“Mmm.”
“Thought you were going through a blonds phase?”
“Well, you saw how that worked out for me.”
How it worked out for the both of us. I wanted so badly to confide in him, but I was lusting after his ex, after all. “How are you holding up?” I asked.
Simon shrugged. “Okay. It’s not that bad.”
“I thought you were in love with him?”
He shook his head. “I thought so, too,” he said. “But I wasn’t.”
He was so certain. He always was. Of all the things I could have envied about my brother – the money, the career, the brains – it was this. His certainty. “Why do you say that?” I said, knowing that Simon never said anything like that without having weighed it, measured it and passed it through a perfect test of pure logic.
“Because if I’d really loved him I would have found the guts to tell him the truth about what we did.”
My heart twisted. “And what if he never forgave you?”
He shrugged again. “Then it would have been my fault. Too bad for me, but at least I would have done the right thing.”
Too bad for me, too. I wanted to tell him the satisfaction was minimal, but he didn’t need to hear that.
“What are you doing tonight, anyway?” he said. “You want to watch one of those strange movies with that man who keeps getting his balls out?”
“Nah. I’m going to get an early night, I think.”
When I was alone I stared at my phone again, trying to figure out the best way to endear myself to someone who had told me to leave him the fuck alone. And there wasn’t one. Grand romantic gestures, as the girls had been so keen to point out, looked a lot like stalking when removed from the context of romantic comedies. I was stuck. The only thing I could do was respect his boundaries.
*
And then he messaged me.
It was late morning. My phone shuddered on the bedside table, waking me up. When I reached out and saw the display I wondered if I was still dreaming. I rubbed my eyes, blinking through the morning eye floaters, and squinted at the text.
—Sorry. I overreacted.
I stared at it for a second and then texted back. No. You didn’t. You had every right to be angry.
There was no reply. I held my breath, then the phone shuddered once more.
—I know. But I miss you.
My heart did something strange and skittish. I miss you too, I typed, and then kept going. Can you talk? I want to hear your voice.
The phone rang. I picked up immediately.
“Hi,” he said. He sounded faint and sleepy, like he’d been deliberating over his decision to call me all night. It had been over forty-eight hours since he stormed out of the Albany.
I almost said I was sorry, but he’d heard enough of that. “Are you okay?” I said, and being allowed to ask that much felt like such a luxury.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”
“Good. That’s good.” I wanted to see him. “Where are you?”
He stifled a yawn. “Day off,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m still in bed.”
I pictured him curled naked in his navy-sheeted double bunk, and the sudden desire to be with him was so strong that it took my breath away for a moment.
I think I’m in love with you. That’s what I wanted to say, but he was still hurt and I was an idiot. So I played it safe. “So…” I said. “Apologies and stuff. How would you like to do this? Is this the part where I come round at midnight and stand under your window with a boombox playing Peter Gabriel?”
He gave a soft huff of laughter. “Tricky,” he said. “If you stood below my bedroom window you’d literally be standing in the Thames. Besides, my neighbours would shit. They think I’m lowering the tone as it is.”
“You’re not lowering the tone. You’re making them look worse by contrast.”
Another soft laugh. “You’re very sweet,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m terrible. You have every right to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Nathan.” He sighed. “Look, I understand why you did what you did. It was incredibly stupid—”
“—you don’t have to tell me. I’m bewildered by how fucking stupid the whole thing was.”
“Will you let me talk?”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“So, yeah,” he said. “Bewilderingly stupid, yes. But your motives…you were only trying to help your brother.”
I pressed my lips tight together, but I knew it was no use. I’d told him the truth once, and now it seemed like I had to tell him the truth all the time. “Uh, he did pay me at one point,” I said.
I heard Rob swallow. “He paid you?” he said, sounding unutterably weary.
“Yeah. To chat you up in the bookshop that first time. That was the only time I accepted payment.”
He sighed down the phone at me. “Well…that’s something, I suppose.”
“I know it sounds bad—”
“—it is bad—”
“—I know. I know. But I don’t want to lie to you.”
“That’s…” He took a breath. “That’s…yeah. Thank you.”
“You deserve the truth.”
He sniffed hard. There was a pause. “Then tell me this,” he said. “Purely because I’m probably a masochist or something, but how much did I set Simon back?”
“Three hundred,” I said. “That particular conversation in the bookshop. That was three hundred pounds.”
“Oh.”
“Insanely good value for money,” I said. “Considering the quality of the conversation involved.”
He exhaled, and I knew the look on his face right now. Closed eyes, a half smile, shaking his head at the stupid thing I’d said.
“Stop it,” he said, and his voice was low and sexy.
“Stop what?”
“Stop making me want you.”
I thought of his golden eyelashes, his sunburned skin warm under the sheets. Hard. He was probably hard, or halfway there, and in that moment I knew that I needed to go to bed with him as soon as humanly possible. “Rob, please…”
“No,” he said. “Don’t let me do this. I told you how I get sometimes, and I can’t afford to do that. Not with you. I’ll get into that whole frantic, one-sided sex spiral thing where I start trying to compete with everyone else you’ve ever slept with in your life—”
“—this isn’t one-sided.” I said. “I want you very, very much.”
