. I sent him a text of complaint, but kept it so mild as to be milquetoast. You seem awfully interested in my whereabouts. 

For some reason, though, I still wasn't too concerned. I knew Cheater was taking a ski trip with his boyfriend at the end of the week. Maybe he was just going a little stir-crazy at work, and needed to tease me to keep himself in a good mood.

I hadn't written in my blog about Cheater before that point, even though we'd fucked for six weeks. The same week as those two texts, though, I decided to sit down and create an entry about him. I was proud of it, when I was done; it was one of the better posts I've made on the blog. Even today, reading it (and no, I won't link to it directly), its hot. It's nasty. It captures the raw heat of the fucks Cheater and I shared. I got a boner re-reading it just now—and I don’t often get aroused at my own work. For the entry, I changed the particulars of his job and his location to protect him, but the encounter I wrote about was quite true to life. I hit the button to upload it thinking what a damned good job I'd done in capturing him.

Readers seemed to agree, in the comments. I had multiple fans tell me they wished I’d fuck them that way.

From this point on in the relationship, things got very weird, very quickly. It all started the day after I’d published my Cheater post on my blog.

That morning I got a text at the mall when I was out with my family. (Going to the Apple Store?) I got a text at a Home Depot, later on. (Plumbing on aisle 30!) Then Cheater started pulling out random facts from my past and presenting them to me via text. I didn't know your mom taught college!, read one. Then he tossed me another with the name of an academic paper I'd written, years ago. More followed—a barrage of publicly-available facts he was gleaning from search engines.

When that evening Cheater started sending me texts with quotes from press interviews I'd given a long while back, and comments on a photograph of me that had appeared in a newspaper at one time (no, it wasn't a mug shot) . . . well, that's the late point in which I ceased thinking of his little intrusions into my life as slightly odd but possibly coincidental, to distastefully stalkery.

Look, I get that people research each other on the internet these days. I don’t—except once, when a guy asked me to, which is an entry I’ll be getting to next week. I find Googling someone invasive and predatory; worse, I find letting the person know you’ve done so unthinkably rude.

If you have to be a creeper, for gods’ sakes, don’t fucking brag about it to the guy you’re creeping on. I once kicked a decent fuck to the curb because when we went out to lunch, he hung around the cashier specifically so he could peep at my last name on a credit card—and then proceeded to use my last name later as if I’d shared it with him. Which I hadn’t. Had the guy simply asked me what my surname was, I probably would’ve told him. To be sneaky about it and then boastfully reveal to me what he’d been up to? Unforgivable.

So how am I going to react when someone who’s been sending me texts for a couple of days all but bragging about how he’s following me around the county, spying around corners in the supermarket and stalking me to the barber shop, suddenly presents all kinds of electronic evidence that he’s digging into every aspect of my life possible? You bet your ass the answer is poorly.

Cheater and I hadn’t met face to face since before the stalking behaviors surfaced. I hadn’t had a chance to look him in the eye and to ask him to stop—so it’s not that his upsetting texts went on for weeks and I allowed it to progress unchecked while I continued to use his ass. The surveillance, both physical and via search engine, started suddenly and escalated quickly. My mind was so numb with shock that for several hours I couldn’t really decide what to do. Break it off? Give him a little more benefit of the doubt and ask him gently to desist? Hope that the week-long ski trip he was taking with his husband would cool him down?

But then I got a text from him mentioning something about a couple of seminars I’d taken as a junior in college. I don’t know how he found out the names of the courses. Maybe I’d written about them, somewhere in my past, though I doubted it. Maybe—and this was the possibility that chilled me—he’d somehow finagled my college transcript from my alma mater. Whatever the explanation, the sexual fog that had been clouding my better judgment cleared instantly.

I am very concerned that you are spending so much of your time Googling me, I texted immediately him back. Please consider this my official request that you stop. I didn’t get a reply. Then, because at that point I was still spending too much time trying to be the Nice Guy, I fretted for a few hours over whether I’d been too hard on the fellow.

Not that it mattered, after what came next.

That evening, my phone started to buzz. I looked at the number; Cheater was trying to call me. I was at a dinner with family and couldn’t pick up. Quite honestly, I assumed he was calling to apologize and make it up to me. Over and over he called, and every time the phone went to voice mail. Eventually I had to set the phone not to disturb me.

Then the texts started, rapid and non-stop. YOU FUCKER!!!! he sent. IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK OF ME???? I didn’t know what he was talking about, or how to reply, until the phone buzzed again. I READ YOUR POST ABOUT ME, MOTHERFUCKER.

My post? The one I’d published on my blog twenty-four hours before? How in the world—?

Oh.

Fuck.

That was the moment that a hundred individual pieces flew into place to form a picture I’d been overlooking from our very first communication. It was the moment when suddenly I could see everything clearly. Cheater hadn’t merely stumbled onto the one post I’d written about him. He’d known about my blog before we’d met, even. Cheater was one of my long-term readers—a fact he’d never once mentioned.

He’d been waiting for this post about himself all along—and now that it was out there, he didn’t like it. The disguise he’d been wearing for six weeks dropped, and for the very first time I was seeing the real man I’d been fucking.

For months, possibly years, Cheater had been gleaning bits of information about me from my blog and storing them away like a squirrel with its acorns, waiting for the day he could use what he knew to lure and entrap me. The fact he had an unerring sense of where to touch and where to kiss me? Picked up from multiple entries in which I’d laid bare for him and everyone else that map of my erogenous zones. The words he’d say during sex? The jocks he claimed he loved to wear? Plucked from blog posts in which I’d mentioned they’d specifically excited me. That scene in the back room of his shop? He definitely exploited the coincidence to keep me enflamed.

