Oh crap, not this stupid story
This story is like my child. Really! No matter how ridiculous it is, and despite the fact that no one else likes it, I can't stop loving it.
Title: The Rectum is a Tomb
Author: sekrit_omg
Rating: R, this chapter
Pairings: Unrequited S/K (for now); multiple others,
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's notes: a) Homage to the literary gay fiction of the 1980s, specifically Hollinghurst. b) If you seriously think you would like to edit future chapters of this story, please e-mail me at sekritomg@gmail.com. c) I'm not British. d) This is so, so AU.
If you read this, you have my gratitude. It's long and it's weird. But hopefully it's also fun! And if it is (or isn't), please tell me.
I'll put up a link to the FF.net version when I get it posted there.
When Kyle turned up tardy by 10 minutes for our standing Monday nighter, he looked plenty disgruntled, and in fact I had barely greeted him when he barked out, “So! Some friend you are, Stanley!” He unbelted his trench coat and I gawked at him while he moved to push back his hair, realized he hadn’t got any anymore, scowled, and sat down.
Finally, I managed, “What’s the matter, darling? What have I done?”
“Oh, you know well what you’ve done, you cad!”
I rolled my eyes. “No,” I said cautiously, wondering where the waiter was with my second whisky. “Haven’t got a clue.”
“You let me go home with old Clyde again!”
“Oh.”
“Oh!”
“Ah, all right, so that’s what you’re peeved about?” I shrugged, not wanting to seem like this conversation wasn’t pleasing me, knowing that Kyle was still down on the man and all. “My apologies, darling. I tried to yank you away, of course, but you were well into your cups by then, and a little bit…” At this point, I sniffed and pointedly wiped my nose. “And besides, you just seemed so enthusiastic about it. In fact, you were pawing at him like you’d never been fucked in your life before, or your sphincter were a crack in the roof of a thatched cottage during an April downpour, and you needed him to plug the leak.” I smiled at him. “So to speak.”
“I’m absolutely shameless,” he said in a thin whine. He put his elbow on the table and held his chin, sighing like he’d had his heart broken all over again. In fact, I think he had, only he was the culprit, which was even more depressing in turn. “It’s not him, darling. I hate him. It’s his cock. You know I hate the term ‘size queen,’ but you really have to see this thing. It’s grotesque, and I do mean that in the most literal and best possible way. Isn’t it always the way, though, that the best ones are attached to the most hopeless men?”
“Eh, I don’t know,” I said, thinking of Token. “I haven’t seen a really great huge one since about 1970.”
“Oh.” He gave me a look, a wanting look, but I didn’t know what he wanted, so I looked away and drank whisky. He frowned, and rubbed at his hair while he looked rather peeved. After a moment, he asked, “Do you mind if we keep it short and cuisine-oriented this evening?” I was caught a bit off guard, but I must have appeared hurt, because he immediately rectified his request with, “It’s not you, dear. It’s me. I have a presentation to do tomorrow; I’m talking to Oxo. And if it’s no problem with you, I’d prefer not to spend the duration of my pitch tomorrow trying to quell my urge to vomit.”
“Oxo,” I repeated. “What are you trying to sell there? And to whom?”
“Well, gravy, naturally. We’re trying to peddle gravy to the well-to-do, cosmopolitan, urban, unmarried gentleman market. Just like mother used to serve, et cetera, in an attempt to capitalize on the stereotype that we are all either obsessed with or not on speaking terms with our mothers. Of course, I tend to think I’m neither, despite being a homo, and I really don’t have an appetite right now for…” He scratched his head as he thought. “You know, gravy and faggots, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe I am all that obsessed with or furious at my mother, either. I would have put you in the former category, though.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, odd. I sort of thought you were the latter. Well, it doesn’t matter. This is my second go-around with these Oxo folks. My first attempt was outright ‘
rejected. Not wholesome enough. Gravy, sausages - you get the idea. Too sexualized. … What? Why are you giving me that look?”
“Don’t you ever feel just a bit alarmed that your livelihood is dependent on shameless punning?”
“Don’t you ever feel just a bit alarmed that your livelihood is dependent on scribbling second-rate gay erotica and begging your father for money?”
“Oh.” I sniffed. “Touché.”
His upper lip softened. “Oh, you know I don’t mean it. I love your erotica, I really do.” His eyes widened, and his smile blossomed. Then he shook it off. “So, what shall we have for dinner?”
“Um.” I tapped my fingernails against the table. “How do you feel about sushi?”
“I don’t feel anything about it. What is it?”
“It’s fish, raw fish. Japanese rolled-up raw fish.”
“Oh, heavens, that sounds just disgusting.”
“It’s not disgusting, it’s fascinating. Wendy was telling me about it on the phone this afternoon, as Token took her out with someone he’s got business with who’s just been back from Yokohama, and-”
“Ah, no. Pick again.”
“I think we should try it. She says it’s really delightful.”
“I don’t care what Wendy thinks. If it’s anything like that yucky-something stuff you dragged me out to, I don’t want it.”
“Sukiyaki, darling.”
“I don’t care. Pick again.”
We ended up eating mediocre Chinese food off Leicester Square. Kyle told me all about the best Chinese food he had ever eaten - in the Queens borough of New York City, which he’d visited every summer for two weeks during his childhood to spend time with his mother’s relatives, a grandmother who died when he was 8, and his aunt’s family. For the thousandth time since we’d met, he told me about how his first cousin was also named Kyle, because the boy was a few months older, and his mother liked the name so much. When he asked her why, she always replied, ‘What’s the problem? You don’t even live on the same continent.’
“And when we went there in July, or they came to visit us over their Christmas vacation, my mother always called me ‘Kyle Two’ to avoid confusion,” he said, concluding a story I’d heard numerous times. “By the time my brother was old enough to laugh at how absurd this was, he was really too old to kick any longer. Of course, he would have felt differently if he had spent three weeks of each year of his childhood being called ‘Ike Two.’ ”
“Or you might have reverted to ‘Isaac.’ ”
“Don’t think so.” Kyle picked up his plastic chopsticks, one in each hand, and tapped out a little rhythm on the edge of his plate. “We’ve never called him by his full name. But it’s nice to have a nickname. I’ve got nowhere to go from Kyle, except for Kyla, but I haven’t been called that except in mocking, and certainly not since school.”
“You don’t want my input on this one,” I told him. “That boy of Eric’s called me ‘Stan’ at Camp on Saturday.”
“Did you chew his ear off?”
“I don’t know if I chewed his ear off, exactly, but I certainly asked him not to.”
Kyle hunched his shoulders and sighed. He tilted his head back. “If he’s anything like Eric he’ll just be calling you something obnoxious that you find incredibly insulting and annoying for the next five years.”
“As much as I don’t like it, ‘Stan’ is not nearly as bad as ‘Jewess,’ darling.”
“Well, you know, they’re probably cut from the same cloth, is what I’m saying. Any lad interested in living with that great obese scoundrel, regardless of how much he is being paid, is probably not the sort of boy you’d want to invite to your tea. Or trust. I don’t trust him. That boy is bad news. He’s lying about his age, and he’s keeping company with Eric. Let’s stay away from him.”
“Good lord, darling, let’s not rush to extremes. I spoke to him after you left, and despite the moral failing of being a kept boy, I found him quite intelligent.” I saw Kyle raising his eyebrows. “Not educated, mind you, but intelligent. I think he has a soul in there. Maybe Kenny sees something worthwhile that Eric’s been too guarded all along to let us access.”
“Yes.” He pushed a hunk of egg roll through the lake of soy sauce and sesame oil mingling on his plate. “Or perhaps Eric has no soul, and no archaeologist, let alone mendacious little ignorant whore, has got the tools to go excavating through those rolls of fat and hardened arteries to discover some kind of beauty within.”
“My god, you are bitter tonight. What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” he sniffed. “Oh, nothing, dear, nothing’s wrong. I just think you should stay away from the boy, is all.”
“And that’s going to come about how, by ignoring Eric?”
“You should have been ignoring him from the moment you met him!”
Now I let my chopsticks clatter onto my empty plate, which shimmered with the glistening gelatinous film of sticky pink sweet-and-sour traces of my dinner. “That’s real absurd, Kyle, considering you fucked him about 10 minutes after meeting him, and did not let up for some time. As I recall, you wanted him to move in with you.” I was blinking back emotions, and trying not to let Kyle see the truthful nature of my accusations.
“Maybe so, all right, I know that, and I’ve lived with my mistakes for years now! I let him abuse me, I let him perpetuate intolerable cruelty, and all in the name of misguided hope, hope that his mistreatment was truly a misinterpretation of affection, perhaps because he never had a real father, or was raised by a doltish, spineless, ex-Nazi slut. But do you know what it all made me learn, being incessantly tortured in emotional and physical ways in the name of what I always hoped I might one day be able to finally call ‘love’? There is no greater psychological reading into why Eric Cartman was made the way he is. He is simply a bad egg. There is no more reason to excuse his massive failings on account of his parentage than there is to excuse my neediness for my mother’s preoccupied over-affection or my father’s detached, aggrandizing moralism. Or, for that matter, your father’s boozy pomposity.”
He took his napkin from his lap, shook the prawn cracker crumbs from it, and when he stood, tossed it onto the table in front of him.
“So, really, Stanley, let’s not get all defensively forgiving about him. The boy, I mean. Kenneth. If he’s in with Eric, he’s automatically a villain in my mind. You can tell everything about a person with what sort of company he keeps. Or you know what, bugger it, go chasing after the little weasel attempting to understand him. It shan’t matter to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting home to Clyde.”
