The dark place

This post has been, in a manner of speaking, about a quarter of a century in the making. It's certainly something I've been skating around since day 1 of this blog. I've even tried, over the last few days, writing a fictionalised version for my other blog to at least allow me to rehearse, as it were, finding a way to talk about the issue, but reading JJ's post of last night that so upset me has become the catalyst to finally drag this dark place in my life into the open.
I'd had doubts about my sexual orientation in my mid to late teens - I had a massive crush, albeit not at all sexual - not even in fantasies - on a middle school boy when I was in the sixth form (he was 13/14, I was 17/18), but I was still reasonably convinced that I was straight. I had a very close friendship with a girl who I'd met through a part-time job, and had I had any self-confidence at all, it almost certainly could have become far more than it was, but I never did find the courage, and it finally dissipated completely when I left home at the age of 20 to move to a new job in North West England. I was lonely, even though I was lodging with relatives, screwed up because I hadn't made the move that might well have made things click with my female friend, and generally feeling pretty sorry for myself. Enter the boy.
I'll call him B, because that has no connection to his real name. I'd known him since he was a baby, because he was a distant relation - I'm not too well versed in genealogy, but I think he was (is) my second cousin. When I first moved into the area, B was 7 or 8, and was a delightful, happy, affectionate child. I remember staying over at his parents' house one weekend shortly after my move (to allow for a boozy night out) where B took every possible chance to cuddle up to me, to the extent that his dad, always one for a smart one-liner, said that he thought his son was going to grow up gay, much to his wife's chagrin. At that stage, I thought no more of it than that B was the sort of boy who liked his hugs and attention, and I had novelty value.
I didn't see him overly often - 2 or 3 times a month, perhaps - during the next couple of years, but we always seemed to get on well, and he still liked, even as he got to the age where a lot of boys wanted to be tough and independent, to sit on my lap and have a cuddle every now and again, but almost always when there were other people around. I'd had a couple of unsuccessful attempts to start a relationship with the opposite sex, stymied by my shyness and the fact that I was on shift work - Saturday night shift is a pretty good passion killer, by anyone's standards.
I moved out of my relatives' house after a while, and rented a flat nearer to where I was working at that point, but I still saw B about as often as before. I'd begun to take him out to various places at weekends and in school holidays, and it eventually came about that he decided he wanted to visit my parents in Kent, because his dad had done that as a child. I was due some annual leave during the school Easter holidays, so it was arranged for me to take him down for a long weekend. We arrived late on a Thursday evening, and, given the space that my parents had, ended up sharing a double bed in the spare room. B, in his typical way, spent most of the night cuddled up to me, while I spent most of the night awake and painfully aroused. I'd begun to feel attracted to him some while before (he was 11 by this time), a combination of guilt and lack of opportunity restraining me from doing anything about it, but having him hugging me for hours and my perception of what his affection, physical and emotional, meant led me to add 2 and 2 and arrive at an answer much greater than 4. By the time I got up, I was almost insane with desire, the house was empty, my parents both being at work, so that when he came downstairs half an hour or so after me it wasn't long before I ended up hugging, kissing and touching him on the living room couch. Had he not had an understanding, or instinct, of where things were heading and the courage to say what he said next - " Do we have to have this sex stuff  " - I have no doubt that I would have had some kind of sex with him. The only very minor credit I can claim for myself is that I wasn't too far gone to realise that he'd said "no" and that he meant "no", and that I stopped what was I was doing. I was devastated at what had happened - I burst into tears, which I think disconcerted B as much as what had nearly taken place before - and tried to find some way of apologising to him. I doubt that he fully understood what I was trying to say, and I'm certain that he had no idea why I was so upset, so the fact that his response was something so grown-up is amazing to me even now - " Don't worry, you forget it and I'll forget it ". And he has, by any superficial appearance. He never mentioned it again, although I didn't make any attempt to remind him, and on the few and far between occasions that I see him these days - 3 or 4 times in the last 10 years, as far as I remember - he's still friendly towards me.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, I seriously contemplated suicide, the only time I've ever been in that kind of place in my life - I even went as far as to acquire a stockpile of Paracetamol, which I was going to wash down with liberal amounts of Pernod, to make sure - but, with hindsight, I know that B would probably have blamed himself, so I'd have ended up damaging him as well as myself.
The longer term effects of what happened are still playing out in my life, even 26 years on. I felt so guilty about what I'd allowed to happen that for a good many years I almost suppressed my attraction to boys - there was the occasional bout of ' window shopping ', including one on my honeymoon - and I certainly did my best, and still do, to never allow myself to get close to any boy, emotionally, and even, as far as possible, in terms of physical proximity. I've been lucky in that regard that my only child is a girl - when the midwife said " It's a girl " when she was born, my immediate reaction, fortunately not aloud, was " Thank f@*k for that " - not so much because I might have been tempted to something incestuous, as the fact that there would have been far more boys around a son than there have been around my daughter - friends, teammates, etc.
All in all, I have to admit that my self-control over the years isn't so much of a virtue as it might seem - it's more to do with the knowledge that the rapist in JJ or Larry's stories could so easily have been me.

Thank you very much to Brian for becoming my latest follower.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B