Junction X (4 page)

“You’re drunk,” I said, trying to push him off. “Piss off, and get up.”

“I’m drunk, and so are you.” He rolled away and stood up unsteadily. “Need to walk it off. C’mon—just—down to the beach and back.” He grabbed my arm, pulled me to my feet—and put his arm around my shoulders. I supported him as we wandered through the small wood behind the house and down the narrow steps to the beach. He walked halfway to the ocean, which was as still as the Atlantic ever was, dark, foam-capped and roaring in the night. The tips of the waves showed as vividly under the moonlight as the highlights in Phil’s hair.

I hoped he would have forgotten the subject by this time, but I was unlucky.

“You didn’t answer me,” he said suddenly, sitting down on the edge of a dune in an undignified heap. “And don’t go saying that it’s not something a gentleman talks about, old boy¸ because we aren’t our parents. No one’s going to know you told me. Who am I going to tell?”

I sighed and sat beside him, feeling deathly uncomfortable but knowing he wouldn’t give it up until I gave him an answer. Phil could out-stubborn a mule.

“No.” I said. I didn’t feel able to go into details. I wasn’t drunk enough for that. “She doesn’t.”

“I knew it!” Phil crowed, throwing his arm around me again with a triumphant grin. “I knew it!”

I kept silent. With a shrug, I attempted to dislodge his arm, glaring at the sea as if it had done me a disservice. I hoped to hell he wouldn’t remember this conversation in the morning, and I wondered how much I’d have to drink to forget it myself.

He took a slug from the bottle he was carrying and passed it over. “An’ you know what? Claire doesn’t either.”

It wasn’t until I had passed the bottle back to him that I realised that I’d never considered that his lips had also been on the neck of the bottle. It had never bothered me before. Now—suddenly obsessed by his lips—I couldn’t help but watch hypnotised as he opened his mouth and wrapped them around the bottle. It was insanely erotic, and I felt a prickling warmth in my groin. I made some non-committal kind of noise, letting him continue to ramble, but wishing with all of my heart that he wouldn’t.

“She never has, and—boy!—has it caused some almighty arguments. Nothing worse than an argument in bed, eh, Eddie?”

I shrugged again, my inner prude still fighting for control. I’d never argued in bed. It wasn’t a place where a lot happened, all in all.

“I’ve had head so good before my marriage that I felt my soul was coming out of my prick—know—what I mean?” He was close, so close his breath was hot against my cheek. I tried to stay stony-faced, but the mention of his experience actually made me blush, and as usual he read me like a book. His voice dropped, slurred with the edge of the grape. “You
don’t
know, do you? You really, really don’t. You’ve never—never had…”

“No. Stop it.” My temper snapped then, angry, ashamed and embarrassed all at the same time. “No. I’ve never had a blow-job, all right? Is that what you wanted to know? Not from Valerie, not from anyone. Happy now?”

The cool air was making me feel completely unreal, and all at once I felt liberated, wanting to tell him everything, like some flood gates had opened, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the balls.

 
He was staring at me with wide eyes, his mouth open in shock. Whether real or feigned, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I wanted to punch the smile from his face.

“It’s not the end of the world.” I staggered to my feet, the world whirling as I fought for purchase in the sand, and started an unsteady trek up the beach.

“Eddie!” He came after me after I had only gone five wobbly paces, caught my arm and pulled me around. “Eddie…”

 
I lost my balance, falling backwards in the sand as the world spun and I tried to stop the stars from fluttering. I was on my knees before my brain could catch up.

I didn’t register where he was. Part of my mind was hoping he’d gone and left me with my shameful admission. But he hadn’t. He was muttering somewhere in the dark, “I’m sorry, Eddie—I shouldn’t have pushed you, but we—we’re
mates
, you understand me?”

I could hardly hear him, let alone understand him. The hiss of the sand as the ocean pulled it out to sea seemed deafening. I may have blacked out.

When I did start to realise what was going on, it was too late to stop. It’s hard to write this down, because what he and I started there on the
Plage de Nice
was so different from the pigeonholes of life I put everything into. Different from Ed with Valerie, different from Ed at the club. A new Ed emerged that night, but his wings were wet.

The first thing I noticed was a pressure in my groin and balls, the thought processes seeming treacle-slow as my brain fought to slot the pieces together in the dark. I swear (and I can’t now believe my stupidity) that when I realised what the divine sensation was, I thought that Phil had got some whore from the village and had set this up as a surprise. It took me another groggy minute, as I looked down and saw his dark trousers, his white shirt, his gold-flecked hair, and his head bobbing up and down, before I realised what was really happening.

The reality of what we were doing in public hit me hard even though I wanted it to go on forever. I struggled a little—but only a little. I didn’t shout, I have to be honest. His arm shoved my chest back down in the sand and he continued working on me until, almost against my will, I came in his mouth, my eyes screwed up so tight that tears seeped from the edges. In spite of all the conflicting emotions—the fear, the disgust, the surprise—it had been wonderful, unlike anything I’d ever done to myself. Heat, warmth, pressure, suction. I’d had no idea. Whatever I’d imagined, it hadn’t ever been like that.

Afterwards, I lay stunned for a good few seconds. I felt Phil pull away and my prick cooled in the night air. It was probably the most embarrassing moment in my life up to that point and, as I refastened my trousers, I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Phil, sitting with his back to me. I imagined that he was as ashamed as I was, but once again, of course, I was wrong, for he turned around and, to my amazement and confusion, he was smiling.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” My mind was swarming with thoughts. Was Phil homosexual—
queer
? And I’d enjoyed what he had done—what was
I?

