Seven #3
There’s a night later that summer I don’t write down for years, because some scenes you have to be sure of before you trust them to a page, and this one took being sure of.
An ordinary evening, his flat, the window open on the heat, a plate of something going cold because we’d stopped caring about it two kisses ago.
He had the drawer open before either of us had our shoes off, which is how we did it then: the strip of foils and the bottle out onto the mattress by his knee, in plain sight, so that nothing later had to be gone looking for at the one moment nobody wants to be looking for anything.
I’d made that rule too, in the same flat voice as the others, and he’d taken it the same way — no ceremony, nobody’s eyes going anywhere, just the small dry click of the cap loosened once and set down where a hand could find it in the dark.
Bare wasn’t on the table that summer and wouldn’t be for a long while, and when it did arrive it arrived the way everything in this does: as a sentence I said out loud, on a date I could tell you, and not as a thing that happened because a drawer was six inches too far away.
I’m on my back with my shirt gone and his mouth working down my sternum, unhurried, the stubble dragging, and I feel the exact moment he reaches the edge of the map, the place where the rules live, and I feel him remember them, feel the question arrive in the pause of his mouth without him having to lift his head and put it into words.
Touch it like everything else, I’d told him, months ago, at a table. Don’t touch it like it’s the point.
‘Tonight it can be the point.’ Into the dark.
And I felt him go still, the good still, the one that means he’d heard the size of what I’d handed him, because he knew the rule, he’d kept the rule, he’d never once got it wrong, and here I was rewriting it live, and he understood that the rewrite was the whole of the gift.
He didn’t say anything clever. He never does. He moved down and took me in his mouth, my cock, the whole soft-hard weight of it, the foreskin easing back under his tongue, and the sound that came out of me wasn’t one I’d have let a stranger hear.
Here’s what nobody warns you about being the one who always steers: how much you don’t know you’re carrying until someone you trust takes it off you.
I set the pace at the site because setting the pace is how I keep the ground under a thing.
In his bed that night I did the opposite, on purpose, and let my hands go loose in his hair instead of tight, let him find his own rhythm, let the current run the way it wanted instead of the way I’d have approved.
He worked me slow and then not slow, the flat of his tongue, the wet, one hand splayed on my hip, not holding me down, just having a hand on me, checking I was still set.
He didn’t narrate me. That’s the thing. Every man before him in that exact position had a commentary running, in his head or out of his mouth, a verdict on what he was doing and what I was, and Ron just did it, mouth and hand and the whole of his attention, no voiceover, no favour being done, because he’d stopped a long time ago needing me to be any particular shape for this to work.
He needed me to be the one he was watching. That was all it had ever taken.
I came in his mouth with both hands finally fisted in his hair and his name coming out of me in a register I keep for no one, and he took it, stayed with it through the shudder, came up only once I’d gone quiet.
Afterwards he fetched the flannel from the bathroom without being asked, warm, run under the tap, and cleaned me up with the same unhurried competence he brings to everything, and I let him, which is its own surrender, being tended by a man who’s learned your body like a trade.
The window still open, the plate still cold, him settling back down the bed, an arm over me, heavy, sure.
‘Alright?’ Not fishing, checking the set.
‘Yeah.’ It came out wrecked and I didn’t mind. ‘Yeah. That was,’ and I didn’t finish it, and I didn’t need to, because the one person I’d have finished it for had already read it off my face in the dark.
He told me the rest of it that summer, in pieces, the way he tells anything true: sideways, late, and never when I’m braced for it.
We were in bed, the good tired, and I said something offhand about the first night I texted him, Night, Ronan, how it took me fourteen months to work up to two words and a name. He went quiet in the way that means he’s deciding whether to hand something over.
‘Fourteen months,’ he said. ‘That’s nothing.’
‘Cheers.’
‘No. I mean.’ He turned onto his back, looked at the ceiling, easier than looking at me for this one.
‘I clocked you before that. Long before. First time I came up to see Ewan, two years back, near enough. Went in that bar because it was by his and it did a decent pint, and you were at the corner table with about four notebooks and a pencil in your teeth, and I,’ he stopped, started again, ‘I couldn’t tell you what I ordered.
Stood at that bar and forgot the English language. ’
I didn’t say anything. I’ve built a whole career out of knowing when to shut up and let a person keep going.
‘Every time I came to Manchester after that, I went back. Told myself it was the pint. Wasn’t the pint.
You were always there, same table, writing, and I’d sit where I could see you and not say a word, for months.
Months, Celyn. Like a coward. Couldn’t cross a bar floor.
Me. I’ve walked live sites with the roof half off. ’
Here’s the thing I never got the measure of, and told him only the half of: I knew he looked.
I said so in the first weeks, with a half-smile on, and enjoyed the saying.
What I hadn’t costed was the length of it, or what it took out of him.
Fourteen months of me at that bar, congratulating myself on my patience, my craft, on being the quiet perceptive one who sees what a hundred other people miss, and the whole superior stillness of it was going on three tables from a man doing the exact same thing to me, and hating himself for it just as quietly.
Two cowards. One bar. Each of us certain we were the only one paying attention.
‘I asked the barman your name,’ he said.
‘In the end. Couldn’t manage hello, but I managed that.
Said, the person at that table, do they come here a lot.
And he looked at me like he’d been waiting weeks for somebody to finally ask.
’ A pause. ‘Said they straight back to me, no blinking. First time anyone handed me the word for you and I didn’t have to work out what to do with it.
It just fit. You just fit. Before I had a single fact about you except red nails and a pencil and the way you never once looked up for anyone. ’
Red nails. Of course it was the red. I’d worn it that whole stretch because red was the bottle I reached for when I needed the nerve to be looked at, and never once clocked that the looking had already started, that the colour I put on to feel brave was the exact colour that had walked a straight man face-first into the question of his own life.
I’ve thought about the symmetry of it more than I’ve told him, because the symmetry undoes me every time I take it out and look at it. I had a whole theory of myself built on being the observer, and the loneliness of it was a price I’d decided I was mature enough to pay.
There’s a version of that story that’s tragic, two lonely people wasting fourteen months.
I don’t read it that way. I read it as the only proof I’ve ever had that I wasn’t broken in some way particular to me.
The watching, the not-approaching, the wanting filed under later, I’d always half believed those were my personal defect, the damage a specific childhood in a specific valley did to a specific kid.
And then here was a Manchester builder with a completely different life doing all of it too, for love, the same as me, and it turned out the thing I’d carried as a private wound was just what wanting looks like on anyone taught to be careful with it. That’s not tragedy. That’s company.
I didn’t tell him that either. I just moved closer, put my head on a chest that had finally stopped bracing, and let the two watchings become one, at last, in a bed above a charity shop, two years late and exactly on time.