by Alexis Hall
“Should I go to the gym?” I asked. “Like, ever? Because otherwise you’re going to have to get used to me being monumentally average.”
“You are many things, Lucien. But you could never be average.”
“No, this is a physical thing and believe me—”
“Stop it.” He kissed me, hard enough to smother my protests, his palm gliding over the exposed skin of my torso and leaving a pattern of fresh warmth. “You’re beautiful. So beautiful I can’t believe I’m finally getting to touch you.”
I wanted to say something suave and witty to show I was…suave and witty, and not a pile of melt. But all I managed was, “F-fuck, Oliver.”
“God.” His voice roughened. “I love how responsive you are. Look…”
His fingertips spiralled up my arm and across my shoulder, goose bumps springing up in his wake like they were doing a stadium wave. I tried to make a noise that, somehow, signalled Yep, this is how I am with everybody, certainly not just you, but then his mouth got involved, laying pleasure over pleasure over pleasure, and I… Shit. I think I whimpered.
“The things,” he murmured, “I’ve dreamed of doing to you.”
I blinked. Maybe I could salvage this before I fell apart. “Why? Are they filthy?”
“Nothing like that.” He pushed me onto my back, his hands unbuckling my belt, and pulling off my jeans, boxers and socks in a flurry of very Oliver efficiency. “I just want to be with you. Like this. I want to make you feel things. Good things. For me.”
He was gazing at me, with this terrible earnestness, meaning every word. And, y’know, it was fine, I could cope with this, I could have feelings, it was fine. Never mind that there was this sense of nakedness settling over me, strangely independent of the fact that I was actually naked. And never mind that every time he touched me it was like he was unmaking me with tenderness. And definitely never mind that I needed this so badly I wasn’t sure how to have it.
Now Oliver was shedding the rest of his clothes, shirt and trousers and everything else, landing messily by the side of the bed. I’d almost forgotten what it was like for a moment like this to mean something—the first time you saw a partner undressed, how they both gained and lost mystery, the truth of them, all their secrets and imperfections, surpassing any fantasy you could have conjured. The strangest thing was that Oliver had seemed so unreal to me at first. I’d wanted him from the beginning—from that horrible encounter at that horrible party—but the way you’d want a watch in a jeweller’s shop window. A kind of frustrated admiration for something distant and perfect and just a little bit artificial.
But actually I hadn’t seen him at all. Only a reflected bundle of badly thought-out desires. And Oliver was so much more than that: he was kind and complicated, and more anxious than he let on, if his texting style was anything to go by. I knew how to make him angry and how to make him laugh, and I hoped I could make him happy.
Or maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I was too fucked up. But Oliver had stuck with me through my dad’s bullshit and my mum’s curry, he’d held my hand in front of reporters, and let me dump and undump him through a toilet door. He’d become one of the best parts of my life. And so I was fucking well going to try.
“Um,” I heard myself say, “I want to be good for you too. I’m just not sure—”
He lowered himself over me, all heat and strength, and the perfect glide of skin. “You are. This is.”
“But I—”
“Shhh. You don’t have to do anything. You’re enough. You’re…”
I gazed at him, not sure what was coming next. From the look on his face, he probably wasn’t either.
“Everything,” he finished.
Well, this was…new. Having to deal with sex-feelings and feeling-feelings at the same time, teaming up to leave you all achy and open and hopeful.
His mouth covered mine, half kiss, half groan, and I flung my legs around him to draw him in closer. He seemed to find this encouraging, which was good because he was meant to. And soon he was driving our bodies together in this samba of promise and sensuality, his mouth painting me with shivery little kisses, and this was amazing—like “oh God stop, oh God never stop, oh God” level amazing—except, for whatever reason, I couldn’t work out what to do with my hands. And suddenly I had these enormous alien mitts floating around at the end of my arms with no clear instructions. I mean, should I have been trying to get at his cock? Or was it too early? Did he mind having his hair stroked—or was that just weird? Was pulling it a bit much? Wow, his shoulders were really defined.
I’d finally settled on spreading my palms fretfully over Oliver’s back when he reared up, caught my wrists, and bore them gently to the pillow on either side of my head. Which, admittedly, wasn’t totally unhot.
“Um,” I said.
“Sorry.” A flush crept down his neck and across his chest. “I…can’t seem to help myself.”
It was strangely comforting to see Oliver even a little bit out of control. Even if it was in quite a controlling way. And at least I didn’t have to worry about my hands anymore, although that might have been cheating. “It’s…okay. I think I’m into it. I mean”—I gave a shaky laugh—“not if you’re going to pull out your leathers and start telling me to call you Daddy.”
He nipped at my throat in playful rebuke. “Oliver will be fine.”
His fingers curled around mine, unexpectedly tender given he was on top and holding me down, as he leaned in for another kiss. I pushed against him, not because I wanted to get away, but to feel what it was like to be…inescapably held.
Not awful, as it turned out. When it was Oliver.
My movements turned squirmy. And I heard myself moaning softly. And, God help me, needily. Which was scary and embarrassing and weird.
