His name wasn't John, but this is a real story, so I'm calling him John so that he can remain anonymous.
Okay, so let's start with the part that some people find crazy. John was 18 and just out of high school and I was over 50, so how is it that we ended up in a hotel room together with me stuffing John full of food? Some people find it odd that younger gay men want to be with older gay men, but in fact this is very common.
I wouldn't have talked to John at all except for the fact that I noticed that he had selected "daddy-son role play" as one of his kinks on a social networking site for gainers and encouragers that we both belong to. Most guys who select that aren't actually interested in calling each other "Daddy" and "Son." It's a way of indicating that you're open to an encounter that involves a significant age difference.
I sent John a message and chatted with him briefly. Then we got on yahoo and had a longer chat. I told him that I was interested in meeting in person. We don't live in the same city, but we live relatively close to each other, so it wouldn't be hard for one of us to travel to the other one's city. I mentioned that it would be easier and cheaper to have him visit me, so that was our offhand plan.
John seemed uncomfortable with the idea that I'd pay for everything. It made him feel guilty and he didn't understand why someone would spend so much money on him. This is a place where the age difference matters. It was hard for me to explain to John that at my age, I have a lot of disposable income. It might seem like a lot of money to him at his age, but for me, it wasn't a lot of money.
Money is a tricky issue when there is a big age difference. I'm still trying to figure out exactly where to draw the line. We all know the stereotype of the creepy old guy trying to lure young boys to get into his car by offering them free candy. I didn't want to use my financial security as a way to manipulate him. Here's where I come down and what I explained to John. I won't buy presents for a guy or give him cash. That would be bribing him or treating him like a hooker. But the two of us want to have an experience together and the experience will cost money. Given our different financial positions, I don't mind being the one to pay for that experience. And if he wants to share it with me, then he should accept without feeling guilty.
I was truly excited because I thought John really wanted to do this. But then, a few days later, he suddenly became distant and quiet. He barely responded to me when I tried to talk to him. This was very puzzling to me at the time. He explained to me later that what happened is that he told several of his friends about how he was going to visit me and they freaked out. They made him watch an episode of Oprah Winfrey about internet predators and they told him that he shouldn't do it.
I'm disappointed whenever John doesn't talk to me much, but I figure it probably has to do with the fact that he was 18. It's a very confusing time in a person's life and for John, he had to deal with an extremely confusing set of fantasies and experiences. He was a football player in high school, but his true passion was theater. He had sex with both men and women long before I met him. He had fantasies about getting fat. He had a doctor trying to get him to lose weight. He was talking to me online and he was talking to his friends. It must be tough to sort it all out. So whenever John doesn't talk to me, I figure he's off living his life or he's trying to figure out what he really wants.
I got such a cold shoulder from John that I just stopped talking to him. And I figured that I wouldn't ever talk to him again. That happens to me often online. I'll strike up a conversation with a guy and we'll share some fantasies and then as soon as I try to turn it into something real, he'll back away and stop talking to me.
But a little over a week later John started talking to me again. I mentioned that I'd be willing to drive to his city and rent a hotel room. At first he said he was so busy that weekend and that it wouldn't work, but he seemed to be frantically figuring out a way to make it work. He could spend a lot of time with me on Sunday. Maybe he could drop by Saturday night, but I shouldn't count on it. But he'd definitely have time to see me on Sunday, so if that was good enough, then I should come.
I had no clue whether John would show up or not, but I went ahead and booked a room at a local hotel that he suggested. It was pretty cheap and I was able to book a room with a Jacuzzi tub, which seemed like fun. If nothing else, I'd get to soak in the tub all by myself thinking of whether I want to ever do this kind of thing again.
I drove up on Saturday afternoon and told John that I was on my way. He had said that he couldn't see me Saturday, so I was expecting to spend the evening alone. But then John seemed to be really interested in having dinner with me. I kept getting this "hot and cold" vibe with John. Maybe it's just his personality that he focuses intensely on something while ignoring other things. But I think it also came from his own ambivalence. Now that I was approaching, he had a chance to make some of his fantasies real. That's simultaneously exciting and nerve-racking, which could make any one of us run hot and cold.
One of the surprising things to me is that gainers aren't more interested in buying food. I sometimes fantasize about taking a gainer to a supermarket or to Costco and telling him to fill up the shopping cart with whatever he wants. But John wasn't interested in shopping at all. He had some suggestions of things that he likes, but he didn't want to shop.
