Life After Joe (5 page)

“Matthew. Matthew, what is it?”

He was kneeling in front of me. If I blinked, I could clear enough static to get a fix on his concerned gaze. Not just concerned—almost frightened. “Sorry,” I said, trying for a laugh which died in my throat. “Maybe not as sober as advertised. I…tripped on something.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re not well, are you?”

I clutched his arms. The tighter I did so—and he didn’t seem to mind; just increased the pressure on my shoulders in response—the less the building swayed around me. “Okay,” I said, the truth on my lips before I had time to censor or pull up. “I…think I tried to kill myself last night.” It sounded absurd. I couldn’t take it seriously. “It’s all right. Nobody noticed.”

“
Matthew.
” How did he know my name? Casting back, I recalled he’d used it that first night at the bar, then found myself lost in how much I liked to hear him say it. My mind was backpedalling from its confession. A stupid mistake, a blip. A secret I’d thought to take to my grave. He’d think I was a nutcase at best. At worst, a hysterical drama queen he was about to escort back to the lift and press the Down button. “Matthew,” he repeated fervently, and put out a gentle hand to my face. He brushed his thumb across my lips. “Thank God it didn’t work. Thank God.”

***

He sat with me on the edge of his bed. The room was very plain, just a square lit by apricot neon from outside. He had his arm round my waist, exerting no pressure, just keeping me close. He watched as I finished off the glass of water he’d poured me, then reached for the bottle on the bedside table and poured me another. “What was it?” he said. “Pills?”

I hadn’t thought I was thirsty, but the fresh tang of untainted liquid had clenched my throat with desire, and I’d drunk till my lungs cramped. “Mm. Just sleepers. Was out for a whole day straight. Don’t know why the fuck I’m so tired now.”

“Chemical sleep’s different to natural.”

“I know. I…I’m a doctor.” This revelation, given the state of me, struck both of us as funny, and I was relieved to hear his laugh. “Or I will be if I don’t screw up my foundation year. Aaron, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Impulse. Stupidity. It’s all gone now. I’m fine, really.”

He shifted and ran a hand across my hair. “Yeah. You look it. Kick your shoes off and lie down.”

I frowned. “You didn’t bring me back here to tuck me up. You saw me with Nicky the other night. You know what I do.”

“I saw what you did then. I assume it’s not a nightly performance…”

“Well, I’m not, like…
in rep,
but—that was tame, believe me, compared with…” I shut up. His hand was on my shoulder, then my chest. In any other circumstances, being gently forced down onto the bed by him would have overwhelmed me with desire. As it was, all I could feel was the shattering relief of being horizontal, of not having to fight anymore. I tried to bat his hands away when he reached to ease off my shoes. Then my head hit the pillow. I stayed with the moment long enough to feel the brush of his hand across my hair, once and then again. I struggled briefly. It wasn’t safe to pass out cold in a stranger’s house…The caress came again, and I surrendered.

Light from the water. I lay for a long time watching the dance, not in any hurry to fit it or myself into my waking world. There didn’t seem to be any urgency. It was Saturday. I knew that much.

The room was strange to me. Normally that would have triggered alarms. No matter what depravities I’d initiated the night before, I got myself fast out of morning-after bedrooms. One guy, who had still thought himself straight when he picked me up at the Dog, had beaten me raw when my continued presence in his bed gave evidence to the contrary. Even lacking aggression, breakfast scenes were seldom nice. Daylight faces, awkward silences. Even the sound of another man’s respiration in the bed next to me made me nervous…

But this sound, like the dancing water-light, was different. It kept me in a halfway world, drifting. I didn’t have many good memories from home, but we’d had a rainwater barrel, hadn’t we, under the pipe beneath my bedroom window. And one of the street’s few trees had shifted in the summer wind…

Light from the river. Aaron breathing softly beside me. I surfaced, voluntarily for once, smiling. I sent one hand on an exploratory mission to the buttons of my shirt, my belt and my zip. All neatly fastened. Further, no sourness in my throat from a stranger’s come—no ache in my jaw or my backside from letting myself be used when too drunk to have a proper pain threshold. Untouched.

Nevertheless, there he was. I rolled cautiously onto my side and propped myself onto one elbow to look at him. He had shared the bed in the most gentlemanly manner possible: was fully dressed, lying on his side on top of the blanket he had carefully arranged over me. I took him in, measuring with unconscious pleasure the proportion of width between his shoulders and his hips, that nice indicator of male strength. The plane and the curve that connected them. I put out a hand. I wanted to lay it on the dip beneath his rib cage, on the place where his shirt was coming a little untucked from his jeans. But he shifted and stirred in his sleep, rubbing his brow against the pillow. The light in the room—it must come from the river, I thought, connecting the pieces of the last fractured night in my mind—picked out the silver glimmer in his hair, cast shadows through his long black lashes. He looked serious, though the corner of his mouth I could see was tucked up in a smile. He looked bloody tired. It occurred to me, belatedly, that he might just have finished a shift on the rig, and I hadn’t been the most restful of companions the night before.

