For Real (Spires)

7.2

I pondered the conversation on my way home. It was a pleasant day, bright and on the cusp of spring, and I suddenly realised I’d seen Toby naked in every way, but I’d never seen him in daylight. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be with him now, walking together, hand in hand, coming back from my friends, or going somewhere together. A couple.

It was an idea at once compelling and absurd. How could I be his boyfriend? Presumably I had been Robert’s boyfriend once, but it felt like a word—and a concept—I had left behind long ago. Surely it was better to admit that Toby and I were simply having a fling. One that, sooner or later, would seem ill-advised to both of us and come to a swift, inevitable end.

The problem was, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted Toby and the way he made me feel. I even wanted the breathless declarations he surely couldn’t mean and I surely didn’t deserve.

But wasn’t it my responsibility to be clear-eyed? To do the right thing?

Whatever it was.

A busy week at the hospital—as if there were any others—meant I didn’t have time to dwell on the problem. Though sometimes, in stolen moments as I drank my coffee, walked home, showered, woke in the morning, went to sleep at night, I did. Instead of the faces and bodies and wounds of the day, I thought of Toby. His too-big, dark-rimmed eyes, his sharp face. The way he kissed, holding nothing back.

The times he had blurted out “I love you” in a babble of passion. And that final time, the time I’d stopped him, when he’d sounded so dangerously certain. He had chained me open, made me vulnerable, made me beg, then weep for him, and the shame had burned itself to nothing until there was only freedom, pleasure, joy. It had been terrible and perfect, and still he’d found a way to strip me deeper with only some words I hadn’t let him say.

I missed him.

And as I waited for him that Friday, I wondered—for the first time since we’d established our weekly ritual—if he would show up. Perhaps I’d been soul-searching for nothing, and he had already moved on. I couldn’t have made any clearer the limitations of what was possible between us.

Even if some terrible part of me had liked hearing the words.

Just words. An indiscretion of the moment. He couldn’t have meant them. Not really. How could they have such power over me? How could he?

I was so full of good intentions—resolved, if he did come, to talk to him. Possibly to bring this impossible situation to a neat and mature ending.

But then the doorbell rang and there was Toby on the doorstep and, suddenly, everything I had thought about and worried about seemed flimsy or irrelevant. And all that was left was a vague intention of maybe talking about it next week and the purest, giddiest happiness.

Sam had been right.

I’d been living my life as if nothing had changed. But the promise of Toby had illuminated all my days, edging them with gold like the calligraphy of medieval monks.

With an ugly, frantic moan, I pulled him inside and bent my head to kiss him.

For a second or two his face was turned up to mine, as if this moment had become as instinctive and as necessary for him as it was for me, but then he wriggled away, ducking under my arm so my lips grazed clumsily over his cheek instead.

His eyes sought mine. “We have to talk.”

Ah.

It should have been a relief, in a way, that he had reached the very conclusion I kept postponing, but all I felt was dread. I nodded and led him into the living room.

I suddenly realised how little time we’d spent here. I’d been on my knees for most of it, and the rest had been sex, or a prelude to sex, and now it was awkward, as though we were strangers.

Toby was standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, his hands hanging at his sides as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them. He looked…young, and I wanted to hold him until his shoulders relaxed their tension and all his tight, anxious muscles unlocked.

“Do you want to sit—” I began, at the exact moment he said, “We can’t go on like this.”

I took a sharp breath. The fact I’d expected this didn’t make it any easier to hear. And there was a part of me—the part that was neither clear-eyed nor responsible and merely ached and craved like some lonely beast—that wanted to beg. Not now. A little longer. Please don’t leave me yet. “I know.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Okay. Right. Good.”

But he sounded miserable. As miserable as I was. The least I owed him was making this easy.

“We don’t have to have this conversation,” I told him gently. “I always thought you’d just stop coming when you were ready. You don’t owe me anything.”

His head came up, and his eyes were so very blue it hurt. “Why the fuck don’t I owe you anything?”

“Because…because—” For a moment, I couldn’t remember the answer. “Because I’m not…anyone to you.”

“But you are. And I want to be someone to you.”

