What Are You Doing In There?

We set off towards the shops. Gareth had lost forty minutes from his comic stores this week.

After a few minutes, he asked me, "So what happened?"

"I told you. I saw him wanking."

"Anything else?"

I was surprised. "Isn't that enough? I couldn't believe it."

"Come on, Seb. He was doing it in private."

I shrugged. "I suppose... but in there? With all those other men so close? It seems weird..."

Gareth smiled. "Some people take a piss or a crap. Others have a wank. What's the difference?"

I nodded. "I suppose... hey! Is that why you take so long in there? Is that what you do?"

We both laughed and Gareth said, "Don't be stupid."

And it did seem like it would have been stupid for me to have thought that. After all, we could both masturbate to our hearts' content in our bedrooms at home – why would Gareth want to do it in the public toilet at Watford bus station?

A couple of months later, after weeks of sitting outside the toilet waiting for Gareth to emerge, I had to take a piss when the two of us got off the bus and so ventured back into the seedy building with him.

Normally I tend to take a piss in the cubicles of public toilets because I get uncomfortable standing at standing at the urinals with strangers, but since all but one of the stalls were full, I let Gareth take that one. His need, after all, was greater than mine.

Two men were standing at the urinal – not pissing, just standing there – and I went to one side of them, as far away as I could manage in the confined space, and pulled my cock out.

I suppose I'd expected them to finish off, zip up and leave the gents to allow me space to piss on my own, but they didn't. They just stood there, staring ahead; making no attempt either to coax their cocks to start behaving themselves like most guys do when they suddenly find they can't go, or shaking their cocks to signal that they'd just about finished.

I became tense standing alongside them and knew, to my embarrassment, that I wasn't going to be able to go. They were going to think I was what my mates called a 'cock watcher', standing at the urinals just to spy on other guys' dicks.

I glanced over at the two of them and was surprised to find that they were both fully hard. The guy nearest to me was the more erect of the two – his cock curved upwards and his foreskin was pulled back to reveal a red and plump bell-end. The other guy was less aroused and his cock stood out at more of a right angle to his body with his foreskin retracted across its head.

The guy nearest to me must have been in his late twenties. He turned to me when he saw that I was checking out his cock and threw me a grin and a wink.

I felt my face flush with embarrassment at being caught, once again, looking at another guy's cock, and quickly pushed my own back into my jeans and turned to leave.

As I headed out of the toilet, I saw something that – only after I'd emerged back into daylight and recovered my composure – occurred to me as being really odd.

A guy was coming out of one cubicle but, instead of going over to the sinks or leaving the building, tapped on the door of the stall next to his and was let in.

At the time, like I say, I was hell bent in trying to get out of there without showing how freaked out I was by what was going on. I don't think I even looked over at what was happening at the stalls, but I suppose I must have noticed enough for the incongruity of what was happening to come back to me during the twenty or so minutes of sitting on the bench outside of the gents.

When Gareth appeared, looking as red-faced and sheepish as he always did when he'd spent a long time in there, I told him what I'd seen at the urinals.

He shrugged it off. "All guys get hard-ons sometimes, Seb. You don't need your big brother to talk you through that, do you?"

I humphed, pissed off that he was being so supposedly mature and patronising about it. I said, "I know guys get stiffies sometimes, but not in a public place, and not just standing there like it was okay..."

He shrugged again. "I dunno... maybe he was as embarrassed as you."

"There were two of them, remember."

"So they got nervous 'cos they couldn't piss in front of each other, ended up with hard-ons which just made it worse, and –"

I snorted. "Guys don't get hard-ons when they're nervous!"

"Some guys do."

"How d'you know?"

"I dunno... I must've read it somewhere."

That was one of Gareth's stock answers when he was losing an argument.

I made a suitably contemptuous grunt and then went on, as we crossed the bridge heading towards the main shopping centre, "Anyway, one guy went into another guy's cubicle. I saw it."

"How d'you know the cubicle was already taken?"

"He sort of tapped on the door of it and someone let him in."

Gareth seemed a little uncomfortable. "You saw a lot of stuff while you were in there... you weren't hanging around, were you?"

I threw him a look of irritation. "Of course I wasn't! Just 'cause everyone else was being weird, don't make out like I was the one doing anything wrong."

He seemed edgy but tried to act like he was indifferent, "Well I didn't hear anything weird going on. Maybe they were mates or something..."

I chuckled dryly. "Come on, Gazz, mates don't go to the toilet together. Or did you read somewhere that that they do?"

"Well, I dunno..." He was starting to look pissed off with me. "Maybe you got things wrong. Maybe he was just tapping the door to see if the cubicle was in use and let himself in when it wasn't."

I was going to argue with him that the door had clicked open from within, but thought better of it. After all, I'd only been vaguely aware of what was going on and so Gareth might have been right: I might have misinterpreted things.

My next few visits to the toilet during the spring and summer of that year were pretty uneventful. Occasionally, I'd get off the bus needing a piss from drinking too much coke on the journey to Watford and so would follow Gareth into the murky building. These days, though, I never dared to stand alongside other men at the urinal: I always sneaked into one of the cubicles.