I didn’t want to disturb him. I withdrew my hand and eased carefully out of the bed. Moving made me realise how badly I needed to pee, and I went in search of the bathroom. There was something very different about this morning, aside from my undisturbed clothes. My head was free from the sledgehammer ache that occupied it more often than not these days when I woke up. My mouth wasn’t dry, and I wasn’t desperately trying to navigate strange rooms in the dark before I threw up. It frightened me that freedom from hangover struck me as a novelty. What had Aaron said while he rocked me on the dance floor last night—
“Why don’t you just stop?”

I stripped and stood under the shower and tried to give it thought. It seemed easy enough at the crack of dawn, of course, when the last thing I wanted—so far, anyway—was a hair of the dog. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent a whole evening sober, though. How had that happened? It was something I used to throw at my dad.
“You can’t even get through one night without.”
I knew it was very genetic.

I got out and dried off, looking at my clothes. They weren’t too bad, for having been slept in after a Powerhouse night. I’d made the walk of shame through the city’s morning streets in worse. Maybe that was what I should do—clear out, let Aaron have his sleep and find somebody else tonight, somebody functional…But I didn’t want to go. Giving my reflection a critical once-over, I wondered if I could redeem myself. I felt not just better this morning, but clearer, as if I had met a few demons in the depths of my drugged sleep the other night and given them notice to quit. Aaron’s dressing gown was on the back of the door. I put it on, picked up my clothes and made sure I’d left the place tidy.

He was still sleeping when I looked through the open bedroom door. For once, shyness touched me. Normally I leapt on my prey…But there was a dignity to him, lying there unshielded, that made me think of an off-duty Greek warrior catching up on his kip between battles, and I turned away.

Not much space for wandering, and not much to see apart from a spectacular view across the Tyne. His flat was two bleak rooms, generically furnished; the kitchen no more than a sink, cooker and fridge behind a divider in the living room. No pictures, no real signs of individual human life, and yet he must spend a lot of time here on his fortnights off duty…There was one large bookshelf, and I padded over to have a look. It had been a long time since I’d been interested enough in a man to care about much above waist level or had the chance to look. Running my fingertips along spines, I emitted a low whistle. There were a few novels—heavy-duty American authors, Mailer and Updike, and endearingly, a well-worn set of Austen—but the rest of the shelf space was occupied by engineering texts so serious even their titles went straight over my head.
Dynamics of Geothermal and Biomass Alternative Energy Applications. Engineering H2CNG Infrastructure Solutions.
I shook my head.
Nice work, Matthew. Not just a beautiful oil rigger, but a smart one.
It only increased the mystery of what he was doing with me.

I heard the mattress creak and padded back to the bedroom door. Aaron had turned on his back. He did not look so serene anymore—shadows of disturbance were chasing like clouds across his face. A morning erection was straining the front of his jeans, but it didn’t seem as if the experience of waking up hard was a pleasant one for him. As I watched, he put a hand to himself, not in a caress, but a kind of warding-off gesture, as if he were trying to push it away. He took a deep breath and said, very clearly, “Rosie. Ah, Rosie…”

Oh, okay.
That cleared things up. This was the flat where he came to work—to get away, probably, from the missus and kids and discharge inconvenient sexual needs with boys from the Powerhouse. Somewhere off in the streets of Newcastle was a semidetached with a garden where he really lived. I took hold of the rising pain in my throat and imagined strangling it at birth; I envisaged it as a bud and nipped it hard. When had he said otherwise? And what bloody business was it of mine? We’d just met. I hadn’t even fucked him. If somewhere in my head a voice was saying,
great—another part-time closet straight hedging his bets with the other side,
I didn’t have to listen. He was beautiful, and he had been kind to me. It was just one night. Well, one morning. Or not even that, if he was due home for breakfast with Rosie. I’d better get started.

I knelt on the bed beside him. I rested a hand on top of the one that was still restlessly planing his cock, and he woke up, green eyes dawning surprised, as if he’d been very far away. As I moved his hand away and unzipped him, his half-erect shaft filled and stiffened, came up hard beneath his boxers. “God,” he said. “I’m sorry. Like some sex-starved teenager.”

I looked at him. A flush had risen beneath his pale skin, and that and the blackness of his five-o’clock shadow and his ruffled hair completed his beauty for me. There was nothing teenage about it. The cock was all grown up as well, a long, thick weight in my hand. If this was my one chance with him, I was going to make the most of it. “Don’t be sorry for this,” I whispered and leaned over him. “As for starved…I can’t imagine you having to go without for very long.”

“Oh, you’d be fucking astonished.”

Ah. Rosie not putting out, then.
Hating myself for the morbid, bitter thoughts—had I always been like this; had Joe’s departure only given the final twist to a nature already soured?—I took him into my mouth.

From the corner of my eye, I saw his head go back. I held him, steadying the plunge of his hips. He was pretty hungry. Maybe it had been a while. His tip hit the back of my throat, and I gagged, my angle not quite right. In recent encounters, I hadn’t minded being choked a bit—or even a lot, on nights when oxygen deprivation had seemed preferable to thought. But he made a sound of dismay and sat up, six-pack tightening deliciously, and shoved my shoulders back. “Don’t, Matthew. You’d better let me go.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want a blow job. I think if you try at the moment, I’m going to…do you a mischief. I want more, but…”

I sat up, surveying him. I wondered why he thought
more
would be a problem for me. I drew my fingertips lightly up his shaft, imagining how it would feel inside, and my own cock leapt. I shifted, showing him. Gave a little shrug. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Oh God. Bedside drawer.”