“Please trust me, Lucien.” In that moment, I was sort of relieved and sort of horrified to hear the vulnerability in Oliver’s voice. “It’s okay to have this.”
“Then what are you having?”
“You.” He smiled, eyes glinting silver. “I’m rather enjoying having you at my mercy.”
And that was when I remembered something—how fucking good it could be, just to be with someone. To let them see you. To be enough.
“How about”—I strained up and kissed him. Well, bit him. Kissily—“less mercy, more having?”
He legit growled.
And things got excitingly rough for a while, my self-consciousness fleeing with Oliver’s self-restraint. I made a few token efforts to wriggle free, but he always distracted me, with my name on his lips, or some fresh touch to a place I never knew could be so sensitive, and by the time he stopped holding me down, I was too far gone to notice.
There was only him and me, and the crumpling sheets, and the play of the streetlights through the curtains.
I was pinned by the sheer pleasure of it all—of Oliver’s ragged breath and the stream of his caresses. Of his deep, deep kisses, ceaseless as the sky in summer. The drag and press of our bodies, the rub of hair and the glide of sweat.
And the way he was looking at me, tender and fierce, and almost…awestruck, like I was a different, better person.
Although maybe, just then, I was.
Chapter 39
What was I thinking? Not only had I agreed to meet Jon Fucking Fleming at the busiest point in my working year, but now he was taking me away from my gorgeous nearly boyfriend who would otherwise be sexing me silly. I guess I was just that good a person.
To my surprise, The Half Moon turned out to be one of those craft beer places, all exposed brickwork and trying too hard. My dad was late—not that I’d really expected otherwise—so I got myself a pint of Monkey’s Butthole, which apparently had notes of mango and pineapple, and a toasty bitterness that lingered right to the end, and found a spare table amongst the beards and ironic lumberjack shirts.
For a
while I sat there, feeling like the sort of person who went out on his own to drink artisanal ales which, thinking about it, was probably a perfectly respected pastime in the artisanal-ale-drinking community. Oddly enough, this wasn’t very comforting.
Having spent the past half-decade missing deadlines and then telling myself it was fine because my friends knew where they stood with me, I felt at once angry at my dad for pulling the same shit and angry at myself for taking so long to realise what a crappy way that was to treat people, and also for being hypocritical about it.
My phone buzzed. It was nice to know Oliver was thinking of me, but it was less nice that he’d apparently decided to think of me through the medium of an old, bald white man.
What the fuck, I texted. I assume this is a dick?
Yes.
Should I have any clue what kind of dick it is?
It’s a political dick.
I liked this better when it was a flirty game instead of an actual general knowledge quiz
I’m sorry. Somehow Oliver could even make text come across as genuinely contrite. It’s Dick Cheney.
How was I ever supposed to get that?
Contextual clues. I said it was political. How many Dicks are there in politics?
To make the obvious joke. Loads
There was a pause. It’s also an I miss you dick.
That’s a very specific flavour of dick
“You’re here,” said Jon Fleming, who was standing over me. “I wasn’t sure you would be.”
Speaking of, I typed, Dad’s here
Reluctantly I put my phone away, and found—as ever—I had nothing to say to him. “Yes. Yes, I’m here.”
“This has changed.” He sounded genuinely peeved about it. “Can I get you anything from the bar?”
I had most of a Monkey’s Butthole left, but my father had abandoned me when I was three and making him say “Monkey’s Butthole” to a stranger might be the only revenge I’d ever get. I showed him the bottle. “I’ll have another of these, thanks.”
Heading to the counter, he scored the latest in a string of small, annoying victories by simply pointing at the drinks he wanted, and somehow making the gesture look dignified and commanding, instead of utterly petty. And then, sporting a second Butthole and a pint of Ajax Napalm, he made his way back to me. Given this was so clearly not what he’d been expecting, and that he was the oldest person in the building by a good thirty years, he looked infuriatingly non-out of place. I think it was the combination of everyone else trying to dress like they’d been rock stars in the seventies and that fucking awful charisma that made the world shape itself to him, not the other way around.
Fuck, it was going to be a long evening.
“You wouldn’t believe”—he settled himself across from me—“that Mark Knopfler used to perform right over there.”
“Oh, I believe it. I just don’t care. Honestly, I’m not even”—okay, this was a lie, but I wanted to piss him off the teeniest bit—“completely sure who he is.”
I’d definitely misjudged it. Not only did he know I was bullshitting him, but he also wasn’t going to let that stop him giving me a long, self-serving rant about the history of the music scene. “When I first met Mark in ’76, he and his brother were both on the dole and thinking about starting a band, so I took them to see Max Merritt and the Meteors here at the Moon. Back then, it was part of what we called the toilet circuit.”
The problem with my dad—well, one of the many problems with my dad—was that when he talked like this, you really wanted to listen. “The what?”
“Bunch of dingy-as-hell venues up and down the country. Pubs, warehouses, that kind of thing. Places you’d play for the beer, and the exposure, and the love of it. It’s where we all got our start in the day. Anyway, I took Mark to see Max Merritt and the Meteors, and what those guys could do with just two acoustic guitars and an electric keyboard… I think that was a real inspiration to him.”
