The Guardian Angel

by Liam Livings

  I stopped walking and looked at him. “Alone, that’s the key word there. Alone.”

  He shrugged, then looked at the ground before we continued walking.

  We arrived at the hotel, and he apologised for the hundredth time that night. “Let’s make up, let’s not spoil the holiday.” He gave me those little-boy-lost eyes, which he knew I couldn’t resist, and pulled me towards him, sticking a finger inside the waistband of my underwear and stroking me a bit, exactly how he knew I liked it.

  I gasped as he grabbed my cock, squeezing tight, then cupping my balls lower down.

  He kissed me and continued caressing me. “The thing about fighting is that making up is so much fun afterwards, don’t you think?”

  I kissed him back and put my hand inside his underwear that he was already straining to leave. “I can’t deny that. All I will say is I don’t think you can have your cake and eat it. At least not with me at the moment. I won’t share my cake with anyone else. If that makes sense….”

  He nodded. “No cakes. Okay. Noted.” We fell onto the creaky bed, and soon I didn’t care about the squeaking or the noises and whether the funny old woman heard us or not. Because for that time in bed with Bobby in that room in Margate, all I thought about was his body and how much pleasure he was giving me. All the Rhinestone Cowboy anxiety drained away as Bobby knelt behind me and drilled into me as I gasped with the perfect combination of pleasure and pain before we swapped positions. He lay on his back so I could watch myself thrusting in and out of him and see from the smile on his face how much he loved it when I did that to him too.

  Afterwards we ran down the hall, wrapped in towels, laughing and trying to pull each other’s towels off. Then we had a bath in the shared bathroom. I lay back against Bobby’s chest as we lay at the opposite end of the bath from the taps. He poured water on my head and washed my hair, kissing my neck periodically. After a bit of awkward, squeaky movement, we turned around so I could scrub his back and wash his chest. Clean and surrounded by bubbles, we lay together, talking about the weekend and agreeing we must do it again soon, and Bobby agreed to spend a bit more on the hotel next time.

  And we never mentioned the Rhinestone Cowboy again.

  Chapter 15

  “Turns out he doesn’t really date. He just shags—or he did until me, it seems.” I closed my eyes and pinched my nose, trying to concentrate. “What the hell have I done?” I opened my eyes. “How have I, a serial shagger, managed to find myself in a monogamous relationship with another serial shagger? How is that possible?”

  “Don’t you argue?” Amy asked.

  “Course we argue. What do you think we are, robots?”

  “So how do you resolve it?”

  “We usually end up fucking like horny rabbits.”

  “Shall I do your tarot cards? Or a crystal reading, how about that? That’ll tell you what you should do, or what to expect, or both… I forget.”

  “I think we’re beyond that, Amy.”

  “So just be happy, see what happens. What’s not to like? He fucks the arguments out of you. You do actually do stuff, other than in the bedroom. He takes you out to exotic cities around the world. Why can’t you just be happy? Someone’s looking after you up there, so just enjoy it.”

  “We went to Margate.”

  I thought about what she’d said. Maybe this was Sky looking after me. Maybe he had steered me on this course as he knew we couldn’t be together.

  “Don’t nit-pick,” Amy replied. “And Berlin too.”

  “I suppose so.” I stuck my bottom lip out and recognised how much of an ungrateful twat I was being.

  “This other bloke—has he been in touch?”

  I had told her about the conversations with Sky but concluded that I still couldn’t be with him because it wasn’t possible.

  “Cryptic. Why’s it not possible? You keep saying you can’t be with him, but never explain why.”

  “To quote Facebook, it’s complicated.”

  “Commitment-phobic twat?”

  “No, really not that at all. He’s the whole package, the conversation, the laughs, the body, but we can’t have a physical relationship.”

  Amy shook her head slowly. “No contest, then. If this Bobby’s half as good as you say he is, why are you moping about this other guy? Build a bridge, get over him, and move the fuck on, darling.”

  Everything seemed to be going pretty well in my life. I had my three-month review at the bank, and Charlie, my boss, told me between sniffs and while running up and down his office quickly, “You’ve done well, Dicky, very well. You’ve surprised all of us with how quickly you’ve picked it up.”

  I smiled and thought I’d evidently covered up that even though I didn’t know exactly what it was, I was picking it up. It was basically all about money. After the Initial Training Programme, Charlie guided me to the Investment Bank division. Which, I now knew was about moving, investing, and protecting money for clients all over the world. Turned out your high-street bank was much more than a mortgage lender or a current account.

  Charlie slapped me on the back hard. “We’d like you to show the new boys how to do it. They start next week. Some of our investment clients mentioned you to me. Said they were very impressed with your work.”

  “Which clients said that?” I asked, remembering one client’s acquisition of another global company, which I’d worked on with a senior manager, well into the night.

  “One of the institutions, and a government client too. I can’t say any more than that as I told them I wouldn’t embarrass them. Just take it as a compliment and move on, all right, Dicky?” He sniffed again and wiped his nose with his sleeve.

  I nodded. “Monday next week. You know where to send them to meet me.”