He tried to keep me on top for a while, as if scared of losing control. I straddled him, letting his sheathed dick slide up into me. And up and up, until I was shuddering, working my cock and trying every trick of relaxation in the book not to tighten up and reject him. I heard my gut-punched moans with surprise. Joe said I was too quiet during sex. Not much chance of that now. It felt like my vocal cords were being squeezed as hard as I was crushing down on this impalement. Then Aaron began to move, and it was hopeless. I hung on through the first few thrusts, throwing a hand back to clutch at his thigh. “Hoi,” I whispered. “You. Gorgeous. Stop.” He did on the instant and lay looking up at me with shock-dilated eyes. “Won’t it be easier for you to screw my brains out if you lay me down?”

His lips parted. A few rasping breaths came and went, and he got out, painfully, “Probably.”

“It’s what you need, isn’t it? Come on.”

Not an elegant dismount. By then I’d caught his sense of urgency, and I didn’t care if he was on a weekend gay break or not. He took me by the armpits as I scrambled off and steadied me from falling out of the bed. Then he stretched me out on my front. I grabbed the edge of the mattress as he entered me again. It was tough even with the extra lube I could feel on him. He’d let me set the pace the first time. Now I knew what that restraint had cost him. He was built to go in hard and deep, and I buried my face in the pillow to muffle a yell that would have woken half the floor. When my lungs were empty, I hauled in a sobbing breath and shouted again. It was welcome, protest at the size of him, wild excitement—a sudden grief that, of all the men I’d let inside my body, for the first time I
wanted
one, wanted to be filled and fucked by someone other than Joe. I spread my thighs to try and tell him. I flailed out one hand blindly, and he caught it. He gasped my name against my ear, covered me with the heat of his body and started to thrust.

I came almost straightaway, without warning. I was out of control, and the spasm almost tore my heart out. More like stepping on a land mine than an orgasm, a detonation. I howled in anguished pleasure and writhed under him, feeling how he timed his strokes to my body’s contractions, wringing me out. But he wasn’t done yet—God, I knew that he had barely got started—and when he hesitated, I growled, “Don’t stop. Jesus, don’t stop, don’t stop.”

He lifted me onto my knees. I could brace against the headboard that way, give him some resistance, some friction. I was almost glad I’d shot so hopelessly soon: could concentrate on him now, on the beautiful feel of being expertly fucked. If he was a part-timer, he was good—oh God, good—ploughing so deep inside me with every stroke that I could think of nothing else, pulling back just the right distance to give impact to the next. Angling to squeeze my prostate, although surely that horse was gone…

“Matthew, I can’t.” The words were a rasp between inhalations. I clutched the headboard, managed to glance back at him. He hadn’t broken rhythm, but his beautiful face was set, almost grim. “I haven’t…”

I tried to finish the sentence in my head. Hard, with every thought now directed to the renewing swell of my own arousal.
Done this before
would have been bloody unbelievable. “It’s okay!” I choked out, pushing back to meet him thrust for thrust.

“It isn’t. I can’t come.”

“Oh…” For a second, the fantasy flashed up of how it would be to get fucked to death by this man. He would never stop, and I would keep rising to climax around him till my heart burst. As I was doing now, incredibly, a tight little seizure beginning high up in my bowels, slicking my palms with sweat, making me groan and shudder. “Jesus, Aaron. You’re gonna bring me over again.” I felt more than heard his faint sound of disbelief, and I grabbed his hand and pulled it round to seize my rigid shaft. “There. Feel. Oh God, feel me come—make me…”

The wave hit again. I convulsed, my head snapping back, and lost my grip on the headboard. He ploughed me down onto the mattress, his hand still wrapped round my cock, and there, trapped between his thrusting and his grip, I wrenched to a second, incandescent orgasm, heaving like a speared fish in his embrace. He groaned against my ear as if something inside him was breaking, and I felt, beginning to slide down off the peak, the moment when his rhythm broke and the thrashing strokes began that would get him past his problem: ah yes, there,
there
; the flash and sudden heat as he burst into me, gasping my name.

When I woke, I thought he was Joe, and the stab of pain that usually came with such a mistake dissolved in the surprise of being warmly held. Not big on aftermath intimacies, Joe. I’d thought I didn’t mind. I hadn’t been with anyone else—I’d thought that was how it was. I told Aaron softly to take off his clothes, watched while he did, then gathered him back into bed with me. His naked warmth stretched out against me, and I slowly let his movements, our gentle roll and caress, become his resurrection. I countered his grunt of incredulity with a whispered assurance that if I could hit a double, he certainly could, and I took hold of his lifting cock. Ducked my head beneath the blanket so I could see, in the wintry light off the river, how he looked when he hit peak and, grabbing wildly at my shoulders, started to cascade…