Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  Acid burned up in my throat, Aaron’s good toast threatening a return. Fuck. I never thought about this stuff. Joe’s betrayal had been subtle and complete. No point in an autopsy, picking over all the points at which my life had slowly died. There were probably hundreds of them, hundreds of explanations, revelations, things I’d thought odd but dismissed. I could drive myself crazy with just one or two. Already I’d spilled my tea, jolting halfway off the sofa as if something had stung me, and given serious thought to doing something I knew to be utterly reprehensible…

  Aaron appeared in the doorway, towelling his hair. He was naked, and the sight of him full length in daylight made me lose a breath. “Are you all right?” he said. “You look like a ghost.”

  I felt like one, I wanted to tell him. My life had died, and since then I had haunted its old scenes and routines, bloodless and unreal. “I’m okay,” I said, trying for a wide, deflecting smile. “I’m sorry. I spilled a bit of tea on your carpet…”

  “Doesn’t matter. It matches the wreckage you made of my bed.” He came across and crouched beside me, the towel held unselfconsciously, concealing nothing. “Matthew, I should have asked you this last night. The pills you took—could they have done you any long-term damage? Have you seen a doctor?”

  I am a doctor. I closed my mouth on that. It was facile and lame, and he didn’t deserve it. His gaze on me was warm. I remembered him last night, thanking God for sparing the life of the drunken stranger that was all I could have been to him then. He had treated me as if I meant much more than that, given his affection as if I didn’t have to earn it. As if it were just there. “No,” I said. “They were just temazepam. I’m not even sure I was trying to off myself, to be honest.” I glanced at his mouth. It was beautiful when he was listening, the lips slightly parted. I kissed him, lightly but with a shudder of fervour across my spine, as if I had wings that were trying to unfurl. “I’m okay, I promise. Thank you.”

  ***

  He wandered around the living room in my flat. I’d told him to relax and have a look around. Unlike his, the room was rich with evidence of previous lives, and I leaned in the doorway, drying my hands on a tea towel, watching him. I’d put a quick casserole on, turning down his offer to help. I felt strange. Part of it was sobriety. On the rare occasions when I bothered to cook these days, I did so with a wineglass in one hand, though it might as well have been the bottle for all that was left when I finished. I’d offered him a drink when we arrived, frightened at how badly I had begun to want one. He’d asked for fruit juice, and I’d told him that just because I wasn’t didn’t mean he couldn’t—astonishing myself, because I couldn’t recall deciding that I wasn’t at all—and he hadn’t made a fuss; just acknowledged this weird new development with a nod and observed that solidarity could help.

  He paused by the photograph of me and Joe on Tynemouth Sands, one of my favourites. He’d bought me a surf class for my birthday, and we’d spent an hour crashing off the rented boards into the perishing cold North Sea. We were bruised and bleeding from sand grazes and blazing with happiness. He had his arms round me, his fingers in my hair. It was taken about eighteen months ago, something else I hadn’t thought about. Marnie had just moved to Newcastle to be closer to her job. Joe’s mam had just fallen ill. His presents had been of their usual thoughtfulness and generosity.

  I didn’t understand. I went to sit down on the edge of the sofa, nursing my own glass of fucking useless fruit juice, which I now strongly wished to dump into a quart of vodka. Aaron smiled at the photo. People often did. That much joy was infectious. He moved on, now looking at the small framed shot on the bookshelf, glancing to me for a permission I could only give by a nod. He picked it up and turned it to the light, matching faces. Joe and me again, this time on the football field. He had me in a friendly neck-lock. We must have been about ten. After a moment, Aaron looked at me, frowning. He said, “Either this is your brother, or…”

  “No. That’s Joe, my ex. We were together for…” I tailed off. We’d hardly been precocious. Hadn’t had sex until we worked out what sex was, well into our midteens, but that had been a technicality. “He lived up the road from me. I can’t remember when we weren’t.”

  “Until…?”

  “Six months ago. June.”

