I prefer to undress at the foot of my bed, facing the wall. I remove each item of clothing methodically, with precision, without looking. I do not keep mirrors in my bedchamber. It doesn't give me any real pleasure to see my unclothed form slowly revealed to my own eyes, and to the empty room.

I wear blue and white striped pyjamas, of which I have three sets, all identical. I look down only briefly at my member before pulling on my nightclothes.

Tonight, as I slide between the sheets, I wonder at the unnerving impulse to get up and turn the lock on the door. It makes no sense to me. I do not feel vulnerable or in danger. But I'm suddenly overcome with a desperate need for privacy.

Almost a week has passed without incident. Each morning I help Mr. Wooster dress, and each night I help him undress.

Nothing discernible has changed, apart from his laugh. He laughs as often and as heartily as always, but there is something brittle in it – like you could smash through its gaiety with the tiniest pressure.

I know he remembers.

I do not press him. Nor do I wait patiently. I walk around carefully, growing slowly more exhausted and dazed, refusing to give the slightest inkling that I feel this way. Every answer I give to every question, every movement I make, every word I speak to him, every brandy I pour him is exactly, deliberately as it was before that strange night.

At night, however, after I retire, I feel this new need to lock myself away. I do not. If I were to do so, it would be to admit that I am doing something I want to hide.

For I am. I turn off the electric light switch, pull the sheets to cover me and pull down my pyjama trousers almost immediately. And then I pull myself off, as precisely, methodically and mindlessly as I undress myself.

All the time the unlocked door towers over me, ready at any moment to crack open and reveal my indiscretion.

It is two in the morning. Mr. Wooster has not been out at his club, though he went to bed quite intoxicated from the seven brandy and sodas he'd requested throughout the evening. He'd entertained himself at the piano since nine, belting out gay popular tunes, his voice becoming slightly more off-key as the hours wore on. At around midnight, he'd said,

'Do go to bed, Old Thing, if you're tired.'

I hadn't felt able to rest, however, until he did. So I remained quietly in the background, dusting and polishing every surface until it shone, rearranging cushions, fixing his drinks when required.

Twice he asked me to join in with a chorus, and twice I refused. After the second refusal he seemed to grow bored and disheartened, and decided to retire.

Now I turn over in the dark, feeling the cool shift of the bed sheets against my bare feet.

I am hovering on the edge of sleep when I hear the door handle turn. The hall light must be extinguished as well, for no shaft of light cuts across the blackness. I hear the door close again, and know he is in the room with me.

For long moments he is perfectly quiet and perfectly still, but I am aware of his presence as keenly as if he were shouting or dancing. I can smell his aftershave slightly and, very faintly, the sweat from under his armpits. It disturbs the perfect equilibrium of my room.

'Jeeves,' I hear him say, at last, not bothering to whisper. 'It's bally dark in here.'

In response, I let out a breath. I imagine he can see my large, indistinct shape beneath the covers, rising and falling softly with the movement of my lungs.

'Do you think I might turn on a light?' he asks.

I turn over to face him at that. He is a dark outline against the pale door.

'I'd prefer it if you didn't, Sir,' I request.

'Right,' he says. 'Right right right. I suppose I won't then.'

I hear him take a step, and then another, and expect for a moment to feel the bed dip with his weight as he sits on it. Instead, I hear the creak and groan of antique wood, and realise that he has rested his weight against the closed doors of the wardrobe directly opposite my bed.

'Sir,' I say, sitting up in bed, 'Are you having trouble sleeping?'

'No no,' he says, again using his daytime voice – loud and clear as a bell – without regard for the unearthly hour or the pitch darkness of the room. It tears through the blanket of gloom like a pair of tailor's scissors. Everything feels all wrong. He is not supposed to be in here. 'No,' he repeats. 'I mean, I'm not sleeping. But I'm not having trouble in the forty-winks department. I could toddle on back to my room and sleep, if I so desired. Lie back down, Old Thing. Don't sit up on my account.'

It feels quite unsuitable, though, that I should be supine in his presence. I remain seated, my body bent at the waist, my legs still straight, my heels hanging just off the end of the mattress.

'Do you require anything, Sir?' I ask, though it seems a redundant question.

He doesn't answer.

'Please,' he says, 'Lie back down.'

Eventually, I do. I don't know what it is that I fear. That he will pull the covers away, exposing me? That he will come to lie on top of me?

When he speaks again, his voice is quieter. Less casual.

'I just want...' I hear him inhale and exhale through his nose. 'I just want you to... carry on, Jeeves. Carry on as you normally would.'

I am lying flat on my back, stiff as a board, looking towards the ceiling, which is invisible in the darkness.

I expected that something else would happen between us, before long. I did not think it would be this.

'Sir,' I say, 'I don't know what you mean.'

'Yes you do,' he says. 'I mean I want you to do what we talked about. In front of the mirror. I want you to...'

'Please, Sir,' I say, 'This is too...'