I noticed that, of the five stalls in the gents, the one farthest from the door was definitely Gareth's favourite. Neither of us said anything about it, of course, but it soon became obvious that if that cubicle was free, Gareth would quickly dart into it, and that if it wasn't, he'd more often than not disregard vacant ones and wait for the end one to become available. I assumed Gareth preferred that one because it adjoined only one other toilet and so the opportunity of being spied on by other men was less likely.

One day though, during one of our first visits to Watford after we'd broken up from school in July, the two of us walked into the gents to find that all but the end stall were occupied.

Gareth muttered, "You just want a piss, yeah?"

I nodded and he gestured for me to use the toilet before him.

I went into the cubicle and locked the door behind me. As I approached the toilet, I noticed that a large hole had been chiselled out of the wooden partition to one side of the toilet, affording the guy in the next stall a graphic view of everything that went on my side. I could see that someone was in there – I could see his hairy thighs and the edge of his arse sitting on the toilet seat – but hoped he wasn't looking my way.

I pulled out my cock and directed it downwards towards the toilet bowl. I knew that it was going to be hard to piss with someone sitting next door potentially watching me, but I really needed to go and thought I might be able relax enough to make something happen.

I must have just stood there for a minute or so, holding my cock and trying to think of waterfalls and dripping taps and anything that might encourage me to want to piss.

It was then that I must have glanced over at the hole in the wall and noticed that the guy next door was rubbing two of his fingers against the bottom of the hole. I watched him repeat the action a couple of times, wondering why he was doing it.

After he'd withdrawn his fingers from the hole for the third time, I reached over and rubbed at the rough, broken plywood myself, wondering what might be so interesting about it. Finding nothing particularly special about it, I pulled my hand away and got back on with trying to piss.

Abruptly the guy next door stood up and, to my surprise, started pushing his cock, which looked semi-erect and about seven inches long, through the hole towards me.

I quickly zipped myself up and hurried out of the cubicle.

Gareth was eager to get in after me, but I yanked at his arm and whispered to him, "The guy in the next stall just pushed his dick through the hole at me!"

I'd expected Gareth to be shocked and to suggest we both got out of there, but instead he just looked irritated with me. He grunted, "Don't be stupid, Seb."

"I'm not being stupid. He really did it!"

"He was probably just joking or something," Gareth hissed, pulling away from me in his impatience to get into the toilet stall.

I tutted, "Yeah, right... some joke," as Gareth pushed his way into the cubicle and slammed the door shut behind himself.

Three quarters of an hour later, after Gareth had skulked out from the gents, I asked him if the guy in the next stall had done the same to him as he had to me.

Gareth looked vague like he'd forgotten what I'd told him it was all so unimportant.

I reminded him: "I told you the guy next to me pushed his dick through the hole. Did he do the same to you?"

Gareth shook his head disinterestedly. "Oh that... no... of course not."

"What did he do?" I asked.

Gareth shrugged. "I dunno. I wasn't really taking any notice. I think he finished up and got out of there just after I went in."

As we waited at the pelican crossing on Exchange Road, I asked him why he preferred to use the end cubicle when some of the others didn't have such large holes carved into their partitions.

He shrugged again like this was all so irrelevant. "I haven't really thought much about it, Seb. Obviously not as much as you have, anyway."

I chuckled. "Come on, Gazz. Like you haven't noticed a great big hole right next to you and guys looking through it. Like you haven't thought about trying a different stall which doesn't have that."

Gareth glared at me. "I like that one because it's the furthest one from the door and so less guys use it. Okay? Can we stop talking about the toilets now?"

I wasn't going to drop it so easily. I went on as we crossed the road, ignoring Gareth's attempts to change the conversation, "But doesn't it freak you out a bit? Having guys perving on you?"

Gareth swung his head around angrily. "Can we just drop it, Seb? If guys get off on watching me take a crap, then good luck to them. That's the end of it."

I didn't pursue the subject any further, even though Gareth's supposed indifference towards being observed on the toilet was so blatantly at odds with his normal attitude. My older brother usually went to great lengths to avoid being seen in the nude – even by me and my dad – and at the swimming pool or in the locker rooms at school, he'd always wrap a towel around his waist when forced to change communally.

It was obvious that whatever was going on in the bus station gents on Saturday afternoons, things weren't as innocent as Gareth would have them seem.

During the following week, I tried to work out what Gareth's attraction towards the gents might be. I figured it most likely that he enjoyed taking the odd peak at other guys' cocks and found their different shapes and sizes interesting. After all, I'd done exactly the same thing one afternoon and had found it pretty interesting, though why Gareth would want to spend so much time over so many weeks doing something which would quickly become repetitive, I wasn't sure.

It also occurred to me that he might enjoy showing off his own cock off. I knew, from the few times I'd seen his cock, that Gareth was pretty well-built. It stood to reason that he'd be quite proud of that fact and so maybe he enjoyed the interest he'd arouse in guys watching him through the hole in the partition. I wasn't sure that whether, in his place, I would enjoy having guys rather than girls getting turned on by the size of my cock, but I could see a certain appeal to it.

I was pretty sure, though, that Gareth wasn't doing anything I would have classed back then as being 'gay'. He'd always seemed as disgusted about gay stuff as everyone else my age did. Once when I'd told him about a couple of boys in my house at school who'd been caught by the housemaster sucking each other's cocks, Gareth had pulled a face and said something like, "Ugh. Not nice."

And I'd once found a well-worn 'Fiesta' under his mattress.