I hadn't bought a lot of food before getting to the hotel. Maybe I wanted to get more of a sense that John was actually going to show up before I bought more. I arrived with a container of cinnamon rolls from Costco and a big bag of peanut M&Ms. John suggested that we use room service for dinner. I don't tend to order room service. I'm just not used to indulging that way. But it made perfect sense. John seemed to want me to order for him. That's another surprising thing. A lot of gainers like to have someone pick out the food for them and tell them what to eat. I told him that they had a nice steak for me and for him I'd recommend the seafood fettuccini. I mentioned that they had three dessert choices: cheesecake, cake of the day, and bumbleberry pie with ice cream. He approved the fettuccini and we decided it was best to order all three desserts for him. I planned on buying some 2-liter soda bottles, but I hadn't done it yet, so I ordered two cans of Coke for him for dinner.
And then I waited. And waited. Room service arrived first, so there I was with two dinners and three desserts. I was beginning to think that John was going to turn out to be a flake. But then he showed up. It's always awkward when you first meet someone in person that you've chatted with online. You aren't sure whether to hug him or what. So we both sort of laughed nervously as we said hello. And then I suggested that we eat dinner. The food was helpful to give us something to do.
I had seen lots of pictures of John including face pictures, but I really wasn't prepared for the man who arrived at my hotel room that night. He was much cuter in person than he was in his pictures. I'd mostly seen pictures of his belly. And while I like bellies, when you're actually with someone, you have to look at their face and deal with the whole person. John was just adorable. He was physically big like all of the linemen that I had lusted after in high school and college. He had both muscle and fat. And he had a reddish tint to his chubby cheeks that was very cute. He was a big, strong guy, but he also had a certain vulnerability to him.
We talked a lot while we had dinner. He told me the story about his friends making him watch Oprah and he told me about some of his past experiences. John might have been young, but he had a lot of sexual experience under his belt with both men and women. I'm a fast eater and he's a slow eater, so it took a long time to get through dinner. I wasn't sure he'd finish all three desserts, but he did. It seemed like a matter of pride to him that he finish all three. He had this satisfied smile on his face when he ate the last bite of the last dessert.
He couldn't stay long, but we managed to fit in some fooling around. With straight couples there is an expectation that the man will be the dominant one, but with two men, that dominant role is always up for grabs. John had nearly one hundred pounds on me in terms of body size and he certainly had a youthful energy and actual muscle mass that would have made it difficult for me to challenge him. But he was a few inches shorter, so I soaked that as much as I could, standing up against him and looking down on him and wrapping my arms around him to give him a bear hug and a big kiss. He might be a big, strong boy, but I was going to take charge.
We kicked off our shoes and started kissing and almost immediately ripped our shirts off. I find that you can do a lot without ever taking off your pants. I wanted to explore every inch of his swollen belly and his jock-gone-bad torso (muscle underneath but being covered over by layers of fat). A lot of people don't realize how special that kind of foreplay can be, especially for a gainer. Both gainers and encouragers have an obsession with bellies. It's wonderful for me as an encourager to have a huge expanse of belly right in front of me, but it's also exciting for the gainer to feel what it's like to be with someone who loves his belly as much as he does. John was ticklish, but in a sexual way. I could turn him on just by gnawing on the sensitive parts of his belly and his love handles and the fat folds under his arms.
I don't want to go into too much detail about the fooling around, because this story is about the gaining part. But it's worth mentioning that we did eventually take off our pants just to be comfortable and there was a lot of grinding up against each other with me on top. I was able to experience his fat from all angles by having him roll over onto his belly and lie on his side and then on his back again.
It's also worth noting that things don't always go quite the way you planned. At one point in the middle of a deep, sensual kiss, John suddenly burped right in my mouth. I know some guys are into burping and I love the sound of a good burp myself, but this isn't exactly what I'd fantasized about. But it goes with the territory. When a gainer is eating tons of food, you're going to have some burping and farting. When it happened, we both just looked at each other and laughed. It was a nice bonding moment.
John couldn't stay that long, so he eventually left. He had mentioned that he sweats a lot, although he wasn't sweaty when he arrived. But he was sweaty when he left. It was clear that eating that much and fooling around had really gotten him quite worked up. He left with a big smile on his face.
I woke up early on Sunday and went in search of food to buy. I would say that I'm still experimenting with what I think is best. One approach would be to plan a specific set of food items and expect him to eat everything. There is a certain appeal to that and many gainers would enjoy the added motivation, as in, "I bought this fucking food, now you are going to eat it. No more excuses. Eat!" John has fantasies of being force fed by a dominant feeder and maybe one day I'll take on that role with him, but the night before we had settled into a gentler pattern. So I decided that it was best to just surround him with his favorite foods and then allow him to set his own pace. It is the classic grazing approach to gaining and what you might call soft encouragement from me.