I felt like a fucking idiot. How likely was it that some random guy from a sex site would have the same ultimate secret sexual fantasy as I? I’d initially felt kinship for this guy because we’d both spent our early teens and adolescence sucking dick and bending over for men in public parks and tearooms. Most likely he’d fed me a line of bullshit, just to establish rapport.

When one of my readers picks up on things I enjoy from my blog and uses it during a sexual encounter with me, I consider it flattering. It tells me he’s been paying attention. He knows it’s going to make me happy, and I know he’s doing it to please me. There’s reciprocity, there. It’s vastly different from someone—this someone—who stacked the odds in his favor with his secret knowledge of my likes and dislikes. It’s different from a manipulator who used my own words and revelations against me, as a weapon. Strategizing, secrecy, and deception—that’s how this asshole had declared war on me, and I had no idea I’d been conquered until my defenses were long down.

His texts kept coming in. WHAT WE HAVE IS SACRED AND YOU MADE IT DIRTY!!! IS THIS WHAT YOU REALLY THINK OF ME???

What, I wondered, did Cheater assume I was going to say about him? Did he, too, expect to be another Spencer? Our sex had some sweet moments, but romance had never driven the relationship between us. Nasty, perverted fucking—well, that’s what we did. We’d never spoken of flowers and feelings when I’d been nuts-deep in him, banging him against the door between his back room and his shop until the hinges had given way. I hadn’t been reading him Baudelaire during our bareback motel fucks and his whore’s baths in the cheap fiberglass sinks.

Every word of the entry I’d written about him had been almost verbatim. Every snarl, every curse word, every whimper. So what if I’d drawn myself as a sadistic top and him a cum-soaked hungry hole? That’s exactly the way it had been between us each and every time we fucked. What had he expected as he checked my blog morning after morning during those six weeks as he waited for me to write about him—that I’d happily bask in his approval when he finally unveiled that he’d been reading me all along?

Fuck that.

My reply was short and sweet. I’m done. You fucked up. Then I blocked him.

That was a bad period in my life, friends. Every belief I’d ever held sacred about my relationship with blog readers fell to pieces. If I couldn’t trust someone I’d been fucking for weeks, how the fuck could I trust any of the incorporeal readers who claimed friendship with me? All the enjoyment I’d experienced in sharing my sexual adventures evaporated.

Before this incident, I’d been posting in my blog several times a week, for several years. After Cheater, I stopped posting for over a month. I eventually had to come back to reassure people I hadn’t died. I attempted throughout 2013 to regain my joy in sharing again, until later that year I was knocked down a second time and left for dead by another reader (whose time in this series will come in the near future).

Then my posts became erratic. Resentful. Guarded. And people wondered why.

You betrayed me, Cheater. You weaponized my own words, my confessions, and used them against me—then attempted to shame me for expressing them. You left me exposed and vulnerable and frightened; for months I was depressed because of you. The distrust you cultivated still lingers. When I contemplate resurrecting regular blog posts—when I sit down to write of my sexual exploits—the revulsion and apathy I mostly feel is directly because of you.

If only you’d been honest from the start. But you weren’t. And here we are, because of it.

For months after, I still had to suffer with Cheater’s continued stalking. He couldn’t text, but he could leave dead flowers on my doorstep, or little gifts of dog shit. He couldn’t send messages on websites or via email, but he could leave nasty, ugly anonymous comments on my entries, daily, for months and months. Every time I attempted to write in my blog, I knew I could look forward to one of his hissing, venomous anonymous screeds. I never approved them so they’d be visible, but I still had to read to screen them.

It’s been years since the fallout, and I’ve avoided writing about Cheater—and every other reader who’s given me reasons not to write—because he’d finally given up and stopped harassing me. I didn’t want to stir the hornet’s nest.

But you know what? I’ve figured out that I’m tougher than I gave myself credit for, at the time. I’m no longer concerned with being the Nice Guy. Not giving voice to my grievances does me no favors. Keeping quiet about what’s bothered me is what has thwarted me creatively.

I’m fighting my way back, resentment by resentment.

And I’m not even halfway there.


Afterword

During my hiatus, I’ve received from readers a lot of very sweet emails wishing me well. Most of them have recognized the amount of work I’ve poured into my blog and have expressed their thanks. I’m so grateful for those sentiments.

Many people who’ve written, however, have made the assumption that the reason I have decided to take a break is because of the so-called haters—that is, the men who leave nasty comments on my blog, and those who go out of their way to make sure I understand how contemptible I am to them.
I’ve had plenty of haters over the years. They wear me down, yes. But more than anyone, the men who have sucked the joy out of my writing (and to a certain extent, my life) are those who meant well. They’re men who claimed to admire me, who wanted to meet me—and many of them did—and who then, whether out of clumsiness or fear or whatever, failed to recognize they’d gone too far. A man can only withstand so many successive blows to the ego (even an ego as Jericho-sturdy as mine) before it begins to tumble.

What’s more, every single one of these men read my blog. They’re men who subscribed to my point of view, who enjoyed my writing. Or read my writing, at least. Some of them wanted to be written about. Others never intended me to know they were blog fans.

Maybe one of these men is you.

If it is you? Although there’s a small and petty part of me that wants to flip a finger in your direction, I’m not going to. I’m moving on as I write this series. A friend of mine shared with me something his grandmother used to say that I truly believe: People do the best they can. If they could do better, they would.

My advice, if you think you recognize yourself . . . or even if you don’t: do better.

All of us could stand to do better.