For Real (Spires)

7.3

Our takeaway arrived a few minutes later, and despite the fact I had a perfectly serviceable dining room just across the hall, we ate on the floor of the living room, surrounded by plastic bags and foil containers.

“You know”—Toby wagged a wooden chopstick at me—“I’ve been reading the internet—”

“You should never read the internet, Toby.”

“Ha-ha. But, yeah, if we were doing this properly, you would be like naked and on your knees and eating from my hand.”

I went still with apprehension. “Um, is that something you’d like?”

He laughed. “No. Not at all.”

“Thank God.”

“Why?” He gave me a wicked, curious look from beneath his lashes. “Would you, if I wanted?”

I groaned, unable to easily articulate or understand the complexities of my reaction. “I–I don’t know. I’ve never done that with anyone. I don’t think I’d like it at all, but there’s part of me that stirs to…to…do something I hated that much for you.”

Toby was quiet, watching me, his fringe falling maddeningly across one eye. How could he stand it? My fingers itched to push it away. “No,” he said finally, with all the conviction I lacked. “No. I’m kind of so totally turned on by the idea of you doing something you hate for me, but I want it to be something I really want, not something I don’t care about.”

Relief swept over me gently. I hadn’t precisely anticipated his answer, but oddly enough it didn’t surprise me. “You know you can do anything you like with me.”

“Yeah, I do.” He grinned. “That’s why I’ve got to make it count.”

“Also, I’m not sure cheap takeaway was what the internet had in mind for those kind of dominance games. It’s not exactly anyone’s idea of sexy, is it?”

He flicked his hair out of the way. “Oh yeah?”

So to prove my point, I ended up licking a splash of kung pao sauce from the centre of Toby’s hand—sticky-sweet, full of MSG, and underneath it, the taste of skin. I lost myself in a matter of moments to the unexpected roughness of his palm, its collection of small scars and its deep grooves. It was a worrier’s hand, a worker’s hand, passionate and restless, though temporarily quieted by my clasp. I slipped my tongue between his fingers, which made him yelp, and circled back to trace the fleshy mound at the base of his thumb. Thenar eminence. Mount of Venus.

He made a half-swallowed guttural noise, which came out something like ngh.

I kissed lightly over the planes of his palm. There was nothing but Toby now, his scent and his taste, his raspy, suddenly shallow breathing.

“Holy shit. Now I know why the Elizabethans got so freaked out about paddling with the palm of the hand. That’s, like, fucking lewd, man.”

I gave him my smile too, left there against his skin, in his hand, like a secret. Then I let him go and sat back against the sofa, trying to ignore our now present and matching erections. “Point proven?”

“I wouldn’t say—” he still sounded shaky— “proven. You eviscerated your point. That is absolutely my idea of sexy.”

“I’m not sure that had much to do with the food.”

“Huh. Maybe we’d better check.”

He held out half a prawn cracker, and I eyed it dubiously. But it was Toby, and pleasing him pleased me, so I leaned forward and accepted it. As his fingers slipped past my lips, I recognised the charade and took them as though they were his cock, sucking and licking until he was moaning unabashedly.

When I let him go, he shoved me onto my back and stretched out on top of me, and we unravelled each other gently, kissing and touching and pushing our bodies together through too many layers of clothing. It was far from the most erotically charged experience of my life, but it felt so good, so profoundly, quietly good in a way I would have been hard-pressed to explain.

On my living room floor, time stopped mattering. There was only Toby, hot and sharp-boned and wriggling, his T-shirt riding up and his jeans halfway down as he rubbed himself against my thigh and occasionally my cock. His hair was in his eyes and his kisses were sloppy, and the scent of sweat and arousal muddled awkwardly with the scent of half-eaten takeaway. Denim chafed my skin, and my partially undone shirt was too tight under my shoulders, but still, I came before he did, almost without realising I was going to, the pleasure cresting from some deep, half forgotten place inside me.

Toby dissolved into his usual litany of love and obscenity, jerked, tensed, and erupted all over me. While he made a cursory attempt to clean us up with a handful of napkins, I stared at my ceiling, slightly stunned, wondering how and why dry humping had suddenly come back into my life.

