Disclaimer: Not mine. DNA's. Hoping he doesn't mind too much.

I remember this being sort of different in the past. With other people.

I am not, and never was, a lothario, but I have had my share of evenings in the company of more or less agreeable women, very few of them leading anywhere, but all enough fun to merit the effort at the time. I remember drinks in bars and giggles on sofas in corners of noisy clubs, where there seemed to be a little cocoon of silence reserved for the two of us, if we just stayed close enough together. I remember the feeling of light, feminine fingertips with delicate nails and dainty knuckles that grazed my chest as they slid between two buttons on my shirt and tried to find some hair to play with, which has always been something of a lost cause. I remember breaths, light as summer breezes tickling my ears and neck, hiccupy with laughter and alcohol, or low and serious with a shared interest that might have become love, but didn't. I remember the slenderness of a woman's leg, sliding up from my knees to rest on my thighs, while soft palms stroked my neck and light touches of lipstick came to rest on my cheek. I laughed, covering any embarrassment I might have felt with a desire to have fun and enjoy the creature I held so carefully.

I remember too the way it changed. It has taken a long time, the change. It is not a change in me, nor in those around me. It is a change in the possibilities open to me and it began with a man.

He arrived a few years ago, and I saw him at the pub a few times and we chatted, as you do when you meet a stranger, then as you do when the stranger becomes someone to wave hello to when you meet them in the street, and finally as you do when that stranger has turned into a friend who you arrange to meet, or who turns up unannounced from time to time.

We had between us a tenuous link in that we were both, vaguely, employed in the entertainment sector, and the even more tenuous link that I like a pint of an evening and he likes five or six. So we spent a lot of time together at the pub, or from time to time at parties, clubs: anywhere he thought he might get a drink and a girl to cuddle. When I'd had enough and left him there to finish however he wanted, he would frequently follow me home sometime later, and demand entrance. The nights I have made up a bed for him on the sofa, bringing him pillows and blankets and giving him food to soak up some of the alcohol, have gone beyond counting. Even when I started to tell him to let himself in, the crashing that woke me up, and the clearing up to do in the morning, never made him a terrifically welcome guest. Yet for all that, I have never come to think of him as an alcoholic. He isn't. He doesn't conform to the checklist of signs you get if you look for information on that lonely breed. He moans that he wants a drink a lot of the time, yes, and he can drink quantities that would knock me out, without even slurring his speech, but he can get by perfectly well without it, he does not drink sneakily if he can't drink openly, and he still prefers his drinking to be sociable. He is an affectionate drunk, and when sober, a perfectly pleasant, if slightly odd, man.

Sometimes his intensity is unnerving. He will, on occasion, stare at me, as if he is trying to see right through me, and he blinks so rarely that sometimes I find it painful to look back at him. When he has been doing it for a while I will gently cough or make some other comment to remind him that it's fairly rude...except it never feels like rudeness. It's like he was brought up without some of the basic social rules. Nothing major, I mean to say, he has never done anything that would make you think he was disturbed or seriously abnormal, it's just little things, as if, perhaps, he had had to teach himself his manners.

Anyway, the more I saw of him, the more I wanted to see of him, and I could not understand it. I'm a normal man. I...I suppose some people might even go so far as to call me boring. I go to work, I come home, then I stay in and watch a bit of television, or I go out with friends to restaurants and parties. Normal friends, ordinary, everyday working people who, at the weekends, like to go to a restaurant and be a bit snotty to the waiter, or go to a party and pretend they are being outrageous by turning up in a Tarzan costume. I am one of the people who maintains the steady averages of Britain. I keep my garden presentable; I try not to appear in public in a condition which will cause embarrassment to the mothers of small children; if I see litter on the road near my house I will pick it up and drop it into the nearest convenient litter bin; and if I think the government or local council are doing something abominable, I will make my views known in an appropriate political arena, such as the dining room of my colleague's house, or the Sunday afternoon bar at my local. If things get really serious, I will write a letter. One day I thought, I'd get married, have a couple of children who would be supported through until they left college, at which point I would kindly, but firmly, send them out into the world to see what sort of a go they could make of it. My plans have, I think, to change.

