7.5
He turned up in good time the next Friday afternoon, carrying what looked like a bundle of clothes in a Tesco’s carrier bag. I leaned in to kiss him and recoiled, eyes watering.
“Good God, you smell like my father.” I sniffed cautiously, and wood and citrus assaulted my nostrils. “Why are you wearing Old Spice?”
He shuffled his feet. “I don’t know… Well…I thought it would be cool to have like a signature scent or something?”
“So you chose Old Spice?”
“It reminds me of my granddad. Also, wasn’t there adverts? Isn’t it cool again?”
I took his hand and pulled him into the downstairs bathroom. He didn’t protest as I tugged off his hoodie and his T-shirt and gave him a hasty sponge bath until he smelled, well, something like my boy again. “I’m sorry, Toby, but Old Spice will never be cool. And it really doesn’t suit you.”
“Oh.”
One very small monosyllable from a very small Toby. Fuck. I’d crushed him. If there was ever a time for disastrous stylistic and sartorial experiments, that time was being nineteen. “Maybe I overreacted. It just…took me by surprise.”
“No.” He hung his head. “You’re right. It’s weird on me. Maybe I put too much on.”
“Everybody’s skin and body chemistry react differently. You might just need to try a few things before you find one that’s right.” I smiled in what I hoped was an encouraging manner. “It’s a good idea, though.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. You know, if we left now, we’d probably have a bit of time before dinner, so…if you wanted…we could…”
“Yeah?”
“Go shopping?” I offered. “Try to find you something.”
“What? Both of us? Together? You and me?”
No, Toby, someone else.“Yes. Both of us. Together. You and me.”
He gave me a smile I’d never seen before. It was so shy it nearly broke my heart. “You’d do that with me? You wouldn’t mind?”
“No, not at all. It’ll be fun.” For some reason, the nakedness of his joy made me slightly awkward. “Also, it’s mainly selfishness on my part because I really can’t stand Old Spice.”
He scampered gleefully out of the bathroom. “Um, Toby…shirt…”
He came back for it, laughing, and then ran upstairs mysteriously to get “something,” but finally we had our coats on, our bags in hand, and we were ready to go. We took a taxi to Paddington because I wasn’t in any mood to wrestle the Tube, and despite Toby’s best if somewhat sheepish efforts to contribute, I got us two first class tickets to Oxford. Which was possibly excessive for an hour of travel and made Toby’s eyes get very wide indeed, but one of the advantages of having a well-paid job and very little free time was that certain minor luxuries—like travelling in moderate comfort—became incidental.
“Y’know,” said Toby, as we got ourselves settled on the train, “I’ve literally never travelled first class ever.”
“Well, it’s hardly the Orient Express.”
“No, but there’s leg room, arse room, and a table. Which”—he frowned—“now I think about it are pretty basic facilities.”
“Yes, first class isn’t so much about extravagance as not being completely miserable.”
He grinned at me over our decadent table. “All the same, I’m still excited.”
“They’ll probably bring you a complimentary cup of tea in a bit.”
“High life, here I come.”
As we pulled out of Paddington, Toby leaned over the arm of his seat and peered down the aisle. There was a suited gentleman with a laptop at the other end of the carriage, and a woman who seemed to be, if not asleep, definitely on the verge of it, but otherwise the place was ours. Quiet but for the clatter and rumble of the train.
I wasn’t sure if Toby would be a talkative traveller, but he seemed content with his phone, and that suited me perfectly. I liked the emptiness of travel, peace and blank time, and there was something unexpectedly pleasant in sharing it with Toby. A companion in my silence.
My own phone was full of diversions—books I could have read, emails I could have answered—but instead I let myself gaze out of the window, partly at the greenish-grey countryside, but mainly at Toby’s wavering reflection.
I usually rationed my looking, not wanting to reveal too much of my foolishness, my fondness, but now I indulged. Revelled, even. He looked different in daylight, paler and brighter and sharper all at the same time, as though he was finally fully in focus. I could even see traces of the man he would become in the set of his jaw and the curve of his cheek. But for now, he was just Toby, my Toby—blue-sky eyes and fading acne, his generous smile, his slightly retroussé nose.
He was slumped right down in his seat, looking every inch the stereotypical teenager, but then his stocking-clad foot slid purposefully up the side of my calf.
I froze, swallowed whatever undignified sound I might have made, and turned away from the window.
Toby’s face was the picture of innocence as his foot crept higher.
“Open your legs,” he mouthed. I shook my head frantically.
“Open. Your. Legs.” Every silent word deliberately framed. Command. Undeniable. Irresistible.
I did it. Of course I did. And hidden beneath the table, Toby spread me wider, caressing with surprisingly agile toes the inside of my thighs and…oh God…the shaft of my helplessly hardening cock.
His eyes gleamed, intent on mine.
“Tickets from Paddington, please.”
I stared up at the ticket inspector, wordless, mindless. Toby stilled but did not pull away. Heat gathered between my legs, heat and the promise—or the threat—of his touch.
