by Liam Livings
“Landlord said he’d do that,” Steve said.
“When?”
“Weeks ago. Months probably, but we were all just leaving it.”
“I could see that. I needed to do something to occupy myself.”
Looking slightly baffled, Steve surveyed the much-improved garden. “Good party last night? Sorry I couldn’t come. I went to a gig in Salisbury and ended up in a beer garden somewhere until three o’clock and then somehow in the market square singing with some people I’d met.”
“Sounds good,” Nick replied, barely listening.
“So was it?” Steve asked, moving closer, “A good party?”
“Think so. Complicated. I’m thinking about it.”
“Big mistake, is that. Don’t think, just do. Easy to overthink stuff like this. Assuming it involves a man. As in someone you fancy.” Steve shrugged.
Nodding slowly as he raked the grass cuttings into a pile, Nick said, “Doesn’t it always?” and then continued in silence once Steve had left him alone.
He’d got out of having to tell someone what he was doing, of having to think about a boyfriend, of needing to consider what they did together. The last thing he wanted was to go back into all that fandango again. Or something approximating that anyway. But as he piled his clothes and bag for work together in a corner, he realised the only thing he wanted to know about next week was when he’d be seeing Tony again outside of work. The sex, he decided as he climbed into bed later that night, which had not quite been the best bit, was definitely the best sex he’d had in a long time. Combined with the easy chatter they had together, it was…well, what was it, exactly?
He hadn’t worked that out by morning so decided to see how Tony played things when they spoke at work. No texts for the rest of the weekend, not since he’d dropped Tony home. Odd.
Chapter 6
Tony arrived at his desk before eight on Monday morning: he had a day of meetings and two looming deadlines so important he’d started writing one of the pieces of work yesterday evening at home. Unable to settle into much, with the ache from where Nick had been inside him, oh, so wonderfully on Saturday night, Tony had sat in the living room and written half of the proposal. It had given him a good diversion from thinking about Nick and them and the party and the fun and the sex. A lot about the sex, he admitted as he sipped his second strong coffee of the morning.
The sex had been so good, Tony had been almost surprised at Nick’s technique. The men who boasted about being amazing in bed so often disappointed. Nick, on the other hand, hadn’t mentioned his previous conquests, although Tony could tell he’d been around the block a few times to be that practised at it, and instead, Nick had gone right ahead and—
Tony stopped that particular train of thought, as he noticed himself stiffening. At his desk. At work.
The sensation of edging himself forwards onto Nick was both exquisitely erotic and also a perfect technique, as opposed to some men who slammed right into him regardless of how ready Tony had been.
Focusing on the task at hand, Tony returned to the report and realised he had a little over an hour until his first meeting. He could do this.
When Nick arrived over an hour later, Tony became rather less confident of his ability to ‘do this’. Obviously, he wasn’t about to lean lasciviously on Nick’s desk and compliment him on his wonderful deep thrusts and foreplay from Saturday night, even if both of those had kept Tony’s thoughts occupied for most of Sunday, culminating in a frustration-releasing shower that night.
“Tea?” Nick asked, raising his eyebrows at Tony.
Tony held up his empty mug. “Coffee. No, actually. Water. I’m shaking.” He held out his hands to make the point.
“Been here long?”
“Couple of hours. It’s amazing what you can get done when no one else is asking you to do more of it!” Tony chuckled to himself and returned to this report, determined not to think about asking Nick when they could next see each other this week. When they could have sex was also high in his mind, but the pre-sex time was important too.
*
Tony’s day passed in a blur of meetings, and he’d also managed to get the two pieces of work off to those who’d needed them by five o’clock. He was leaning back in his chair, exhausted but feeling accomplished. “I can breathe now,” he said, loud enough for Nick to hear.
Nick didn’t respond and continued staring at his computer screen.
Tony repeated himself, adding, “Do you want to grab a room and we can catch up? Sorry I’ve not been mentoring well today. I’ve been…”
Nick looked up from his screen. “I saw. Yeah. Five minutes all right?”
While Nick finished up, Tony opened his notebook and jotted down a list of things they could discuss. Then, realising there were probably still two minutes until Nick’s five were up, he turned to the back of his notebook and wrote a list of pros and cons about ‘N’:
Pros: great in bed, kisser, funny, friends—no friends = odd—see ex.
Cons: colleague, awkward, just out of LTR, commitment—eugh why, no, again, no. Immature?
As he contemplated whether Nick was or wasn’t immature, a voice broke him from his thoughts.
“Ready?” Nick was standing by Tony’s elbow, so as quickly as he could, Tony closed the notebook, stood and led the way to a quiet room for their meeting.
***
Tony opened up his notebook—to the front, Nick noticed. What was he writing at the back? It looked like two lists about something…
Nick had a few questions he wanted to ask but instead sat back, waiting for Tony to start.
It didn’t take long to work through Tony’s points and Nick’s questions, after which Nick wanted to ask if Tony had plans later that week and did he fancy coming round for dinner.
But he didn’t say any of those words out loud because when he repeated them in his head, they sounded like him asking Tony on a date, and since neither of them was doing dating, that would be ridiculous.