  He set the picture carefully back on the shelf and turned to me in silence. Oh God. That look would finish me. There wasn’t a trace of pity in it. It was searing compassion: hot, wordless, man-to-man. “It’s all right,” I tried, aware that though my voice was steady, huge tears were hitting the knees of my jeans, a flood I hadn’t given permission to start and was completely powerless to stop. “I’ve been filling my time in—you know, drinking, fucking around…”

  “Swallowing handfuls of pills. Okay.” He came and sat next to me. He put his arm around me. “Okay, yeah. In the circumstances, all that seems pretty reasonable.”

  Did it? This view of things had never occurred to me. I thought I’d just been an arsehole. A coward who had fallen over at his life’s first real adversity and lost control of everything. His arm tightened—gently, not demanding, leaving it up to me whether I leaned in towards him. Whether I surrendered. He raised his other hand and pushed my fringe back, and I reflected, as his mouth brushed warmly at its roots, that he’d found a place on me that even Joe had never kissed, the widow’s peak. The gesture sent shivers through me. My eyes closed. When he leaned back on the sofa, I went with him, turning my face to his shoulder.

  Another trouble with breakups—the instant loss of the dozens of daily touches, the background tapestry of comfort, given and received. You can screw your way through half a city’s population and never get that back. I had been starving for it without knowing. I pressed myself to him, feeling his embrace close round me, hard and strong, so tight my ribs popped. Grief went through me, but this time instead of crawling like sickness, it seemed to ring like bells over hard-frosted fields, plangent and clear. It wasn’t spineless, was it—not cowardly, pathetic, any of the other names I’d been calling myself? To weep for Joe, for this kind of loss; even briefly to want to die of it. “Pretty reasonable,” Aaron had said. My throat filled with hot salt. “Poor bastard,” Aaron whispered. “You’re in bits, aren’t you? Poor sod. You’ll be all right; you’ll be all right.”

  ***

  We had lunch when I was capable of raising my head again, of speaking and making sense. He was nice about the casserole, which somehow hadn’t burned, and we sat for a long time, talking about some of the stuff we hadn’t had a chance to cover so far, what with all the street fights and fucking. He told me he’d gone out to the rigs straight from university, attracted by the money, the chance to leave behind a childhood in deprived western Cumbria that was as unpromising as my own had been. He’d enjoyed the cash and the experience and slowly come to realise the damage the oil industry was doing, its ultimate destructiveness in a world running dry of fossil fuels. He admitted without shame he was biting the hand that fed him, but hoped to do better in future—was using his off shifts to work towards his degree in engineering, studying the structures needed to make alternative energy sources more than a nice idea.

  It was good to hear him talk. We washed up together afterwards, looking out across the wintry roof garden I’d tried to keep alive for Joe. We were keeping to safe subjects—for my sake, I knew, to let me find my equilibrium. I’d cried until my sinuses were raw, and my chest was still aching, shuddering on deep in-breaths, a side effect I hadn’t experienced since childhood. To make it easier on him and show him I could be calm, I volunteered the circumstances of Joe’s leaving, told him I was selling the flat. He listened quietly, and I heard myself eventually say, “And…you? Anyone in your life at the moment?”

  He took his gaze from the cold grey afternoon beyond the window, where it had just started to snow. “No,” he said, folding a tea towel onto its rack. “Not at the moment.”

  And that was the problem with information legitimately gained. You had to t
rust the source. I didn’t see how those clear eyes could lie to me, and I nodded, smiling uncertainly. “Good.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Mm.” I put my hands on his waist, pulled him towards me and kissed him. “Yes. That’s good.”

  The bedroom was too much for me. Only as we stumbled through the door, kissing frantically, did I finally work out that the last time I had seen it was when Lou had turfed me out of it the night before, and the night before that, if I hadn’t lain down in the rumpled bed to die, I certainly hadn’t gone there to try and stay alive. And for Christ’s sake, it was Joe’s. I’d never brought anyone home. If two men could be said to have a marital bed, that had been ours, and I wasn’t bloody ready. I stiffened in unwanted resistance. Aaron said, “Okay. Okay,” clearly putting two and two together, and turned me around.