I literally did spit my weak jasmine tea back into my handleless, thick-rimmed cup. “Home?” I sputtered. “To old Clyde?”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged his shoulders, frowning. “I did ask you to stop me! I begged you! But you just don’t care who I go home with, do you?”
“No,” I said in a breath. My heart was throbbing against my ribcage. “I do. I do care.”
“Well, if you want to be a help, think of some way I can wriggle myself out of it!”
“Just, just tell him you’re not interested.”
“I cannot do it like that! Goddamn you, you know I can’t. Sometimes you are so perfectly obtuse it makes my heart ache!” And without so much as handing over the money for his half of the bill, he stormed out of the place, leaving me to finish our prawn crackers and contemplate paying the check on my lonesome, feeling like I’d just been stepped on.
~
“So I went home and drank about an entire bottle of Glenfiddich and felt like an utter wretch,” I concluded at the end of regaling Wendy with this story over coronation chicken sandwiches the next afternoon.
“My, my, Stanley.” She twisted a dark lock around her index finger. “This is really sensational!” I leaned in. “You’ve got to tell me everything about this lad of Eric’s.”
Scowling, I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, that’s hardly the point at all,” I scoffed. “It’s just some boy.”
“Well, he hasn’t had a boy in the longest time! Tell me everything. Is he attractive? Is he tall? You know I love when the passive fellow is taller than the active one. How old do you think he is, truly? Be honest!”
I put my index finger to my bottom lip. “Oh, I don’t know how old he is. It’s not impossible he’s telling the truth about being 23 anyway, and if he is it’s still something of a scandal - I mean, Eric’s got 14 years on him in which case, and…” I trailed off. “Oh, damn you! I really don’t want to discuss Eric’s sex life any further today, if you don’t mind, Wends.”
She sighed and absent-mindedly stirred a sugar cube into her dainty cup of Westminster Afternoon Black, a blend she and Token had commissioned in honor of their 15th anniversary earlier in the year. “Oh, but I want to discuss it. You know we don’t keep in touch, so how else am I going to get the details?”
I shrugged, because the truth was that I really was the only way she might get any details at all. Then again, neither she nor Eric had ever disclosed why they’d stopped conversing, and in typical fashion I did not push the issue, because I did not really care. The last time I saw them in each other’s company was in the reception line at her wedding. He whispered something in her ear, and she scowled, and Eric sat in the corner by himself shoveling lobster parcels into his mouth. He was still attractively slender at this point, just out of university as it was. A number of pretty ladies of all social strains came over to chat him up, and he waved them all away with the biggest grimace.
Lovely fete, was Token and Wendy’s wedding reception. I brought Kyle as my plus-one. I considered bringing the boy I was seeing, but there’s something that’s truly disgraceful about toting along the boy you’re currently fucking to the wedding party of the man you used to fuck. He was dismayed about it, we had angry sex one last time and he left me. Never heard from him again, but that’s how it goes.
“Well, come on then. At least tell me something.”
“I don’t know.” I scratched my head. “You tell me. What could possibly possess Kyle to keep screwing around with old Clyde like this?”
She groaned. “Not about Kyle, Stanley! I don’t care about him.” She must have seen my expression, because she added, “Oh, I’m sorry. But I don’t! All right? Just give it a week or two and Clyde will get scared off by his clinginess like the rest of them.”
“But that’s the problem,” I moaned. “It’s not some respectable bloke, it’s old fucking Clyde. He’s too pathetic to leave, isn’t he? Kyle’s finally got the upper hand this time, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know, what do you want from me? I’ll say some nasty things about Kyle the next time Token brings Clyde over, if you like. I’ll say you’ve told me he has genital warts or something.”
“They’ve done it already. If Kyle had genital warts, Clyde would already know. And besides, you’d enjoy that too much, spreading falsehoods about Kyle.”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it at all!” she protested. “Don’t you see? I don’t care a whit about damn Kyle, all right? His only significance to me is how you feel about him, Stanley, and if there had been some progress on this front in 15 years we could discuss it but as for what he sees in Clyde it’s none of my concern, all right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Ah, Wendy.”
“Ah what?” She sipped some tea. “I’m sorry, darling, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.” She set her teaspoon down daintily; I always admired the way she stuck her pinky out when she drank. It was so unlike the way everyone else I knew did it. Wendy was a lady, and she had been forced to sit through the formal etiquette lessons we middle class schoolboys were thankfully spared back in the day. Her posture was refined, ankles locked in a cross. She was trying to keep her high breeding concealed, and yet it betrayed her. One can only glean so much about how to naturalize in with the common folk at school. Tea-taking is often bred, not learned.
“Not much to say about the boy. I’m telling you, really. He’s blond, he’s Irish, he’s got some slightly mangled teeth, if you look closely. Seems to have a nice sense of irony about the whole thing. Is this was you wanted to know?” I sighed, and pushed my thick veil of bangs back. It was time for a cut, I knew it, and yet I took no delight in the queer passion of maintaining one’s own hairstyle; Kyle did enough of that for the both of us. I was fussy about my hair vicariously through him. Perhaps I could color it, but there wasn’t a great deal I could conceive of doing to it by way of cutting.
“I think the blond catamite model is in this season, really. First Craig turns up with one, then I run into that miserable drug dealer fucking one against the sink in the loo, and now Eric’s got one as well.”
“I think maybe you should go out and get a blond boy,” Wendy told me with a straight face. I could tell she wasn’t joking. “You’d look great next to one.”
“I had my blond boy once,” I reminded her.
“Oh, yes, Gary.” Her cheeks reddened. “Gary, right.”
“Right.” She gave me a pitiful look, and to punish her, I asked, “So, speaking of men who do not love us. How are things going with your husband?”
She raised her hand, and for just a moment I was sure she was about to give me a dirty gesture, but instead she bit her bottom lip slightly before sighing. “Do you know, I think they are not horrible.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Oh, yes, it’s fine.” She blinked and shook her head, but she seemed lost in a daze, her thoughts elsewhere. “It’s perhaps too much to dare say you were helpful, but…” She swallowed. “I think we’re working on it.” Swallowing, her fingers absently found the twisted handle on her china teacup. It was a Wedgwood service in navy and gold, a fat band of decoration running along the rim. I fondly recall going with her to Selfridges to pick out the pattern. She had been effortlessly pleased, glowing without rouge at the excitement of planning a wedding to a man she was very well aware would never grow to love her the way I’m sure she did not realize she would eventually desire. I pronounced almost every pattern hideous until we got to this one, asking to see gravy boats and then gasping at the lightness of china of this quality, because it was all some stupid game to us then. The salesman was wearing a hideous yellow shirt, and he looked down his nose at her and with his canines bared in lechery at me. I blew him in the men’s room while she had a salt beef sandwich downstairs. We bought a box of Charbonnel et Walker truffles to share over drinks that night, and left arm-in-arm, much the way we used to walk along the river back at university. The way her freshly manicured talons clicked against the rim of the teacup brought this back to me.
She walked me out, which wasn’t usual, and I wondered why until we reached the mammoth front door, where she paused, and very carefully said, “I shan’t be seeing you next week, dear. Unfortunately I’ve got to go out to see my mother.” Wendy’s parents lived in a manor house in the Cotswolds. They had a townhouse in the city, which they seemed to frequent when we were in university, but I suppose in the ensuing years they’d decided they preferred country living to the metropolitan pleasures London had to offer. She took me once over an Easter holiday, and I was dismayed to find that it wasn’t particularly Brideshead-ish at all; her parents got on quite well, there were no siblings to create pathos. Tey seemed to be only the most cursory of Anglicans, and did not give me and my Catholicism (or lack thereof) any prompts to discussion.
“So don’t show up here next week expecting tea sandwiches, as I won’t be in town,” she seemingly concluded. After a short pause so she could swallow, though, she added, “But Token will be here, of course, so do feel free to pay him a little visit.” And then she rolled her eyes.
“Token not invited?” I asked, ignoring her jab.
She shook her head. “Oh, no. Well, he’s welcome, you know, but Token and Daddy haven’t gotten on since forever, it seems. They’re so bitter toward each other, and the odd thing is that there really isn’t any reason why. I suppose it’s territorial, to pick at small wounds in the relationship between oneself and one’s in-laws.”
“Well, thank god I haven’t got any in-laws.”
“Yes, you should feel so lucky you’re gay.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but isn’t Token?”
“I suppose.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But it’s really not the same, is it?”
“No,” I said before departing. “I suppose it’s not.”
~
I had not spoken to Kyle, and an unsettled feeling began to permeate my routine, if one could call it that. After I left Wendy and Token’s I swam, and the next day I returned to the pool for more laps. In the shower, I noticed an older gentleman - although he could not have been too much older than I - cruising me, and willingly went back to his flat, which was in Bayswater, and not so far from Kyle’s. On my walk back to the Tube, I really did have half a mind to turn left instead of right and go bang on his door and ask him why he would not return my phone calls. I tried to reassure myself with the idea that it might not have been personal. I wanted so badly to run into old Clyde and just give him a good, swift kick right in the crotch. For every ounce of disgust and fury I felt toward him, however, there was an equal amount of pity. The idea that Kyle hated him intrigued me, and yet it frustrated me. If he was willing to just shack up with anyone, why not me?
Thoughts swirled around me as I walked and sulked, eventually popping into a pub for a drink, which I rudely swished around in my mouth as I wondered just what I was doing. The man I had just fucked had given me his number, but I hadn’t enjoyed it much - I was just going through motions, distracted. Feeling lousy, I went home and read until the early hours.
On Thursday, I awoke with renewed optimism for no good or apparent reason. I made myself poached eggs and a rasher of bacon, and greedily ate while I poured over a week-old copy of the Guardian. Absurdly, the top editorial was lambasting Sheila Broflovski’s censorship bill as “pitiful and timid.” If only they knew the lady - she was nothing of the sort.
