Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  Lou took a step backwards. As soon as he did, Aaron turned his attention to me, and it was like the beam from a powerful flashlight, dropping the rest of the world into darkness. “You don’t want to sell this place, do you?”

  “No. I’ve got no fucking choice.”

  “Okay. I tell you what. Go and grab the things you need, and come over to mine until it’s sorted.”

  I stared at him. I think if I hadn’t been leaning on the wall, I’d have dropped to my knees. He was so bloody beautiful, so real. Lou, his mouth hanging open, looked like a cardboard cutout in front of him. “That…that could take ages.”

  “Fine by me.” He walked past Lou and past the poor estate agent, whose eyes were wide. He took me gently by the arm. “Come on. You’ll be out of the way, and…” He paused, glancing back, sweeping Lou with those unsettling green eyes, as if he knew him inside out. He looked almost amused, and his voice became more devastatingly mild with every word. “And if Joe, Lou and Marnie want the place tidied up, they can come in and do it themselves.”

  It took me less than a minute to fill a holdall. I did so as steadily as I could. I had to do something to match Aaron’s poise and not let him lead me out of my flat as if it were the wreckage of a crashed plane. I managed pretty well: walked past the agent and Lou in the hallway with my face straight and my gaze front and centre. I heard Lou say my name in what sounded almost like alarm, but I didn’t look back.

  Out on the pavement, Aaron’s arm went round my waist. I seized his hand. “Thank you.”

  “It’s quite all right. Jesus, Matt—if they’d bust in five minutes sooner…”

  I looked at him. I suspected my expression was absolutely grim, but something about it was making Aaron smile. I flashed back to our grinding, white-hot culmination on the kitchen chair—the passion that seemed to have fed on the slaking we’d given it earlier—and shook my head. “They’d have had to bloody wait till we were finished.”

  ***

  I lived with Aaron for a week in the Quayside flat. If I say it was the best time of my life, that doesn’t quite cover it, because up until the previous June, my life—the adult part, anyway—had been rich and good. Joe had made me happy in a thousand ways I could never dismiss or forget. But it was as if Aaron opened the windows. The air in his mass-produced little apartment was breathable in a way I had never encountered before. I can’t describe the difference even now. With Joe, I’d moved along an expected track in a world I helped create from day to day. Aaron—I don’t know; it was as if he carried a larger universe around with him, stars in his black hair, far horizons in his eyes.

  He was dead serious about his engineering degree, and if he let me drag him off to bed two or three times a day—on top of bruising, increasingly uninhibited interactions at night—he put in long hours at his desk in the living room too, turning over pages of the huge textbooks, his face grave and abstracted in the pale light from his laptop. The sight of him reminded me of a time when I, too, had happily lost myself in study. I made one brief and targeted run home to pick up my medical books, making sure no one was there, looking neither left nor right. Aaron made no comment when I lugged the pile of texts into his living room—just smiled and pulled up a chair for me on the far side of his desk.

  I went to see my supervisor at the hospital on Monday morning. Lou had been right. I’d been sailing close to the wind, and it took a lot of persuading and a fairly clean breast of my crimes to convince her I was serious about my career. She set me a batch of catch-up assignments large enough to take my breath away. Well, I knew I needed to prove myself again. When Aaron saw the essay list, he whistled, took the sheet from me, kissed me until I was seeing flashing lights from anoxia, then declared a moratorium on sex until the work was done. This proved a marvellous incentive. I put in forty-eight hours straight, and we spent the next day in bed making up for lost time.

  It was almost a shock to realise Sunday was Christmas. I’d worked A&E wards over previous festive seasons and watched the suicide bids roll in. Nothing like a month or so of consistent reminders, from TV, colleagues and shop windows, that this was the season of family joy, to knock the lonely down, and I’d wondered how the hell I was going to get through. One of those firsts, like Joe’s birthday and my own, that could rock the foundations. As it was, I took my courage in my hands and asked Aaron to come to my flat on the twenty-fourth and stay over for Christmas Day. We ought to be safe from viewers and surveyors then, and I could make us a proper elaborate lunch. Lay my ghosts about being there, and then for preference lay Aaron, right down on the hearth rug which had been Joe’s favourite place for a fuck, and where, weirdly, he had chosen to end us.

