We have a strict rule during Lost nights: no talking during Lost. It’s complicated enough without unnecessary distractions. Not that we’re that into the plot, as I said. But rules are rules and even random lustful comments have to be stored up for the ad breaks. So, because of that, tonight I’ve made sure that we are all sitting on the sofa with our g and ts a good twenty minutes before the show’s start time, because I have something wanted to talk about: Lust.
Really, this time. Except, actually, his name is James.
James. A friend of William and Mark’s. A very very lovely friend indeed. I’d met James in the pub with Mark and William about two weeks ago and I hadn’t been able to think of much else since. I was smitten.
The three of us had met up in the pub – without Gracie – for a post mortem on a highly significant event. Mark and William had, after months of bribery, corruption and general skulduggery, managed to get themselves a pair of invites to a very special party. A big dirty gay party. One of the biggest and most notorious ones anywhere, held in some big fancy house somewhere on the South Downs.
I was, being something of a fan of Mark and William’s nefarious activities, desperate for the lowdown. I wasn’t disappointed. When they described events to me, well, ‘party’ seemed to be a rather tame word for the event in question. Orgy would have been a little more appropriate. And, big nutso gay orgy where loads of oiled-up men writhed around, under, over and in and out of each other would probably have really hit the nail on the head.
Nice.
Naturally, I pumped them both mercilessly for a full and frank account. When they gave me the description I craved, room by room, one thing fascinated me more than any other. Sure, I loved hearing about the orgy rooms and the dungeon and the sex swing and the go-go boys. But none of those things were as endlessly fascinating to me as the glory hole.
‘So, it’s like, just a hole? Like, in a wall,’ I said.
‘Um, well –’ William pouted and screwed up his face with the supreme effort of remembering it just right ‘–it’s more like a big box. In this case. I think sometimes it is a hole in a wall. Well, it can be all sorts of things, but at the party it was a big box, about five-foot square with a hole in it, like the size of this.’ He held up his thumbs and forefingers, touching the tips to make a circle.
‘And you just stick your …’
‘You just stick your dick in it,’ Mark said with a laugh.
‘And someone inside …’
‘Someone inside sucks it.’ Mark again.
‘What if they, um, what if they don’t want to suck it?’
William looked at me like ‘does not compute’. ‘Well, the person inside, see, they’re kind of in there because they do want to, so that doesn’t really come up.’
I sighed. Fuck, but that was horny. Something about the idea of the glory hole just seemed to embody everything I found so compelling about dirty anonymous sex. The idea that men just stuck their cocks into this hole not knowing or caring who was inside to service them, spoke to a dark place inside me. And even more vividly arousing – perhaps because I don’t have the required piece of anatomy to be the one sticking myself into the hole – was the thought of being the person inside, anonymously taking whatever was offered.
And then, before I really felt like the subject was exhausted, Mark shouted, ‘Ooh, there’s James. Hey, James.’
And this blond head at the bar turned around and, I swear, I heard birds singing. (And I don’t just mean Kylie and Danni on the jukebox.)
James took my breath away. In that moment – with the boys’ salacious talk of glory holes still buzzing in the dirty part of my brain – he had it all. Beautiful, witty (OK, I found that out a bit later), single and, as Mark and William couldn’t wait to point out, gay. Or in Mark’s later words, ‘So gay. Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay! Get it? Gay!’
Usually, I don’t hold by those kinds of aphorism; the type of things about all the handsome men being gay or gay men taking better care of themselves. That stuff. I reckon all that is just made up to make women feel bad. And, me, I’m not that big a fan of feeling bad. Not when there are so many other great ways to feel. However, it was very true that James was both handsome and gay. Very handsome and very gay. (‘Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay!’, in fact, let us not forget.) And I wanted him nasty bad.