As time has gone on, he has become so much a part of my life that I can no longer conceive of spending long periods of time without him. He will still come over only on the pretext of asking me to accompany him in his quest for a drink, or to utilise my conveniently situated rest and refreshment facilities – my house being considerably nearer to the pub than his own. So I see him maybe two or three nights in a week, sometimes for a few hours, mostly at the pub, but occasionally at my house when I persuade him to stay in with a bottle of something, sometimes for just a few minutes as he lurches between front door and bathroom and I close my eyes and go back to bed.

The thing is, that he does not talk to me as other men do. He does not respond in a way I am used to. He doesn't even behave like the few gentlemen of the pink persuasion (as my mother charmingly puts it,) I meet at work, who either keep themselves to themselves, or try to get noticed by sometimes wholly inappropriate behaviour. He is just...himself. I didn't see him coming. That is how he got me.

He has always, even right at the beginning of our acquaintance, thrown an arm round my shoulder in drunken friendliness, or caught me for a hug of thanks as he left my house in the morning or early afternoon. I considered his behaviour unusual and vaguely continental, but not disturbing or worthy of note. I never supposed there was anything more behind it. Nor, I think, did he.

The changes I have noticed are these: When I am somewhere where there is dancing and the lights are low and the music changes to the soft melodies of the lovers' dance, I find myself torn. In times past the girl in my lap would have pulled me to my feet, arms around my neck. We would have swayed in our little patch of dance floor, barely eighteen inches square, gazing into each others' eyes, or with our faces buried in each others' necks. That little phantom dance, a sway with no relation to the beat of the music, feet moving imperceptibly, leaving the floor maybe only one time in eight. At the end of the song we would pull back, gaze into each others' eyes one last time, squeeze our hands together and return to our seats and our half-drunk drinks with those embarrassed little smiles at the others seated nearby.

Now, I do not have the girl in my lap. This is not, I hasten to add, because I am no longer attractive or pleasant enough to acquire one, should I wish, but I no longer so wish. When the smooch song plays, I do not look for the girl, although parts of my conscious mind tell me to get up and grab a girl as I would have done once upon a time. Now my eyes scan the room for him. Who is he dancing with? The little blonde by the bar? The brunette in the corner? I can always find him, glass in hand, other hand wrapped round the waist of a laughing girl, looking contented and perfectly at ease. On these occasions, I know I stare. It is unforgivable, but I stare. I stare until he can feel it, until he turns and finds my eyes locked on him across the room and, and this is what first alerted me, he is not angry or confused. He smiles. He raises his glass and grins and his eyes twinkle at me and my stomach flips over, and I wave slightly and smile back because I am the one who is confused.

Call it five months this has been going on. This loss of what I knew was normal for me. Suggest to yourself that he knew. He always knew. Then see why I do not mind: because he waited. He waited so patiently that I never knew until I worked it out straight from inside myself, that I love him.

So tonight, when I saw him dancing, the girl on his hip pressing herself into him until I felt a prudish part of myself say 'why not just unzip his trousers for him here on the dance floor?', he knew. He saw a look on my face I had not let show before, and he put his hand on the girl's shoulder, bent close to her and whispered in her ear. Then he gave her his drink, his two-thirds full drink, and he left the two of them on the other side of the room, and came straight towards me.

'Let's go home, Arthur,' he said.

The walk home with him was so simple to achieve. It was done in silence, because I was not certain, having left the place, of the look he had given me. I feared to say something that would reveal my having grasped the wrong end of the stick, or to lose my nerve and push him away with sarcasm, which he has never been very good at spotting, and which I am afraid I fall back on rather a lot when I am annoyed or nervous. We walked side by side, just as we have on many occasions, the walk today being a little longer. Later in the evening, I might have called a taxi to get me home, but it was still just light as we left, the summer sun remaining warm as it peeped over the roots of the trees and fought through the hedges by the roadside. He walked on my right, his satchel swinging from his right shoulder, because he refuses to go anywhere without it, though I have never seen him take from it anything he needed while we were out. His sleeve brushed mine repeatedly and our shoulders bumped, and by the time we reached my door, the sun had set and we bumped into each other with greater frequency in the bluish dark.

When I let us into the house, he put the hall light on as I locked up behind us, and when I turned around, he was leaning against the wall, one knee hitched up so that his foot rested on the wall behind: a thing that I have asked him repeatedly not to do, as it marks the paint-work. I was about to say something, to tell him off and shoo him into the living room, when he smiled at me.