  Aaron accepted. Despite everything, he seemed a bit surprised to be asked, colouring a little with pleasure. That was another thing about him—he was wonderfully easy to please. He wouldn’t take a penny for my food or keep, so I slipped out to the Laing Art Gallery and bought him a top-end reproduction of their Interior of the Central Station by Dobson and Carmichael. It was a shot in the dark, but somehow I just felt it was him. I had it framed that afternoon and remembered my DIY skills to do a nice job of getting it hung up on his living-room wall before he came home. His reaction was perfect—silent astonishment, a perusal of the soaring pillars and fan vaulting from all angles and then his hand going out, blindly reaching for mine. “God, Matt. You got this for me?”

  And on Friday, I fucked it all up. Aaron got a phone call early in the morning, on the landline by his bed. I was too sleepy to stir and didn’t lift my head while he asked the caller to hang on. To wait while he picked up the call in the other room.

  He was being considerate. I sat up, wrapping my arms round my knees. I heard the living-room door open and very quietly close. When he came back to bed, he was pale. I waited for him to talk, and when he didn’t, something kept me from asking. He put his arms round me but shivered out from under my returning embrace, dived down the bed and put his mouth on me. Sucked me off almost feverishly, moaning and swallowing deeply when I came. When I reached for him, he said, “Can you keep it for later, love? I’ve got to go out today.” It was his first endearment. The first time he hadn’t looked me in the eyes.

  If he’d told me today would be all day, I might have been all right. I was at first, even after Lou texted me to say there’d been an offer on the flat. I put in a shift on the children’s ward and handed in my assignments to Dr. Andrews, who received them with a raised eyebrow and a nod of acknowledgement. When I got back to the flat, the early-winter dark was down, and I half expected Aaron to be back, brewing up his jet fuel–strength coffee in the kitchen, stepping silently behind the door to ambush me, a trick that just got better with the playing. But the rooms were as dark as the night outside. The only source of light in the living room was his laptop. The lid was up, a screen saver of geometric forms rolling over the screen.

  I sat down at the desk. I must have brushed the mouse with my elbow, because the saver flickered off. I suppose if I’d been thinking straight, I would have worked out that a man with real secrets to keep would never have been so careless as to leave his e-mail open. But I was stupid. I got up and walked around the flat’s confines. Aaron had asked me, with a casual ease that enabled me to answer, if I would like him to chuck out the odd bottle of wine and scotch he kept around the place, but if I was going to stay on the wagon—and it seemed I was—I thought it best not to create false environments, and all this week had drunk juice and mineral water without a second thought.

  I poured myself a glass of wine and sat back down. It was only one, I told myself. And I would only read one e-mail. One wouldn’t hurt.

  ***

  It was late when Aaron got back—late enough for me to have gone to bed. I lay on my side, my back turned to the door, feigning sleep while he moved softly round the room. I waited for the dip of the mattress beside me, but it never came. After a while, I heard the click of the bedside light being turned off and the soft closing of the doo
r.

  Alone, I cracked open my dryly aching eyes and saw by streetlight what he had left me—a big glass of water, complete with ice, and a bowl by the side of the bed…Almost too numbed out and sick to care, I turned my face into the pillow. I hadn’t, then, hidden my tracks. A week of sobriety had lowered my resistance, and I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the empty wine bottle. Left it beside his computer, probably. Beside the open e-mail.

  You couldn’t read just one, of course, any more than I could have stopped after one glass of the velvety red Hardys. Like most people, Aaron and Rosie e-mailed in replies to each other, creating a string, so even though I’d only opened one, I’d read down through nine or ten of their exchanges before my vision blurred.

  I didn’t remember much of the content. Who would, with love letters? There wasn’t much to be remembered, although Rosie must have been on his engineering course, because after some of the outpourings, there were incongruous sidetracks into hydrogen fuel-cell technology and what they each thought of each other’s ideas regarding supercavitation, whatever the fuck that might be. Other than that, the letters were just what you’d expect—meaningless, except to the parties concerned. God, they loved each other, though. Rosie’s exclamations over Aaron’s beauty, his kindness, his power and courtesy in bed were all things I’d have liked to tell him myself. Aaron’s responses, though more restrained, were full of affection and more lyrical than I’d have given him credit for. He spoke to her in a way I couldn’t imagine him ever speaking to me, and it broke me, cracked me quietly along the faults I’d thought might be healing.