“I want you, too.”
“I can be there in under an hour.”
He groaned. “No, Nathan. I like you. I really like you. Please don’t let me fuck this up.”
I lay back on my bed. I was naked in the summer heat and my cock was heavy and thick against my lower belly. “Does this mean no sex?” I said. It seemed like a waste of an excellent erection.
“For now, yes. Otherwise I’m just going to repeat the same stupid pattern as before and ruin everything by turning into a total sex monster.”
“Yeah,” I said, reaching down to stroke. God, I was hard. “I’m going to need details about what that looks like.”
He giggled. “Uh…you overheard, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’m a visual learner.”
“Nathan,” he said, in a playful, warning tone. “Do not make me send you photos of my penis.”
“Oh, go on. Is it hard?”
Rob drew in a sharp breath, making me shiver at the thought of him touching himself. “So hard,” he said.
“So is mine. Wanna see?”
“No, no, no. I mean yes, but no. We’re not going to start texting one another pictures of our genitals.”
“Aw. But all the cool kids are doing it.”
He giggled again. “Nathan, stop prodding the sex monster. I have no idea if you can even handle the sex monster.”
“Neither do I, but I’m definitely willing to have a go.”
“Oh my God,” he said. “You are such a flirt. We’re going to need some rules.”
“Okay.”
“First, no dick pics.”
“Aw.”
“Nathan.”
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. I really want to see it, though. Come on. You know what mine looks like. At least, I suspect they’re identical, unless he’s secretly a lot freakier than he lets on and he went and got a Prince Albert or something.”
“No dick pics,” said Rob, who was determined to be ruthless. “No phone sex, no Skype sex, no sexting.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“I am. I can’t be trusted with sexting. I have a big vocabulary and a dirty mind, and I can get pretty fucking filthy.”
I made a small, involuntary whining noise.
“We can see each other in public places,” he said. “Go on dates.”
“Can we kiss?” I said. “Or are we going full weird fundamentalist Christian with that, too?”
“No. Kissing is okay. Hugging. Hand holding. Maybe some discreet nuzzling.”
“What about grinding?” I said. “Dry humping?”
“Nope.”
I sighed. “I think you’re being very unfair. How am I supposed to explore my sexuality if you won’t even let me play around with you?”
“Nathan, there is an entire internet full of gay porn if you’re feeling bicurious.”
“I’m not feeling bicurious,” I said. “I’m full on gay curious. And more than just curious. I’m all the way up for it.”
He laughed. A new kind of laugh – low and throaty and deep down sexy. “Can I ask,” he said. “Just how far you went before? I know you said you’d done oral, but are we talking giving or receiving?”
“Both. I was on drugs, like I said. Everything felt fantastic and somehow we ended up sucking one another off. Oh, and he pushed a finger up my bum. Might have been two, actually. Either way, I liked it.”
“So…you took turns going down on each other?”
“No. Same time.”
Rob hesitated for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “So you sixty-nined with another man, but you’re straight?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I told you, I was rolling my tits off at the time. Besides, what does it matter now? Right now I am incredibly gay. I’m completely naked and you could hang a rainbow flag off the end of my cock.”
“Nathan…”
“We could touch ourselves. Is it phone sex if we don’t actually talk?”
He made a low, needy sound that went straight to my balls. “You’re going to be difficult, aren’t you?”
“Fuck, no. I’m easy. If it feels good, I’ll give it a go.”
“How about dating?” he said. “Are you willing to give that a go?”
“For you? Yes. Anything.”
10
We went to a lot of museums over the next few weeks. The British Museum started off well, until Rob threatened to come down with a prostrating case of white colonial guilt in the presence of the Parthenon Marbles, and I steered him away into the nearest room, which happened to be full of Greek vases.
“It’s still someone else’s culture,” he said. “And we just wandered around the world helping ourselves to it because we decided God was a fucking Englishman or something.”
“I know. I know. But let’s look at the vases. I’m sure they’re very interesting.”
He wobbled. “I don’t know, Nathan. I think I’ve reached that ‘interesting things’ saturation point.” He eyed a large amphora and tilted his head. “Wait…are those people doing what I think they’re doing?”
They were. All three of them. “Huh. Ancient Greek spitroast.”
“No, it’s not a spitroast yet,” said Rob. “Spitroast is when you have one in the arse and one in the mouth, and he hasn’t penetrated him in the mouth.”
A chintzy looking elderly couple overheard and gave us the sideeye. Rob was oblivious.
“Him?” I said. “How can you tell it’s a him?”
“Easy. Look at the shape of him. That’s a broad, manly back.”
“It might be a statuesque lady.”
“It’s Greek,” said Rob, as if that explained everything. And it probably did, because the next red figure vase was less ambiguous. Two men, standing face to face, their erect penises touching. I stared at it with mounting resentment. Even four thousand year old vases were getting more than me.