He has smiled at me many times before, as you do when you are with a friend. This was more than his usual cheeky, slightly penitent grin, however. This smile seemed to expand into the air around his face, rushing towards me like a tangible stream of pleasure or excitement. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and shook me out of the comfortable state into which I had fallen. If any fault lies with me in this, it is that I utterly failed to get him to remove his grubby shoes from my white wall. I mean, really one should keep a clear head at such times and insist on maintaining the niceties of social interaction; like not giving the man you are apparently attempting to seduce a full morning's work with a scourer and the cream cleaner to look forward to.

The lack of propriety in our interaction at this point can, however, be firmly blamed on him. He saw me falter and took advantage. That is the only way I can put it. It doesn't cover it completely, because, you see, I really had no objection to being taken advantage of at this point. Nevertheless, he reached out a hand to me, which I could not help taking, because part of me, which shall remain nameless, was screaming out to be touched, and I had to do what I could.

'I hope I didn't make you abandon anyone when we left?' he said, as if I might have had someone hiding behind me, who I had simply ignored in order to follow his suggestion. Truth be told, had I been duty bound to tell somebody if I was leaving, I cannot honestly confirm that I would have honoured that duty tonight.

I shook my head, my mouth having gone too dry to speak. My body does this. It gets all worked up, then when there is something important to be done, like speaking, or maintaining a calm and balanced outlook, it betrays me and I am left floundering. The only benefit of this is that, having abandoned me for a short period, my brain usually returns with a fully-formed argument primed and ready to go...I suppose, actually, that's not always a good thing. I have created merry havoc, to my immense satisfaction, at the council tax office, on the occasions when they have mislaid my account, tried to charge me for three properties I do not, and never have owned, or just attempted to make me pay in a lump sum a fee I prefer to pay in monthly instalments, thereby retaining as much as possible of the interest from the amount in my own bank account, rather than the council's over-full and badly misused coffers. They have seen me coming, blank and wordless in the queue, my body weak with exasperation, my mouth empty of all but the most bland and pointless arguments regarding my identity and normal spending habits. They have smiled their tired, customer-service smiles at me as I have approached the glass and slid my letter and identification into the finger-biting tray with the sliding top. Then they have sunk into their chairs, awed by the strength and breadth of my reasoning as my brain has worked into gear, allowing me to tell them exactly what I think of them, and exactly what I think should be done to resolve my little problem. I have watched as they slink off their chairs and form tight little knots at the back with their managers, aware that although my argument has been vehement, it has also been reasoned, and above all, polite. I have never spoken in anger a single word of which I would be ashamed should my Aunt Rosemary be listening in from her undoubtedly heavenly abode. This unlooked-for skill has saved me money and has earned me a slight reputation for being a man whose utility bills it is worth getting right.

For this reason, I was slightly concerned, not to say upset, when my brain failed in this particular respect as I faced the man who had wrapped his fingers around mine and was pulling me gently towards him. I wanted to argue. I wanted so desperately to say that this was not what I had meant. Perhaps the problem was that it was what I meant. It was exactly what I meant.

He didn't bother to say anything else. I rather wish he had, because the more I think about it, the more of a pushover I look. I wish I could say we had a reasoned discussion, or at least, that I had put up some sort of protest. But no. I just let him pull me closer, and when he leant in and pressed his lips to mine, I am vaguely ashamed to admit that I might possibly have let out a little whimpering sigh, which must have told him, if he didn't know already, how desperately my body wanted to carry on. I like his lips. They are warm and firm. Women's lips are different. They are usually fuller, squashier if you like. When you kiss lips that you have found at a party, they are normally coated with something to make them fuller, glossier or more colourful. Until you have a woman you can call your very own, who you know well enough to see her un-made-up, you never kiss her lips. As I kissed him, I realised that I had spent my life kissing Max Factor.

He stopped there. Just kissed my lips. I expected any second to feel him try for more, to press for entry, to make the kiss deeper, more passionate. But it was passionate. It was simple and more about sensation than any battle of tongues, and when he pulled away, I fell towards him, my eyes still closed, so that his hands on my shoulders increased their pressure and pushed me back, and he said in a friendly way, as I opened my eyes,

'Careful, Arthur. Come on, stand up, I'm going to make us a drink.'

Then he left me in the hall, with his satchel and the dusty footprint on the wall.

As always, reviews craved and deeply appreciated :-)