I showered, dressed, ate a digestive and, feeling antsy, decided to take a walk down to the coffee shop nearby with the seedy toilet. A lazy half-erection brewed in my jeans as I walked, thinking about what sort of man I might like to meet there. He should be shorter than I with large hands, and a tight, hairless scrotum. I hummed in appreciation of my own capacity to conjure these things as I walked. Before going into the loo, I bought a latte, and sat down in a battered armchair to scan the crowd. Mostly business types today - some spillover from the City, possibly. I resigned myself to patience and sipped my coffee slowly, inspecting the packages of various customers. Nothing caught my eye.
Things could have been worse, of course; I might have been drinking stale American tea with no character. This was fine; I could stand to sit by my lonesome for a bit while I waited to see who came into the shop. I was hard, but not so hard that I was desperate for release right away. If I had a more typical line of work, would I have been the sort to run to a coffee shop on my lunch break?
Kyle wasn’t that type; he preferred to keep his sex within the confines of long, drawn-out, tumultuous affairs. Eric, as far as I knew, had been acting out of character when he picked up that boy in the loo at the London Stock Exchange. He was an insurance underwriter, actually; he often boasted about how the Jews he worked with were dependent on his services to run their businesses. I don’t know what attracted him to that line of work but if he had ever seduced a man in the toilet - provided he were able to - he would have told us. Miss B kept to herself. I didn’t often internalize it, but I was alone in my proclivity.
After a second latte, I gave up. No one I found particularly attractive had come in, except for a pair of businessmen I was positive were, against all odds, actually heterosexual. According to the clock on the barren brick wall I was facing, an hour of my life had been lost to this fruitless activity. Sighing, I set my empty coffee cup back on the counter, wiped my lips with a paper napkin and left the shop. I accidentally bumped into a lady on her way in, mumbled an insincere pardon, and bent over outside the windows to tie my shoe. Over, under, and so on, until I noticed a shadow in front of me, and obviously someone was standing there. I could tell this person was male because he cleared his throat, and when I stood up I was shocked to discover it was Kenny.
“Oh, hello.” I was trying not to sound all that thrown. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Oh, there’s nothing fancy about it,” he said, flicking some ash from his cigarette onto the pavement; his other hand was poised on the jutting angle of his cocked hip. “Just tricks as usual, I’m afraid.”
“Tricks?” I asked. “What tricks?”
“Oh, you know.” He took a massive inhale on the end of his cigarette, and exhaled when he said, “The ones I turn for a living?”
“Yes, I know. One doesn’t forget a detail like that. And yet … I thought you were exclusive with Eric, or something. Shouldn’t you be bothering him?”
“I don’t follow him to work. What would I do while he’s busy all day?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the logistics of the arrangement were loose - Eric liked to have a very tight rein on things. “Well, I don’t know, what would you do all day? Sit under his desk and blow him?”
“Did it! Got neck cramps.” He took my elbow. “Come on, Stanley. Let’s have a walk.” Dutifully, I followed, and not before shaking his hand from my elbow.
~
I didn’t know where we were going.
“What brings you out here?” I asked as we strolled past a butcher, and a second-hand clothing shop.
“Well, I’ve been living not too far from here,” he reminded me. “Besides, all the businessmen who come over at lunchtime are usually pretty horny.”
“Not today,” I told him. “I’ve just spent an hour in that coffee shop and didn’t get one interested glance.”
“It’s their problem, not yours.” He paused for a moment to check himself out in a storefront window, preening as he shuffled the locks of his dirty hair around. In tight-fitting, light-blue denim trousers and a threadbare T-shirt, he seemed either a runaway attempting to look respectable, or a bourgeois poseur attempting to look punk. I knew it was a bit of both, but perhaps his clientele hadn’t any idea. I wondered what Eric thought, or if Eric actually cared. I assumed he didn’t.
“But really, what are you getting out of it?” I asked around the time we’d walked a kilometer, not marveling at the way this question was so familiarly posed to a boy I had met only once before.
He did not flinch at my investigations; he offered me answers without hesitation. “I’m earning a salary as his personal assistant,” he explained. “So technically I’m his live-in help, and the rest is supplementary. I mean, the way he’s explained it, whatever happens between an employer and an employee just happens. It’s not illegal, and with valid employment over here I can get a passport.”
At this my eyes went wide. “You want to naturalize?”
“Yeah, ’course I do. What do I wanna be Irish for?”
“Because that’s your home, dear. Because that’s who you are.”
“Nah. Home’s where you make it, really, and I’ve left that behind. I wanna exercise all my rights and shit. You know, it’d be nice to vote.”
“To vote?” I laughed. “Essentially you are shacking up with Eric because you think he’s going to provide you with a legitimate job that will enable you to get a British passport and vote?” It just seemed ludicrous to me.
“No, not just!” He halted in front of a cherry-red post box with the curvaceous letters GR crowned triumphantly. “Voting is important to me!”
“That’s … something. It’s odd; it’s quite odd. Do you know, I’m 37 and have yet to cast a ballot in a single election?”
He frowned, and kicked the post box with the heel of his tatty trainer. “Well, that’s despicable. Don’t you care?”
“Yeah, I care, but I care in the abstract.” I sighed. “Look, Kenneth-”
“Kenny’s fine,” he reminded me.
“Kenny. Dear. I know you are a prostitute, but perhaps you’re not properly jaded yet. All elections are essentially between two candidates you cannot stand: A self-important ponce, and a complete wanker. It’s just Labour squabbling with the Tories, over and over again. Who needs it? I just let the pieces fall where they may.”
“But you could impact something!”
“Unlikely.”
“Do you even know who your MP is?”
I realized I didn’t. “Oh, it must be someone. I know it’s not Kyle’s mother.”
“Who is Kyle’s mother?” he asked as we passed by a homeless woman sitting on top of a pile of rags.
“Her name is Sheila Broflovski. She’s a Labour MP, for North Islington. I only know because of Kyle, really. He’s always lived in London, and when I met him at school I thought he was the most glamorous boy I’d ever met. He knew all about the government and actually had been to all the places we read about in old books during our course of study. I’d never been to London until the first summer after a year at university, actually, when Kyle took me home for the summer.” Kenny gave me an incredulous look. “Well, all right, I suppose my family went once or twice to see something at the British Museum. But, honestly, for an academic, my father doesn’t much like culture. As a geologist I think his interest has always been captured by the Iron Belt. If we were going to go to the city, we’d go up to Birmingham.”
“Your father is a geologist?” He raised his eyebrows. “What the fuck is that?”
“Someone who studies rocks.”
“Is that important?”
“Alas, no. No, it’s not important.”
“What’s his name?”
“Professor Randy Marsh, D. Phil., Oxford, 1937.”
“What’s a dee-fill?”
“It’s the highest academic certification a person can receive.”
“You got one?”
I laughed. “Me? No. It’s not a very useful degree. Certainly not in English literature.”
“Seems like school is a big waste to me.” He was digging into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes, and fiddled around with it while he spoke: “At the end of the day the best thing to do is something that impacts other people. Politics is good. Even whoring is good. You know? I never heard of your father. sorry. No offense. But I most certainly know who Sheila Broflovski is.”
I stopped walking in front of an empty storefront. “How the hell have you heard of Sheila Broflovski?”
Kenny rolled his eyes. “She’s just about the most vocal member of the opposition.”
“Yeah, she’s a fascinating woman,” I conceded. “I lived with her for a summer, you know.”
“Well, of course I didn’t know before you just mentioned it. What was that like?”
“Ah, well.” I had to think for a moment about what to say. “I don’t know, it was summer, and she seemed just like any other woman to me, except she was American, and my friend’s mother. She cooked dinner every night and nagged us a bit, like she wasn’t sure if she should encourage us to go out and see the city, or keep us huddled in the house protected against her bosom, which is substantial. She … oh, I guess the best word for her is ‘maternal.’ But they have a very nice house, the Broflovskis. Have you ever been up to Islington?”
“I don’t even know where that is.”
I thought about telling him, but was tiring of supplying him with easy answers. “Look at a map,” I snapped.
So, again, he was smoking, and we were halted on the street, not so far from my flat, and there were boarded up windows all around us, intricately and obsessively layered in what I often overheard the young artists who lived nearby me referring to as ‘street art’ - a ridiculous inflation of what was essentially vandalism, not that I minded a bit of vandalism, but generally I found it appealing on a much less visible level.
The smoke from his fag was pinching the back of my throat, and I was about to request that he stop exhaling right into my eyes lest I fall over into respiratory-related convulsions. But, surprisingly, he said, “That’s what I think I like about you, Stanley. You’re accommodating, but you don’t give anyone an inch on anything unless it’s for that ginger who looks at you like you’re Jesus and he’d like to choke on your balls simultaneously.”
“Well, how the hell would you know?” I asked, legitimately. “This is the second time we’ve met in less than a week.”
“You learn how to read people when you basically have to do it for a living.”
“Oh, right, you’re a prostitute,” I sneered. “Right, I missed that the first 70 times. You should be less subtle about it, perhaps, dear, if you want to go someplace with it.”
And to this, he burst out laughing. “You’re a nearly 40-year-old unemployed queen living by himself in the fucking council estates with a bunch of artists half you age.” He took a final drag on his cigarette, and tossed it behind his shoulder before taking a step back to squash it into the damp pavement. Then he lurched forward, grabbed my collar, and hissed, “And I find it fucking sexy.”
I swallowed as his lips rubbed against my cheek. “To be fair it’s not a council estate, and I’m not unemployed but rather self-employed.”
