I was sitting in the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta last week, finishing my fourth vodka tonic, making small talk with the bartender and looking at another traveler on the other side of the bar.
He was on his phone with his wife, and the conversation didn’t appear cordial. I probably stared a little too long, because when he hung up I realized we were staring eye to eye.
I felt uncomfortable, darting my eyes away and sipping the last of my drink, feeling like I’d invaded the man’s privacy or something.
I’ve lived a very private life through the years myself, one spent in the air as much as at home. My life has revolved around airports and hotel rooms, rental cars and hotel bars like this.
At home, my wife lives comfortably. The kids are in college, and she spends her time working from her study, hanging out with neighborhood wives and occasionally going to the country club or church.
She has no idea what I do. She has a semblance of what my life is like: flying around the Southeast, visiting clients, going to conventions and enduring an endless schedule of boring meetings.
And she’s right about all of that. But what she doesn’t know is what I’ve done in my downtime.
My secret life has been anything but boring, anything but routine, despite the constant flights, nights in hotels, meals from restaurants or room service, drinks at the bar and nights of adventure.
But all that was before the pandemic. For one long year, I was stuck at home. I had to come up with ways to bide my time in between Zoom meetings and phone calls. Laurie and I found ourselves in constant close proximity as life ground to a halt.
For the first time in 15 years, I was a homebody.
It wore on me. Laurie and I sort of re-awakened our sex life together, even getting a little kinky at times, but it faded as the pandemic lingered, and I found myself longing for my old life. At nights, after she’d fallen asleep, I would get up and walk to the porch, looking up at the sky and wonder if this was how my life would end, stuck at home, away from the jets and Marriott’s and late nights with, well, strangers.
My other world was exciting beyond description, a steady string of fellow travelers meeting over and over again, new faces every week, working moms and dads and couples, old and young, all with a few things in common.
We were all generally in our 40s, all generally well off, all generally good looking, fit and educated, and every single one of us away from home and free to do anything we wanted without anyone back home knowing a thing about it.
At home, I was a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor and a pretty good cook and golfer. On the road, I was an exciting jet-setter hanging out with my jet-setter friends, always aware of the sexual atmosphere we shared.
In one glance, I could tell if the stranger I was looking at or talking to wanted to fuck me. In little moves, body language, eye contact, wry smiles and animal instincts, I became an expert at reading people in hotel or restaurant bars, even in terminals or plane seats or business meetings.
It was a game to me, a wildly exciting game of sexual tension, desire and freedom. So the year at home took all that away. And as I stood on the porch late at night dreaming and reflecting on the way we were, I was yearning for another chance to get back on the road. I had already decided if I ever got back there, I would pursuit something I once thought I’d filed away forever.
More on that a little later. Anyway, that was back in spring when restrictions began to ease and I indeed found myself making short trips again, overnighters and an occasional two-night stay in D.C. and Charlotte and Atlanta.
The delta variant now raging is threatening to end even these short excursions, and as I venture back to my old haunts, there’s something different. Something has changed.
First, there are nowhere near as many people flying now, nowhere near as many people in the hotels and the bars, and a few of my favorite restaurants are simply gone. It feels like the old lifestyle I was looking for has vanished, or at least replaced by new faces I can no longer read, wary strangers instead of kindred spirits.
The clink of glasses, the laughter, the camaraderie and sexual tension gone, and instead there’s an uncomfortable quiet that seems to have descended on the happy places I remember.
I found myself daydreaming as I sat at familiar bars, staring into blank faces and for the most part thinking back to past exploits, past nights in the fast lane. Images of women in power skirts, nylons and heels, silk shirts that were always open one button too many, sometimes more as the nights went on.
I thought back to breezy conversations with gorgeous women, some divorced, some just away from husbands and kids, even some with their husbands right beside them at the bar. It was so normal, so easy, buying drinks, toasting to freedom, talking about our lives back home, our spouses, our sex lives. We would completely open up, wandering souls totally removed from real life restrictions.
I went to bed with more women in the past decade or so than I could ever remember, crazy scenes with women exploding in pent-up passion, doing things they would never do with their husbands.
One night, I was basically seduced by a married couple in Nashville. We ended up in their room taking turns with the wife, exploring all her holes and ending the night with something rare, a blow job from a couple.
That was a first for me, but it wasn’t the first from a single woman or, yes, a single guy.
That was what I’d filed away, I thought, forever, a night in DC with a man who, quite frankly, reminded me of me. The alcohol, the conversation about our wives and sex combined to make me horny as hell, and he noticed.
To make a long story short, I ended up in his room, naked, sucking each other’s cock, even swallowing his cum. I remember waking up that next morning embarrassed and ashamed, unable to look myself in the mirror, the smell of another man still in my mouth. I swore I would never do it again.
But I did. Several times. It was too easy, and once the ice had been broken, so to speak, I found myself in other men’s rooms from time to time. The men on the road, it turned out, were even easier to pick up than horny married women away from home.