“I deleted all the apps,” Nick said in a pause in conversation after they’d finished talking work and were discussing the weather and traffic that morning.
“Did you?” Tony asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Every. Single. One.” Nick showed him the folder on his phone where they’d been. Of course, that didn’t stop him texting guys he’d already met if their numbers were saved on his phone. And he’d been doing that. A few times. Less lately, though. Less since…well, the night in the hotel with Tony.
Tony smiled, standing to signal their meeting was over, unless Nick could think of a good reason why not.
“I’d better…” Tony pointed back to their desks in the main office.
“I think I might go home,” Nick said, gathering his papers together.
“Make the most of it while you can, is my advice.” And before Nick could think of any reason to keep him there, Tony was gone.
***
That night, Nick had his friend Laura round for pizza and beers. Since the house party, they’d promised to continue seeing each other as often as possible.
“Settling in?” Nick asked as he handed the pizza box over.
“The others are great. I thought I’d be so lonely here. Southerners are all so aloof, I was told.” She smirked.
“Some of them are.” Chewing the pizza, Nick opened another beer. “Some of them aren’t.”
“Any in particular?” Laura asked. She was watching him out the corner of her eye.
Nick nodded. “We don’t talk about it, though. Not when we’re at work, and not when we’re doing it the next time. Like, it just happens.” He shrugged.
“Do you always need to talk about stuff? Or can you sometimes go with the flow?”
“That’s what I’m doing. I’m not going to talk to him about it. That’s why I’m knocking it about with you now. I don’t want to spoil it with Tony by putting a label on it—a label neither of us wants but is probably what it is. You know?”
; “Precisely. Besides, because you talk about stuff doesn’t mean it’s any better, that it gets resolved. It means you’re talking about it.”
“There’s not so much anything to resolve. Like, he’s nice, I’m enjoying spending time with him. All the time.” He raised an eyebrow in a signal that told her their bedroom antics had continued.
“So what’s the problem?”
“If we were dating, it would be OK to ask when we’re next seeing each other. If we were friends, same—but different frequency, of course. And being colleagues is easy—the odd drink after work, lunch together. But I don’t know when I can ask if he wants to see me again without, you know…”
“Needy?”
“I’m not needy! More having to think of him when I’m making plans. Should I think of seeing him first before others? Or is that a bit…” Boyfriendy, he thought.
“Boyfriendy?” Laura said.
Nick nodded.
“Kinda is.”
“I really wanted a break from all this after splitting up with you-know-who. I wanted to enjoy being single for a bit.”
“So go, enjoy. Be single. Don’t worry about him. It’s not like you’re exclusive ‘anything’, really, are you?”
And right there, right then, Laura had hit the nail on the head: they weren’t anything to each other. So why was Nick worrying about putting Tony first when he wouldn’t do so for some other guy he’d slept with?
“We kinda agreed to stop all the dating. All the sexting, all the apps—everything. When he came back from that weekend for his friend’s birthday, we agreed to come off the whole merry-go-round of it all. Cold turkey.”
“Doesn’t sound much like enjoying being single to me, but who am I to know?”
Nick hadn’t thought of that before. Maybe their pact had been flawed from the start. Maybe the simple fact of agreeing not to date anyone was what had thrown them together in the first place, and was why neither of them wanted to discuss it or put a name to whatever it was they were doing together.
“Pass me another slice of pizza, would you?” Laura asked.
As he did so, Nick realised he had a lot of things to consider about his friendship with Tony, and he really didn’t want to consider any of them. Not yet, anyway. Not if it meant he wouldn’t be seeing Tony anytime soon.
***
The following week, when Tony thought he’d got through the piles of work, he faced with a shitstorm of additional work as his supervisor, Barbara, asked him to be the lead for mentoring across Wiltshire, formalising the informal approach he’d been using with Nick.
“I’ve not really done much,” Tony had objected when asked.
“Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s working,” she had replied, handing him a folder containing papers about the previous approach for mentoring.
“I don’t know how to write it down.”
“If you can describe it, you can write it. The leadership team wants a proposal by the end of the week.”
“This week?”
“Thursday, actually. It’s too late for advanced papers, so it’ll have to be tabled, but you can do a presentation to bring it to life, can’t you?” It wasn’t really a question, that last part, Tony knew. It was a statement. One of those ‘just get it done’ statements his supervisor was famous for.
So that was why, now, Tony was reviewing the previous approach for mentoring and supervising new social workers, the framework of objectives it needed to deliver, and thinking about how what he’d done with Nick could fit that.
Nick wasn’t at his desk at the moment—must’ve been visiting a client or something. In fact, now Tony thought about it, they’d hardly seen each other since the house party. Not even lunches together. And their mentoring meetings had become distinctively formal too. Why was that?
Nick hadn’t asked about drinks or dinners; there’d been no more house parties. And Tony had kept things to work—unconsciously. OK, so there had been some friendly banter, jokes about why Tony refused to listen to the modern electropop bands—because they were pale imitations of The Human League—and how Nick thought that was very closed-minded without even listening to them.
Tony smiled at that conversation they’d had in the kitchen while making a drink for each other.