“Like it matters.” I felt his tongue against my lips, and pushed him away. “What?” he asked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Truly, nothing much was wrong with me; I was certain my erection wasn’t outwardly visible through my trousers anyway. “You cannot do that on the street.”
“I do it on the street whenever I like,” he said. “What’s the matter? It’s not like Eric’s around.”
“Oh, bugger Eric!”
“Yeah, I’ve already done, thanks.”
I rolled my eyes. “Even if it weren’t illegal to have sex on the street, Kenny, this is a working-class neighborhood, and it’s still fairly likely that some aggressive bloke will wander down this way and put his boot through your arse and mine. This isn’t the West End and even there one still shouldn’t go around humping gaily in public. And let us not forget the police, dear, for all gross indecency is still largely illegal outside of one’s own home.”
“Well, then.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s go back to your place before you kill the mood any further.”
~
It does not take an English bachelor’s to determine what happened next. With very little pretense, I took him back to my flat, and before I had even managed to bolt the door, he was on top of me, grinding his crotch against mine with a refreshing ferocity. There was something innocent in his lips that I could not identify, an undue anachronism I hadn’t expected to encounter in a prostitute. Obviously he was practiced, but then, Gary aside, when was the last time I’d actually fucked a virgin? We were all schooled in this art, trained by older tutors who could easily have taken degrees in this if they’d offered it in school. His hands were knowing, tightening on the flat, rough nipples under my shirt like he had mapped them before; his hips he presented against mine in mimicry of our kissing, only harder and more focused.
But it was his lips I might have fallen in love with, had I been about 20 years younger and terribly naïve. The scabby cracks stroked the moisturized contours of my jaw knowingly. It was indescribable, the way we kissed and kissed and shed clothing en route to the loft. At the bottom of the stairs we untangled our tongues and a viscous pillow of spit fell gracelessly onto his T-shirt.
On the long wall of my flat, in between the doors to the multitude of smaller catacomb-like rooms in which I had been storing rubbish for my father and old papers, I had hung a number of photographs. I did not look at them very often, and in many cases I did not remember framing them or putting them on the wall. I went through fits and spurts of sentimentality, and always had done ever since I was a boy.
Kenny was kissing my neck, lips barely brushing the uneven line where pricks of stubble had begun to emerge after shaving the previous evening. I in a haze of ecstatic lasciviousness slapped a hand against the wall for balance, and knocked off a picture frame - a sterling behemoth enrobed in Corinthian coils of nondescript ivy, vines meant to mock the idea of ivy, but a six-leafed variety that matched no species I’d ever met. A picture of my parents on their wedding day clattered face-up with a crack down the middle, slicing my mother’s dour expression in two.
“Oh, bother,” I muttered, feeling the words butt up against my swollen tongue. I tried to wipe it off, but being so drunk on youth and my own potency I fumbled a bit, and Kenny smiled at me. I nudged the damaged portrait with my shoe.
“Bed, Stanley,” he said wickedly, with a cocked half-smile. “Take me to bed.”
Well, when a 23-years-or-younger lad demands that you take him to your bed, what sort of idiot denies that? Upstairs, I hit my elbow on a side table as he was fumbling off his knickers, yellow Y-fronts painfully discolored. “Come on,” he taunted. Nearly straddling me, his cock unfurled out into the daylight streaming through the dust on my two-storey windows, shorter and fatter than I imagined it, and quite hairless. I think my mouth must have been hanging open, because he lunged over and put his tongue in again while I regretted not taking a longer peek at the equipment. Every surface of my body felt tense, expanded, immense. It is amazing the way passivity allows one to notice the machinations of his own body during sex.
There was a lot of kissing and wriggling and shifting of weight while everything was painfully slowly assembled. I was dying for it, just thirsting for the sensation of plunging into his arse, but first I pushed his little behind away from my cock, where it had been trembling as it hovered just a few centimeters away, to slip on a rubber.
“Oh,” he said, wiping his mouth, fingers tensed. “What have you gotta do that for?”
“It’s just something you do,” I managed to choke out as the tight, rubbery ring glided past poorly defined veins.
“But I don’t like it.” He took one of my hands, the hand that wasn’t rolling on the condom, and placed it on his hip. “Don’t you want to feel this?”
In lieu of verbal reply, I grabbed him around his waist, and kissed him a bit more, until both of us were gasping and saliva was everywhere again. So I used some of that to rub into his entrance. While I was doing it, he distracted me with a well-placed tongue to my collarbone, and deftly rolled the rubber back off in one fluid stroke.
“Give me lube,” he commanded. “What do you use?”
I handed him a small tube. “I don’t know, this is fine,” I said, kissing his knuckles. “I bought it at some absolutely indecent place in Soho.”
“Smells like mint,” he commented. His erection was drooling across my abdomen, and I was sucking the tips of his brief fingers so that I was nearly kissing his nails. “Don’t you use petroleum? One figures that’s the standard. I don’t got a lot of clients who use fancy shit or something. Often it’s just spit.”
“You always talk this much?” I flipped him over onto his belly - or, rather, I coaxed him with hesitant pressure from the palms of my hands, and he willingly submitted. “Why don’t we just fuck?” I rasped into his ear. I had a stifling hard-on pressing into the small of his back, and all I could think about was how passively unbothered he was by this situation. I suppose, it’s true, he was a whore, and meeting a man on the street (outside a cruisy coffee shop, no less) and ending up in his bed in short order must have been nowhere outside the boundaries of the usual. Still, he was not begging for it from me - just lying there with his head turned on the pillow of his arms.
“All right, do it already.” His voice rang with optimistic impatience. It made me even harder, or at least it felt that way. With a final latching of my lips to the back of his neck, I ground my cock against the back of his thigh.
“I’ve never fucked a whore before,” I panted, angling into position.
“Oh, shit.” I felt his cheeks clench around my cock. “Then this is your big chance, isn’t it?”
“Have I been missing out?” My nose trailed his hairline, so that I was speaking against the base of his skull.
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never fucked a prostitute either.”
“Oh, masturbation doesn’t count?”
“No, masturbation does not count.”
~
I did not notice the clock while we were fucking, but by the time we had finally spent ourselves, the sun was low enough in the sky to illuminate the loft of my bedroom, and indeed the entire flat, in vibrant yellow splendor. It was that perfect pitch of seemingly divine light through my Romanesque windows that drew me to this space. When the realtor had showed it to me years before, calling it a ‘conversion’ with a dour look on his face as if he were insulted to even have it listed, I was won over by the idea that only 80 years before scores of indebted Victorian laborers sat in rows at smoke-belching machines while the windows were their only chance to glimpse the outdoors in daylight.
“What used to be made here?” Kenny asked, glancing around the apartment. He obviously hadn’t done so while we were fucking, but I did not mind that he was singularly focused - he’d have to be good at this to make a living off of it. Likewise, I had actually come twice, which was a feat I hadn’t managed in some time. Most men I’d been with hadn’t really possessed the patience to lie there and continue fucking after the initial release; Kenny had coaxed more out of me. To say the least, I was utterly limp with exhaustion. Still, I felt plenty glad about it.
Finally realizing he’d been speaking to me, I muttered, “Oh, I don’t know,” because I was too numbed by my own afterglow to begin explaining the curious and extinct permutations of my home.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said, sitting up slowly. I could see how stiff he felt, how gingerly he moved. He checked the backs of his thighs and the undersides of his forearms; it took me a moment, but I deduced that he was looking for bruises. “Come on.” After slipping out of bed he tugged on my arm. “Let’s get a beer. Come on, Stanley. Quit being lazy.”
“Are you this impatient with Eric?” I asked.
“Oh no, he would whip me.” How little he knew.
“Well, I haven’t got any beer.” I grabbed something that looked like an undershirt off the edge of my bed. I sniffed it; I must have shed it after my most recent swim. “I drink whisky, dear. That’s my choice of beverage.”
“You’re so dreadfully old,” he teased.
“Not too old to climax twice.”
“Yeah, true.” He trailed me down the staircase.
I poured him two cups, one of Famous Grouse and one of tap water. Not quite knowing what else to say, I asked him about his life with Eric.
“Oh, Eric is just so back-and-forth about the whole sex thing. He is in between being an utter lazy ass without the energy to will his penis to harden, and a grunting, feral sex pig who cannot help himself from drooling on me as we fuck. The things he is into are appalling, but like you already know, what’s got money behind it is surprisingly easy to swallow. So to speak.”
“Please don’t tell me what he’s got you swallowing,” I said drolly.
He wrinkled his nose. “Very well.” He took a gulp of whisky, finishing the glass. “I’m going to the loo. Where is it?”
I pointed him up the stairs, and sat at the table by myself with my head in my hands until he returned, dressed again, with his hands on his hips and a tough little look of satisfaction spread across his face.
“Tell me about the photographs,” he commanded.
“You mean, the ones I’ve got on the wall?”
“No, the ones in your arse. Yeah, the ones on the wall.”
“Oh, right, okay.”
He dragged me over, tugging at my sleeve.
“What’s this?” Kenny asked, picking up the cracked frame I’d left on the floor in a sex blind. “Is that your parents? When is this?”
“Well, yes, that would be my parents” I answered. “That would be 1940.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Your father didn’t fight in the war?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Oh, my, no. He spent the entire war lecturing at Oxford. It worked out really well for him; practically the entire department died and he was promoted to a professorship. My uncle fought, though.” I tapped on a square frame to the left of the space vacated by my parents’ wedding photo. “This is my Uncle James and his batman, Edward - Ned for short.” In the photograph, a well-fed man in a cap and vest bearing a rifle was flanked by a shorter, bespectacled fellow with dark hair. In black and white, and in military dress, you could not tell that I was related to my uncle at all. Indeed, as my father’s half-brother, we shared few genes.