  I fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of them. Sometimes she was the Rosie of my imagination, dark and slender, lying in a nice suburban bedroom with her arms held out for him, smiling a welcome. Then she flickered and morphed and turned into Marnie and then Joe, and Joe fucked Aaron hard from behind and looked up straight into my eyes where I stood helplessly watching and snarled, You don’t deserve him, you fucking loser. I woke up choking and sobbing, struggling upright in the bed. Oh Jesus. What had I done? I disentangled from the sheets and stood, head pounding, stomach hot and tight.

  I thought that he had gone. When I saw his elegant shape stretched out beneath a blanket on the sofa, my head spun with relief. To my astonishment, when I crept across the dark room and knelt by him, he pushed up on one elbow straightaway. “Matt,” he said hoarsely. “How are you feeling?”

  There were no words to tell him how bad. I just bowed my head, closing my eyes on hot tears as he moved his hand over my hair. I got out, “I’m sorry,” and he grabbed my armpits and hauled me up to sit by him. I shivered, and he put the blanket round my shoulders. “Don’t make a deal of it,” he murmured. “Just start again tomorrow if that’s still what you want. Clean slate.”

  I leaned into his arms. He meant the bloody booze. Maybe that was all there was for him to mean—maybe I’d got away with it, left his computer as I’d found it. My head ached fiercely. I’d forgotten what a red-wine hangover felt like. It was sweet beyond belief to let my brow rest in the junction of his neck and shoulder, where the skin was smooth and cool, and his sun-on-sand fragrance most intense. Leaning his chin very softly on the top of my skull, he said calmly, “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  Hope died. I let go a breath that turned into a moan. “Oh Christ. Aaron…”

  “It’s okay.” I heard the smile resting in his voice. “More or less, anyway. I more or less understand, after what you’ve been through. But…please don’t ever do anything like that again. I’ve told you the truth.”

  But you haven’t. I lay against him in silence, rigid with self-disgust and incomprehension. Was he one of those men who genuinely didn’t know when he was lying—a psychopath or schizophrenic, maybe? Sitting opposite him at the table or our shared desk, rocking with him in the throes of a face-to-face fuck, I thought I’d never looked into a saner pair of eyes, but what the hell did I know? I’d believed Joe—who was also technically sane—for two years.

  I could hardly challenge him on information I’d gained by violating his e-mails. His arm around me, treacherous or not, was warm; his touch still the sweetest thing I knew…After almost a minute, he yawned, rubbing his cheekbone on my scalp. “All right,” he said. “You’re freezing cold, and I’ve got a kink in my spine. We’ll both be better off back in bed.”

  Chapter Eight

  I had volunteered for two long Christmas Eve shifts, partly in a shameless desire to reingratiate myself with Dr. Andrews, partly to get the next day off. Aaron, who clearly took the business of forgiveness seriously, brought me breakfast in bed, and we parted affectionately, arranging to meet at the Metro station that night. Standing in the hallway, after giving my pallid face an anxious once-over, he had smiled and said, “I’m not sure what this is yet, but our first bust-up feels like a milestone,” and he’d given me one of his benediction kisses, the ones that bypassed all my erogenous zones and buried themselves in my heart.

  Not much of a bust-up, I thought, sitting at a table in the canteen to recover after giving my fifth piece of bad news in the cancer ward upstairs. I’d done something unforgiveable, and he’d let it go with a smile and a breakfast tray of strong coffee, orange juice, toast and two aspirin. As for what this was, what we were to each other, I didn’t know either. I only knew my own part, brought home to me sharply when he’d told me he was due back on the rig the following Wednesday, his voice, his touch, his unstinting kindness put beyond my reach for a whole month: I’d fallen in love with him.