  “I certainly do, Dicky. Let’s see if some of that acquisitions-and-mergers magic can rub off on them, eh.” He smiled, then gestured to the door, so I turned and left.

  We went out that night to celebrate, Bobby and I. He had insisted. “You’ve got to celebrate the victories, ’cause God knows there are few enough of them most of the time.”

  “You are lovely, Richard, and I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  This, in bed to me after we’d tumbled home in a semi-drunken celebratory mood, had laughing, slightly too adventurous for being drunk sex, finished with a frantic wank stood opposite one another while kissing, surrounded with clothes on the floor in a trail from front door to bedroom.

  I sat up in bed. “Whoa, come on, no one said anything about love, did they? Where’s this come from?”

  “From all the months we’ve been together. It’s not a surprise is it? Are you telling me you don’t want to have sex with me, and all these times we’ve had sex, you wished you weren’t?”

  “Well, I don’t know….”

  “You seemed to be enjoying it earlier. You didn’t put up any fight just then. Or yesterday morning before work. Or in the shower on Sunday, or Saturday morning in your kitchen.”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point.” Well, very well. You couldn’t argue with that evidence.

  So why am I still resisting the relationship? Why can’t I just let go and let the relationship take me along with Bobby? Or is it just me fighting being in a relationship since I’m new to planet Boyfriend and automatically resist every step towards it even though I do really like Bobby?

  “So how am I doing? As a boyfriend, marks out of ten? Bearing in mind I’ve not actually had a boyfriend before, and neither have you, I seem to remember.”

  I made a balancing motion with my hands, palms facing upwards. “I’d say seven or eight. And what about you? How is it, being with me, unable to shag other men as they pass by. The ongoing smorgasbord of men is off limits.’

  “Not even a sniff. Not anymore. Don’t want it, because I’ve got you. It’s like someone’s looked at us two and our chequered, varied pasts, how gregarious, and how many men we’ve been with, and put us together just to see what happens.”
<
br />   “Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

  “And look at us. Weekends in bed together. Meeting the parents and each other’s friends. Pretty boyfriendy if you ask me.”

  I shrugged because really, I couldn’t argue with that, could I? I took off the brakes and let myself flow forward to planet Boyfriend. Relief flooded my body. “Bobby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I’m falling in love with you too.”

  Later that night I took the glass of white feathers, arranged them in a wheel as before, stroked them, and called Sky’s name, to no avail. I started shaving, looking in the bathroom mirror, and then Sky appeared in the middle of the bath, towering over me. One of his wings disappeared through the bathroom wall, the other filled most of the space to the side of the bath.

  “Nice of you to drop in.” I smiled.

  “I told you, you cannot summon me. I can’t be seen to respond to your calls. It’s very much not allowed. So I’ve sauntered in here, casual like. All right?”

  “Whatever you need to do.” I wiped the shaving foam off my face with a towel and composed my thoughts. “You’ve seen what I said, haven’t you? It wasn’t a fade-to-black moment for you?”

  “I have seen it.”

  ‘And how’s that with you? That I’ve told him I love him and I never said it to you after that night together.”

  “Well, we weren’t together together, were we?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m fine with it.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Happy for you and Bobby.”

  “Why are you being so quiet? You’re in a mood aren’t you? It’s all right to be upset, I’m a bit upset too, but like you said, we can’t be together, and you said you were happy for me. And I do love him. Or I wouldn’t have said it. So have I got your blessing?”

  Green smoke, poof, he was gone, leaving me with a bathroom full of steam, a half-shaved face, and a head full of questions.

  Chapter 16

  The following week I showed the new trainees the ropes, and Charlie slapped me on the back again, then asked if I’d made up my mind which part of the business I wanted to try out next.

  “Another rotation?” I asked, having thought after the initial orientation, where I’d sampled the full range of what the bank did, I was now settled on mergers and acquisitions.

  “Normally we don’t, but since you’ve shown so much talent, we wanted to see if you could show that talent in another division. I’ve got the heads of department rolling dice for where you go next.”

  “And where did the dice end up?” I asked, still not quite believing what he was saying to me.

  “The head of Financial Crimes took me out for dinner and twisted my arm, so….” He smiled.

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Plenty of travel if you want. People commit financial crimes all over the world.” He patted me on the back. “I’ll tell him yes, shall I?”

  I nodded. “Why not?”

  That evening I told Bobby. I had expected him to be a bit reticent, worried that we’d drift apart. Instead he said he’d support me, whatever I decided, and wasn’t it exciting?

  “But we won’t see each other,” I replied quietly.

  “How much travel, really? You’ll be back for weekends, surely. Better to make up for lost time during the week. Saving up our love for when we’re together.” He smiled, and I knew he was being tongue-in-cheek. “Besides, let’s see if you like it first. You might find it really boring in comparison to mergers and acquisitions, or whatever it was called.”

  “It was that. And I don’t think it will be boring. I’m actually hoping it’ll be more interesting. Charlie didn’t mention weekends. I think it’ll be pretty full on if I go-ahead.”

  “We’ll work it out.” He kissed me, holding my head in his hands.

  I nodded, because I knew we would. And that it would all work itself out.