Continued here.
Title: The Rectum is a Tomb
Author: sekrit_omg
Rating: R, this chapter
Pairings: Unrequited S/K (for now); multiple others,
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's notes: a) Homage to the literary gay fiction of the 1980s, specifically Hollinghurst. b) If you seriously think you would like to edit future chapters of this story, please e-mail me at sekritomg@gmail.com. c) I'm not British. d) This is so, so AU.
If you read this, you have my gratitude. It's long and it's weird. But hopefully it's also fun! And if it is (or isn't), please tell me.
I'll put up a link to the FF.net version when I get it posted there.
When Kyle turned up tardy by 10 minutes for our standing Monday nighter, he looked plenty disgruntled, and in fact I had barely greeted him when he barked out, “So! Some friend you are, Stanley!” He unbelted his trench coat and I gawked at him while he moved to push back his hair, realized he hadn’t got any anymore, scowled, and sat down.
Finally, I managed, “What’s the matter, darling? What have I done?”
“Oh, you know well what you’ve done, you cad!”
I rolled my eyes. “No,” I said cautiously, wondering where the waiter was with my second whisky. “Haven’t got a clue.”
“You let me go home with old Clyde again!”
“Oh.”
“Oh!”
“Ah, all right, so that’s what you’re peeved about?” I shrugged, not wanting to seem like this conversation wasn’t pleasing me, knowing that Kyle was still down on the man and all. “My apologies, darling. I tried to yank you away, of course, but you were well into your cups by then, and a little bit…” At this point, I sniffed and pointedly wiped my nose. “And besides, you just seemed so enthusiastic about it. In fact, you were pawing at him like you’d never been fucked in your life before, or your sphincter were a crack in the roof of a thatched cottage during an April downpour, and you needed him to plug the leak.” I smiled at him. “So to speak.”
“I’m absolutely shameless,” he said in a thin whine. He put his elbow on the table and held his chin, sighing like he’d had his heart broken all over again. In fact, I think he had, only he was the culprit, which was even more depressing in turn. “It’s not him, darling. I hate him. It’s his cock. You know I hate the term ‘size queen,’ but you really have to see this thing. It’s grotesque, and I do mean that in the most literal and best possible way. Isn’t it always the way, though, that the best ones are attached to the most hopeless men?”
“Eh, I don’t know,” I said, thinking of Token. “I haven’t seen a really great huge one since about 1970.”
“Oh.” He gave me a look, a wanting look, but I didn’t know what he wanted, so I looked away and drank whisky. He frowned, and rubbed at his hair while he looked rather peeved. After a moment, he asked, “Do you mind if we keep it short and cuisine-oriented this evening?” I was caught a bit off guard, but I must have appeared hurt, because he immediately rectified his request with, “It’s not you, dear. It’s me. I have a presentation to do tomorrow; I’m talking to Oxo. And if it’s no problem with you, I’d prefer not to spend the duration of my pitch tomorrow trying to quell my urge to vomit.”
“Oxo,” I repeated. “What are you trying to sell there? And to whom?”
“Well, gravy, naturally. We’re trying to peddle gravy to the well-to-do, cosmopolitan, urban, unmarried gentleman market. Just like mother used to serve, et cetera, in an attempt to capitalize on the stereotype that we are all either obsessed with or not on speaking terms with our mothers. Of course, I tend to think I’m neither, despite being a homo, and I really don’t have an appetite right now for…” He scratched his head as he thought. “You know, gravy and faggots, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe I am all that obsessed with or furious at my mother, either. I would have put you in the former category, though.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, odd. I sort of thought you were the latter. Well, it doesn’t matter. This is my second go-around with these Oxo folks. My first attempt was outright ‘
rejected. Not wholesome enough. Gravy, sausages - you get the idea. Too sexualized. … What? Why are you giving me that look?”
“Don’t you ever feel just a bit alarmed that your livelihood is dependent on shameless punning?”
“Don’t you ever feel just a bit alarmed that your livelihood is dependent on scribbling second-rate gay erotica and begging your father for money?”
“Oh.” I sniffed. “Touché.”
His upper lip softened. “Oh, you know I don’t mean it. I love your erotica, I really do.” His eyes widened, and his smile blossomed. Then he shook it off. “So, what shall we have for dinner?”
“Um.” I tapped my fingernails against the table. “How do you feel about sushi?”
“I don’t feel anything about it. What is it?”
“It’s fish, raw fish. Japanese rolled-up raw fish.”
“Oh, heavens, that sounds just disgusting.”
“It’s not disgusting, it’s fascinating. Wendy was telling me about it on the phone this afternoon, as Token took her out with someone he’s got business with who’s just been back from Yokohama, and-”
“Ah, no. Pick again.”
“I think we should try it. She says it’s really delightful.”
“I don’t care what Wendy thinks. If it’s anything like that yucky-something stuff you dragged me out to, I don’t want it.”
“Sukiyaki, darling.”
“I don’t care. Pick again.”
We ended up eating mediocre Chinese food off Leicester Square. Kyle told me all about the best Chinese food he had ever eaten - in the Queens borough of New York City, which he’d visited every summer for two weeks during his childhood to spend time with his mother’s relatives, a grandmother who died when he was 8, and his aunt’s family. For the thousandth time since we’d met, he told me about how his first cousin was also named Kyle, because the boy was a few months older, and his mother liked the name so much. When he asked her why, she always replied, ‘What’s the problem? You don’t even live on the same continent.’
“And when we went there in July, or they came to visit us over their Christmas vacation, my mother always called me ‘Kyle Two’ to avoid confusion,” he said, concluding a story I’d heard numerous times. “By the time my brother was old enough to laugh at how absurd this was, he was really too old to kick any longer. Of course, he would have felt differently if he had spent three weeks of each year of his childhood being called ‘Ike Two.’ ”
“Or you might have reverted to ‘Isaac.’ ”
“Don’t think so.” Kyle picked up his plastic chopsticks, one in each hand, and tapped out a little rhythm on the edge of his plate. “We’ve never called him by his full name. But it’s nice to have a nickname. I’ve got nowhere to go from Kyle, except for Kyla, but I haven’t been called that except in mocking, and certainly not since school.”
“You don’t want my input on this one,” I told him. “That boy of Eric’s called me ‘Stan’ at Camp on Saturday.”
“Did you chew his ear off?”
“I don’t know if I chewed his ear off, exactly, but I certainly asked him not to.”
Kyle hunched his shoulders and sighed. He tilted his head back. “If he’s anything like Eric he’ll just be calling you something obnoxious that you find incredibly insulting and annoying for the next five years.”
“As much as I don’t like it, ‘Stan’ is not nearly as bad as ‘Jewess,’ darling.”
“Well, you know, they’re probably cut from the same cloth, is what I’m saying. Any lad interested in living with that great obese scoundrel, regardless of how much he is being paid, is probably not the sort of boy you’d want to invite to your tea. Or trust. I don’t trust him. That boy is bad news. He’s lying about his age, and he’s keeping company with Eric. Let’s stay away from him.”
“Good lord, darling, let’s not rush to extremes. I spoke to him after you left, and despite the moral failing of being a kept boy, I found him quite intelligent.” I saw Kyle raising his eyebrows. “Not educated, mind you, but intelligent. I think he has a soul in there. Maybe Kenny sees something worthwhile that Eric’s been too guarded all along to let us access.”
“Yes.” He pushed a hunk of egg roll through the lake of soy sauce and sesame oil mingling on his plate. “Or perhaps Eric has no soul, and no archaeologist, let alone mendacious little ignorant whore, has got the tools to go excavating through those rolls of fat and hardened arteries to discover some kind of beauty within.”
“My god, you are bitter tonight. What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” he sniffed. “Oh, nothing, dear, nothing’s wrong. I just think you should stay away from the boy, is all.”
“And that’s going to come about how, by ignoring Eric?”
“You should have been ignoring him from the moment you met him!”
Now I let my chopsticks clatter onto my empty plate, which shimmered with the glistening gelatinous film of sticky pink sweet-and-sour traces of my dinner. “That’s real absurd, Kyle, considering you fucked him about 10 minutes after meeting him, and did not let up for some time. As I recall, you wanted him to move in with you.” I was blinking back emotions, and trying not to let Kyle see the truthful nature of my accusations.
“Maybe so, all right, I know that, and I’ve lived with my mistakes for years now! I let him abuse me, I let him perpetuate intolerable cruelty, and all in the name of misguided hope, hope that his mistreatment was truly a misinterpretation of affection, perhaps because he never had a real father, or was raised by a doltish, spineless, ex-Nazi slut. But do you know what it all made me learn, being incessantly tortured in emotional and physical ways in the name of what I always hoped I might one day be able to finally call ‘love’? There is no greater psychological reading into why Eric Cartman was made the way he is. He is simply a bad egg. There is no more reason to excuse his massive failings on account of his parentage than there is to excuse my neediness for my mother’s preoccupied over-affection or my father’s detached, aggrandizing moralism. Or, for that matter, your father’s boozy pomposity.”
He took his napkin from his lap, shook the prawn cracker crumbs from it, and when he stood, tossed it onto the table in front of him.
“So, really, Stanley, let’s not get all defensively forgiving about him. The boy, I mean. Kenneth. If he’s in with Eric, he’s automatically a villain in my mind. You can tell everything about a person with what sort of company he keeps. Or you know what, bugger it, go chasing after the little weasel attempting to understand him. It shan’t matter to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting home to Clyde.”
I literally did spit my weak jasmine tea back into my handleless, thick-rimmed cup. “Home?” I sputtered. “To old Clyde?”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged his shoulders, frowning. “I did ask you to stop me! I begged you! But you just don’t care who I go home with, do you?”