So as I stood on that porch that night, thinking back to the years before, that memory somehow flashed into my head, not just the first night but all the nights for what turned out to be a little more than a year when I went from a straight married man to a bi-sexual cocksucker who found that the sensation was so overwhelming, so completely out of character, that it was somehow arousing. Strangely erotic. Wrong but so fucking hot.
Standing on the porch, I realized my cock was hard thinking about it and making a decision then and there that if I ever went back on the road, I would lose all inhibitions and follow my cock, wherever it led me.
Which is why now it feels so strange to be sort of back on the road, sort of back in the old lifestyle, sort of feeling the old feelings. The bars are almost empty now, in comparison, and all those women I remember simply aren’t there any more. I have no idea why, but I feel like I’m traveling in another time, back in the 60s or something, when there were no women on the road, no women in airplanes other than stewardesses, no business women in sexy professional clothes, no gorgeous women in silk shirts with too many buttons undone.
Now it’s just men.
It’s been four months, and not once can I remember even having a conversation with a woman in a hotel bar. Yes, there was the flight attendant out of Charlotte that ended up in the same hotel. We fucked that night, and while it was satisfying, it wasn’t amazing.
It wasn’t the same, and deep down I knew it would never be again. We kissed goodnight, and I never saw her again. That was in June, three months ago. And I honestly believe that was the last women I’d even spoken to in a hotel since.
And now I’m back in Atlanta, sitting at the lobby bar in the Marriott Marquis, making small talk with the bartender almost completely alone when I sensed someone sitting down next to me. It was the man across the bar that I’d stared at.
“Could I buy you a drink?” he asked in a deep and masculine voice. I looked at him strangely for a second, his question hanging in the air when I suddenly smiled and said “sure!”
It’s funny how life comes at you when you least expect it, in a dark and quiet bar out of town. But as I took the vodka tonic from the bartender, a rush of emotions and old feelings washed over me.
This man beside me, this handsome man dressed the same as me, was like something out of the old days, back when the bars were full and there were as many women as men in the bar, all strangers but somehow familiar acquaintances, all of us relaxed and away from home, all of us reading each other in the game we all played.
And now, it suddenly hits me that this man has read me. This complete stranger, who I’d looked at once, rather too long I admit, but with just a fleeting glance, he knew in an instant that we were going to end up in his room.
We clinked glasses and said “cheers” together, and for the next 30 minutes we talked about the old days, the way we were, the nights from before the pandemic when life on the road was exciting, and the drinks flowed and we all seemed to float into each other’s arms, all of us cheating on someone else, all of us just wanting one more night away from spouses and kids and all that was waiting for us back home.
We got a little drunk, and at some point I realized he’d put his hand on my thigh, inches away from my raging hard cock which was outlined obviously through my slacks. I looked down, and his cock was bulging too.
I don’t know if we said another word to each other, just charging the drinks to our rooms, signing the check and floating out of the bar, into the elevator and into his room.
We were out of our clothes immediately, sliding our bodies against each other on his bed, our cocks grinding and slapping the other like a sword fight. It wasn’t like we were kissing or hugging. It was too horny animals acting out our deepest desires, acting out our yearning for sex of any kind, on the road again, like the old days.
It was a night I’ll never forget. It wasn’t quite like I remembered, but the fire burned as it used to.
His mouth found its way to my cock, hot and wet as he slurped and licked. He worked his way to my balls, and I groaned and moaned.
“Suck me,” I whispered. “Suck my balls.”
He was a little aggressive, which was something I hadn’t fully expected and he physically lifted me over, pulling my hips up to put me on my knees, and I felt his tongue sliding up and down my ass crack.
I was overcome. The sensation was incredible, something I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and never with another man.
I reached back and opened my cheeks and made a deep sound from within as I felt his tongue press against my asshole. He rimmed me for five minutes or more, devouring my hole, tongue-fucking me as I moaned loudly and made noises without actually saying any words.
The sound of my wet ass, getting slicker, my hole relaxing as he pushed his tongue deep inside me.
Looking back on it now, I realize I was submitting to him and my own deep sexual yearnings, submitting to my memories and my fantasies during the pandemic when I would stand on the porch and reminisce about days I feared would never come back.
They’ve come back all right. Not like it used to be but something that at least reminded me of all those nights, those wild lust-filled nights on the road, doing things I’d never let anyone know about, things that would destroy me back home.
I realized this was how it was going to be now. Not the hotels filled with horny married business women but horny married men.
And I was OK with it.
The last words I said to this man who reminded me of me echoes in my mind now, like a phrase I repeat over and over again, like a song I can’t get out of my head.
I’m on this man’s bed, my head spinning, strange thoughts and longings all somehow mixing in with what was actually happening to me.
The last image I had in my head was me standing on that porch, making a promise to myself that I would indeed lose all inhibitions if I ever got back on the road.
So here I was, a man’s tongue in my ass, me jacking my cock wildly underneath when the words just came out.
“Fuck me,” I said, breaking the silence and shocking us both.
It wasn’t a question. It was me, from somewhere inside me, making a bold decision with a bold statement. It was a relenting sentence abandoning all reason. It was me coming to terms with the way things are and the way things are going to be now.
“Fuck me in my ass.”