by Marina Ford
One-night stands, in my limited experience, involve a lot of hard elbows, don’t-touch-thats, and awkward tension rising usually from the doubt of whether this was going to work. The surprise of how smoothly Harry accepted my weight on top of him quickly gave way to a glow of warmth from how good he felt under me, how clever he was in response to every move I made. I shifted my leg, he pulled me in by my hip. My cock, rigid from the moment he pawed on it when we burst into the flat, glided against his warm skin; my eyes rolled up in my head, and in return he sighed against my neck and rocked his hips up against me.
My lips traced his collarbone and his breath hitched. I kissed down his chest, his warm belly, until I was on all fours.
“Oh my God,” he muttered, winding his fingers into my hair. It gave me a thrill to hear the shocked little sound at the back of his throat. “Oh God!”
I loved it. I loved the feeling of him in my mouth, I loved the taste and the scent of him, and the sounds I could make him let out. Using my tongue, lips, throat, and hands, I made him mutter oaths to the God and saints, until his breath became so ragged I was sure he was skirting the edge. I came up to kiss him.
“You’re good at this,” he said, breathing hard.
“Happy birthday . . .”
“What are you— Oh . . .”
I’d taken us both in hand and, holding him close to me with one arm, I stroked us. He let out helpless sighs, short and abrupt, clinging to me, his hands and mouth urgent, insistent, hot. He jerked, an “Ah!” escaping his lips, and his hot spill was all over my fingers. I let go of him; my head fell down onto his shoulder.
“Did you . . .”
I could barely hear him over my pulse drumming in my ears. I was still hot and hard and very close. He lifted me up and turned around to drop me on the bed, onto my back.
“What—” I didn’t finish, his kiss stopped me. I should have warned him that I was still covered in his come, but blood was pooled away from the part of my brain that helped with speaking, and then he was there, warm mouth, sucking, deep and wet and warm . . .
After, we lay, breathlessly, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. The backs of our hands were brushing together. My heart was racing. That had been . . . wow.
I rubbed my face.
I’d had good sex before. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt like I couldn’t get enough of a guy. But I hadn’t expected Harry to be that good. Or rather, I hadn’t expected him to feel this good. Where’d he learn to kiss like that?
He turned to his side, smiling at me. My eyes had adapted to the darkness enough to have my heart stutter a little at the way he was looking at me.
I don’t want to go home yet, sprang to my mind.
“So, how did you do it?” he asked.
“What?”
“That card trick.”
I started to laugh, returning to reality. It came back to me now: the napkins, Malcolm, the cards . . .
“I mean, how did you know? You can’t actually read minds; I know you can’t. But bloody hell!”
“It’s a thing between magicians. We’re not allowed to tell,” I said, my voice trembling with laughter.
He reached for my face and kissed me, saying against my lips, “I couldn’t convince you?”
“You can try.”
He deepened his kiss, then moved abruptly away, sucking in air as if resisting extreme temptation. It made something warm settle in the depths of my chest.
“I need a shower,” I said. Come with me, I meant. Moving up, I reached for him and he followed, reading my intention with a pleased bemusement.
His flat was small. We went by moonlight across to the bathroom, barefoot, our bodies bathed in silver light. He ran the water in this almost darkness. Let it go warm.
“Come here,” he murmured.
“You come here.”
He grabbed for the back of my neck, pulled me to him. “Can you not always,” he muttered, then kissed me. We walked into the cubicle, still kissing.
We kissed the way two lovers might when one of them is about to go to the front. Like we would never see each other again for some tragic reason: his arms about my neck, pressing his whole body to me, eyes closed, mouth open, sighs deep from his throat echoing through all my nerves in a hot shiver. I wanted to bury myself deep inside of him, claim him in some primal way.
I turned him around, pressed him close to me.
It seemed to surprise him. I held him close to my chest, my heart beating a riot. His body, tight, muscled but spare, felt so good against me, his bottom pressing up against my quickly hardening cock. Wild thoughts of sliding into him, of taking him, of what that would feel like, raced through my fevered brain.
I kissed his neck, sucked on his earlobe. Looking down his body, I watched soap and water gliding down his chest, his flat stomach. He was stroking himself, waiting for me to decide what I’d do next. There was so much I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to scare him away. Men didn’t sleep with me for my pleasure. They slept with me for what I could do for them.
Soap slick, I pressed my rigid cock between his thighs and reached around, taking him in hand. I stroked him slowly along with the rhythm of our rolling hips, alternating pressure and lavishing his neck with kisses where he seemed most sensitive.
His arousal was quickly reaching its tip, his moans echoing off the shower walls. I stopped, releasing him to the sprinkle of the shower water and running my hand up his stomach. He grabbed it, pulled it down to his straining erection, wound my palm around him and thrusted into it, insistently.
Our actions became frantic, racing, thrust for thrust, groan for groan, in clouds of steam, sweat and water mingling, until we came together in copious bursts.