“You’re angry. I thought you’d be pleased. You’ve had a blow-job now, Eddie.”

“Why did you do it?” I hardly recognised my own voice. I thought that I should be shouting, storming off, punching him. “Why did you have to spoil it all?”

“I wanted to show you that men—that
friends
—can do things together, in secret. It’s the companionship you were talking about.” He sounded perfectly sober now. “Nothing’s spoiled.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Once.”

“Who with?”

“My tutor, at university.”

My mind reeled, and I saw it clearly: a dusty study, Phil, perhaps his grades slipping, and a teacher willing to exploit a pretty young man. Phil on his knees; it’s what he would do. It’s what he always did.

“But you said you’d had…before.” I felt horribly sober, and the words seemed wrong in my mouth, my tongue swollen and dry. Gone was that feeling of liberation, lost somewhere in the flood of salt, washed back into the sea. I wanted us to go back, back to the talk of rugby and cricket. Back to before he lit that cigarette for me and burned away part of my life.

“Birds,” he said. He leant forward, wrapping his arms around his legs. “The tutor showed me what was what, and then I knew what I liked. They never wanted to spread their legs, but once you threatened to leave, they’d always suck you dry.”

His coarseness shocked me, and the vision it raised in my mind made me feel doubly uncomfortable. Girls kneeling before Phil, doing anything he asked to keep him. I didn’t have that in my past. I’d had Valerie and that had seemed to be enough.

I wondered briefly, as I struggled to my feet, what he wanted in exchange—whether he’d want me to do the same for him. But he didn’t say anything else until we got back to the terrace. The
gîte
’s lights were out, making the terrace seem a dark and sinister place. How had I thought it was a little haven for him and me? That fleeting moment of intimacy seemed gone forever—I couldn’t imagine how I was going to look at him in the face in the morning, let alone continue the holiday. Perhaps, I thought, reaching the top of the steps, I could fake an illness and we could return early.

“Eddie.” He caught my arm and I stopped. It was like a spell, his voice. I still didn’t understand. I thought he had me in his power, that he could blackmail me with what we’d done. I was wrong, of course, but he did have me under his power, all the same.

He moved in front of me, his voice so low that even I had trouble hearing him. “Don’t be angry,” he said. “We could have it good, you and me.” He went to touch my hair and I hit his hand away, but he persisted.

I got angry, pushed him away and things got muddled, perhaps I was… No. I was going to blame the wine, but I know now that it wasn’t that at all. I found myself pinning him back against the cool golden stone of the cottage. I was so angry, and I remember being angrier with myself than I was with him. How
dare
he come along and smile at me and give me something like that? I wanted to punch him, but he was too close, his breath was against my cheek and his groin brushed against my leg, announcing his own hardness. I stared at him, and his face was no longer mocking, his mouth wasn’t smiling. It was wet, and a little open, his tongue just showing behind his teeth. So close. An inch—less—from mine, and there was only one thing I could do. So I did it.

Chapter 3

I was often angry with Phil; but the infuriating thing was that he brushed it aside as if I was joking and his charisma helped him to get away with it. I soon found that our relationship was easy, amazingly easy, to maintain. Not that I would ever call it a relationship. I couldn’t let my mind go beyond my own hemmed-in, hospital-corner boundaries. I was a husband, a father. A man. I wasn’t having a relationship with another man; it was laughable. I looked on it as a series of ‘episodes,’ and I called it that in my head. I refused to call it…what it was.

We continued our friendship as if nothing had happened that August night. Or rather, Phil continued as if nothing had happened, and I stumbled through the holiday wearing wine-blinded blinkers and feeling hot and sick every time Phil walked in the room. We were not alone together in the same way again that holiday and, as far as I know, neither of us wanted to be; Phil was his normal self, while I was too confused to even allude to it again. I made sure we weren’t alone, making excuses to spend more time with Valerie, going shopping with her, spending hours on the beach just with her. At night, Phil went to bed when Claire did, and I was careful to do the same with Valerie. If anything, the thought of what Phil and I had done made me reach for Valerie’s body with a fierce enthusiasm that surprised us both, and several months later, upon our return to England, she thought she was pregnant again.

I was greatly relieved when she found that she wasn’t. I felt a rush of guilt whenever she said that the holiday was like a second honeymoon, and it hurt me to see how happy she was when my attention to her was caused by something that she could never understand.
I
didn’t understand it—so how could she?

But afterwards, I couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get away with those episodes with Phil, and I suppose it’s because people don’t look for aberration where there is an established routine. Everyone knew that Phil and I were best friends, and no one saw anything but that. If we were five minutes longer getting changed after golf, if we disappeared into the rough to hunt for a lost golf ball, if (and most dangerous of all) we bumped into each other at work, or somewhere in our respective houses, no one saw. No one suspected.

The first episode after France happened at the golf club early one Sunday morning. We sat on a slatted bench side by side and, as I bent to lace up my shoes, Phil touched me on the back of the neck, his fingers teasing in the short curls. I flinched at first, still unused to gentle touches from a man, and glanced sideways, knowing what he meant before he spoke.

“There’s no one but us,” he said. “Next pair’s not due to tee off for an hour.”

I think now, looking back, that it was the public aspect of it that gave it an edge. I suspect for Phil the danger meant more than the act itself. He never arranged for us to get together at a business convention, where we would have been private. For him, it was all about the fear of discovery, and I have to say that this was part of the groin-churning excitement for me, too.

I straightened up and leaned towards him, keeping half an eye on the door, but he turned his head away. “No time,” he whispered. “I’m hard, Eddie, so hard. I need it.”