“Oh man”—Toby draped a possessive arm over me—“that was awesome.”

We drifted for a little while in satiation and silence, and I came perilously close to falling asleep, but then Toby tilted his head back so he could look at me and asked, “So, when that red helicopter is whirring overhead…that’s you?”

“Occasionally. At night we use a car. But I only do a couple of shifts a month. Mainly I’m at the hospital, seeing patients there or doing tedious things like paperwork and training junior doctors.”

“Do you only work a few shifts because it’s so…I was going to say ‘stressful’…but I guess ‘intense’ is better?”

He was right; intense was better. After a moment, I nodded.

“What sort of stuff do they call you out for?”

“All sorts of things. Car crashes, stabbings, shootings, industrial accidents, cardiac arrest, falls. We go wherever we’re needed. I was there after the London bombings.”

“Seriously?” He pushed himself onto an elbow. “Oh my God, I was, like, at school.”

“Thank you for the reminder of your appalling youth.” I gazed up at him, less shocked than I should have been at the evidence of the distances between us. Perhaps it was because, right now, there were none. We were simply each other’s, in a world of our own making.

“It felt totally weird, like the day before you break up for the holidays, except the opposite of that.”

I pulled him back into my arms, where he fit and I could keep him safe.

“We were off for the rest of the week.” He sighed, and for a moment he didn’t seem quite like Toby. Smaller somehow, a little bit faded. “I was really fucking scared for ages. And everyone kept saying how brave we all were. Like you have a choice not to be around if someone blows up part of your city using the thing that takes you from one bit of it to another.”

He fell quiet again, and I had nothing to say either. I was too busy being uncontrollably afraid of the world and all the ways it could hurt my Toby, and how little I could protect him from any of it. It was a foolish impulse, selfish and slightly patronising. Pain was simply an inevitability of living, and I had to learn how to trust him with his own, as I trusted him with mine.

“I remember it too.” The words came out hesitantly, almost against my will, an offering of a kind.

His head snapped up. “Yeah?”

“Yes. I remember…I remember walking along the tracks to get where I needed to be. I was walking past people, people who were injured, probably dying, calling out to me and to each other and to God, all of them lost in the dark. And I was ignoring them because…because they would probably die without me, but beyond them were the people who definitely would. And beyond them there were people for whom I wouldn’t even try.”

“But aren’t there, like, secondary explosions and stuff when bombs go off?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you went down there anyway?”

“It’s my job. I was probably terrified, but I didn’t really think about it.”

“You’re one of my favourite people in the universe.” He nuzzled under my chin like an overly enthusiastic, slightly amorous cat. “And you totally blow my mind sometimes.”

For lack of any other response, I cleared my throat, pleased and embarrassed and slightly overwhelmed. What was I supposed to say? Ditto? Because he did, with his honesty and his playfulness, his unexpected strength.

“You know what else blows my mind?” he asked.

“What?”

“Just other people’s lives generally. How fucking real they are sometimes. Like, take my great-granddad. He was in the war, right? He doesn’t think he was brave either because it was just what he had to do, you know?”

His voice had grown a little husky. I stroked his hair a bit, letting its wayward strands fall softly between my fingers, and then he began to speak again.

“We used to do Poppy Day together every year and—”

“Used to?”

“Yeah, he’s not well. We missed last year. Had to watch it on the telly. We’re not religious or anything, but we always used to go to a service with his army mates. And I’d get all kind of…tight inside…when I saw them, always one or two less than the year before, shuffling and limping and hobbling into the church, all these frail and, like, totally valiant old men, you know.”7

“I know.” I kissed him close-lipped and still tasted salt.

He sniffed rather wetly into my collar. “Once in Africa, Granddad’s whole unit got killed or scattered so there was just three of them left, starving and ragged and desperately trying to get back. But there was this minefield between them and the British Army, and they were all like, ‘Well this is it, curtains.’ But he was like, ‘No way. I’m a Jacobs; I’m going to be first against the wall when the Germans catch us.’ So he just, like, leads them over this…this fucking minefield, y’know. This kid from East London whose name nobody is going to remember but me.”

Oh God. Toby, my Toby. I held him tightly, though really, I was the one who felt held. Surrounded by him and all his deep, fierce love. “Toby…”

“Yeah?”

