seventeen
David entered the farmhouse to find Ramon had disappeared into the darkness, taking the torch.
So he stood there and waited. After half a minute or so, several overheads flickered on at once.
A single fluorescent tube above him glowed and then stammered into light, illuminating a huge room.
He saw the door behind him, the one they’d entered, was simply a postern set in a much larger leaf of two doors that rose nearly to the ceiling, all constructed of thick oak beams. The roof was high vaulted plaster, from which paint was peeling, hanging in ragged strips.
Church pews, sofas and low tables were scattered throughout the space, suggesting some attempt at making it a living room area.
Ahead, at the far end of the space, a stone spiral staircase rose to an upper level, and thick timber doors were set in the walls on each side of the room.
In the corner under the spiral staircase was a small hearth.
Though the spring evening outside was mild, it was chilly in here, and David shivered in his thin tee-shirt.
Ramon entered from one of the doorways to the left, and went around turning on a couple of lamps, before switching off the overhead fluorescent. Instantly the room seemed warmer, but as if sensing some unspoken protest, he said:
“Later, I’ll make a fire, to help the place warm up. But don’t worry, it’s still too cold to spend much time here at this time of year. Come through.”
And he crossed the space to open another big door to the right.
Up a step, and over a wide flagstone threshold, David discovered a spacious, high-ceilinged kitchen.
Extending across the right-hand wall, on the same wall as the house’s main entrance, were a row of three windows.
The depths of their sills showed that the building’s outer walls were a good half-yard thick.
Underneath them ran counter tops, a stove top, and a shallow marble sink that looked as if it had been hand-carved.
The taps above it were of copper, fixed to long copper pipes that snaked across the length of the wall in random zigzags before disappearing into a hole that had been drilled through the thick masonry.
At the other end of the kitchen, a huge fireplace occupied the far wall, so large they could have parked Ramon’s four-wheel-drive inside it.
It was protected by a chimney so massive, its mantelpiece consisted of a single broad oak beam that crossed the room at shoulder height from one wall to the other.
The kitchen was divided into two halves: a large round dining table with eight or ten chairs around it dominated the kitchen end; while a collection of mismatched armchairs clustered around the fireplace at the other.
“This is where we spend most of our time.”
“We?”
“It used to be my parents’, plus my sister and I. Mum and Dad both passed nine and ten years ago now. My sister sometimes comes up here with her family, but mostly it’s just me.”
“Sorry… about your parents.”
Ramon shrugged. “They loved this place. I do too. I come down when I can. To ride Ferro, mainly.”
As he spoke, he was turning on lamps and turning off the garish fluorescent that had first lit up the kitchen.
Then he busied himself at the hearth, laying a fire.
David looked around. The walls held artworks, mainly watercolors and prints, while pottery ceramics dotted the surfaces, probably done by some family member.
“Who’s the artist?”
“That was Mum. She liked her pottery… and painting. Dad was an inventor.”
“And you became a policeman?”
Ramon smiled. “Everyone says that.”
He now had a fire going in the hearth, and crossing to a big old wooden dresser, he pulled out a bottle of wine from its lower cupboard.
“Bring us glasses.” He nodded his head towards a shelf where crockery and glassware were stacked, while back at the table he attacked the bottle with a corkscrew.
David chose two large elegant wineglasses that almost matched, as nothing quite did in the whole house. Bringing them to Ramon, he said:
“It’s an amazing house.”
“You haven’t seen the half of it. It’s a masia, an old farmhouse, built in 1673, the earliest part. The rest in the eighteenth century. My parents bought it when we were kids for next to nothing, and spent our childhood fixing it up.”
He handed David a glass and took one himself.
“Salut!”
David sipped the red wine, which was full-bodied and strong on tannins, with an aftertaste of flint and iron.
“Wow!”
“It’s from the Montsant region, just upriver.”
Ramon’s eyes were on him in their black intensity. So what now? It must be past three in the morning. Were they going to have sex? He was tired, but he would… though it had been a long day. Not knowing what to do, he said:
“It must have been a cool childhood.”
Inadvertently he’d slipped into English, though up to that point they’d been speaking in Catalan. But Ramon replied in fluent English:
“It was: riding, the beach, helping Dad and Mum work on the house. What about yours?”
“At Ravenscragg? Horses, always horses. Everything was horses. I loved it. Our Owen, my brother, not so much.”
David saw that Ramon was on the point of saying something and then stopped himself.
He also saw that Ramon was at a loss, not quite knowing how to proceed.
With his heart hammering in his chest, David put his wineglass down, crossed the few feet separating them, put his arms around him and kissed him.
Ramon kissed him back, as with one hand he also placed his glass on the table, before his powerful arms wrapped around David.
They stayed like that, just kissing, for a long time. Finally, Ramon broke off to say:
“If I take you upstairs, the bed’ll be freezing.”
David’s voice was hoarse when he tried to speak:
“Can… Can we stay down here?”
“OK. Wait here. Clear the chairs away from the hearth. Make a space.”
Then he was gone. David took his wine toward the fire.
Putting it down on a low table, he began to drag the heavy armchairs back from the hearth, leaving what he judged was a double-bed-sized space before it.
Then Ramon had returned, his arms loaded with bedding.
Dumping it on one of the armchairs, he unrolled a thin, self-inflating air mattress and let it blow itself up.
“This is what we used to do as kids,” he chuckled, taking a sip of wine. “We called it camping.”
David helped him spread the blankets and duvet on top of the air mattress.
When it was done, they stood looking at each other for a moment.
They were still fully dressed from outside, as the temperature inside the masia when they entered had been colder than outside.
But now, of a single mind, watching each other, they stripped off their jackets.
David kicked off his shoes and strode across the mattress to where Ramon was standing doubled up, struggling with his lace-up shoes.
David pulled at the tee-shirt on his back, pulling it off and over his head, causing Ramon to overbalance and stumble into his arms. Then they were kissing again, even as Ramon struggled with David’s tee-shirt, while continuing to kiss him.
Finally he wrenched it off over his head, but by that time David had Ramon’s belt open and his flies down.
He tugged at Ramon’s jeans, pulling them down his thighs, even while he dropped to his knees on the mattress.
As Ramon kept pulling at his shirt, he let his arms be raised, allowing the garment to slip off.
Already his face was in Ramon’s crotch, pressed against the black boxer briefs he’d got to know already in the stables up in Barcelona.
Once his hands were free of the shirt, he brought them up to the elastic waistband, pulling them down around his thighs.
And there again was the cock and balls he loved so much. He opened his mouth.
David felt warm, and held. He felt as he had when he was a small boy, tucked up comfy in bed.
Only here he was, lying on his right side, cocooned into another’s warm body, Ramon’s.
He pushed back slightly and felt the hot lump of Ramon’s sex against his ass.
Ramon’s right arm lay beneath his neck like a pillow, and his other arm lay across David’s torso, under his left arm, hugging his chest tightly.
He felt Ramon’s hot breath on the nape of his neck.
He was asleep and his slow, even exhalations—not quite snoring—tickled the hairs on David’s nape.
They had not lasted long the night before.
David had started where they had left off in the stables, but he hadn’t been sucking long before he became aware of Ramon’s snores.
The guy had fallen asleep on him! It had been a long drive down.
Instead of feeling offended, Snorting to himself—were his blowjob skills that bad?
—David had crawled up and into Ramon’s embrace, pulling the blankets over both of them.
Then they had fallen asleep, blissfully enwrapped in the heat from the other’s body as the fire beside them collapsed into glowing embers.