by Riley Meyer
I could see what was going to happen. Jason would be steering the boat at the bow (like the Cambridge man I am, he announced), Tom and Maura would be together up front, and I’d be left solo-ing it in the stern.
Maybe I should just go home.
“Rafe, come on!” Maura slapped her knees as though I was a dog.
The other guys didn’t say anything. I knew they couldn’t care less if I came or not.
Maura seemed to read my mind.
“Please, Rafe. I want yer to come too.”
I knew she thought that now, but would she be saying that when she had Tom’s tongue down her throat? The thought of my quiet room and my soft bed suddenly seemed very appetising.
A voice behind me said:
“Room for one more?”
I turned, heart already in my throat. I knew that voice.
Mark stood there, chest rising and falling quickly—he must have run over—and his cheeks were red from the effort. He caught my eyes for a second and then looked away, embarrassed.
I nodded like an idiot, smiling, unable to find any words that didn’t sound stupid. I clambered into the boat without anything approaching elegance.
As I lowered myself into my seat, I caught Maura, who had turned all the way around, sending me an aren’t-you-a-naughty-boy look which I chose to ignore.
Mark followed after me onto the boat, keeping low and making it look easy. He didn’t sit opposite me as I’d expected, but right next to me on the same bench, our thighs against each other in the middle.
Fuck.
“Push off!” Jason called, brandishing the quant.
Mark turned, and I held my breath as he reached over and along me in order to grab the planks of the pier. His biceps flexed as he first drew us back towards the shore to get traction and then he pushed off with all his force, letting out a grunt that vividly recalled the sounds he made when I was sucking his dick outside the Bodleian.
The punt slipped through the water without resistance, Mark and I using the leverage of the boats around us to head towards the arch under Magdalen bridge.
Jason dropped the pole into the water, not accidentally as I’d first assumed, but as part of what turned out to be a complicated dance of pushing off the riverbed and then using the pole as a rudder to steer the punt.
We picked up speed and passed under the bridge, leaving the boat for a moment in total darkness.
Maura let out an excited squeal and I felt Mark’s left leg full against my right leg as he relaxed into his seat.
I looked at him, but under the shadow of the bridge I couldn’t make out anything more than the smudge of his outline. As the boat slipped out from the bridge, though, the strong factions of his face took shape in the moonlight. Half in shadow, half in the silver light, he turned to me, a questing look in those dark eyes.
“Nice of you to join us,” I said, trying to sound cool and ironic but ending up somewhere closer to tremulous.
He nodded his assent, non-committal. I could almost hear the cogs of his mind whirring.
I smiled, my body thrilling at the sensations around me: the heat of Mark’s thigh offset by the cool air of the water rising from the river and the soft smell of the muddy banks around us. It reminded me of walking in the bush in New Zealand and I felt myself relax.
Maura was talking a mile a minute at Jason and Tom but, in the back, Mark and I sat quietly, looking around us as we passed alongside the fields of the local school and towards the majestic fields of Christ Church Meadow. Everything felt peaceful and charged with possibilities.
I knew Mark was freaking out. I knew he was thinking: fuck, what have I done? What does it mean that I ran like an idiot to have a boat ride with this guy? What should I do now?
It sounds cruel but knowing that his mind was working so very hard, so very quickly, made me feel even more relaxed. My angst about all those questions was behind me. If Mark’s angst just beginning, and if I was making it worse, then he deserved my pity and my help, but it was also a reminder of everything I’d been through years ago when I was first coming to terms with my sexuality.
Seeing him going through it, reassessing all his assumptions, made me doubly grateful that I’d already come out the other end and in one piece. I let myself sit with that feeling for a while.
“Going OK, my fine things?” Maura turned around.
“Perfect. It’s so peaceful.”
“Don’t turn philosopher on me,” she wagged her finger. Then she turned to Mark and stuck out her hand:
“We haven’t been introduced. I’m Maura. Aunty Maura.”
“Oh,’’ Mark leant forward, making the boat lurch, “I’m Mark. Good to meet you, uh, aunty.”
“The pleasure’s mine. You’ll learn that about me.”
With that, Maura turned back around. Jason was switching places with Tom, who was lecturing him about proper punting technique.
Mark looked over to me, hesitantly, and half-whispered.
“Are you and her together?”
I scoffed.
“What do you think?”
“You kissed. At the pub”
“Don’t you kiss your aunty?”
“Not like that...”
“I’m just joking,” I patted his knee, “we’re just friends. Why?”
He shrugged, but his eyes flicked to where my hand had rested, momentarily on his knee.
“I was just wondering.”
I smiled, a little bit smugly, knowing exactly why he was interested.
Mark saw my smile.
“Fuck off,” he said, shaking his head but also half-laughing. He looked furtively up at the other guys, making sure they hadn’t noticed anything.
It was so clear, in that moment, what would happen between us that it felt like we could take our time, like there was no need to rush. The knowledge of what was to come hung between us, became a matter of when not if.