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“Fuck wise.” He stepped close to me, this bundle of bones and nerves, skin and ferocity, reached up, and slid a hand round the back of my neck. It was as sure as a collar, as undeniable as steel and leather. He could so easily have brought me to my knees, but all he did was draw our mouths together. “You promised you wouldn’t do this again, but you’re still doing it. You’re just doing it a different way. So stop pretending I could just walk away and it wouldn’t mean anything to you. Stop pretending it’s all about me and what I want. Stop pretending this isn’t real. Just stop fucking pretending. Because you’re here too.” His eyes burned into mine. “You’re here too.”

I stared at him, held by nothing but the lightest of touches and the brush of his breath, captive, as I’d been all along. “I’m here too,” I whispered.

“And I love you, okay? So you’d better get used to it.”

“Toby, you can’t—”

“Nonnegotiable.” He curled his fingers, his nails pressing star-bright crescents into my skin. “You don’t have to say it back, but it’s how I feel, and I’m not going to lie about it or pretend it isn’t there. I love you.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I couldn’t tell if what I felt was pleasure or pain. Or if the difference mattered. Only that he wanted to say it, and that it unpeeled me. Left me naked and shuddering.

“I love you.” He glared. “I love you.”

If I didn’t do something, he might never stop saying it. “All right, all right. You love me. Point taken. Messaged received.”

I’d meant to be gentler, but to my surprise, he let me go and laughed. “Well. Okay. Better than last time. It’ll do for now.”

For now? Oh God. I should have been managing his expectations, but I wasn’t sure how to do that anymore or why I had ever wanted to.

My legs were strangely shaky, so I sank onto the sofa. “I thought you were about to break up with me,” I said pitifully, then recoiled from myself. Why had I told him that?

Toby flew across the room and practically jumped into my lap, flinging his arms around me. And I clutched him helplessly because…because I wanted him, and this brush with the reality of losing him had stripped all my justifications and consolations from me. It had left me afraid. Defenceless.

“God,” he cried. “No way. Never. I love—”

“I know, you’ve told me. But please stop saying it.”

He rested his forehead against mine. This close he was a blur of blue eyes and a grin. “It’s your own fault for not listening the first time. You’ve built up a love debt. Like a sleep debt. You’ve got to pay it off.”

“Can’t I pay it off some other way?”

“You mean”—he drew back a little and raised eyebrows in what I was sure he believed to be a lascivious fashion—“in a sex way.”

“Yes. In a sex way.”

“Totally. But Laurie?”

Oh no, he was serious again. “Yes?”

“I love the sex, I really do. I spend like literally all week thinking about all the things I want to do to you. But I want other stuff too. That’s what I came here to say. I’m sorry if this sounds all blackmaily or something, but it honestly kind of hurts when you use something that’s special to put me in a box.”

It’s just sexwas the answer that hovered on the tip of my tongue, but it would have been a lie, and I was tired of lying. To him and to myself. With Toby there was no just anything, however hard I tried. “I never want to hurt you, darling.”

“Then trust me. Not just with your body.” His hand settled over my chest, missing my heart at usual, because he was both sentimental and hopelessly inaccurate, and for some inexplicable reason that…moved me.

I leaned into him, into his touch, and just breathed him in, the heat and the traces of his day, cooking oil and washing up liquid and Toby. Oh, Toby. Yearning unfurled into a vast and fathomless swell, swept me against him, and I broke.

I broke, and it felt like peace or hope or love, and I didn’t care. “Anything. Anything you want.”

“Everything.”

Sweet, greedy, impossible princeling, he could have me.

Because, truthfully, he already did.

We sat there for a long time, doing nothing except holding each other, Toby’s body curled into mine, utterly quiescent, almost as if he slept. But he was wide awake, and I sensed his eyes upon me, never straying. I half wondered what he was thinking. What he made of this man he had just made his.

* * *

Later, much later, we were hungry, so I pulled out the collection of takeaway menus Robert and I had long ago begun collecting and dumped them all in Toby’s lap, where they shone like a neon rainbow.

“Do you have a favourite?” he wanted to know.

Once. I shook my head. “Why don’t we… Why don’t we find one?”

The smile he gave me. God. As bright as a pinwheel against my skin, and I submitted myself to it, not perhaps gladly but without hesitation, and let it spark every nerve I possessed.