“Let me guess: you also said to him, ‘Wow, it sounds like you’re in dire straits.’”
He smiled. “So you did know who he was.”
“Yeah, all right. I had an idea.”
“Of course, it’s all different now.” He paused meditatively and took a swig of Ajax Napalm. “This actually isn’t bad. Though in my day what you call craft ales we used to call beer.” Another equally meditative pause. “Then the chains took over and the small breweries shut down, and everything was pressurised and standardised. And now we’ve forgotten where we came from, so a bunch of guys in their twenties are trying to sell back to us something we should have never given away in the first place.” A third pause. He was really good at this. “It’s a funny thing, the pendulum of the world.”
“Is that,” I asked, half-sincerely, half not, “what you’re going to call your next album?”
He shrugged. “That depends on your mother. Your mother and the cancer.”
“So, um, what’s up with that? Are you okay?”
“Waiting for tests.”
Oh fuck. For a split second, Jon Fleming just looked like a bald, old man drinking IPA from a fancy bottle. “Look, I’m…sorry about… It must be awful.”
“It’s what it is. And it’s made me think about things I haven’t in a long time.”
A month or so ago I would have said “you mean, like the son you abandoned”? “Like what?” I said instead.
“The past. The future. The music.”
I could almost pretend that I fit into “the past” but it wasn’t much comfort.
“You see, it’s like the beer. When I started out, we were just kids with big ideas playing on borrowed guitars for anyone who’d listen. Rights of Man recorded our first album on a busted-up eight-track in a garage. Then the studios swept in with their bubblegum pop and their bands of plastic children, and all the dirt and the heart went out of the business.”
I’d read interviews with Jon Fleming, I’d listened to his songs, I’d seen on him TV, so I knew that this was just how he talked. But it was different when it was him and you, and those intense blue-green eyes were looking right at you, and making it feel like he was telling you things he’d never tell anybody else.
“And now,” he went on, with legendary melancholy, “we’re back in the sheds and the bedrooms, and people are making albums on borrowed guitars on busted-up laptops, and putting them on Soundcloud and Spotify and YouTube for anyone who’ll listen. And, suddenly, it’s real again, and it’s where I began, and where I can never go back to.”
For once, I wasn’t trying to be a dick. But at this stage, against my better judgment, I was genuinely interested. “And how does The Whole Package fit into this?”
And for the first time—the first time ever—I got a reaction from Jon Fleming. He looked at his beer and closed his eyes for a long moment. “I can’t be what I was,” he said, “so I have to be something else. Because the other option is being nothing. And I could never be nothing. My agent said Package would be a good fit for me—remind my old audience I was there and tell a new audience who I am. It’s not a comeback, it’s a curtain call. It’s standing on the stage with the lights going down and begging the crowd to wait and listen to one last song.”
I didn’t know what to say. I should have realised I didn’t have to say anything. He’d do the talking for both of us.
“Everybody tells you that when you’re young, you think you’ll live forever. What they don’t tell you is that when you’re old, you think the same. It’s just everything starts reminding you that it’s not true.”
How the fuck had I got here? What was I supposed to do now? “You’ll…you’ll never be nothing, Dad.”
“Perhaps. Except you look back, and what have you done?”
“Like, nearly thirty studio albums, countless tours, a career spanning five decades, that one time you stole a Grammy from Al
ice Cooper.”
“I didn’t steal it. I won it fair and square.” He seemed to cheer up slightly. “And we beat the shit out of each other in the carpark afterwards.”
“See. You’ve done loads of important things.”
“But when it all comes round again, who will remember?”
“I don’t know, people, the internet, me, Wikipedia.”
“You could be right.” Having downed the last of his IPA, he set the bottle down with a decisive clank. “Anyway, this has been good. I should let you go.”
“Oh, you’re going?”
“Yeah, I’m expected at Elton’s for a party. I’m sure you and…and the boyfriend have a lot to do as well.”
Somehow, he was making me resent the ending of a meeting I’d resented the start of. “Okay, well. This was a thing we did.”
As he stood, I realised he hadn’t even taken his coat off. But, then, he paused and gave me one of those deep, soulful looks that, just for that moment, made it all okay. “I’d like to do this again. While there’s still time.”
“I’m pretty busy the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a work do and it’s Oliver’s parents’ anniversary.”
“After that then. We’ll go to dinner. I’ll text you.”
Then he was gone. Again. And I did not know how to feel. I mean, I was pretty sure I’d done the right thing. But, apart from that, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. There was no way we’d ever be close. Any chance of that had gone out the window when he’d walked out on me and not come back for twenty-five years. And, now I stopped to think about it, he’d still expressed no remorse about that, and was clearly never going to. Probably we’d never even have a conversation that didn’t centre entirely on him.
Not that long ago, it had been a point of pride for me to take the fuck all he was offering me and shove it up his arse. But I didn’t really need to do that anymore, and I think I liked not needing to do that. Besides, the man was dying. I could listen to a few stories if it helped him deal. The truth was, Jon Fleming wasn’t going to change, and I wasn’t going to be important to him in the way I used to think I had to. But I was sort of getting to know him. And I was sort of getting to be there. And that was something.