Harry turned, wound his arms around my neck and, pressing my flushed back against the cool, wet wall, kissed me again, accepting my arms around his waist as if that was where they naturally belonged. Suddenly, I felt sick at the thought of letting go. Our embrace tightened, as if loosening it would mean we’d both dissolve and slip down the drain together. Instead, as his embrace tightened, it was as if the rest of the world had slipped away, and it was just the two of us, together, our hearts pumping violently against each other.
I woke up to a bright, rather Spartan room. Next to me, Harry was asleep, on his front, with the side of his face pressed deeply into a pillow turned away from me, snoring gently. His flat was a studio apartment on Carnaby Street in Soho, so from my position on his bed, I could see the flat in its entirety, and noticed for the first time that all of his belongings were in boxes. The night before, we hadn’t bothered to switch on the lights. As soon as we had entered his flat, he’d pulled me to him and kissed me, and then we’d stumbled straight onto the bed. Now it was daylight, and it was clear that Harry was moving either in or out of this place. The sight of boxes and empty shelves and counters disoriented me for a few moments, and it was a while before I identified the sounds that had woken me up: someone was trying to fit a key into the lock of the door.
Whoever was trying to get in finally found the right key; the grind of metal in the lock resonated with an echo in the room, and then the door opened and a man walked in.
I had lifted myself up onto my elbows and had on nothing but the leather bracelets around my wrist and the rings on my fingers. The man was staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, all colour drained from his face. He was soldierly in appearance—short-cropped hair, a flat nose, and eyes set wide apart.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said. Not the sort of thing you necessarily want to hear from a man who, over six foot tall and quite wide, in a black biker’s jacket, looked like a person who could handle New Zealand’s All Blacks all by himself.
“Who the fuck are you?” I demanded back, nevertheless.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, advancing.
“What the—” but before I could say anything more, he grabbed me by my arm and dragged me out of Harry’s bed.
“Hey!” Harry said, at las
t waking up. He was squinting and rubbing his jaw. “Kieran? What are you doing here? What— Let go of him!”
“Is this what you do when I’m not around?” Kieran, the guy who was now painfully holding my arm in one of his enormous hands, demanded. “You go off and sleep with the first homeless hippy you find?”
“Hey!” I cried indignantly.
“Let go of him.” Harry sat up in bed. “You’re making a scene.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about!” Kieran shouted. “You never understand the important things! All you want is fucking ceremony and—”
“This really isn’t the time—”
“The fuck it isn’t! When it comes right down to it, all you want is—”
“Will you let him go? You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I am embarrassing myself?”
“Mate . . .” I tried, delicately, to intercede.
“Shut up, you!” Kieran shouted at me. Rude.
He glared at me with a measured menace, a snarl on his lips and a warning in his eyes that said, Careful or I’ll snap. Presumably, big guy that he was, he expected me to turn away in submission, but he miscalculated. Adrenaline was boiling up in my blood, my muscles were hardening with every second, and though he had several inches on me, I’d fought before. He probably never had to. I fixed my eyes on him squarely, and I could tell when he became conscious that I wasn’t afraid.
Harry stood from the bed. He was entirely naked, which stunned both me and Kieran into silence, because, boy, he looked fine. At night I hadn’t seen that much of him, though he had felt good, and in the shower we stood too close together for me to really take him in fully, but now, in bright daylight, he took my breath away a little.
Calmly, he walked over to Kieran and touched his hand where it held my arm. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Kieran’s hand loosened and then he stepped away from me in a huff. Harry turned to me and said, quietly, “I’m really sorry. The bathroom’s right behind you.” He picked my clothes up from the floor and handed them to me. Evidently, he tried to do this as delicately as possible, but it still felt like he should have stuffed a tenner into one of my pockets for my services.
I walked off to get dressed in the bathroom. Cold tiles against my bare feet, my nipples puckered against the chill. It wasn’t just the temperature in the room that made everything inside of me tighten.
The bathroom, like the rest of the flat, was almost entirely empty, save for a cardboard box on the floor where all the shower gels, shaving foams, and toothpastes were. Last night, I hadn’t noticed any of it. It was like a completely different bathroom from last night.
I dressed quickly, and then saw myself in the mirror. I suppose I did look a little rough, with my hair loose and half my face shaded by dark stubble, but homeless hippy was an unjust description.
Outside of the bathroom, Harry and Kieran were quarrelling. I couldn’t make out the precise words, but the tone said it all, and it was clear that the sooner I was gone, the better it would be for everybody.
I hoped to sneak out straight to the front door, but that hope was dashed as soon as I peeked out from the bathroom.
“Joe?”
Harry had his dressing gown on, a navy blue one with red and white stripes, and he was able to carry this off as if he were wearing one of his suits.
I came out then, ignoring Kieran altogether. Not that I was particularly keen to talk to Harry either, now that I realised what he’d done last night.
He walked me to the front door, even though it was only a few steps from where Kieran stood by the kitchen counter, glowering at me from underneath thick, dark brows.
“I’m really sorry about all this,” Harry said, in an almost whisper, his hand rubbing my arm where Kieran had held me moments earlier. I nodded, eager to get out already.
“Thank you for last night,” he said.