Sometimes gainers and encouragers can end up being silly when it comes to money. The real costs for me were driving to John's city and renting a hotel room. So I was already out those costs no matter what. So who cares if I ended up spending a lot of money on food that might not be eaten? It wasn't going to add up to nearly as much as the hotel. So I bought 3 big bottles of Coke, a pumpkin pie and whipped cream, a rhubarb/strawberry pie, a cheesecake sampler, a cookie sampler, and a pastry sampler.
John slept in late because he had stayed up very late at a party. He liked what I'd bought already, but he said he had a real craving for peanut butter pie and yam cones. So I made another trip out to get a peanut butter pie and three yam cones (he asked for two, so I figured I should buy three). I was also going to get some burgers and a shake at McDonalds, but I didn't want those to go bad and McDonalds was just a few blocks away, so I figured I could get those later.
In retrospect, I can see that I bought way too much sweet stuff. It would have been better to have a more balanced combination of food. But those were the things John had mentioned to me and I didn't think it through well enough to fill in the gaps to balance it out.
I brought a scale with me because I knew that he was interested in checking his weight. I probably should have weighed him the minute he arrived on Saturday night, but we had so little time and it was already somewhat awkward. He mentioned to me that he weighed 294.5 before he came over on Saturday. I weighed him first thing on Sunday when he arrived and he weighed in at 296.
Another practical thing I didn't think through very well is what to do while John was eating. He wanted to spend hours stuffing himself. When I fantasize about something like that, I think about the eating. But there is a lot of time in between bites, so what are you going to do with that time? We ended up watching some movies on cable. It would have been a better idea for me to plan ahead some movies that we both wanted to watch. But the cable movies worked out okay.
The day was an exhausting mixture of eating, drinking, making out, belly rubbing, kissing, and just plain old resting on the bed to catch our breath. My second favorite moment came in the middle of the day. John had made a major push to really stuff himself full and then he sprawled out on the bed with his belly sticking up like a beached whale. I rubbed his belly slowly and gently, tracing the tracks of his body hair and his stretch marks. And then he turned towards me and curled up in my arms and he fell asleep. He was so exhausted from stuffing himself that he actually started to snore. It was a very special moment for me. Here was a big, beefy boy who wanted to get even bigger who had stuffed himself full for me and he was cradled in my arms snoring. For that moment alone the entire trip was worth it.
When John woke up from his nap, he said he had to go soon. He was also pretty exhausted from five hours of eating and he could tell that he couldn't do much more, but he clearly wanted to make one last push. So we filled up the Jacuzzi tub and brought in the last three pastries. I sat in the tub with my back against the side of the tub and John sat in front of me facing away from me so that our legs were intertwined and I had his back pressing against my belly. It wasn't the best angle for giving someone an effective belly rub, but it was a nice feeling to be able to wrap my arms around him and squeeze him tight. It was also nice to feel the tub filling up around us. And then came the best moment of the weekend.
I fed him the last of the three pastries. I had to reach around him from behind to be able to feed him and he didn't resist. He didn't try to grab the pastry from me or to push it away. He let me put it up to his mouth so that he could take a bite and then I'd move my arm back for a minute to allow him to finish before I fed him another bite. I guess you could call it the gainer version of a reach-around. And even though he was stuffed to the max, he finished off those last three pastries.
Then we weighed him again and he weighed in at 299. I would have liked to have gotten him to 300, but a 3-pound increase from one day of eating is pretty good. I had taken a picture of the scale before and after so that we could prove to people that we weren't just fantasizing about the 3 pounds. Obviously he didn't permanently gain three pounds in one day. He had stuffed himself full and a lot of that wasn't going to last. But I was certainly pleased that he had managed to eat so much in just five hours. I also measured his belly standing (51.25") and sitting (53") and took pictures of that as well. Maybe I should have taken before and after pictures or done a before and after belly measurement, but it's hard to imagine that in one day we could have made a lot of difference.
John and I live in different cities and we live very different lives, so it's unlikely that we'll ever spend a lot of time together. But I really cherish the weekend I spent with him. I feel like we shared something very special. When John left he had this big "cat who ate the canary" grin on his face as he said, "I think you could tell that I enjoyed that." I get the sense that John was disappointed that we didn't manage to fit in all of the things he has fantasized about into that one weekend. Perhaps that is a lesson to take from this. We have such intense fantasies and we have so little chance to make them real that it is easy to expect too much when we have a real encounter. I think John realizes that. I've told him that it's not a problem if he has some leftover fantasies. It's an opportunity for what we might do when we have a round two. And I think there will be a round two.