He picked up a couple of the menus. “How do you feel about wok puns? Do you, in fact”—he pulled out finger guns—“wok them?”

“I was about to say I could go either way on wok puns, but I’ve changed my mind.” I sat down on the floor at his feet, propped an elbow on one of the sofa cushions, and rested my head against it, which allowed me to look up at Toby as he sorted through takeaway menus. It wasn’t a particularly, or intentionally, submissive act. It was simply where I wanted to be right then.

“Not even…Woking on Sunshine?”

“That’s a lie. You made that one up.”

He laughed. “Yeah, but there’s some strong competition here. Wok This Way? Wok ‘n’ Roll. Wok Around the Clock. This one’s just called Wok 22, I don’t even know what that’s a pun of. It’s just a really random reference. Anthem for Doomed Woks.”

“The Grapes of Wok?”

In the end we settled on the Tasty House because Toby said he was susceptible to really blatant advertising. He stroked my hair and told me a story about being lost in Brighton after a night out clubbing, desperate for sustenance, and ending up in an eatery called FOOD simply because of the name. He rambled on easily enough, half hypnotising me with his voice and his fingers until I was helplessly content and as completely his as I’d ever been.

“Laurie?”

“Mmm?”

“Tell me something about you.”

I half opened my heavy eyes. “What sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“That’s not helpful, Toby.”

“Well”—he pouted at me—“neither are you.”

“How do you mean?”

“You don’t talk.”

“What do you call this?”

He tugged playfully at my hair. “I mean, like, you say things but you don’t volunteer. You don’t tell me stuff. I don’t really know much about you at all.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then I realised he was right. My friends had all known me for years, and to the sort of strangers I met, I told only my preferences, my hard and soft limits, my safeword. Somehow, I’d lost the habit of talking in the way he meant. Of sharing myself like that. It was a rather frightening thought. And lonely too.

My mouth had gone dry. “I’m not trying to keep anything from you.”

“So talk to me.”

Oh God. I had no idea how to begin. And suddenly, I found myself wishing I played the alto sax. Was that why Dom had told me that? Because he felt like this as well? “I can’t… I don’t… I want to but…”

What I wanted to say was help me. But I couldn’t quite form the words. I didn’t like to beg outside the bedroom.

Then Toby grinned and helped me anyway. Granting mercy when I needed it most. “What’s your sign?”

“My…oh, Leo.”

“Your favourite colour?”

“Blue.”

“Your favourite ice cream?”

“Vanilla.”

He gave a whoop of laughter. “Seriously?”

“What did you expect me to say? Mint choc pain? Rum and suffering?” He was still giggling, so I went on, “Look, I’ll have you know that proper vanilla ice cream, the sort with the pods in it, is really good.” Oh dear God, I sounded pompous.5

But Toby leaned down and kissed my brow. “It’s okay, I’m into cooking. You don’t have to defend vanilla to me. It’s awesome.”

For a little while, we were quiet, his hands still moving tenderly in my hair, and I wondered if he was satisfied with the talking we had achieved. But then he asked, “Do you like your job?”

I shrugged, my shoulder nudging his knee. “I’m not sure ‘like’ comes into it.”

“That’s your answer to everything.” There was an edge of laughter to his voice.

“Just sex and work.”

“Is there anything you do like without making it really complicated?”

I smiled up at him, soothed and absurd and undone. “I like you.”

He went a little pink. “Now you’re just avoiding the question.”

“I…” I wanted to answer, but I didn’t know how to begin, so I lost myself in silence, while his impatience gathered around me.

“See, this is exactly what I mean. You’re fine to talk to me about ice cream but not what you do every day?”

“I’m not…I’m not trying to push you away. I’m just”—frightened of frightening you—“wondering how to explain.”

“What’s to explain?”

The truth was, most people didn’t understand what I did and why I did it and how it made me feel. If I was lucky, they would tell me they thought I was very brave. If I wasn’t, they would shake their head and say, I just don’t know how you can do something like that. As if I were an alien or a serial killer. I sighed. “I don’t like what I do, Toby, but I need to do it, and it’s part of who I am. I think…I think there’s a strangeness or some dislocation inside me that makes me perfectly designed for it.”