In the weeks since the sex at Nick’s house, Tony had found himself wanting to not quite thank Nick for it but to at least ask if he wanted to do it again. But he hadn’t. Because that would imply they had something between them—something to return to rather than the casual nothing they actually had.
Returning to Nick would feel distinctively like commitment, which Tony definitely didn’t want. And neither did Nick.
Perhaps even friends with benefits had been a mistake, Tony reflected, as he stared at his screen and the pseudo-Venn diagram he’d been unsuccessfully trying to update for the past half an hour.
Nick’s voice broke Tony’s concentration, and he looked up.
“What happened—when you met with Barbara? You left that meeting looking like someone had died.”
“In a way, they had.”
Nick looked shocked as he collected his jacket from the back of his chair and switched his computer off, ready to leave. “Who?”
“Not to worry. I’m being dramatic, as usual. My social life. My evenings. Nothing much, I suppose.”
“More cases?” Nick stood by his chair, his arms folded and his bag over his shoulder.
“I wish. That I can handle. In fact, there’s guidance on how many cases per social worker, so she can’t give me any more without breaching those. So she wouldn’t. It’s…” He described what he was doing and when he had to complete it by.
Nick removed his jacket, put his bag on the desk and switched on his computer. “I’m staying. What can I do?”
Tony hadn’t been about to ask for his help, but now Nick had blatantly offered it, he certainly wasn’t going to refuse. “If you don’t mind,” Tony said cautiously. “I reckon a few hours and we’ll be done.”
“You’re buying dinner.” Nick smirked, and Tony’s heart did a little somersault.
“Obviously.” Tony surveyed the folder, printouts, emails and his own notes covering his desk. He needed some sort of a plan if they weren’t going to still be there at midnight. “Can you read these?” He handed Nick the folder of the previous approach. “And work out how to make sense of this lot.” He passed a stack of emails he’d sent himself to structure their mentoring sessions.
Nick took them and began to read. “Anything else?”
Surveying his desk, Tony handed over his notebook—nothing in there Nick hadn’t already heard in other client meetings. “I’ve got a section near the back where I’ve tried to work out some structure to our sessions.”
“There was structure?” Nick smiled, his eyes glinting.
“Of sorts. Now I look back, it was all planned,” Tony said. “Unless you want to work out the cost-benefit analysis based on hours, risks and some other factor I’ve not yet got to hear about?” Menacingly, he waved a large A3 spreadsheet at Nick, who shook his head and returned to what he’d been asked to do.
A few hours of intense, mostly silent work later, the office now empty except for the two of them, Tony said, “How’s it coming along?”
“Nearly done. Emailed to you…now!”
Taking a break from the spreadsheet hell he’d been living, Tony opened the document Nick had sent, and for the first time all day his shoulders relaxed. It was exactly what he’d asked for. And more. Nick had gone into lots of detail and added in extra things to consider when having the mentoring discussions—things that Nick had found useful but which Tony hadn’t even considered.
“Do you want me to help with the spreadsheet hell?” Nick offered quietly, staring at Tony’s screen.
Tony wanted to kiss him, never mind say thanks. With Nick’s help, they’d done what would’ve taken Tony at least three times as long on his own, and it wouldn’t have been as good quality. “I’ve just got t
o do the slides for the leadership meeting. Should be fairly quick.”
“I’ve done some rough ones,” Nick said. “Let me sit next to you and we can finish them together. If you like them, of course.”
Shortly, the slides came through on his email, and Nick was now sitting next to Tony.
They worked together for the next hour or so, Nick leaning across the keyboard and using Tony’s mouse and then Tony taking over as a flash of inspiration hit him, despite it being nearly eleven o’clock.
Sitting back to admire their work, Nick said, “Happy?” When his arms obscuring the screen had become too annoying, Tony had suggested he perch on the desk and direct things from there.
Noticing Nick’s shirt riding up his back, Tony’s thoughts moved to him directing only one thing, which was very much not work related.
Nervously, he placed his hand on the small of Nick’s back and stroked the exposed flesh. Nick didn’t move away and instead let Tony stroke for a moment more before turning to face him and shifting into a more comfortable position, hands resting on Tony’s, which lay flat next to the papers and mouse.
Wordlessly, Nick wrapped his legs around the back of Tony’s chair and wheeled it closer to the desk.
“Can I kiss you?” Tony asked. “To thank you.”
Nick looked up to the ceiling. “Isn’t there CCTV?”
Closing his eyes in recognition, Tony said, “Let’s save everything, email it to ourselves and then I’m buying dinner.” In reality, the last thing on his mind was food. He only wanted to eat one thing, and it was sitting on his desk, having given him an erection merely from stroking the slightly furry skin on Nick’s back.
Damn, this really is going to get messy. But at least they could keep the mess away from work, from spying cameras and eyes…
***
In the lift, they stood at opposite corners, not daring to stand any closer for fear they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves once they started.
Despite the massive horn he had, both from enjoying working with Tony and from the touch that had sent electricity coursing up and down his spine, Nick’s throat was dry, his stomach churning at what he’d seen in the notebook.