“No,” I said in a breath. My heart was throbbing against my ribcage. “I do. I do care.”
“Well, if you want to be a help, think of some way I can wriggle myself out of it!”
“Just, just tell him you’re not interested.”
“I cannot do it like that! Goddamn you, you know I can’t. Sometimes you are so perfectly obtuse it makes my heart ache!” And without so much as handing over the money for his half of the bill, he stormed out of the place, leaving me to finish our prawn crackers and contemplate paying the check on my lonesome, feeling like I’d just been stepped on.
~
“So I went home and drank about an entire bottle of Glenfiddich and felt like an utter wretch,” I concluded at the end of regaling Wendy with this story over coronation chicken sandwiches the next afternoon.
“My, my, Stanley.” She twisted a dark lock around her index finger. “This is really sensational!” I leaned in. “You’ve got to tell me everything about this lad of Eric’s.”
Scowling, I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, that’s hardly the point at all,” I scoffed. “It’s just some boy.”
“Well, he hasn’t had a boy in the longest time! Tell me everything. Is he attractive? Is he tall? You know I love when the passive fellow is taller than the active one. How old do you think he is, truly? Be honest!”
I put my index finger to my bottom lip. “Oh, I don’t know how old he is. It’s not impossible he’s telling the truth about being 23 anyway, and if he is it’s still something of a scandal - I mean, Eric’s got 14 years on him in which case, and…” I trailed off. “Oh, damn you! I really don’t want to discuss Eric’s sex life any further today, if you don’t mind, Wends.”
She sighed and absent-mindedly stirred a sugar cube into her dainty cup of Westminster Afternoon Black, a blend she and Token had commissioned in honor of their 15th anniversary earlier in the year. “Oh, but I want to discuss it. You know we don’t keep in touch, so how else am I going to get the details?”
I shrugged, because the truth was that I really was the only way she might get any details at all. Then again, neither she nor Eric had ever disclosed why they’d stopped conversing, and in typical fashion I did not push the issue, because I did not really care. The last time I saw them in each other’s company was in the reception line at her wedding. He whispered something in her ear, and she scowled, and Eric sat in the corner by himself shoveling lobster parcels into his mouth. He was still attractively slender at this point, just out of university as it was. A number of pretty ladies of all social strains came over to chat him up, and he waved them all away with the biggest grimace.
Lovely fete, was Token and Wendy’s wedding reception. I brought Kyle as my plus-one. I considered bringing the boy I was seeing, but there’s something that’s truly disgraceful about toting along the boy you’re currently fucking to the wedding party of the man you used to fuck. He was dismayed about it, we had angry sex one last time and he left me. Never heard from him again, but that’s how it goes.
“Well, come on then. At least tell me something.”
“I don’t know.” I scratched my head. “You tell me. What could possibly possess Kyle to keep screwing around with old Clyde like this?”
She groaned. “Not about Kyle, Stanley! I don’t care about him.” She must have seen my expression, because she added, “Oh, I’m sorry. But I don’t! All right? Just give it a week or two and Clyde will get scared off by his clinginess like the rest of them.”
“But that’s the problem,” I moaned. “It’s not some respectable bloke, it’s old fucking Clyde. He’s too pathetic to leave, isn’t he? Kyle’s finally got the upper hand this time, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know, what do you want from me? I’ll say some nasty things about Kyle the next time Token brings Clyde over, if you like. I’ll say you’ve told me he has genital warts or something.”
“They’ve done it already. If Kyle had genital warts, Clyde would already know. And besides, you’d enjoy that too much, spreading falsehoods about Kyle.”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it at all!” she protested. “Don’t you see? I don’t care a whit about damn Kyle, all right? His only significance to me is how you feel about him, Stanley, and if there had been some progress on this front in 15 years we could discuss it but as for what he sees in Clyde it’s none of my concern, all right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Ah, Wendy.”
“Ah what?” She sipped some tea. “I’m sorry, darling, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.” She set her teaspoon down daintily; I always admired the way she stuck her pinky out when she drank. It was so unlike the way everyone else I knew did it. Wendy was a lady, and she had been forced to sit through the formal etiquette lessons we middle class schoolboys were thankfully spared back in the day. Her posture was refined, ankles locked in a cross. She was trying to keep her high breeding concealed, and yet it betrayed her. One can only glean so much about how to naturalize in with the common folk at school. Tea-taking is often bred, not learned.
“Not much to say about the boy. I’m telling you, really. He’s blond, he’s Irish, he’s got some slightly mangled teeth, if you look closely. Seems to have a nice sense of irony about the whole thing. Is this was you wanted to know?” I sighed, and pushed my thick veil of bangs back. It was time for a cut, I knew it, and yet I took no delight in the queer passion of maintaining one’s own hairstyle; Kyle did enough of that for the both of us. I was fussy about my hair vicariously through him. Perhaps I could color it, but there wasn’t a great deal I could conceive of doing to it by way of cutting.
“I think the blond catamite model is in this season, really. First Craig turns up with one, then I run into that miserable drug dealer fucking one against the sink in the loo, and now Eric’s got one as well.”
“I think maybe you should go out and get a blond boy,” Wendy told me with a straight face. I could tell she wasn’t joking. “You’d look great next to one.”
“I had my blond boy once,” I reminded her.
“Oh, yes, Gary.” Her cheeks reddened. “Gary, right.”
“Right.” She gave me a pitiful look, and to punish her, I asked, “So, speaking of men who do not love us. How are things going with your husband?”
She raised her hand, and for just a moment I was sure she was about to give me a dirty gesture, but instead she bit her bottom lip slightly before sighing. “Do you know, I think they are not horrible.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Oh, yes, it’s fine.” She blinked and shook her head, but she seemed lost in a daze, her thoughts elsewhere. “It’s perhaps too much to dare say you were helpful, but…” She swallowed. “I think we’re working on it.” Swallowing, her fingers absently found the twisted handle on her china teacup. It was a Wedgwood service in navy and gold, a fat band of decoration running along the rim. I fondly recall going with her to Selfridges to pick out the pattern. She had been effortlessly pleased, glowing without rouge at the excitement of planning a wedding to a man she was very well aware would never grow to love her the way I’m sure she did not realize she would eventually desire. I pronounced almost every pattern hideous until we got to this one, asking to see gravy boats and then gasping at the lightness of china of this quality, because it was all some stupid game to us then. The salesman was wearing a hideous yellow shirt, and he looked down his nose at her and with his canines bared in lechery at me. I blew him in the men’s room while she had a salt beef sandwich downstairs. We bought a box of Charbonnel et Walker truffles to share over drinks that night, and left arm-in-arm, much the way we used to walk along the river back at university. The way her freshly manicured talons clicked against the rim of the teacup brought this back to me.
She walked me out, which wasn’t usual, and I wondered why until we reached the mammoth front door, where she paused, and very carefully said, “I shan’t be seeing you next week, dear. Unfortunately I’ve got to go out to see my mother.” Wendy’s parents lived in a manor house in the Cotswolds. They had a townhouse in the city, which they seemed to frequent when we were in university, but I suppose in the ensuing years they’d decided they preferred country living to the metropolitan pleasures London had to offer. She took me once over an Easter holiday, and I was dismayed to find that it wasn’t particularly Brideshead-ish at all; her parents got on quite well, there were no siblings to create pathos. Tey seemed to be only the most cursory of Anglicans, and did not give me and my Catholicism (or lack thereof) any prompts to discussion.
“So don’t show up here next week expecting tea sandwiches, as I won’t be in town,” she seemingly concluded. After a short pause so she could swallow, though, she added, “But Token will be here, of course, so do feel free to pay him a little visit.” And then she rolled her eyes.
“Token not invited?” I asked, ignoring her jab.
She shook her head. “Oh, no. Well, he’s welcome, you know, but Token and Daddy haven’t gotten on since forever, it seems. They’re so bitter toward each other, and the odd thing is that there really isn’t any reason why. I suppose it’s territorial, to pick at small wounds in the relationship between oneself and one’s in-laws.”
“Well, thank god I haven’t got any in-laws.”
“Yes, you should feel so lucky you’re gay.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but isn’t Token?”
“I suppose.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But it’s really not the same, is it?”
“No,” I said before departing. “I suppose it’s not.”
~
I had not spoken to Kyle, and an unsettled feeling began to permeate my routine, if one could call it that. After I left Wendy and Token’s I swam, and the next day I returned to the pool for more laps. In the shower, I noticed an older gentleman - although he could not have been too much older than I - cruising me, and willingly went back to his flat, which was in Bayswater, and not so far from Kyle’s. On my walk back to the Tube, I really did have half a mind to turn left instead of right and go bang on his door and ask him why he would not return my phone calls. I tried to reassure myself with the idea that it might not have been personal. I wanted so badly to run into old Clyde and just give him a good, swift kick right in the crotch. For every ounce of disgust and fury I felt toward him, however, there was an equal amount of pity. The idea that Kyle hated him intrigued me, and yet it frustrated me. If he was willing to just shack up with anyone, why not me?
Thoughts swirled around me as I walked and sulked, eventually popping into a pub for a drink, which I rudely swished around in my mouth as I wondered just what I was doing. The man I had just fucked had given me his number, but I hadn’t enjoyed it much - I was just going through motions, distracted. Feeling lousy, I went home and read until the early hours.
On Thursday, I awoke with renewed optimism for no good or apparent reason. I made myself poached eggs and a rasher of bacon, and greedily ate while I poured over a week-old copy of the Guardian. Absurdly, the top editorial was lambasting Sheila Broflovski’s censorship bill as “pitiful and timid.” If only they knew the lady - she was nothing of the sort.