“Tickets from Paddington, please, sir.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
My hands were shaking so badly Toby had to help me with my wallet. He offered up the tickets with a sweet and effortless smile. The inspector smiled back as she put the little paper stubs into her clicker, punched, and returned them.
And I felt…naked, Toby’s flushed and flustered creature, as though whoever I was the rest of the time—a careful, controlled, and competent man—was just a skin I wore.
“Would you like a complimentary tea or coffee?”
Toby was still smiling up at her. “I’d love some tea.”
The words blurred about me. Faraway sound. Close to meaningless.
“What about you, sir?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Orange juice? Water?”
“I’m really fine.”
I couldn’t hear my own voice properly. Did I sound impatient? Normal? As though I were nothing but a single point of contact, a star going supernova where Toby’s foot was resting?
She nodded, and continued down the aisle. Tickets from Paddington, tickets from Paddington, please…
As soon as she was gone, Toby grinned. Wriggled his toes. And I let out a long, slow breath that might as well have been a scream.
He got his complimentary tea, and biscuits he picked from a basket, deliberating endlessly—wickedly—between chocolate brownie cookies and raisin oatmeal crunch. As though I wasn’t his captive, leashed by his lightest touch.
He tormented me nearly all the way to Oxford, holding me on the most maddening edge of desire, never enough, never too much. Watching my face for the reactions I couldn’t always suppress and occasionally moving against me more explicitly—a firm nudge to keep me spread, the arch of his foot slipping beneath my balls—just to make me blush or gasp or shake.
He made me powerless, desperate, debauched. His suffering plaything.
I loved it.
He pulled away when the driver announced we were approaching Oxford, which gave me a little time to recover what was left of my mind and my dignity, but even so, my legs felt absurdly shaky as I descended to the platform.
Toby bounced after me. Not a care in the whole damn world.
We could have taken a taxi, but we were in good time, and I’d promised Toby shopping. He stopped for a moment on the steps of the station.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Is this it?”
“Not what you were expecting?”
“I thought it was the city of dreaming spires, not, like, a really bad traffic junction and a random bronze bull.”
I was used to Oxford, but Toby was right. This corner of it wasn’t particularly impressive. The squat grey station, the mess of the Botley Road, the Said Business School with its sandstone aspirations.
“That bull was nearly Margaret Thatcher, so don’t knock it.”14
He gave me a slightly blank look—as though he’d heard the name, but couldn’t place it, or remember if it was important. Which was, frankly, terrifying.
“Ready to go?” I asked, so I didn’t have to think about it.
He nodded, and we set off, past the random bronze bull and the really bad traffic junction, heading towards the centre of town where grey surrendered everything to gold and green.
Toby was big-eyed and eager. Adorable. I wondered what it would be like if we actually went travelling together. Somewhere a little farther afield than sixty miles up the M40. I didn’t care where. How good it would be, just to be with him. To have his silences and his touches, his cruelty and his joy.
Foolishness. It was all foolishness.
Robert and I had kept intending to go away together—for twelve years we’d intended—but we were both too busy and life kept getting in the way. And here I was daydreaming of running off who-knew-where (Prague, Venice, Paris) with a nineteen-year-old I’d known for barely a handful of months.
“I lived down here for a bit when I was a student,” I said, as though I could drown out my own thoughts by talking. “My bedroom looked directly out over the train tracks.”
“Room with a view, huh?”
“Actually, I really liked it. Especially at night, when it was just moving lights and the shadows of people. Gold walls and green grass are nice, but the railway used to make me feel part of something.”
“What, like, industrialisation?”
I smiled. “Life.”
“Aww, man.” Toby’s tone was strangely exasperated.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I fucking love you.”
“Thank you.”
He snorted. “That’s slightly better than ‘all right’…so improving steadily.”
“Well, what do you expect me to say?”
“‘I love you too, Toby’ is kinda traditional. Would be nice.”
“You can’t nag someone into falling in love with you.”
He gave a sad little smile. “Yeah, I noticed.”
We walked up George Street, between the interchangeable pizzerias, in not-quite-comfortable silence. It was probably fortunate we were not in Prague, Venice, or Paris.
At last, Toby tugged on my arm. “It’s just you let me feel you up all the way here, even though it looked like you were going to actually die, and then you said all that stuff like you’d peeled it off your soul just for me. And my heart got so, like, big and heavy and squishy that I thought it might literally explode if I didn’t tell you I loved you. Don’t you ever feel like that even a little bit?”
“I–I don’t know.” It was a cowardly answer. And it wasn’t even true.
“Okay.”
God. That was his crushed voice. “I mean, yes, sort of. A bit. I mean, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But that’s not love. It’s just happiness and…and the moment.”
“And that,” said Toby triumphantly, “is just semantics.”15
I shoved him, and his little grinning face, into Debenhams, and we rode the escalator up to the cosmetics section. The perfumes and colognes were arranged in long, brightly lit aisles, separated by designer.16
Toby turned bewildered eyes up to mine. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Truthfully, neither did I, but I set off as though I did, and soon we lost all our inhibitions, picking up outlandishly decorated bottles largely at random, spraying and sniffing, and bickering. Toby was fatally drawn to heavy, woody musks, which he was at least self-aware enough to recognise were wrong for him.