  He steered me back into the kitchen. If he was seeking to distract me, he did it well—pulled out a chair for me and sat me down, then lithely straddled my lap. He picked up the kiss where he had left off, bracing his weight on his thighs and moving sinuously over me until my cock heaved up as if I hadn’t been screwed six ways to sunset barely four hours previously, as if I’d never had it before in my life. He took a moment to dismount and strip off his briefs and jeans, and stood before me, hot as hell in his unbuttoned shirt, stomach muscles rippling in the fabric’s shadows, shaft blooming up dark with blood. “Lift up for me,” he said, and together we pulled my trousers and underwear down my thighs far enough.

  It took me a second to work out far enough for what. Events were moving too fast. And I’d stupidly thought, because he had taken the driver’s seat for our first couple of rides—because he was refinement of the stereotype—that was his preference: that he would not like to be fucked. Now he took hold of the top bar of the chair and sat back down across my lap, moving with a slow grace it dried my mouth out to watch. He let his weight down, and my shaft found its target straightaway, despite the difficult angle. “Yes,” he gasped. “Push up. Fuck me.”

  I obeyed, lost. Only his dry tightness and the sound he made when the head of my cock tried to broach him brought me back to recall of my manners and the basics. “Christ, wait! We need some lube. And…a rubber, for God’s sake, you idiot. I…I haven’t been good.”

  “Do you want to get up and get them?”

  I stared up at him. He was watching me with a kind of grave merriment, and I realised he was capable of all sorts of mischief, that I shouldn’t take his calm surface for the whole man. I said faintly, “Not in the slightest. Look, we…test one another in the hospital. The interns. I’m okay—somehow. But for you, gorgeous…Not taking any chances. Come on. Shift.”

  “Um. At the risk of losing your good opinion of me, maybe you don’t have to…” I frowned in confusion, and he clarified, one corner of his smile tucking up a little tighter, “In my jacket. I never did expect to have much luck in the Powerhouse, but…Well. Hope springs eternal.”

  “Oh…” It took me a long few seconds to catch up, but then he was reaching over my shoulder, and I remembered he’d slung his coat round the back of the chair before we’d sat down to eat. I drew an unsteady breath. There was something very erotic in the thought of him getting dressed for the night in his riverside flat, shrugging into the soft leather jacket, making a check in its inside pocket, thinking about what might lie ahead. “Prepared is best,” I whispered, watching half-hypnotised while those capable fingers popped a condom from the packet and drew it adeptly down over my cock. “Don’t worry—your reputation’s quite safe with…”

  I couldn’t finish. He had shifted back into position, and I could feel the fluttering gape of his entrance. “All right,” he got out. “Good. As for lube…” I saw him stretch one arm back, reaching blindly among the bottles and glasses on the table. “Oh yes. Luigi’s, extra virgin. Very nice.”

  My eyes widened. “You’re fucking kidding, Aaron.”

  “I’m really not, Matthew.” Uncapping the bottle, he poured a stream of green-gold oil into his palm.

  “Oh God. Call me Matt. Oh God.”

  He rode me gently but hard. I could have come within ten seconds of my cock sliding up into his body. The sounds he made as it entered, the spasms in his muscle ring brought my balls up tight, my load starting to strain for release. But I had to hang on for him. He was smiling down at me, pale skin flushed now, mouth a little swollen with arousal. I laid my hands on his thighs, shuddering at the feel of the hard, working muscle, the machinelike rhythm as he shifted up and down, bringing me deeper with every pulse until I’d reached so far inside him he barely needed to move for the impact, the pressure to jar us both closer to orgasm. I felt it start, gasped out a denial and clenched both hands so hard on him I knew he’d be bruised for days, then scrambled down off the peak. “Aaron, come on,” I whispered. “Let me…let me have you.”

  “Yes. I want to. I…”

  There it was again. That last restraint inside him, holding him back from the crest. Whose memory was he honouring? Whose image rose up just before he came? “Come back,” I pleaded, shifting my grip to his backside to try and draw him down an impossible last half inch. “If there’s somebody…making you feel bad, just…let it go…”

  The green eyes clouded. “I told you. There’s no one.”