I showered, dressed, ate a digestive and, feeling antsy, decided to take a walk down to the coffee shop nearby with the seedy toilet. A lazy half-erection brewed in my jeans as I walked, thinking about what sort of man I might like to meet there. He should be shorter than I with large hands, and a tight, hairless scrotum. I hummed in appreciation of my own capacity to conjure these things as I walked. Before going into the loo, I bought a latte, and sat down in a battered armchair to scan the crowd. Mostly business types today - some spillover from the City, possibly. I resigned myself to patience and sipped my coffee slowly, inspecting the packages of various customers. Nothing caught my eye.
Things could have been worse, of course; I might have been drinking stale American tea with no character. This was fine; I could stand to sit by my lonesome for a bit while I waited to see who came into the shop. I was hard, but not so hard that I was desperate for release right away. If I had a more typical line of work, would I have been the sort to run to a coffee shop on my lunch break?
Kyle wasn’t that type; he preferred to keep his sex within the confines of long, drawn-out, tumultuous affairs. Eric, as far as I knew, had been acting out of character when he picked up that boy in the loo at the London Stock Exchange. He was an insurance underwriter, actually; he often boasted about how the Jews he worked with were dependent on his services to run their businesses. I don’t know what attracted him to that line of work but if he had ever seduced a man in the toilet - provided he were able to - he would have told us. Miss B kept to herself. I didn’t often internalize it, but I was alone in my proclivity.
After a second latte, I gave up. No one I found particularly attractive had come in, except for a pair of businessmen I was positive were, against all odds, actually heterosexual. According to the clock on the barren brick wall I was facing, an hour of my life had been lost to this fruitless activity. Sighing, I set my empty coffee cup back on the counter, wiped my lips with a paper napkin and left the shop. I accidentally bumped into a lady on her way in, mumbled an insincere pardon, and bent over outside the windows to tie my shoe. Over, under, and so on, until I noticed a shadow in front of me, and obviously someone was standing there. I could tell this person was male because he cleared his throat, and when I stood up I was shocked to discover it was Kenny.
“Oh, hello.” I was trying not to sound all that thrown. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Oh, there’s nothing fancy about it,” he said, flicking some ash from his cigarette onto the pavement; his other hand was poised on the jutting angle of his cocked hip. “Just tricks as usual, I’m afraid.”
“Tricks?” I asked. “What tricks?”
“Oh, you know.” He took a massive inhale on the end of his cigarette, and exhaled when he said, “The ones I turn for a living?”
“Yes, I know. One doesn’t forget a detail like that. And yet … I thought you were exclusive with Eric, or something. Shouldn’t you be bothering him?”
“I don’t follow him to work. What would I do while he’s busy all day?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the logistics of the arrangement were loose - Eric liked to have a very tight rein on things. “Well, I don’t know, what would you do all day? Sit under his desk and blow him?”
“Did it! Got neck cramps.” He took my elbow. “Come on, Stanley. Let’s have a walk.” Dutifully, I followed, and not before shaking his hand from my elbow.
~
I didn’t know where we were going.
“What brings you out here?” I asked as we strolled past a butcher, and a second-hand clothing shop.
“Well, I’ve been living not too far from here,” he reminded me. “Besides, all the businessmen who come over at lunchtime are usually pretty horny.”
“Not today,” I told him. “I’ve just spent an hour in that coffee shop and didn’t get one interested glance.”
“It’s their problem, not yours.” He paused for a moment to check himself out in a storefront window, preening as he shuffled the locks of his dirty hair around. In tight-fitting, light-blue denim trousers and a threadbare T-shirt, he seemed either a runaway attempting to look respectable, or a bourgeois poseur attempting to look punk. I knew it was a bit of both, but perhaps his clientele hadn’t any idea. I wondered what Eric thought, or if Eric actually cared. I assumed he didn’t.
“But really, what are you getting out of it?” I asked around the time we’d walked a kilometer, not marveling at the way this question was so familiarly posed to a boy I had met only once before.
He did not flinch at my investigations; he offered me answers without hesitation. “I’m earning a salary as his personal assistant,” he explained. “So technically I’m his live-in help, and the rest is supplementary. I mean, the way he’s explained it, whatever happens between an employer and an employee just happens. It’s not illegal, and with valid employment over here I can get a passport.”
At this my eyes went wide. “You want to naturalize?”
“Yeah, ’course I do. What do I wanna be Irish for?”
“Because that’s your home, dear. Because that’s who you are.”
“Nah. Home’s where you make it, really, and I’ve left that behind. I wanna exercise all my rights and shit. You know, it’d be nice to vote.”
“To vote?” I laughed. “Essentially you are shacking up with Eric because you think he’s going to provide you with a legitimate job that will enable you to get a British passport and vote?” It just seemed ludicrous to me.
“No, not just!” He halted in front of a cherry-red post box with the curvaceous letters GR crowned triumphantly. “Voting is important to me!”
“That’s … something. It’s odd; it’s quite odd. Do you know, I’m 37 and have yet to cast a ballot in a single election?”
He frowned, and kicked the post box with the heel of his tatty trainer. “Well, that’s despicable. Don’t you care?”
“Yeah, I care, but I care in the abstract.” I sighed. “Look, Kenneth-”
“Kenny’s fine,” he reminded me.
“Kenny. Dear. I know you are a prostitute, but perhaps you’re not properly jaded yet. All elections are essentially between two candidates you cannot stand: A self-important ponce, and a complete wanker. It’s just Labour squabbling with the Tories, over and over again. Who needs it? I just let the pieces fall where they may.”
“But you could impact something!”
“Unlikely.”
“Do you even know who your MP is?”
I realized I didn’t. “Oh, it must be someone. I know it’s not Kyle’s mother.”
“Who is Kyle’s mother?” he asked as we passed by a homeless woman sitting on top of a pile of rags.
“Her name is Sheila Broflovski. She’s a Labour MP, for North Islington. I only know because of Kyle, really. He’s always lived in London, and when I met him at school I thought he was the most glamorous boy I’d ever met. He knew all about the government and actually had been to all the places we read about in old books during our course of study. I’d never been to London until the first summer after a year at university, actually, when Kyle took me home for the summer.” Kenny gave me an incredulous look. “Well, all right, I suppose my family went once or twice to see something at the British Museum. But, honestly, for an academic, my father doesn’t much like culture. As a geologist I think his interest has always been captured by the Iron Belt. If we were going to go to the city, we’d go up to Birmingham.”
“Your father is a geologist?” He raised his eyebrows. “What the fuck is that?”
“Someone who studies rocks.”
“Is that important?”
“Alas, no. No, it’s not important.”
“What’s his name?”
“Professor Randy Marsh, D. Phil., Oxford, 1937.”
“What’s a dee-fill?”
“It’s the highest academic certification a person can receive.”
“You got one?”
I laughed. “Me? No. It’s not a very useful degree. Certainly not in English literature.”
“Seems like school is a big waste to me.” He was digging into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes, and fiddled around with it while he spoke: “At the end of the day the best thing to do is something that impacts other people. Politics is good. Even whoring is good. You know? I never heard of your father. sorry. No offense. But I most certainly know who Sheila Broflovski is.”
I stopped walking in front of an empty storefront. “How the hell have you heard of Sheila Broflovski?”
Kenny rolled his eyes. “She’s just about the most vocal member of the opposition.”
“Yeah, she’s a fascinating woman,” I conceded. “I lived with her for a summer, you know.”
“Well, of course I didn’t know before you just mentioned it. What was that like?”
“Ah, well.” I had to think for a moment about what to say. “I don’t know, it was summer, and she seemed just like any other woman to me, except she was American, and my friend’s mother. She cooked dinner every night and nagged us a bit, like she wasn’t sure if she should encourage us to go out and see the city, or keep us huddled in the house protected against her bosom, which is substantial. She … oh, I guess the best word for her is ‘maternal.’ But they have a very nice house, the Broflovskis. Have you ever been up to Islington?”
“I don’t even know where that is.”
I thought about telling him, but was tiring of supplying him with easy answers. “Look at a map,” I snapped.
So, again, he was smoking, and we were halted on the street, not so far from my flat, and there were boarded up windows all around us, intricately and obsessively layered in what I often overheard the young artists who lived nearby me referring to as ‘street art’ - a ridiculous inflation of what was essentially vandalism, not that I minded a bit of vandalism, but generally I found it appealing on a much less visible level.
The smoke from his fag was pinching the back of my throat, and I was about to request that he stop exhaling right into my eyes lest I fall over into respiratory-related convulsions. But, surprisingly, he said, “That’s what I think I like about you, Stanley. You’re accommodating, but you don’t give anyone an inch on anything unless it’s for that ginger who looks at you like you’re Jesus and he’d like to choke on your balls simultaneously.”
“Well, how the hell would you know?” I asked, legitimately. “This is the second time we’ve met in less than a week.”
“You learn how to read people when you basically have to do it for a living.”
“Oh, right, you’re a prostitute,” I sneered. “Right, I missed that the first 70 times. You should be less subtle about it, perhaps, dear, if you want to go someplace with it.”
And to this, he burst out laughing. “You’re a nearly 40-year-old unemployed queen living by himself in the fucking council estates with a bunch of artists half you age.” He took a final drag on his cigarette, and tossed it behind his shoulder before taking a step back to squash it into the damp pavement. Then he lurched forward, grabbed my collar, and hissed, “And I find it fucking sexy.”
I swallowed as his lips rubbed against my cheek. “To be fair it’s not a council estate, and I’m not unemployed but rather self-employed.”