William and Mark – I should point out – I didn’t want. Still don’t want. Even though there really would have been no problem there, because William and Mark weren’t so much gay as sexually gluttonous. A pair of dirtier boys I had never yet met. Sometimes I thought that Mark was probably properly bi, and William was mostly gay but open to opportunity, but I never really figured it out. Needless to say though, our combined dirtiness (dirty to the power of three) was probably the cement that held our friendship together. But we never took all the frisson and flirting into the bedroom. There was a line. An unwritten rule. It never quite went that far. Although, actually I’m pretty sure it spilt over into the bedroom between Mark and William, but not between me and either of them. (Well, OK, I’d snogged them both. Separately. But what girl hasn’t snogged her gay(ish) male mates? Just as an experiment.)
But I’d always insisted that Mark and William were just my fag bangles. Or maybe I was theirs. I never quite figured out how that term was meant to go.
But anyway, after two weeks of obsessing about delicious James, I decide enough is enough. Nothing ventured and all that. So making sure I’ve got a good ten minutes before Lust-I-mean-Lost starts I tell William and Mark and Gracie of my enduring passion.
‘Angel,’ William says, after I outline my angst, ‘James is gay. Forget it.’
‘But, but, but,’ I say, stalling for time while I wait for something to appear in my brain. ‘But he might be one of those gay guys who sleep with women.’ Rather like the two I’m looking at right now.
‘He isn’t.’
‘But he might want to sleep with a woman just once, just to check he doesn’t like it.’
Mark shakes his head. ‘If – and that’s a giant-size “if” with flashing neon lights on the top – he did want to do that, he probably would have done it by now.’
‘But he might just not have met the right woman yet.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ William says, raising his eyebrows so high they almost wrap around the back of his forehead.
I scrabble around for some chance I might get my way. ‘But, well, couldn’t I convert him? I hear you and your friends boasting about converting straight guys all the time. What’s that joke? “What’s the difference between a straight guy and a gay guy?”, “About five pints of lager.” Couldn’t it work the other way? Can you turn gay boys straight with enough alcohol?’
‘No,’ William and Mark say, both at once and snappily fast.
‘But couldn’t I just suck his cock? I mean, what difference would it make?’ I say hopefully, my James fantasies suddenly clashing with my glory hole fantasies and almost overloading my brain.
‘What?’ Again they both speak together. It’s like they have become one consciousness.
‘What difference would it make if I were a guy or a girl then? I have a mouth, right?’ I insist.
‘Babe,’ says Mark, ‘cock-sucking is an art, perfected by gay men over the millennia. There is no way you could suck cock as well as a gay guy.’
‘Actually, I’m pretty good at sucking cock,’ I say, because actually, I am. I enjoy it. Over the years I’ve made it my business to be good at it. I know some women don’t like it, but I don’t get that, what’s not to like? What else has the same twisted conflicting rush of being empowered by being able to give such incredible pleasure while at the same time being used and degraded? It ticks all the boxes.
Mark gives me a yeah-right kind of look.
‘He’d never even know the difference,’ I say, quite softly.
William shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I mean, you’re not just talking about James g
etting his rocks off. You’re talking about a person’s political, social and sexual identity. You’re talking about light years of repression.’
‘Light years is a measure of distance, not time,’ Mark points out, unhelpfully.
‘But if he thinks I’m a guy, what difference does it make?’
And then Gracie, who has been very quiet throughout this debate says, ‘It’s starting,’ and I have to shut up for ten whole minutes until the first ad break.
I don’t get to set the conversational agenda to me, me, me in the first ad break because Gracie says, ‘Do any of you lot want to earn some extra spending money this weekend?’
Gracie runs her own sort of company. Sort of. It’s basically a catering company, but she likes to pretend they do events management and party planning as well. They don’t. They reheat vol-au-vents and serve champagne. And it’s not really even a proper company because Gracie’s family are utterly loaded and the entire organisation is being propped up by the generous handouts her family keep giving her (supposedly to avoid paying inheritance tax).