  With a man who belonged, resoundingly, to someone else. Who seemed to be living some kind of double life so efficiently that not only could I feel thoroughly loved in return, but Rosie, off in her semidetached in the suburbs, was perfectly happy too. And where the fuck was that about to go? We both acknowledged each other—his lady for his surface life and church on Sundays, and his gay lover for the Powerhouse nights—and somehow shared him?

  I tried to rest my face in my hands but only ended up knocking over my coffee. As I mopped up with paper napkins, I reflected that I was putting my cart way before the bloody horse. All right. I loved him. He’d never indicated the equivalent, and if all his actions seemed to declare it, maybe he was just like that with every boyfriend—so attentive, so adept at drawing from our bodies climax after toe-curling climax, so damned nice that anyone not made of stone must routinely fall for him within his fortnight’s leave. Maybe there were dozens of us, and the long term wouldn’t get the chance to be a problem.

  I looked up at the canteen’s grimy ceiling. In the wards above me, vast dramas of life and death were playing themselves out beneath the tinsel streamers. Most of them were quiet and restrained—a shadow on an x-ray, hope draining from a human face to be replaced by mortal fear. Words, options, diagnoses. How long do I have left? I tried, always, to speak gently and with absolute truth, to feel how it would feel if it were me. But it wasn’t. For all my misadventures, I was here and well, my blood clean, with nothing worse than a fading hangover to mar Christmas. I didn’t know what I was to Aaron, but to me, he was—oh God, so much—warmth and life, proof I could, despite all post-Joe expectations, find it in my heart to fall in love again. I had three more days left with him. If he was lying, couldn’t I accept that, given what he was, his reasons must be good?

  My pager buzzed, and I stood up, checking the coffee hadn’t spattered my white coat. Nothing less inspiring to a frightened patient than a dirty, bleary-eyed intern. All I could do was give the day—the hour, the moment—my best. The rest, for now, could take care of itself…

  ***

  Aaron and I collided in a clatter of laughter and glass. I pushed back reluctantly from his embrace—the first one he’d offered in public, a massive bear hug under the Metro station neon, turning heads across the ticket hall—and laid a hand on the neck of the champagne bottle that had risen between us in absurd symbolism from his carrier bag. “What’s this?” I asked, not neglecting to give the ro
unded cork a caress. “Are you trying to unleash the beast?”

  He grinned down at me. “This is for over Christmas lunch. You can handle it, can’t you?”

  In his own quiet way, he was a great advocate of personal freedom and personal responsibility, this Aaron. He’d look after me to an extent, then help me look after myself. Insist I do so, probably. “Yes,” I said, convinced by his conviction that I could. “Great. Thank you.”

  “And before I chicken out…Here.” He rummaged in one pocket and produced a small blue cardboard box. I felt my mouth go dry. I didn’t know what was in it, but I knew the jeweller’s logo. “Small present. No big deal.”

  “God, Aaron. I didn’t get you anything. I didn’t know…”

  “Where you stood. I know that. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk to you more. Can you stand it?”

  “I…think I’m learning to love it.” I glanced up, letting him take that however he pleased. “Do I open this now?”

  “God no. When we get home. When I’m out the back…chopping logs or whatever, for preference, so I can fade back into the forest if I have to. Come on! I’m freezing my arse off here.”

  There was a feeling of a whole world shutting down. The most determined of last-minute shoppers had been finishing up as I walked through town, the most obliging of shops closing their doors. The night was cold and clear. A little starlight was making its way through cobweb clouds and neon, catching the pale strands in Aaron’s hair. Christmas trees in every other window we passed set their lights in his eyes. I walked at his side, trying to keep coherent thought together and make conversation. My fingers closed round the little box, which I’d tucked into my coat’s deepest pocket. A few days before, he’d come with me into the Northern Goldsmiths jeweller’s to help me choose a present for my sister. He’d been beautiful in there too—almost as lovely as he was now, the lights and the shimmer around him seeming to call out his own. I’d talked—I think I’d given him a little lecture—about my distaste for rings, for civil ceremonies, all the trappings of a mainstream society which had never honoured, helped or even acknowledged my choice of partnership, so why should I ape its symbols? Nevertheless, I’d looked for a while at a broad, plain silver band and admitted, when Aaron raised a brow, that if I had been going to bow to convention, that might have been where I would start.