  Bobby said, “Amy called, she wanted to know if we can come round hers for dinner this weekend. I said I’d check with you but it would probably be fine. She said she hasn’t seen us in ages and she has lots to tell us and wants to hear what we’ve been up to.”

  “Did you say we’ve mainly been in bed, involving various toys and some root vegetables?” I blushed at the memory of one weekend when we’d not left the flat and had just had marathon sex session after marathon sex session, each time trying out different things that I thought would make a whore blush. Fun, though. I looked at a stain on the carpet, created that night, and laughed.

  “Course not. What you laughing at?” Bobby asked.

  “Thinking about how we made that stain on the carpet.”

  “Still there, is it?”

  I pointed at the large ominous blemish. “I tried to get it out but haven’t managed so far.”

  “Oh, and there was a message at my reception from your mum. She tried to speak to you all day, but it just went to voicemail, and she needed to tell you something.”

  “What was the message?” I was amused at my mum’s tenacity, despite her having met Bobby only a few times.

  He handed me an envelope.

  I opened it and read the letter, written on headed notepaper from Bobby’s PR firm.

  Richard,

  All day I left messages for you to call me, but you didn’t return my call. I don’t want to leave my news on voicemail because I want to talk to you, not a machine.

  Please call me when you get this message.

  Mum

  I felt an icy hand clutching my heart. People don’t hold back good news in this way. This was not a small talk call about my job, or Bobby, or if I’d seen that drama on ITV1 with that actor I liked. No, this was something serious. Something bad.

  I rang her mobile, my stomach twisting with dread, and she answered after one ring.

  She told me how she’d been in hospital for a routine operation, something to do with her plumbing and the age she was.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  ‘No need, it was routine. They do these operations every day. Thousands of women my age have it. And I knew you wouldn’t want to know the details. Sandra next door hardly wants to hear about it, and she’s been through it herself.”

  “So why the panic?”

  “I had to go back in. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was burning up all night. The tablets they gave me didn’t touch the sides – might as well have not bothered with them. They did some tests and said I’ve got an infection. From the surgery, an infection got in, and it’s stopping me from healing.”

  “So now what?”

  “They’ve got to open me up again, have a look around, see what’s going on inside. They said I’ll need an X-ray, or an MRI, I can’t remember which. Some scan, anyway.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I thought I was going to die. One morning I was so full of painkillers, I didn’t know what day it was. I was lying in the hospital bed, pain everywhere, all across my stomach, and I just started crying. I wanted it all over. I wondered why the wound wasn’t healing, but I thought it’d pick up after a bit. But it didn’t. It carried on feeling itchy and red, and hurting. They said that was the infection.”

  “Which hospital are you in? Can I visit?”

  She told me the name of a hospital in outer North London, near where she lived, and I made a note. “I’m coming now.”

  “No point now, visiting time’s over. Come tomorrow. I’ll see you then. Love you, Richard.”

  “Love you, Mum. See you soon.” I put the phone down, and all I could think about was her lying in the hospital bed, all alone, with no visitors—not even Sandra Next Door—coming to see her.

  Since the divorce, having given up work and done whatever came along and helped to pay the bills, now Mum took things like this easily, but I was more upset that she had no one to share the burden with her, except me. Dad had divorced her, left her with enough to buy a little flat outright, then buggered off to Spain
with his new wife, who was only a few years older than me and whose head possessed as much intellectual capacity as a pillow stuffed with feathers. Unsurprisingly he hadn’t stayed in touch with either of us afterwards. So since I was thirteen, it had been just Mum and me.

  I knew Mum’s “women’s things” were a bit of an unknown quantity, since she’d got pregnant with me at forty, as a surprise, but this was a whole new set of worries.

  Bobby stared at me, open-mouthed. “What’s happened?”

  I told him what I’d just heard and said I’d go and see Mum tomorrow.

  I visited her at the hospital, and once I’d got used to the swelling and tubes, realised she wasn’t in too bad condition. She certainly was in the best place for someone with an infection and a temperature. The intravenous antibiotics were keeping her temperature down, and she had another drip of liquids to make up for not drinking, because she felt sick at the sight of food and drink.

  I visited Mum every day for the rest of the week, taking a long lunch, then returning to work for the afternoon. Every time, she said I needn’t have bothered, but when I asked who else had been in, admitted it was just me. “Sandra Next Door’s not had chance. She works, see. People are very busy nowadays. I don’t want to make a fuss,” she told me a few times.

  Chapter 17

  On Friday morning, I arrived at my desk at eight thirty. After three tries at logging on to my shiny new work laptop, I wondered if I had changed my password without remembering. I looked at the back of my notebook, and the password was still as IT had set it when they gave me the computer. I tried again, and this time it locked me out.

  I knew IT didn’t arrive until nine, so I made myself a drink and waited. I looked at my work phone and checked my emails. None had come through. I turned the phone off and on again—always keen to do the simple fixes first. No new emails. This was without precedent. Until then, I’d always had at least ten to fifteen fresh emails to greet me, from either Charlie or the head of Financial Crimes whom I’d been working with. I noticed a text message that read Please contact your IT administrator for help.