I don’t like working for Gracie at the weekend. For any number of reasons born of both laziness and class-warring principle, but she does pay pretty well and I’ve been a bit trigger happy on eBay lately – my last credit card bill was just a piece of paper with the words ‘Oh my fucking God’ written on it.
‘Front of house?’ I ask, because wafting around topping up champagne glasses is slightly better than unloading and reloading a dishwasher in an ancient kitchen.
Gracie winces. ‘Front for Willy or Markie, back for you, Lou.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Um, well, it’s kind of a men-only kind of party,’ Gracie says and makes such a weird face that you would actually think she couldn’t possibly conceive of why a group of men would want to have a private party with no women around. Her. Her who is sitting here next to Mark and William. William with his hand down the front of Mark’s trousers – I swear he’s giving him a little squeeze every time the good doctor appears on screen.
Then William says, ‘Um, I don’t think I can make this weekend, sorry.’
He and Mark exchanges glances. And then Mark says, ‘No, nor can I.’
‘Lou?’ Gracie says to me. I’m still feeling a bit pissed off about having to be behind closed doors. It’s a bit much that I have come off badly purely because of my gender twice in the space of half an hour. But I think of that credit card bill again and shrug my shoulders. ‘Sure.’
In the next ad break Gracie goes to the loo and I say to William, ‘This is going to be one of those parties, isn’t it?’
‘One of what parties?’
‘One of those dirty parties. Like you told me about in the pub. The plushie orgies?’
‘Oh.’ William nods. ‘Oh, yes.’
Mark says, ‘Actually you do know “plushie” means something very specific. You should watch you terminology there, girl.’
But I ignore Mark’s sexual semantics lesson. ‘So how come you’re not going?’ I ask both of them.
William gives me a look. ‘Who says we’re not going?’ he says, with emphasis.
Then, when Gracie returns and Lost starts up again, I find I’m not really paying attention to the show any more, despite the delicious parade of prettiness dancing across the screen – and I don’t mean Hawaii.
Four days later it’s party time. Except not for me. The work on Saturday afternoon is hard. The house itself is stunning, a real country pile, all huge stone steps and crunchy gravel drive. Not that I’m seeing much of that. I’m strictly below stairs.
My job seems to be mostly washing up baking trays in a huge Belfast sink which screams whenever the taps are run and refuses to supply me with water any more than a few degrees above room temperature. That and running around fetching things.
It’s hard to decide which is worst really.
At about six thirty the grumpier of the two chefs (not that the other one isn’t grumpy) yells at me that we haven’t got any fresh basil, and before I can respond that that is hardly my fault, Gracie appears and apologetically explains that a tray of fresh herbs seems to have gone missing and could I possibly run round to the front door of the house and find out if it got delivered there by mistake.
I nip out of the kitchen door and sprint around the side of the massive house. It’s further than I would have thought possible. When I get there, there’s about twenty cars parked on the drive, but no one around.
I look around hopefully, wondering if I will see a tray of herbs that has been tucked neatly by the door, like the postman sometimes does with my eBay parcels if they won’t fit the letterbox.
But nothing.
And then I notice the front door is actually just a little bit open. Which makes me think that maybe I could cut through the house and get back to the kitchen that way rather than go around the outside. Not very upstairs downstairs, I know, but I’m pretty eager for a sneaky peak at the dirty party set-up.
Inside the house isn’t the riot of tapestries and old masters I might have imagined from its façade. It’s kind of like an ordinary house really, only on a more massive and massively kinky scale. Just the entrance hall I am standing in contains a bank of man-sized cages, a set of stocks and a huge overflowing bowl of condoms.
As I walk through this den of iniquity I stop by the condom bowl. Something has caught my magpie eye. Right in the centre of it is a gold condom. Hardly the most spectacular thing in the room, but strangely compelling. It holds my gaze. And then I reach out and grab it.