I believe this is the first time in my life that I have left a sentence hanging in mid-air. And it does. It remains in the air between us, unravelling in all its possible ways of ending, taking its time in dissolving into the dark.

'Come along, Jeeves,' he says, at length. 'I want you to do it.'

I think that perhaps, because we cannot see each other, we are not truly doing this. We are in the ungodly time between midnight and morning and anything we do will perhaps pass away like a dream.

It is this that makes me decide. This, and the fact that I am stunned, curious, trembling with the danger and the strangeness of this unexpected course of events.

I reach underneath my pyjama bottoms and take myself in my hand. I can tell from his intake of breath that he knows I have done it.

'Turn on the light,' he requests.

'I would prefer not, Sir,' I say. I begin to move my hand along my length. Slowly. Listening to the soft rustles the bedclothes make.

'You're doing it, aren't you?' he asks, his voice eager.

I harden suddenly and painfully, unable to keep my mind blank any longer. I see him there, in my mind's eye, watching me with dark, curious eyes and a wet, open mouth, fascinated and aroused by my actions.

'Yes,' I say.

'You're touching your cock.'

I arch my head back into the pillow, in uneasy pleasure and a species of disbelief. That I am doing this. In front of him. For him. At his request. Just as I might pack his things for a trip to New York, or send a telegram of acceptance to an invitation.

'Yes, Sir,' I say. 'I am.' My breath comes faster and louder.

'Turn on the light,' he requests.

'I'd prefer not,' I reply, in between hitching, panting breaths.

'Oh my Lord, Jeeves,' he says, and I hear the wood of the wardrobe creak again, first once, quite loudly, and then more steadily and quietly, in rhythm. My hand is hot. My palm is sweating, mixing with the fluid that leaks from me. I can feel him looking at me.

'Turn on the light,' he requests again.

Coaxed into it by his soft, persuasive voice, I reach out with my other hand and pull the cord to the bedside lamp.

And he flickers into being before me with incredible sharpness, his trousers pulled down to just below his member, his hand working himself furiously, his eyes wide open, on mine.

I look down at the covers – the rapid movement of my hand disturbing them into billowing waves. I feel myself about to come off. It seems that he is close, too.

I stand, pull up my trousers and before I can think what I am doing I am in the hall outside my bedroom, shivering slightly in the colder air. I close the door, shutting Mr. Wooster into my bedroom.

I keep my hand on the handle, holding it closed. The handle rattles from the other side, first quietly, then more insistently. Then desperately. Still I hold it.

'Jeeves,' comes his muffled voice at last from the other side of the door. 'Jeeves, what the hell are you doing, Man?'

I keep hold of the handle.

'Jeeves!' he says, quite sharply. 'This isn't funny.' As though I ever thought it might be. 'Let me out this instant! Have you lost your marbles?' I hear him thump on the door with his fists. Then he goes quiet.

I realise with a start that I am holding the handle with the hand I used to touch myself, and pull it away suddenly, looking at the brass to see if I have left any stain. I haven't. I walk quickly to the kitchen and wash my hands with soap and hot water.

Then I walk into the living room, unable to go back into my bedroom, and unsure of where else to go.

I feel at once as if I am dreaming and wide awake. When I turn on the electric light, every colour in the room stands out – every curl on every pattern on every vase, every stitch on every cushion on every chair. I made the shine on each and every surface, but at the moment they look alien and unfamiliar, incongruous as I am out of my uniform in the middle of it all. I am in the living room in my pyjamas.

I hear Mr. Wooster open the bedroom door, and turn to stand beside the drinks cabinet, my hands clenched by my sides, my chest rising and falling rapidly. He appears at the end of the hall, his pyjama trousers pulled back up. Then he begins to undo his pyjama buttons from the bottom to the top. The sides of his pyjama top hang to frame his torso. He has no hair on his chest. It is flat, pale and smooth, like a boy's, and his pectoral muscles are only slightly developed. His nipples are as pink as cat's noses. I recall the warmth of his skin. The peculiar feeling of my hand around his prick. The vaguely stomach-churning sight of his mess strung across the mirror.

For a minute or more, we simply look at each other, the tension in the air thick, our flesh crawling with the things we want to do to each other. Finally, he says,

'Fix me another drink, would you, Jeeves?'

I turn away and reach for a cut glass and the brandy bottle, and as I lift the lip of the bottle to the rim of the glass, I glance up in see in the reflection in the window that he is approaching. Then he is even closer. Then his reflection is hidden behind my own.

Then his teeth come down on the back of my neck, just below the hair at the nape, and bite down hard, surrounded by the hot, wet ring of his lips, and he sucks hard enough that I fear he will rupture my skin. His chest comes forward to press hard against my back and his arms come around me, undoing my buttons now, from the top to the bottom.

I do not drop the glass or the bottle – I place them both deliberately down on the cabinet, the chink of glass on glass slicing through me as keenly as his bite.

