Chapter Thirty
Marcello
“Wow, you really do have all the gear,” I look Kris up and down. Which doesn’t take long. She’s barely an inch over five feet, has her dark hair cropped short and is wearing a simple but serious-looking black set of matching cycling shorts and zip-up top.
“And I do actually have an idea too,” she says with a glint in her eye. She rests her bike against her hip as she puts her racing helmet back on.
“Since when? I had no idea you were into cycling.”
“Last year. Met a woman who was into it and decided to join a beginners’ group at a cycling club so I had something to talk to her about.”
“Oh, Kris, that’s very—”
She holds her hand up at me. “Don’t say it. She ghosted me after the first date.”
“Jesus. Ouch.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t my best date, but interestingly also not my worst ever.”
“Was that me?”
“Actually no. Although I don’t really remember us dating. I just remember a lot of red wine, a long conversation about how Channel Four should bring back Football Italia and you didn’t leave my house until I kicked you out on Sunday night.”
“That sounds familiar.” I smile at the vague and admittedly quite blurry memory. There was a lot of red wine. “So, dating not getting any better?”
Kris’ expression changes. Not shutting down or closing off exactly, but I am not surprised when she ends my line of questioning very quickly.
“You could say that,” she mumbles. “Come on. Clip in.” She swings her leg over her bike and is on it before I can pull my underwear out of my arse crack.
Maybe that article advising you to not wear underwear under these ridiculous tri-suits was onto something.
“Where are we going?” I ask when I finally catch up with her.
It’s nine o’clock at night. The sun is on its way down and the sky is a warm orangey-pink that only summer evenings can be.
But we didn’t choose this time to go for a ride because of the sunset; it’s because of the greatly reduced traffic of South London.
“Richmond Park and back. I’ll have you home in one piece by ten-thirty at the latest.”
“An hour and a half with you. Maybe you’ll actually have to spill the details about your love life,” I wonder out loud. “I know there’s a story there.”
“You first,” she says in her short and sharp tone that I know others would bristle at but it just makes me smile.
“The last text I got from you on the topic was your coming out message. Congratulations by the way and welcome to the alphabet mafia. We don’t require loyalty payments for protection but we do expect you to wear rainbows, challenge gender norms and fight heteronormativity at every available opportunity. ”
“Sounds… fun.”
“So, how is it going with… what’s his name again?”
“Giles. His name is Giles,” I reply. Even saying his name makes me smile and annoyingly, Kris chooses that moment to glance at me so she witnesses it too.
“Oh, shit. You like him.”
“Well, yes, that’s kind of how this all got started.”
“No, I mean, you really like him.”
There’s a slight lurching in my stomach, like somebody’s jumping up and down in it, but it’s not unpleasant. Oh, wait. Are they butterflies?
“I do yes,” I admit.
“That’s fucking awesome!” Kris calls out over the rumble of a passing Double Decker bus on the other side of the road. “I just thought you wanted to get your dick wet.”
“Kris, honestly…”
“It has been a while.”
“Oh, I didn’t realise you were counting each day of my celibate streak.”
“I gave up after two years.”
“It wasn’t…” But I trail off because maybe it was more than two years. “You don’t think that that’s why I’m now… you know… with a man. Because it’s just been so long and no woman will have me?”
Despite the traffic, I can hear Kris’ tut. “Don’t say that. Plenty of women would be lucky to have you. And I say that with some obvious authority.”
“I’m not sure how authoritative your authority is, considering I turned you gay.”
“You did not turn me gay! I was gay. You were my beard. And it wasn’t personal. You weren’t the first, you just happened to be the last and as I’ve said before, I think you were such a comfortable and safe space for me to finally admit to myself what I’ve known all along.”
I don’t reply immediately. I’m wondering if that’s what Giles is to me. Was he the safe space I needed to realise things about myself that maybe I’ve known all along?
“So what are you and this Giles then?” Kris interrupts my thoughts. “Friends with benefits? Lovers? Dating? Partners?”
Each label hits me like a precisely fired arrow. And each one prompts a quick Yes from me. The yeses getting louder and louder.
“We’re still just training buddies and, you know, having sex lessons.”
“Even though you have feelings for him?”
“It’s only been two weeks. Two weeks and three lessons,” I tell her but even I can’t believe that’s all it’s been. Those lessons have felt like so much more.
“You didn’t answer my question. You have feelings for him, so surely it’s more than that for you.”
I swallow and catch my breath. We’re going at a fair pace but I’m not sure my chest feels tight because of the exercise.
