Going Walkabout

I looked for him when I left the abbey and set out on the final, six-mile hike of the day to the lodging I’d picked out for the night between Wood Stanway and Stanton. Sure enough, he’d picked up on me again outside the abbey and accompanied me all the way to the countryside inn and pub, the Dancing Boar. Seeing him again gave me a sense of both comfort and arousal. I was entering a submissive mode that I took on when I was with older men who covered me. I relaxed and gave over control and decision making to the man, leaving it to him to enfold, embrace, and possess and use me.

He was coming for me. Surely he was coming for me.

Now that I knew who he was and that our eyes had met in some sort of recognition, my heart was racing, I was feeling randy, and I couldn’t think of anything beyond him—what he looked like in the nude, what he would do in lovemaking in bed. How big was he built? I thought of that without embarrassment. I wanted to be possessed—to be stretched. It was almost a feeling of loss that swept over me as I walked through Stanway and couldn’t see him behind me. Was he only going this far for the night? When I had checked, there didn’t seem to be any more inns in the area for the Cotswold Way hikers than the one I had picked out, the Dancing Boar, but maybe he’d known of one in Stanway.

It was fretting for naught. When I reached the Dancing Boar, he already was there, in the pub, sitting near the fireplace, with a mug of ale before him. Doing my best not to acknowledge or to go directly to him, I went to the bar and engaged a room for the night and ordered a mug of ale. What if I was wrong? What if his trailing behind me and being here at the same inn where I would be spending the night was all happenstance? How embarrassed would I be if I approached him only to find out he had no intentions toward me at all—that he wasn’t even the novelist Forrest Adams?