When my buttons are undone, I wrench my neck away and turn in his arms, clutching at him experimentally, amateurishly. Our bare chests meet. My stomach is slightly more pronounced than his, and it flattens against his solid flesh. The whole of my front feels immersed in liquid heat.

I kiss first his neck with an open mouth, then bite down upon his jaw, and then our mouths come together quite hard and untidily.

This is the second time in my life that I have kissed someone. When I was eleven, one Summertime I played for an entire day with the ten year old daughter of my Mother's best friend. We did all the things that children usually find pleasure in. Exchanging marbles, climbing trees, making fortresses out of discarded timber and branches broken from dead trees. Before it came time to go home, we went behind the derelict cottage on the outskirts of the village. She showed me beneath her skirt, and I took down my trousers in exchange. Then we replaced our clothing and pressed our closed mouths together for a long while, imitating some strange idea we had of romance – something we had seen in moving pictures or read about in books stolen from our parents' top shelves.

This is quite unlike that first kiss. I am grounded – alive and aware. I feel everything keenly – every movement of his thick tongue against my own, every touch of his teeth against the soft flesh of my lips. I can smell our combined saliva. The bitter aftertaste of soda moves from his tongue to mine. It does not conform to any idea I ever had of the romantic. I do not think either of us had any idea that something like this was within us – we've blundered upon it quite by accident, and cannot quite get a grip upon what precisely it is, or how we should proceed. Any other combination of circumstances and we might have carried on just as we were, missing this strange situation by an inch and completely unaware of its possibility. If, for example, Mr. Wooster had had one fewer drink that night last week. If he had, would we be groping blindly and clumsily at each other tonight?

We are both still erect beneath our trousers, and I feel our privates meet, pressing against each other with an almost painful friction.

He drags me towards the chaise longue and pulls me to sit down with him, our mouths coming apart noisily as we tumble onto the chair. I fall backwards, he on top of me, and he licks at my nipples until they are shiny and swollen.

'Jeeves,' he says. 'I never thought it... But I'm afraid I can't...' He takes down his pyjama bottoms, and my own, kicking them off the end of the chair. He parts my legs, moving in between them, pressing my left knee, bent, against the back of the chair, and moving my right leg so that it hangs off the chair's edge, my foot on the floor.

He licks at his fingers and spits on them, feeling between my buttocks, working the tip of his ring finger into my hole. I gasp at the intrusion. My lower body squirms and jerks.

He sits back on his haunches and takes his prick in his hand, a distant and inward expression upon his face, as though he is about to write a serious letter. Then he makes to press himself inside me, but I am too tight and tense, and he has barely slipped the head in before he is forced back out. He tries again, but the angle is wrong, and he misses entirely. I feel at once a sense of failure and immense relief. With a growl of frustration, he places his cock between my thighs and uses his hands to press them together hard, rutting into the hollow between my legs, beneath my own erect member.

I look down at my cock. It is flushed and shining, the head raw and aching. This is the longest I have ever looked at it. Mr. Wooster is looking at it as well. Intently. He uses his hand to squeeze it in long, tight strokes. He leans forward and licks around the head with the very tip of his tongue – it feels sharp as a knife.

He lets it go, and I take it into my own hand.

My breaths are thickening, becoming louder, harder and more vocal against my will. My voice box rumbles with an astonishing groan.

'Oh Dear God' I say. I clench my teeth together, and through them I say, 'Dear God in Heaven.'

He is bent forward. I can see the white line where his hair parts.

I spend hard against his neck, the second before I feel his wetness spread between my thighs, running down the crack between my buttocks. It is as warm as blood.

After he gets up unsteadily and tucks himself away, I lift my right leg onto the chair and straighten my left. I sit up gingerly, mindful of the mess beneath me.

He goes to the cabinet and drinks the brandy in the glass, though I hadn't added any soda. Then he replaces the glass on the cabinet, crosses the room and goes back into my bedroom.

When I enter the bedroom, my nightclothes back in place, he is going through my wardrobe. I feel more exposed than he has made me feel all night.

'These pj-s are very plain, Jeeves,' he says, with a note of rebuke in his voice, fingering one of my two spare sets of nightclothes, which are folded on the second-top shelf. 'Not unpleasant,' he hastens to add, 'But plain.'

'Sir,' I request, with more sharpness in my voice than I intend, 'Please stop going through my things.'

He replaces the pyjamas, closes the wardrobe doors and turns back towards me.

'Sorry,' he says, unapologetically. Then, quite vehemently, he says, 'I'm not an invert, Jeeves.'

'I never thought for a moment that you were, Sir,' I say.

He moves his head in a barely perceptible nod.

'Jolly good. I'm...' he tilts his head towards the bedroom door. 'I'm going to sleep in my own bed, what?' he says. 'You too? I mean... in yours?'

'I had intended to, Sir,' I say. 'I will see you in the morning?'

'Jolly good,' he says. 'Jolly good.' He leaves the room, closing the door quietly behind it.

I cross to it and turn the lock.