“But he doesn’t have feelings for me,” I state. “Not like that, anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because…” I think about Tony and his perfect hair and lithe body. I think about Jeremy and his sculpted physique and supermodel bone structure. “I’m not his type.”
“Have you asked him that?”
The suggestion stuns me so much I wobble on my bike nearly veering out of the already pitifully narrow cycle lane.
“I don’t need to. I know what Giles’ type is.”
“So why did he agree to give you sex lessons?”
“Because…” I pause again but no quick answer materialises. Until it does, making complete sense. “Because he’s a nice guy. A really nice guy.”
Another traffic-defying tut from Kris. “Nice guys don’t suck dick or whatever it is you’ve been doing just because they’re nice. There must be more to it.”
“Kris, he has changed his whole gym schedule for me too. And he gives up his Saturday mornings to go running with me. He is genuinely that nice.”
“I’m not convinced. Anyway, how did you even ask him to give you sex lessons if he’s the reason you wanted them in the first place?”
My suit suddenly feels uncomfortably tight. “I told him I thought I was feeling attracted to another man I’d met.”
“But not him? Left up here.” She sticks her arm out and I do the same.
“No, not him.” I follow her around the corner before catching up again. “A man at my swimming training.”
“And is there a man at your swimming training?”
“There are lots of men at my swimming training. And they’re all very friendly. Women too, of course—”
“But do you fancy any of them?” Kris cuts me off.
“No,” I admit after a beat.
“It’s really only Giles that you’re attracted to?”
“I mean, I saw a photo of Tom Hardy this morning in a magazine in the café and that may have stirred some feelings in my nether regions.”
“Ew. But the whole reason you wanted to figure out if you were queer, that all started with Giles, right? Not some man at your swimming training.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” I had hoped I’d feel relief at coming clean to Kris but I feel almost the opposite. I feel the full weight of the predicament I’ve gotten myself in, and I feel a not-insignificant amount of shame about that too.
“So this super nice guy thinks that you’re just using his body to figure out if you’re queer or not. Have you told him that you’re pretty certain that you are?”
“Not in as many words,” I mumble as a black cab beeps at us because apparently us cycling in a bike lane is a problem for him.
“Pardon?” Kris shouts at me.
“Not exactly!”
“And is he really completely happy about your arrangement? He doesn’t seem confused by it at all?”
I think back to Sunday, to watching him cleaning his windows like a man-possessed.
“I think so,” I lie.
“Rather him than me,” she says.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, firstly, I wouldn’t agree to give somebody sex lessons, but even if I did, I would want to know if the whole reason that those sex lessons were happening was because my so-called pupil has feelings for me not some imaginary guy at swimming training.”
“He’s not imaginary. There actually is a man at swimming who wears yellow Speedos and—”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Marcello?”
“Fine. Point taken. So you think I should tell him I have feelings for him?”
“Yes, or stop these silly sex lessons. You know you’re queer and you seem surprisingly comfortable with that, which is brilliant by the way.
How you’ve managed to dodge a decade of internalised homophobia and comphet, I don’t know, but I’m happy you have.
So just be honest with him. Or stop the lessons and go find someone who actually wants to be with you and isn’t doing it for karma or whatever. ”
“I don’t think Giles is doing it for karma…
” But then I think about what I read about OCD on Sunday night.
It’s all about doing things in order to avoid what feels like a real threat.
What if Giles has told himself he has to train with me, do the Sunday meet-ups with me because if he doesn’t something bad will happen?
What if it’s that sense of obligation that has him locked into an arrangement that he otherwise wouldn’t dream of doing?
I shake my head as if to shift these thoughts and again my bike wobbles.
“You okay?” Kris calls out. She’s inching ahead of me now.
“Yeah, just realising what a mess I’ve got myself into.”
“It’s not a mess that can’t be tidied up,” Kris responds and then as a white van cruises by so close I feel the air change around us, she sticks up a middle finger. “Eat shit sonofabitch!”
“I hope you don’t talk to your own current crush like that,” I say, lifting off the saddle and pumping my legs to keep up.
“Why would you think I talk to her like—” Her mouth snaps shut.
“Ha! Got you! There is someone! Now spill!”
And much to my surprise, Kris does indeed tell me all about her neighbour who she thinks she has feelings for.
It’s a conversation that takes us all the way to Richmond Park and most of the way around it.
It’s a conversation that we only stop when both of us are too tired to talk on the way home.
But that conversation, nor the silence that follows it, doesn’t stop me thinking about Giles and wondering if it should now be me apologising to him and coming clean once and for all.