“Like it matters.” I felt his tongue against my lips, and pushed him away. “What?” he asked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Truly, nothing much was wrong with me; I was certain my erection wasn’t outwardly visible through my trousers anyway. “You cannot do that on the street.”
“I do it on the street whenever I like,” he said. “What’s the matter? It’s not like Eric’s around.”
“Oh, bugger Eric!”
“Yeah, I’ve already done, thanks.”
I rolled my eyes. “Even if it weren’t illegal to have sex on the street, Kenny, this is a working-class neighborhood, and it’s still fairly likely that some aggressive bloke will wander down this way and put his boot through your arse and mine. This isn’t the West End and even there one still shouldn’t go around humping gaily in public. And let us not forget the police, dear, for all gross indecency is still largely illegal outside of one’s own home.”
“Well, then.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s go back to your place before you kill the mood any further.”
~
It does not take an English bachelor’s to determine what happened next. With very little pretense, I took him back to my flat, and before I had even managed to bolt the door, he was on top of me, grinding his crotch against mine with a refreshing ferocity. There was something innocent in his lips that I could not identify, an undue anachronism I hadn’t expected to encounter in a prostitute. Obviously he was practiced, but then, Gary aside, when was the last time I’d actually fucked a virgin? We were all schooled in this art, trained by older tutors who could easily have taken degrees in this if they’d offered it in school. His hands were knowing, tightening on the flat, rough nipples under my shirt like he had mapped them before; his hips he presented against mine in mimicry of our kissing, only harder and more focused.
But it was his lips I might have fallen in love with, had I been about 20 years younger and terribly naïve. The scabby cracks stroked the moisturized contours of my jaw knowingly. It was indescribable, the way we kissed and kissed and shed clothing en route to the loft. At the bottom of the stairs we untangled our tongues and a viscous pillow of spit fell gracelessly onto his T-shirt.
On the long wall of my flat, in between the doors to the multitude of smaller catacomb-like rooms in which I had been storing rubbish for my father and old papers, I had hung a number of photographs. I did not look at them very often, and in many cases I did not remember framing them or putting them on the wall. I went through fits and spurts of sentimentality, and always had done ever since I was a boy.
Kenny was kissing my neck, lips barely brushing the uneven line where pricks of stubble had begun to emerge after shaving the previous evening. I in a haze of ecstatic lasciviousness slapped a hand against the wall for balance, and knocked off a picture frame - a sterling behemoth enrobed in Corinthian coils of nondescript ivy, vines meant to mock the idea of ivy, but a six-leafed variety that matched no species I’d ever met. A picture of my parents on their wedding day clattered face-up with a crack down the middle, slicing my mother’s dour expression in two.
“Oh, bother,” I muttered, feeling the words butt up against my swollen tongue. I tried to wipe it off, but being so drunk on youth and my own potency I fumbled a bit, and Kenny smiled at me. I nudged the damaged portrait with my shoe.
“Bed, Stanley,” he said wickedly, with a cocked half-smile. “Take me to bed.”
Well, when a 23-years-or-younger lad demands that you take him to your bed, what sort of idiot denies that? Upstairs, I hit my elbow on a side table as he was fumbling off his knickers, yellow Y-fronts painfully discolored. “Come on,” he taunted. Nearly straddling me, his cock unfurled out into the daylight streaming through the dust on my two-storey windows, shorter and fatter than I imagined it, and quite hairless. I think my mouth must have been hanging open, because he lunged over and put his tongue in again while I regretted not taking a longer peek at the equipment. Every surface of my body felt tense, expanded, immense. It is amazing the way passivity allows one to notice the machinations of his own body during sex.
There was a lot of kissing and wriggling and shifting of weight while everything was painfully slowly assembled. I was dying for it, just thirsting for the sensation of plunging into his arse, but first I pushed his little behind away from my cock, where it had been trembling as it hovered just a few centimeters away, to slip on a rubber.
“Oh,” he said, wiping his mouth, fingers tensed. “What have you gotta do that for?”
“It’s just something you do,” I managed to choke out as the tight, rubbery ring glided past poorly defined veins.
“But I don’t like it.” He took one of my hands, the hand that wasn’t rolling on the condom, and placed it on his hip. “Don’t you want to feel this?”
In lieu of verbal reply, I grabbed him around his waist, and kissed him a bit more, until both of us were gasping and saliva was everywhere again. So I used some of that to rub into his entrance. While I was doing it, he distracted me with a well-placed tongue to my collarbone, and deftly rolled the rubber back off in one fluid stroke.
“Give me lube,” he commanded. “What do you use?”
I handed him a small tube. “I don’t know, this is fine,” I said, kissing his knuckles. “I bought it at some absolutely indecent place in Soho.”
“Smells like mint,” he commented. His erection was drooling across my abdomen, and I was sucking the tips of his brief fingers so that I was nearly kissing his nails. “Don’t you use petroleum? One figures that’s the standard. I don’t got a lot of clients who use fancy shit or something. Often it’s just spit.”
“You always talk this much?” I flipped him over onto his belly - or, rather, I coaxed him with hesitant pressure from the palms of my hands, and he willingly submitted. “Why don’t we just fuck?” I rasped into his ear. I had a stifling hard-on pressing into the small of his back, and all I could think about was how passively unbothered he was by this situation. I suppose, it’s true, he was a whore, and meeting a man on the street (outside a cruisy coffee shop, no less) and ending up in his bed in short order must have been nowhere outside the boundaries of the usual. Still, he was not begging for it from me - just lying there with his head turned on the pillow of his arms.
“All right, do it already.” His voice rang with optimistic impatience. It made me even harder, or at least it felt that way. With a final latching of my lips to the back of his neck, I ground my cock against the back of his thigh.
“I’ve never fucked a whore before,” I panted, angling into position.
“Oh, shit.” I felt his cheeks clench around my cock. “Then this is your big chance, isn’t it?”
“Have I been missing out?” My nose trailed his hairline, so that I was speaking against the base of his skull.
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never fucked a prostitute either.”
“Oh, masturbation doesn’t count?”
“No, masturbation does not count.”
~
I did not notice the clock while we were fucking, but by the time we had finally spent ourselves, the sun was low enough in the sky to illuminate the loft of my bedroom, and indeed the entire flat, in vibrant yellow splendor. It was that perfect pitch of seemingly divine light through my Romanesque windows that drew me to this space. When the realtor had showed it to me years before, calling it a ‘conversion’ with a dour look on his face as if he were insulted to even have it listed, I was won over by the idea that only 80 years before scores of indebted Victorian laborers sat in rows at smoke-belching machines while the windows were their only chance to glimpse the outdoors in daylight.
“What used to be made here?” Kenny asked, glancing around the apartment. He obviously hadn’t done so while we were fucking, but I did not mind that he was singularly focused - he’d have to be good at this to make a living off of it. Likewise, I had actually come twice, which was a feat I hadn’t managed in some time. Most men I’d been with hadn’t really possessed the patience to lie there and continue fucking after the initial release; Kenny had coaxed more out of me. To say the least, I was utterly limp with exhaustion. Still, I felt plenty glad about it.
Finally realizing he’d been speaking to me, I muttered, “Oh, I don’t know,” because I was too numbed by my own afterglow to begin explaining the curious and extinct permutations of my home.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said, sitting up slowly. I could see how stiff he felt, how gingerly he moved. He checked the backs of his thighs and the undersides of his forearms; it took me a moment, but I deduced that he was looking for bruises. “Come on.” After slipping out of bed he tugged on my arm. “Let’s get a beer. Come on, Stanley. Quit being lazy.”
“Are you this impatient with Eric?” I asked.
“Oh no, he would whip me.” How little he knew.
“Well, I haven’t got any beer.” I grabbed something that looked like an undershirt off the edge of my bed. I sniffed it; I must have shed it after my most recent swim. “I drink whisky, dear. That’s my choice of beverage.”
“You’re so dreadfully old,” he teased.
“Not too old to climax twice.”
“Yeah, true.” He trailed me down the staircase.
I poured him two cups, one of Famous Grouse and one of tap water. Not quite knowing what else to say, I asked him about his life with Eric.
“Oh, Eric is just so back-and-forth about the whole sex thing. He is in between being an utter lazy ass without the energy to will his penis to harden, and a grunting, feral sex pig who cannot help himself from drooling on me as we fuck. The things he is into are appalling, but like you already know, what’s got money behind it is surprisingly easy to swallow. So to speak.”
“Please don’t tell me what he’s got you swallowing,” I said drolly.
He wrinkled his nose. “Very well.” He took a gulp of whisky, finishing the glass. “I’m going to the loo. Where is it?”
I pointed him up the stairs, and sat at the table by myself with my head in my hands until he returned, dressed again, with his hands on his hips and a tough little look of satisfaction spread across his face.
“Tell me about the photographs,” he commanded.
“You mean, the ones I’ve got on the wall?”
“No, the ones in your arse. Yeah, the ones on the wall.”
“Oh, right, okay.”
He dragged me over, tugging at my sleeve.
“What’s this?” Kenny asked, picking up the cracked frame I’d left on the floor in a sex blind. “Is that your parents? When is this?”
“Well, yes, that would be my parents” I answered. “That would be 1940.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Your father didn’t fight in the war?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Oh, my, no. He spent the entire war lecturing at Oxford. It worked out really well for him; practically the entire department died and he was promoted to a professorship. My uncle fought, though.” I tapped on a square frame to the left of the space vacated by my parents’ wedding photo. “This is my Uncle James and his batman, Edward - Ned for short.” In the photograph, a well-fed man in a cap and vest bearing a rifle was flanked by a shorter, bespectacled fellow with dark hair. In black and white, and in military dress, you could not tell that I was related to my uncle at all. Indeed, as my father’s half-brother, we shared few genes.
Continued here.