“Frottage,” he said.
“Whattage?” There was nobody else in the room now. I placed a furtive hand on his bum. He swayed subtly towards me.
“Frottage. Wet humping. It’s when you get your dicks out and just…rub. Little bit of lube, lots of kissing.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“It is.”
I buried my nose in his hair. “Why aren’t we doing that?”
“Because,” he said. “You don’t want to unleash the sex monster.”
“I do want to unleash the sex monster. I’m treating the contents of the British Museum like my personal erotic wish list. That’s got to be a sign that we are way overdue to unleash the sex monster.”
He slipped away from me, biting his lip. He was enjoying this far too much. “Why don’t we go and get a nice cup of tea?” he said.
A nice cup of tea. Yeah, right. I was sure I’d heard that one before. Boy George, if I remembered rightly. He said he’d rather have a nice cup of tea than sex, which turned out to be a massive lie, because in reality he was embroiled in a hot, psychotic affair with the drummer from Culture Club.
We went outside and grabbed a drink. Tea for him, cappuccino for me. “We really need to get to the bottom of this,” I said.
“The bottom of what?”
“The sex monster thing. Do you have any idea why you get into this particular pattern whenever you like someone?”
He grinned and sat back on his precarious plastic chair. “You’re trying to psychoanalyse me?”
“I’m trying to establish why you’re keeping me at arm’s length.”
“Because I have a bad habit of using sex to paper over the cracks in a relationship,” he said. “I jump into bed with people too quickly and imagine all kinds of intimacies that don’t exist, simply because I know what their dicks taste like. If you think you’re shallow…well, so am I.”
“You’re not shallow,” I said. “And FYI, I managed to simulate a modicum of depth, according to my director.”
He leaned forward, interested. “Oh?”
“Oh, yeah. Nailed it. I think I’ve got it now. Valmont, right?”
“Right.”
“He’s hopelessly broken. So broken that he has no idea he’s broken until Tourvel makes him feel something. Something he barely understands. No self-awareness whatsoever up to that point. If he ever felt a glimmer of anything approaching love he shrugged it off, made light of it, staged a grand break-up to sate his appetite for drama.”
Rob nibbled on a thumbnail. “Love it. We never do see how he handled the break-up with the Marquise.”
“Exactly. And she’s probably the only other woman he’s come close to loving. How did he leave her? It can’t have been dramatic or humiliating, because she’d never forgive him. I think he framed his affair with her very differently to all the others. They were all conquests. She was his equal, which is why he shielded himself that much more closely against falling for her. Not because of any self-awareness—”
“—but because he knew she’d eat him alive. Yeah. I get it.”
“Pure animal instinct,” I said. “He’s a lizard brain in a beautifully embroidered frock coat. Very scary.”
A breeze caught a stray tendril of hair and blew it across his forehead. “I can’t wait to see it,” he said. “You’re going to be fantastic.”
“You’ve never seen me act. For all you know I could have the acting skills of a porn star.”
Rob laughed. “Nah. I don’t think so. You can time a joke. That’s usually a good indication that someone can act.”
“And what about you?” I said. “How’s the book?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said, hand on my heart. “I’m a creative type, too, remember? And I really do want to know.”
He sighed and slumped. “I’m sorry. I get so defensive, mostly because I’ve done fuck all.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Every time I try to write up my notes on my laptop, or – God forbid – turn them into actual prose, it’s like there’s this voice in my head. Screaming. And it tells me I’m shit and I’m stupid and I shouldn’t even try, because it’s embarrassing how bad I am at this. I find myself physically cringing at my own thoughts. And I don’t even know why. It’s not like I can’t write. I can write. I write all kinds of stupid stuff, but as soon as I sit down and tell myself I’m going to work on the novel…ppft.” He sighed again. “That’s the end of it. I end up paralysed every damn time.”
“Maybe you’ve built it up too much in your head,” I said, recognising the symptoms. “It’s too big. It’s too important. You’ve sunk too much time into it.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s exactly it. What if there’s no way to make it work? What if I’ve completely wasted my time doing all this planning and research?”
“I don’t know. You’ll never know unless you try.”
Rob leaned back and ran his hands over his hair in despair. “I know that, too. But fucked if I can get past this fear that there’s no use in trying. Or that what I’m trying to write is even more cringeworthy than watching Theresa May trying to dance.”
“I don’t think those levels of cringe even exist in nature, Rob,” I said, wincing at the mental picture. “You just have to power through the embarrassment. Just do it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. You just…do. It’s like something Nadia said to me once: if we, as actors, took even a second to step outside ourselves and look at what we’re doing, we’d never do it again. Because what we do is absolutely fucking mental.”
“At least you get to share the madness,” he said. “When you’re writing a book you’re all alone, with nothing but a blank page and a flashing cursor for company. And those cursors can look awfully judgemental after a while, let me tell you.” He stretched out his legs in his tight blue jeans, the toe of his shoe bumping mine under the table. I wanted to tear off his clothes and kiss him all over, and when he caught my eye I could see he was thinking something similar.
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