I leant back, opening my legs so that they pushed harder against Mark’s and let my fingers run over the still surface of the water. Across a field to our right, we could see the stone walls of Merton illuminated by spotlights and, looming above to the left, the towers of Christ Church. It was all so beautiful, so quiet. Like being in a living, moving postcard.
Soon the punt came to a narrow part of the river where there were trees on either side. Their leafy canopies crowded over us, throwing the boat into gloom.
“Anyone got a phone torch?” Tom asked from the helm.
Maura replied an affirmative and went rooting through her bra.
I glanced at Mark. He was looking out past the banks, across to the colleges in the distance, letting me appreciate in privacy the just-visible line of his jaw. God, he was handsome. I let myself take him in, bit by bit, feeling all the while the hard warmth of his leg against mine.
“Mark.”
I said this so quietly that I wondered if I had actually said it at all.
But slowly he turned, his eyes peaceful now, and looked at me. For a long moment we stared at each other.
Then the moon must have gone behind a cloud because the world went pitch black.
Maura screamed, trying to get her phone torch up. Tom buried the pole in the water to slow them down and Jason started rooting for his own phone.
All these activities I was only distantly aware of. They may as well have been happening in another dimension; they felt like they were reaching me through a thick pane of glass, muffling their sounds and their meaning. My full attention was on Mark, or the patch of dark that I knew to be Mark.
I leaned closer towards him and, though I couldn’t see anything, I knew by some primal instinct that he had done the same.
We were close. I could feel the warmth of his breath, the heady small of his cologne and of his body. His body was coiled and mine was coiled. Our faces were only an inch apart, not quite touching, but wholly aware of the other with an intensity of focus that sharpened all our senses.
We stayed there for a long, stretching
moment—far and away the most erotic moment of my life. I was harder than I’d ever been and we hadn’t even touched.
With a sigh of pleasure that might have come from me or might have come from Mark, our noses brushed across each other. But still we didn’t kiss. We nuzzled against each other, exploring each other’s faces with our noses and cheeks.
I felt his stubble graze against my jaw.
He inhaled, deeply, shudderingly.
More quietly than even the boat slipping through the water, he whispered back:
“Rafe.”
He charged that one barely audible syllable with so much meaning that, if I hadn’t already been sitting down, my legs would’ve given way.
The bridge of my nose full against his, I returned his syllable with my own.
When at last our lips touched, it was as light as a feather, one more brush in a symphony of grazes that made me wonder at the sensitivity of skin, at how something so gentle could be so unbearable, could be such exquisite torture.
The second kiss was longer, but no harder. Mark tugged at my bottom lip with maddening gentleness.
My tongue replied, tentatively tagging his lips, and then feeling his make its own reply.
Just then, Maura switched on her torch light, swinging it around the boat and spotlighting for a brief instant Mark and I, our faces tight together in perfect intimacy.
Mark sprung back, leaving me outstretched like a question mark hanging in the dark.
Maura admirably kept her composure though I was certain she knew what she’d seen. She aimed her torch to the front of the boat, navigating us out from under the copse of trees and towards the main of the river.
The moon emerged from under the clouds again, as if to say: show’s over, thanks for coming. Or that’s how it felt.
I glanced over at Mark, who was looking away from me, half covering his face with one of his hands. That the guys, Jason and Tom, looked none the wiser seemed little comfort to him.
Even our thighs were barely touching now.
That’s how it was for the rest of our river sojourn. A few minutes later, more punts started to join us, our drunk fellow students disrupting the eerie quiet for something decidedly rowdy.
Jason and Maura were kissing in the front of the boat by the time Tom, his face etched with a deep frown, finally steered us back into the dock.
Mark hopped off so quickly it was like he’d been stung by a bee. He pulled the boat in and tied up the dockline. I stood up and got off, ignoring his offered hand.
You could say I was a bit pissed off. This was the problem with straight guys. They got spooked. Did I really want to be someone’s shameful secret? I’d done that before and I knew what it entailed and what it entailed was exhausting.
“Alright, then,” Mark announced, tipping back and forth nervously on the balls of his feet, “catch you guys. Thanks.”
Then he left. Just like that.
I turned back to Maura who emerged from a deep kiss with Jason to give me an ironic look.
“What’s his bloody problem?”
“Fragile masculinity,” I sighed.
“Oh, right, the usual then.”
“Huh?” asked Jason, looking between us, thinking he was being talked about.
“Nothing to do with yer, my fine muppet,” Maura patted Jason on the cheek.
He grinned like a well-trained dog.
“I’m gonna go back,” I announced.
“We’ll come with you. Walk with me, Rafe.”
So we did. Maura and I walked arm in arm back to the college with Jason and Tom straggling behind like two spare pieces in a finished jigsaw.
Maura gave me a long, slightly incoherent lecture about the “stage I was at in my life” and why I didn’t need to be mucking around with cauliflower-eared rugby players who had only just got the right to buy their own pint. I say “incoherent” but that was more about her slurred tone. In content, I knew she was 100% right.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t in the market for a fixer-upper.
“Yer here to have fun, Rafe—and to learn or whatever—but mainly to have fun. Now what’s fun about having to rebuild some lad’s self-esteem from dot just because he was gimp enough to build it around fannies when it turns out he likes cock?”