Yeah what indeed. “Let me take you to bed.”

He blinked, damp eyelashes scraping my neck. “Why are you even asking? Hell yeah.”

We untangled, stood—in my case rather stiffly. I held out my hand, and he took it, and we went upstairs together.

I stripped him, laid him out, and covered him with my body, and he lifted his knees and wrapped his legs around me. “I don’t think I’m ever going to do anything amazing.”

“You’re already amazing,” was the last coherent thing I said to him that night.

* * *

He woke me the next morning with a kiss, a cup of tea, and a plate of his inexplicably delicious scrambled eggs. We were both a little shy after the intimacies of the night before, but even that was pleasure of a kind. I’d shuffled away, bruised, almost satisfied, and slightly shamed, from so many semi-anonymous encounters that I could no longer differentiate them, but I couldn’t remember the last time it had been like this. If it should even have been possible to be thirty-seven and feel so new.

“Laurie?” Toby was sprawled naked on his stomach, his feet swinging in the air, the silverish sunlight pooling on his back and shining on the curve of his arse. He was entirely at ease, beautiful, some Wildean wet dream given form. Just for me. God. Was this my taste now? Hyacinth boys? Or could I say my taste was simply Toby?

“Yes?”

“What’s in the Bluebeard room?”

I should have expected it—he never let anything go—but, nevertheless, the question hit me hard enough to make the blood roar in my ears. “Nothing. I mean, almost nothing. Just some relics. It’s mostly empty.”

He propped his chin on his hand and eyed me slyly. “Mostly empty except for a single rose in a glass case, wilting slowly, petal by petal, and, like, waiting for you to learn to love again.”

For a moment I thought I was angry, but it turned out I was laughing—a slightly odd laugh, edged with pain. Was that really how he saw me? My love as abstract and ridiculous as a fairy tale? “Fine. You can look if you want.”

He bounced off the bed, an entirely different creature to the shivering boy who had clung to a towel and refused to let me see him, and claimed my dressing gown. Somewhat more reluctantly, I cast aside the Times, pulled on some trousers, and followed him down the hall.

The room was exactly as I’d left it. The first memory that surfaced was not of Robert, but the night I’d met Toby. When I’d stood here, shamefully weeping, for myself, and perhaps for Toby, if only I’d known it then.

Right now he looked confused, his face turned up to the skylight. “Um…I was kind of expecting…not like a dungeon…but…like something…”

“I told you there was nothing here. Once, it was a space we used. Now it’s just a room I don’t.”

“There’s that.” He pointed to the wooden chest shoved against the far wall. “It’s not got a body in it, ’as it, Mr. Todd?”

I wasn’t in the mood to be playful. “It’s full of things, Toby. Things I used to use with Robert, all right?”

“We don’t have to do this. I was just interested, but not if it’s going to make you pissy.”

God. I could hear the hurt in his voice. “No. No, it’s fine. Sorry. Here.” I crossed to the chest and threw it open, revealing…everything. Topped by the cuffs I’d given him when he’d asked to tie me up and I’d…let him. Even thinking about what he’d done to me that night made me hot with fear and humiliation and bliss.

Toby crept over, peered inside, and gasped. I hadn’t been particularly careful. I’d simply bundled up the ropes and chains and floggers and toys and dumped them into the box, and now they lay tangled up together, neglected, stripped of context, frankly peculiar. I’d been vaguely intending to throw them away for years, but somehow I’d managed not to. It hadn’t felt like I would be moving on. It’d felt like I would be giving up hope. Not for Robert, but for something.

“I don’t even know what half this stuff is,” said Toby. I couldn’t tell if he sounded horrified or awed.

“Well, you can ask me, and I’ll tell you.” I was so far away, so very far away, right now.

“You’ve got a lot of rope.”

“Yes. Robert… He…he liked it.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “That was your boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend.”

“You’ve got a serious bee in your bonnet about that word.”

“It’s facile. I mean, he was my friend, but he was my lover and my partner, the man I would have chosen to live my life with.”

Toby straightened and the lid of the chest fell shut with a muted crash. His face was oddly still, reflecting nothing, his eyes flat and stripped of their brightness. “You’re seriously not over him, huh? After…how long?”