“I’m different in my head,” he explained, reluctantly setting down something redolent of sandalwood and cedar. He went up on tiptoes, leaning into me, and inhaling deeply against my neck, before I pushed him away in case we got spotted canoodling like teenagers in the middle of Debenhams. “What do you use? I like that.”
“Uh, nothing. That’s just soap and me.” I grabbed for the nearest bottle and shoved it at him, hoping to distract him. His merciless attentions on the train had left me…reactive. “What about this? Cool Water.”
He held out his hand and pointed at an unscented spot on the back of his wrist. We went through the now familiar ritual of spray, shake, wait, and sniff.
“Actually”—surprise and relief, along with peppermint, orange blossom, and sandalwood rolled over me—“that’s quite pleasant. Inoffensive.”
“Is that how you see me? Quite pleasant and inoffensive?”
“How about this, then?”
It was childish of me, but I handed him a tester of Vera Wang’s Princess, in its purple crystal, heart-shaped bottle. Laughing, he pushed me out of the way as if intending to put it back on the shelf. Then spun, at the last second, enveloping me in a sticky-sweet mist of sugar and flowers.
“You little bastard.”
He blew me a kiss, utterly unrepentant, and disappeared into the next aisle. Soon we’d lost all ability to smell or recall what we’d smelled previously. We were sense drunk. Slightly giggly.
“I liked one of these… I’m sure I liked one of these…” Toby was running his nose up and down his bare arm like the world’s most peculiar code cracker. “Was it Eternity?”
“Or the Givenchy?”
“No, you said that one smelled like I’d been lying on the floor of a public lavatory and a nice attendant had poured disinfectant on me.”
“Right. Um. How about Cool Water?”
“But I don’t want to be pleasant and inoffensive!” he wailed.
Oh I was laughing again. “Believe me, you’re in no danger.”
We’d run out of Toby, so I sprayed the sample from the next bottle onto my own wrist. It was too sweet for me, floral but not feminine, the top notes deepened by a hint of those woody base notes he loved so much, lending it balance and just a hint of machismo. “Toby. This one.”
I lifted my hand for him, and he breathed the air over my pulse point, his eyes closing as he savoured. He hadn’t even touched me, but somehow, it was shockingly sensuous. I might have gasped. At last, he looked up again. “Yeah. That one.”
I dabbed a little against his neck, to make sure it wasn’t going to react badly with his skin, but it didn’t. It suited him perfectly—sweet and dark and spicy. I glanced surreptitiously around us and stole a quick, clumsy kiss.
“You do know,” he said, as I pulled back, “the Sexual Offences Act was passed in the sixties, right? We’re allowed.”
I blushed. The truth was, Robert and I had not been particularly public with our affections. But I was touch-hungry around Toby, touch-hungry and silly, as though no years stood between us at all. Seeking some kind of physical distraction, I picked up the biggest bottle of Burberry London that they had and looked around for a till point.
“Uh…uh…” Toby’s hands fluttered. “I can’t… I don’t need… The small one’s great.”
“It’s on me.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well…because I’m broke and I can’t—”
“Then it makes sense for me to be the one paying, doesn’t it?”
“I guess…” He scuffed at the ground, hands buried deep in his pockets, hair falling hopelessly into his eyes. “Um. Thank you. Nobody’s…um—”
“You can make it up to me later.” Oh God. “I mean, not in a prostitute way.”
“I wouldn’t mind.” His eyes shone like the bottles that surrounded us. “It’s kind of hot, actually.”
“I’m ignoring you now and going to pay for this.”
He sidled up too close, his hip knocking against me. “So, am I like your kept boy?”
“Stop it, Toby.”
He was giggling as we approached the counter. I put the bottle down and pulled out my wallet. “Just this, please.”
To my surprise, the cashier—a pretty young woman with soft brown eyes—smiled at us. Warmed and a little flustered, I smiled back.
“Hey”—Toby’s hip nudged me again—“this was really nice of you.”
“He’s very generous, your dad.” The cashier’s words bloomed in the silence like jellyfish.
I felt the upward curve of my mouth turn rigid.
“Oh my God!” Toby was actually laughing. “He’s not my dad! He’s my boyf—errr…lover.”
I was starting to wish I hadn’t objected so strenuously to boyfriend. Lover sounded particularly seedy when I was holding my credit card.
And Toby was still talking. “He’s thirty-seven, I’m nineteen, so while he could technically be my father, he would have had me irresponsibly young.”
The machine jammed on my receipt. I stared at it ferociously because there were no more smiles for us.
“And also,” finished Toby, “he’s gay. So. No.”
I’d thought Get out and run away were the only words left in my universe, but then I heard myself say, “It’s very rude to make assumptions, Toby. I could have had you with a lesbian.”
I put my wallet away, picked up the bag, and walked off, Toby pressed tight to my side. The ridiculous boy would probably have tried to hold my hand if I’d had one free.