“Yeah, no, totally,” I said, abstractedly, reaching for the handle. He said something else, but I didn’t hear him—as soon as the door opened, I dashed downstairs and out onto the streets.
This had been a bad idea. I mean, sleeping with your boss was a strategy that rarely worked out for anybody, but in this particular case, I really ought to have known better. Christ, he had a boyfriend! Has anybody ever kept their job after being discovered with their boss by their boss’s partner? I cursed myself and my stupid impulses.
My heart was heavy. It wasn’t the job I’d probably lost that was making me feel so . . . let down. It was the memory of him embracing me with both arms, kissing me like I had just returned, having been thought missing presumed dead for the past three years. I considered myself a fairly experienced man, but that had been a first. It’d felt dirtier and racier than anything else we’d done.
It was disappointing to know that all he’d wanted was to use me to cheat on his troglodyte boyfriend.
Six Months Before the Big Day
When I get excited, the excitement often takes over, and sometimes (read: always) I get carried away. Usually, this means I burst into action and do whatever it is that is exciting me. But not now. This proposal, I vow to myself, will be all about Harry.
I start planning.
This I do for Harry’s benefit, because Harry is a planner and I’m not, and so I know that if I plan something—as in plot, organise—he’ll be impressed.
As I draw a map of the different plot elements I am putting together, Chloe sits next to me, with a glass of wine the size of an infant in her hand, drinking and criticizing in turn. With her thick, long grey hair frizzed up into a beehive, she looks like Frankenstein’s bride.
“Do you know,” she says thoughtfully, as she leafs through the various schemes I discarded, “these would make for great slapstick comedy.”
“I told you, I’m not doing any of those.”
“Yeah, but what a shame! I’d quite like to see you dangling from a hot-air balloon by a rope tied around your ankle, with a hundred doves in cages that won’t open rattling underneath, and Harry, panic-stricken, trying to drag you back in.”
“Thanks.”
“Or this one!” She enthusiastically points to the bottom of another page. “Where would you even get a Chinese emperor from nowadays? I mean, honestly, Joe . . .”
I grumble in response.
“Or this one!” She turns to another page. “Where you get sawn in half by a magician on stage and the magician pretends that the trick didn’t work and you were really sawn in half. I mean, you could carry that one all the way to a fake funeral. Comedy gold.”
“You’d like that, would you?” I mutter.
She laughs hoarsely. Then she attaches a cigarette to her ridiculous, old-fashioned cigarette holder, lights up, and continues her reading.
I won’t deny that I have a few crazy ideas at first before I come up with the viable one. But that’s the creative process in a nutshell.
The central idea behind the Plan is that the engagement is going to be a complete surprise to Harry. He will expect nothing. He is to be knocked off his feet. I want him to first be shocked, then say yes (naturally), and then in the days that follow I want him to slowly assimilate the lengths to which I’ve gone to do this for him. It’s going to be like a slow-release art piece.
Phase One of the Plan begins a few days later while Harry and I are at home.
It’s the evening: as far as Harry knows as ordinary an evening as any other. We are cooking. Or, to be more precise, he’s cooking, while I’m distractedly waiting for the first plot element to arrive. He talks about the away day his firm had, and the team-building exercises they’ve gone through, while I intermittently stare at him and then the door wondering if the whole plan will collapse on this first step.
“I mean, in the end, I suppose they must serve a purpose,” he says, chopping vegetables like a TV chef, “because you do have to work as a team, and the exercises are sort of fun. Not that I would ever praise any idea of Malcolm’s, but there you go. Although—” he laughs “—Soph
ie was telling us about this retreat she’d done with the firm she worked for some years back, and— Pass me the parsnip, will you?”
I start at being addressed. “Hm?”
“Pass me the parsnip?”
“What parsnip?”
“Bob,” he says, dryly, “Bob the Parsnip. Could you please pass him over so that I can acquaint him with Betty the kitchen knife?”
I relax and laugh, and pass him the parsnip.
“What’s with you today? You seem distracted,” he says.
I shake my head and go to the fridge.
“Want some wine?” I ask, very casually. Like a man who has nothing to hide.
“Beer.”
I open a bottle for him and hand it over.
“Thanks.”
“So what did Sophie say?”
He looks at me curiously, and I avert my eyes because I’m a terrible liar and a worse actor, and I know that if he realises something’s up, he’ll get it out of me without any difficulty at all. Luckily, before he can ask anything, the doorbell rings, my heart jumps, and I say, “I’ll get it.”
I run to the door.
It’s Chloe, as arranged. My heart is pumping so hard, my chest aches. It’s happening. I did it. I am doing it. Oh God.
“What took you so long?” I hiss at her.
“Thought I’d give you time to think the better of it. Has it worked?” she whispers.
“No!”
Harry’s voice comes from the kitchen: “Who is it?”
I make desperate gestures at Chloe. She rolls her eyes, clears her throat, and begins.
“Oh, Joe!” she cries, loudly, theatrically, so that Harry can hear. “Had a call from the Temple! They said your exhibition has been moved forward!”
“What’s that?” Harry, wiping his hands on his apron, comes around to see what the noise is all about.