But as I do that, I realise that there is the soft sound of conversation coming from the room on my left. I go over and peek through an ajar door into a gorgeous ballroom. And it’s full of people. Men. Most of them naked, semi-naked or wearing various exotica. Oh my God, the party has already started. I stare around the entrance hall. Frozen. And then I hear it. Footsteps. Someone is coming up the steps outside, any minute now they’re going to be coming in the front door. I don’t know what to do. I dart behind the bank of cages and leg it up the imposing staircase behind me.
I try to make my way back to the kitchens as best as I can, keeping a look out in case I bump into any party guests. But the upstairs part of the house seems deserted. Maybe the party hasn’t really begun properly yet. I still manage to take a few wrong turnings though. Get lost. Get double lost. Try to retrace my steps. Fail. Double back again and find I am utterly, well, lost. Real life being lost – nothing like as fun as the TV show. I can’t even find my way back to the front entrance. Desperate, I head up another flight of stairs.
But being further upstairs doesn’t seem to be proving any better for finding my way out. Damn my retarded sense of direction. I just seem to be winding my way deeper into the house.
Here the party-in-waiting becomes something rather darker than the almost light-hearted bondage fun downstairs. Upstairs, most rooms are dark, in half-light or freakily strobe lit. The background music has changed from twinkly classical to throbbing German industrial.
I glance into a medium-sized room, which is mostly empty. All it contains is a heavy red velvet curtain, through which peeks a large wooden box, with a hole in it. A really very large wooden box with a rather small hole in it. Of course, I know exactly what it is. And I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist a closer look.
But before I get even halfway across the room towards it, a voice behind me says, ‘Excuse me.’ And I turn around to find if not the last person I would have expected, certainly a double-take-worthy coincidence.
‘William?’
‘Lou. Hey.’
‘Um … I got lost,’ I say, feeling a bit awkward. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, I kind of told you I might be here.’
‘Yeah, but what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be downstairs?’
And then William starts to look shiftily at the box, and I follow his gaze with one of those dawning revelation feelings. ‘Oh.’ I point across the room. ‘You�
��re meant to be in there.’
But before I can say anything else, a tinny tune strikes up from somewhere in William’s pocket. ‘Woah,’ he says. ‘Girl, interrupted.’ And fishes in the pocket of his tight, tight jeans for a phone that is playing the theme to Bewitched. ‘Yep. Mark, hey dude,’ he twitters into it.
I look over at the box while he’s talking. Thinking about what he told me about the glory hole. Feeling myself get buzzy and wet with the filthy idea of it.
And I suppose I’m lost in all of that, which means I don’t notice the way things have changed in William’s voice. The way most of his phone conversation is being punctuated by angry and frustrated swearing. ‘Fuck!’ says William. And then again, ‘Fuck!’ as he hangs up the phone.
‘Something wrong?’
‘That stupid fairy Mark’s only gone and locked himself out. I’m going to have to drive back to Brighton with my keys and sort it.’
‘What? Isn’t Mark here?’
‘No, he’s revising. He’s got an exam in the morning. Hence me having to go and let him back in. All his notes are in the flat.’
‘But didn’t you tell him you were kind of busy?’ I tip my head towards the box, which is making its presence felt like a third person in the room.
‘Yeah, but, oh God. What can I do? Look, it’ll only take three-quarters of an hour, max. I’ll just find someone else to take my place for a bit. James is downstairs maybe he would –’
‘James is downstairs!’
‘Yeah.’ William blinks at me, like he’s thinking, why is that surprising?
I’m still holding the little gold foil packet in my hand. I rub my fingers across it like a lucky charm. ‘I’ll do it,’ I say.
At first William looks at me like I’ve just said something in a foreign language. ‘You? You can’t.’
‘Why not? No one’ll know. Go on, William, you can sneak out. No one’ll even know it wasn’t you in there all night.’
Sex with Strangers Page 4
