This is kind of long, but I’ve paired it down quite a lot, so it’s much shorter than the first draft.

So, present day, I’m gay and in a long term relationship with another man and we’ve been together about four years. He knows everything I’m about to share with y’all.

Let’s go back in time now. Early 2000’s, I was 18 and my best friend and I had known each other since we were toddlers. We lived down the street from each other. We went through a phase where we would experiment sexually a little, just jerking off together, but I was raised very Catholic and my religious guilt always got the best of me so we never finished each other off. It never went any further than that. Over the next several years, we would text about it once in a while. We would just text dirty things back-and-forth.

Fast-forward about 10 years where nothing really happens and we drift apart. One night we got back together for dinner and we went back to his place “just to chill” and I watched him jack off. Since then nothing else has happened but now he’s married to a woman and has a kid.

Here’s where things heat up

One day about three years ago, I texted him out of the blue to catch up again and we start talking and I ask him if he ever still thinks about how we used to beat off back when we were teenagers, and he says yes and he still thinks about it sometimes when he’s getting off today in his mid 30s. We talked dirty a little bit, and I said “hey, I know that you are in a relationship, but I was wondering if you’d still be down to talk about what we used to do once in a while.” He said he needed to think about it, and will get get back to me.

The next day he texted me back and said he just doesn’t feel like it’s a good idea because he’s got a wife now. At the time they didn’t have a kid.

Now we are in our late 30s and we text pretty regularly. Once or twice a week. It’s always just about work or family or whatever’s going on in our lives. Every once in a while I make a vague reference to something about sex or jerking off or cum. He usually kind of brushes it off but once in a while, we will exchange a couple of texts about whatever it is, and I can tell he has a little bit of interest.

Several weeks ago we had coffee together, and I told him that I often have dreams about this particular area of his old house where he grew up. It was this detached part of their house, where we would go and hang out and play music or video games and spend the night. And occasionally fool around with each other. Here’s where I missed an opportunity: he said, “yeah, I have a lot of dreams about that place too” and there was a long silence, and for some reason I did not expand on that and we started talking about something else. I could kick myself. Maybe it was something, maybe it was nothing.

Anyway, I don’t know what to do. I would love to go back down that road and talk about the stuff we used to do and maybe even trade pics in person. I can understand why he would not want to text about it since we’re both working professionals now. This feels like a part of my life that is unfinished business. I think about it probably once a week because I have this longing and desire to bring it back up with him.

I’m open to any advice, even if it’s tell me that I’m being a shit person, and should just totally leave it alone.

The last thing I will add is that he’s been sober for probably the last 10 or 15 years and I have this fear in my head that if we ever do hook up again or we start trading pics, that it’s going to cause him to feel a lot of guilt and make him go back to drinking, which would be pretty awful. I don’t know how likely that is though.

OK that’s it for now. I’ll sit back and read the comments.