“Six years, almost. Together for twelve.”

“You don’t think that’s edging on…y’know…pathetic.”

I was too weary to even be angry with him. “Probably, Toby. Very probably.”

There was a long silence.

“What? That’s it?” One of his arms flapped in a gesture of frustration so profound it was almost comical. “That’s all I get?”

I could have pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I did, and he was right. He deserved more. “It’s not him I’m not over. I mean, I loved him, and love doesn’t just go away when it becomes inconvenient. But it’s the loss of…a whole life, I think.”

I sat on top of the chest. Too late, Pandora.

After a moment, Toby squeezed on next to me, pulling up a knee and hugging it. “Plenty of people have multiple successful relationships. Some divorcées even get married again. Crazy shit like that.”

“No, I know that. But”—I patted the chest—“there’s this. Early on, I told myself it didn’t matter. It was just sex. So I went out, and I tried to meet people I could fall in love with. But it always came back to this.”

“Because,” he asked uncertainly, “you need it?”

I’d never liked to think of submission as need, because it stripped away too much agency and reduced to helpless compulsion everything I craved and wanted and thrilled to. What I needed was the choice to share these things, not simply to have them fulfilled. How long since I had thought about this? And longer still since I’d had to articulate it to someone else. But then, usually I didn’t offer, and people didn’t ask.

Except today I’d come as close as I ever could to offering, and Toby had asked.

“Because,” I explained, “it’s part of me, and if I deny it or ignore it, it feels like I’ve had to give something up for someone else. Even if it’s something that some people would consider, I don’t know, unimportant in the grand scheme of love and desire.”

He grabbed my hand and gently uncurled my fingers. “It’s not unimportant.”

“I think it’s almost incomprehensible sometimes. The truth is, somebody could be perfect for me in every way, but if he didn’t want me on my knees occasionally, then I couldn’t be happy with him.” I looked down at our hands, at Toby’s skinny fingers and knotty knuckles, his pared-down, slightly ragged nails. I could imagine them on my skin. “That’s when I got into the Scene, where everything is about this.” Another tap on the chest. “And I realised I was going to have to choose, so I did, but it was just another compromise really.”

He twisted round so he was facing me, and since it felt a little odd to be in profile to him, I turned too. Perhaps this had been his plan all along, because he slid his spare hand round to the back of my neck and pulled me close, his gaze intent on mine. “Is that how you see me? A compromise?”

I swallowed.

Yes. And no.

And maybe. And no.

No. But perhaps that was just the answer I wanted to give him, and it wasn’t fair to lie.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He still didn’t flinch. “Because you aren’t any sort of compromise to me.” He leaned in and kissed me lightly. “You’re perfect.”

I blushed. I actually blushed. All because of a chaste kiss and a childish compliment. “Nobody’s perfect, Toby.”

“Well, okay, if you ever felt like actually believing in me. In us. That’d be nice. And, like, someday you could maybe make it easy, instead of making me fight for every scrap of you like you’re the fucking Somme.”

His thumb swept back and forth over my wrist. I hadn’t realised I was sensitive there, but my pulse quickened at his touch. “So not perfect, then.”

“You could work on it.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t take much. And then I’d have a sexy, clever, kind, and interesting guy who’d be willing to love me back.” Before I could answer, or—more likely—protest, he went on. “It doesn’t have to be this or that with me. Because all that stuff and all this stuff”—he tapped his chest, missing his heart as usual—“they’re the same, y’know. They’re just reasons I’m into you.”8

I couldn’t afford to think about any of that right then. Toby had too many ways of making me naked. I shuddered suddenly, remembering being on my knees for him, remembering wearing chains for him, suffering for him, begging for him. The wild light in his eyes. The way I made him gasp and moan and come apart, just by being helpless. By being his.

“All right,” I said.

He let me go, laughing. “Someday you’re going to stop being the Somme and be…like…Zanzibar.”

“Um, I’ll last thirty-eight minutes?”

“You’ll just stop fighting.” He leaned in and nudged my nose with his. “You can occasionally and voluntarily say something nice to me, you know. I won’t expect you to marry me after.”

I kissed him instead. Concession, apology, promise.