I sighed.
“We’re not sure he likes cock.”
“Oh, please. If cock is London and Dublin is fanny, he’s in Oxford.”
“What?”
“I mean he’s well on his way. Catch up, Rafe, my god.”
“Why does Dublin represent fanny?” I tried to follow.
“Because I’m from Dublin. Jesus, Rafe, are yer sure yer got into Oxford?”
“Not really,” I laughed.
“My point is: the boy is cock adjacent. Oh, he still might like fanny. He might still send fanny postcards but he’ll have no choice but to use the postal system because—you mark my words—he’ll have moved to London on a permanent basis any day now.”
“Right, so what does this mean for me?”
“Oh, right,” she hesitated, “Well, what it means is, just because the boy’s on his way to cock-town doesn’t mean you should get in the carriage with him and climb on it before he’s actually got there.”
“What if I want to?”
“Then you need to slap yerself. Have some fooking self-respect. If he’s gonna freak because you kissed, he’s only going to put you through grief before and after every grope you have. It’s not worth it. You’ll be half fuck buddy and half counsellor. And, before you even ask—zero percent boyfriend. Zero.”
“I don’t want a boyfriend.”
Maura just looked at me.
I had said it so unconvincingly I actually surprised myself.
“Yer a bloody sop, Rafe, anyone can see it from a mile off.”
“A sop?”
“Feelings, you’ve got ‘em. And lots of them. That’s why you don’t need any extra ones fooking up your head. Take it from your aunty Maura, she’s seen some shit.”
I thought for a moment. We were near the college now, the light of the porter’s lodge pouring onto the empty stone streets.
“You are pretty wise, you know that.”
“I do know that, darling, but thank you.”
I leant down and kiss her on the top of the head. She pinched my arse and shot me a cheeky look.
“Now, I need a bit of your expert advice,” she said, guiding us across the quad, “which one?”
“Tom.”
“You think? What about Jason? I’m a bit sweet on him. He reminds me of my pocket rocket.”
“I thought you were over the pocket rocket?”
“Maybe I’m a sop too.”
She turned around to look appraisingly at the two guys following us. Both of them smiled eagerly, on display.
“God, it’s hard having options.”
“Hey,” I laughed, “don’t rub it in.”
“Which would have a bigger cock, in yer professional opinion?”
I looked back, and considered.
“Jason thicker, Tom longer.”
“Hmmm. How long? I don’t want to be punched in the cervix.”
I shook my head, smiling despite myself.
We were outside the staircase that led from the second quad to our accommodation.
“I don’t have X-ray vision. You’re gonna have to take your chances.”
The guys came up to us.
“You two, with me,” Maura said.
Jason and Tom looked at each other. For the second time that night, I saw some serious mental cogs in action.
“Chop chop. Or does one of yer want to sit out?”
She turned to me. My mouth was hanging slightly open.
“Sometimes yer gotta make yer own luck. Have a good night, Rafe,” she smiled, “and don’t think too much.”
She got on her tippy-toes and pecked me on the cheek.
Then she walked up the stairs. Tom and Jason hesitated and then followed her,
each nodding to me as they passed.
I stood there, shaking my head. You had to give it to Maura. She wasn’t fucking around—at least not when it came to fucking around.
9
The thought of Maura getting the Tower Bridge treatment made me feel doubly forlorn and just a bit horny—not that I wanted to be involved exactly, but I wouldn’t have said no to watching Tom and Jason going at it. I’m sure Maura wouldn’t mind; in fact, she probably had a lot to teach me. Her experience seemed to well outstrip her years.
But I was going home alone.
As I waited for the lift that would take me up to my floor, I played the day back in my head and found it to be—or at least to feel—very long indeed. I couldn’t believe that only that morning I’d dodged out of Mark’s room, still half-asleep and half-drunk.
Seeing James at orientation, and then drinking in the Fellow’s Garden with Jack... It all felt like it had happened over weeks instead of over one over-packed day.
And tomorrow: only hours away, I had my first classes. What the hell was that going to be like?
The lift arrived and I got in, pressed my button and leant back against the mirrored glass. I saw my nervous expression reflected back to me.
I’d never been to a class at university before. Going to uni wasn’t the ‘done thing’ in my part of rural New Zealand. Oh, sure, a few kids at school had been that way inclined, but not the ones I talked to or hung out with. The whole myth of student life, the rituals of university, were familiar to me only out of books, TV shows, movies. My parents had never gone to university and neither had their parents. All of which meant that the very fact of me being here felt like a cosmic fluke, if not actually just a genuine mistake. I’d read about radiation from space suddenly flipping atoms on earth. Maybe a big dose of radiation had flipped some electron in a computer and turned my Oxford rejection into an acceptance?
The lift rang its arrival on my floor and I stepped out.
My eyes were on my feet, preoccupied by thoughts of the week ahead and the reality of my being here. I walked on auto-pilot to my room and only looked up when I saw, at the periphery of my eyeline, a pair of familiar-looking shoes, standing right outside my door.