He blinked, but he kept on touching me, and I pressed into his touching. Don’t lose me. Don’t let me get lost. “I don’t think there’s anything weird about being a doctor. About helping people.”

“I don’t really help people in any sense you’d recognise. I just stop them dying.”

“That seems pretty helpful to me.”

That was how it always started: trying to make light before understanding set in. There would be a few minutes, at least, when Toby might look at me and believe me some kind of hero. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t noble. I was just a man who made decisions.

“It’s not benevolence,” I explained. “It’s detached from that, just like I am. When I arrive at an incident, that’s the first thing that happens. The adrenaline hits me, and everything slows down, and all of me is gone, shunted away to I-don’t-know-where, so there’s only the things I know how to do and the clarity to do them. It’s how I can do it. Know which bodies I can fight for, which ones I can’t, or won’t.”

His eyes held mine, not yet flinching. “That sounds kind of like a big responsibility. I freak out when I have to do the weekly egg order for the caff. Does it scare you?”

“No, it…it thrills me.” I closed my eyes for a moment, hiding from my own truths and his reaction to them. “It’s a profoundly powerful thing to stop someone dying in such a direct and individual way. Most medicine is an extended negotiation, but prehospital medicine… It’s the thinnest imaginable line between life and death. It’s where I can do something that matters.”

“Wow.” He let out a rush of breath, as if he’d been holding it. “Laurie, that’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

It was desperately tempting to let him think that. To snatch up his admiration like a greedy child. I couldn’t do it though. I couldn’t take what wasn’t rightfully mine, no matter how much I wanted it. “But you see,” I said softly, “it’s only afterwards I remember. Only afterwards I remember it’s lives. Not just bodies and statistics and probabilities and triage.”

For a little while, Toby said nothing. I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking. Another thin line, but this time I was powerless, waiting for him to choose his side. Choose me. He slithered off the sofa and came fully in my arms. His answer was a kiss.

And we kissed for a long time, softly, Toby’s tongue sweeping mine. The last time we’d brought our bodies together on (well, in the vicinity of) my sofa, it had been in passion, our kisses clanging cymbals, so different from these. But in some strange way they felt the same, kisses that were their own journey. I’d forgotten it could be like this, but each and every time, whether it was fast or slow, rough or sweet, Toby reminded me.

At last, we parted, but he stayed close, both of us still on the floor—which should have been ridiculous. Oh, why did I care? Who was here to judge us, except me?

Toby tucked his head against my shoulder and wriggled his hand into mine. “It doesn’t matter how you do it. Just that you do.”

I smiled, grateful for his stubborn affection, his conviction that, whoever I was or whatever it meant, it was right for me to be that way. It had been such a long time since I’d talked about any of this. I hadn’t thought I needed to. With Robert it had been accepted as part of me and therefore part of us, just like everything else, as unchangeable and irrelevant as the colour of my eyes, my inability to roll my tongue, or my preference to suffer and his to make me.

It wasn’t long before Toby stirred again, peeping up at me through his lashes in what he clearly thought was an appealing fashion. And he was right. “Can I ask something else? And don’t say you just did, because that shit isn’t funny.”

“Um. Yes?”

“Even if it’s weird?”

“Especially if it’s weird.”

“You don’t like…what you like…because of, like, stuff, do you?”

I ran the words through my head a few times trying to make sense of them. “I don’t like what I like because of, like, stuff?”

I felt him laughing before I heard it. It was an unexpected intimacy. “Thanks for making me sound like a moron. I meant…the sex thing, the kinky sex thing.”

“Oh, I see.” Another reasonably familiar question, though rarely asked as bluntly. “You mean, do I want to be hurt and shamed and denied because I’m stricken with terrible guilt for all the lives I can’t save?”

He stared at me. “I guess that’s a no.”

“That’s a no.” I slid a hand under the hem of his T-shirt and up his back, wanting the simplicity of his skin under my palm. He shuddered a little, his spine shifting against me as he uncurled beneath my touch. I stroked him, smiled, felt light. Content. “This is where you reassure me that you don’t have some trauma to avenge upon my not-particularly-reluctant flesh.”

His eyes flew wide. “God no. I want to hurt you because I love you.”6

And, as some potent mixture of anticipation, tenderness, wanting, and fear flooded me with heat, I believed him.