  I closed my eyes in shame. Thought for one god-awful second I was going to lose him. But he had gone over the edge, and when I next could look, he had flung back his hands to brace on the table behind him, his spine arching, a cry leaving him that had bright wires of anger and pain running through it as well as completion. And even as I jerked up to climax, I could have cut my bloody tongue out for what I had said, for questioning this great and enormous good the world had somehow thrown into my lap.

  He held me, panting and shivering. My spent cock was still in him, held there by the aftershock contractions of his flesh. For a moment, he gave his whole weight over to me, and I groaned in pleasure; again, as he bent and stopped up my apology with a kiss. “Ssh. I’m not surprised. Not surprised, but…there’s no one, Matt. No one.”

  We clung together. When I could, I let go the death grip I’d established on his firm backside, and lifted my hands to stroke his hair. The shirt he’d loaned me was soaked with his come, the skin of my belly beneath it too. God, still warm as blood. He grunted in discomfort and eased up a little, freeing me, and we both rocked with laughter at passion’s indignity. I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of his breath come and go in my hair.

  The sound from downstairs was so familiar, so much a part of my old daily life that I didn’t take it in. Three clicks—two soft, one louder. Aaron, whose lovely head had drooped almost to my shoulder, suddenly stiffened and sat up. “Matt.”

  I was almost asleep. “What?” I said, instinctively reaching to balance him as he stood up.

  “Your front door…”

  “What about it?”

  In spite of circumstance, he grinned. “Somebody’s coming in, you dope. Who’s got the key?”

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh Christ.” I lurched to my feet. “Lou. The guy in the club last night, the…the one who’s not my boyfriend.” I glanced around. I wasn’t too bad—hauling up my pants and zip covered most of the damage, apart from the wet patches—but Aaron, this beautiful, inexplicable new phenomenon in my life, was naked from the waist down, and the idea of Lou clapping eyes on him like that made me feel sick. “Stay here,” I whispered. “I’ll sort it.”

  Not just Lou. Before I could reach the kitchen door, I heard another voice, then a four-beat clatter of feet on the stairs. I saw the crown of Lou’s head, and I planted myself in the doorway. “Yes,” Lou was saying to the neatly suited stranger following him, “it’s nice and airy, isn’t it? The living room’s just to your left. The main bedroom is straight ahead, and…”

  He jolted to a halt, clutching the banister. His companion almost ran into him. “Bloody hell, Matt. I didn’t know you were home.”

  The best
defence was offence. Even as the thought occurred, anger twisted in me—why should I damn well defend my presence here? Defending Aaron was another thing. I leaned my shoulder on the door frame, filling as much of it as I could. They’d have to go through me. “You could have called.”

  “I’ve been calling you all morning. This is the agent from Reid’s. I told you he’d be coming round…” Lou’s startled gaze left mine and travelled to the open bedroom door. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You know, Joe and Marnie aren’t asking you to do any of this apart from keeping the place tidy. It looks like a bomb hit. Please tell me you’ve cleared up the kitchen, because…”

  Lou was pretty solid. I did my best to block him, but he had the advantage of momentum and temper and knocked my arm aside. I swung round to follow him. “Lou, you bastard—”

  But there was no need to worry—or at least no reason apparent from Aaron’s elegant slouch in the kitchen chair. He was fully dressed and had somehow contrived to look as if he had been there for hours, drinking coffee and reading the papers. From where I was standing, I could see Lou’s face. The change in expression was fascinating, if not pleasant viewing. Like a landslide. From irritation, through a brief blank as he took Aaron in and then…disgust, a disappointment, as if despite everything, he had been holding out hope. I found myself wondering how long that had been going on. Me, Joe and Lou. We loved him, of course. He was part of our world. But always on the outside…“Okay,” he said slowly, never taking his eyes off Aaron. “Kitchen looks all right. But for the future, can you let me know if you’re gonna bring home one of your…”

  Aaron sat up. Then, unhurriedly, he got to his feet. He wasn’t that much taller than either of us, but as I’d seen before, he could make that inch or two look like ten. Lou went white. Aaron said pleasantly, “One of his what?”