Afterwards, he grinned at me. “Hey, since we’re here, can I have another look in the magic box?”

I couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so we climbed off, and I unleashed Toby. I stared out of the window at the grey morning sky as he rummaged, trying not to pay too much attention to the clinks and thumps.

“Laurie?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Will you come back? I don’t have a fucking clue about any of this.”

Which was how I ended up sitting on the floor with Toby, surrounded by sex toys like the most depraved Christmas morning imaginable. Most of it, thankfully, was self-explanatory and Toby was a child of the internet age, so it never quite became a show-and-tell. But there was no denying that it felt good—some impossible, shiver-inducing mixture of anticipation, fear, and pleasure—to watch him there and imagine myself at the mercy of Toby and all these things.

“This,” he announced, “looks like something you’d use in the kitchen.”

Oh God, help me. “It’s not something you use in the kitchen.”

“Like one of those really complicated things people buy for separating eggs that never work properly because that’s what hands are for.”

I gave him a look. “And verily the Lord beheld Adam, who He had fashioned in His image, and thought to Himself, ‘I had better give him some appendages for the separating of eggs,’ and thus he gave man two hands for that purpose, and, lo, eggs were separated, and it was good.”

Toby giggled—it was a giggle, there was no other way of describing it—and I smiled at him, helplessly pleased to have inspired it and how natural, how easy, it felt to be with him now I wasn’t constantly on my guard against any show of affection. Even if part of me still balked and called it foolishness.

“What’s it for, then?” he asked.

“It’s just a type of cock ring, Toby.”

He jangled the thing. “Cock rings, you mean.”

“They’re called ‘The Gates of Hell.’”

Suddenly he grinned at me, just like he had at Pervocracy: too big, too bright, too goofy, the tip of one incisor peeking out of the edges of his smile. “You’d look gorgeous in it. Can I put it on you?”

“What, now?”

“Easy, tiger. I mean, like…at some point.”

My cock hardened self-defeatingly, as if in masochistic expectation of future restriction. “You know you can.”

“Yeah, I know. I just like hearing you say it.” He traced the circumference of the widest ring with a finger. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes, but I don’t mind. If you like it.”

He tilted his head curiously. “Could you come with this on?”

“Probably. If you”—my careful tone wavered a little—“forced me.”

“I’d like that. I’d really like that. God.” He was a little flushed as he put the Gates of Hell back down, which filled me with the most terrible desire to kiss him, to please him, to hurt for him.

And to tell him all these things.

To admit that I’d always been Zanzibar.

“Now this”—he picked up something else—“this is definitely kitchenware. It looks like it’s one of the bits from under the sink.”

“It’s an anal hook.”9

“Jesus…does that…go where I think it does?”

“No, Toby, it goes—” I tried to think of some sarcastic alternative, but then I realised how pointlessly petulant it would sound. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

He ran a hand gently over the curving steel. “You’re into some seriously hardcore stuff.”

“I wouldn’t say into. More sort of own.”

“How am I supposed to live up to this?”

I reached out, pulled the damn thing off him, and cast it away. “You’re not.”

“Wow.” He frowned, his face pulling into a sequence of tight, hurt lines.

“That wasn’t supposed to sound negative. The thing is, it’s not what you do that matters, it’s”—I paused a moment, not quite sure what I was saying—“what it means.”10

Oh. Oh God.

In the rush to console him for my carelessness, I’d stumbled over a piece of truth that was fundamental to me, held so deep in my heart I’d forgotten it was there. On instinct alone, I’d tried to give it to Toby, and instead given it back to myself.

It’s not what you do, it’s what it means.

For a moment, I was dizzy with rediscovery. Then there was only pain. A flood of interchangeable memories accumulated over three years’ worth of hopeless, pointless hookups. Necessary at the time, but so very much not what I had ever wanted and nothing close to what I needed. And how hollow it seemed now that I was with Toby. A wretched past to bring to this beautiful boy.

I didn’t think I did anything or said anything, but there must have been some trace of what I felt reflected on my face or revealed by my body because suddenly Toby was in my lap, in my arms, kissing me.

“I’m so glad I met you,” I told him.

And I meant it. I meant it as deeply as I’d ever meant anything.