Junction X

by Erastes

  “I knew it!” Phil crowed, throwing his arm around me again with a triumphant grin. “I knew it!”

  I kept silent. With a shrug, I attempted to dislodge his arm, glaring at the sea as if it had done me a disservice. I hoped to hell he wouldn’t remember this conversation in the morning, and I wondered how much I’d have to drink to forget it myself.

  He took a slug from the bottle he was carrying and passed it over. “An’ you know what? Claire doesn’t either.”

  It wasn’t until I had passed the bottle back to him that I realised that I’d never considered that his lips had also been on the neck of the bottle. It had never bothered me before. Now—suddenly obsessed by his lips—I couldn’t help but watch hypnotised as he opened his mouth and wrapped them around the bottle. It was insanely erotic, and I felt a prickling warmth in my groin. I made some non-committal kind of noise, letting him continue to ramble, but wishing with all of my heart that he wouldn’t.

  “She never has, and—boy!—has it caused some almighty arguments. Nothing worse than an argument in bed, eh, Eddie?”

  I shrugged again, my inner prude still fighting for control. I’d never argued in bed. It wasn’t a place where a lot happened, all in all.

  “I’ve had head so good before my marriage that I felt my soul was coming out of my prick—know—what I mean?” He was close, so close his breath was hot against my cheek. I tried to stay stony-faced, but the mention of his experience actually made me blush, and as usual he read me like a book. His voice dropped, slurred with the edge of the grape. “You don’t know, do you? You really, really don’t. You’ve never—never had…”

  “No. Stop it.” My temper snapped then, angry, ashamed and embarrassed all at the same time. “No. I’ve never had a blow-job, all right? Is that what you wanted to know? Not from Valerie, not from anyone. Happy now?”

  The cool air was making me feel completely unreal, and all at once I felt liberated, wanting to tell him everything, like some flood gates had opened, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the balls.

  He was staring at me with wide eyes, his mouth open in shock. Whether real or feigned, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I wanted to punch the smile from his face.

  “It’s not the end of the world.” I staggered to my feet, the world whirling as I fought for purchase in the sand, and started an unsteady trek up the beach.

  “Eddie!” He came after me after I had only gone five wobbly paces, caught my arm and pulled me around. “Eddie…”

  I lost my balance, falling backwards in the sand as the world spun and I tried to stop the stars from fluttering. I was on my knees before my brain could catch up.

  I didn’t register where he was. Part of my mind was hoping he’d gone and left me with my shameful admission. But he hadn’t. He was muttering somewhere in the dark, “I’m sorry, Eddie—I shouldn’t have pushed you, but we—we’re mates, you understand me?”

  I could hardly hear him, let alone understand him. The hiss of the sand as the ocean pulled it out to sea seemed deafening. I may have blacked out.

  When I did start to realise what was going on, it was too late to stop. It’s hard to write this down, because what he and I started there on the Plage de Nice was so different from the pigeonholes of life I put everything into. Different from Ed with Valerie, different from Ed at the club. A new Ed emerged that night, but his wings were wet.

  The first thing I noticed was a pressure in my groin and balls, the thought processes seeming treacle-slow as my brain fought to slot the pieces together in the dark. I swear (and I can’t now believe my stupidity) that when I realised what the divine sensation was, I thought that Phil had got some whore from the village and had set this up as a surprise. It took me another groggy minute, as I looked down and saw his dark trousers, his white shirt, his gold-flecked hair, and his head bobbing up and down, before I realised what was really happening.

  The reality of what we were doing in public hit me hard even though I wanted it to go on forever. I struggled a little—but only a little. I didn’t shout, I have to be honest. His arm shoved my chest back down in the sand and he continued working on me until, almost against my will, I came in his mouth, my eyes screwed up so tight that tears seeped from the edges. In spite of all the conflicting emotions—the fear, the disgust, the surprise—it had been wonderful, unlike anything I’d ever done to myself. Heat, warmth, pressure, suction. I’d had no idea. Whatever I’d imagined, it hadn’t ever been like that.

  Afterwards, I lay stunned for a good few seconds. I felt Phil pull away and my prick cooled in the night air. It was probably the most embarrassing moment in my life up to that point and, as I refastened my trousers, I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Phil, sitting with his back to me. I imagined that he was as ashamed as I was, but once again, of course, I was wrong, for he turned around and, to my amazement and confusion, he was smiling.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” My mind was swarming with thoughts. Was Phil homosexual—queer? And I’d enjoyed what he had done—what was I?

  “You’re angry. I thought you’d be pleased. You’ve had a blow-job now, Eddie.”

  “Why did you do it?” I hardly recognised my own voice. I thought that I should be shouting, storming off, punching him. “Why did you have to spoil it all?”

  “I wanted to show you that men—that friends—can do things together, in secret. It’s the companionship you were talking about.” He sounded perfectly sober now. “Nothing’s spoiled.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Once.”

  “Who with?”

  “My tutor, at university.”

  My mind reeled, and I saw it clearly: a dusty study, Phil, perhaps his grades slipping, and a teacher willing to exploit a pretty young man. Phil on his knees; it’s what he would do. It’s what he always did.

  “But you said you’d had…before.” I felt horribly sober, and the words seemed wrong in my mouth, my tongue swollen and dry. Gone was that feeling of liberation, lost somewhere in the flood of salt, washed back into the sea. I wanted us to go back, back to the talk of rugby and cricket. Back to before he lit that cigarette for me and burned away part of my life.

  “Birds,” he said. He leant forward, wrapping his arms around his legs. “The tutor showed me what was what, and then I knew what I liked. They never wanted to spread their legs, but once you threatened to leave, they’d always suck you dry.”

  His coarseness shocked me, and the vision it raised in my mind made me feel doubly uncomfortable. Girls kneeling before Phil, doing anything he asked to keep him. I didn’t have that in my past. I’d had Valerie and that had seemed to be enough.

  I wondered briefly, as I struggled to my feet, what he wanted in exchange—whether he’d want me to do the same for him. But he didn’t say anything else until we got back to the terrace. The gîte’s lights were out, making the terrace seem a dark and sinister place. How had I thought it was a little haven for him and me? That fleeting moment of intimacy seemed gone forever—I couldn’t imagine how I was going to look at him in the face in the morning, let alone continue the holiday. Perhaps, I thought, reaching the top of the steps, I could fake an illness and we could return early.

  “Eddie.” He caught my arm and I stopped. It was like a spell, his voice. I still didn’t understand. I thought he had me in his power, that he could blackmail me with what we’d done. I was wrong, of course, but he did have me under his power, all the same.

  He moved in front of me, his voice so low that even I had trouble hearing him. “Don’t be angry,” he said. “We could have it good, you and me.” He went to touch my hair and I hit his hand away, but he persisted.

  I got angry, pushed him away and things got muddled, perhaps I was… No. I was going to blame the wine, but I know now that it wasn’t that at all. I found myself pinning him back against the cool golden stone of the cottage. I was so angry, and I remember being angrier with myself than I was with him. How dare he
come along and smile at me and give me something like that? I wanted to punch him, but he was too close, his breath was against my cheek and his groin brushed against my leg, announcing his own hardness. I stared at him, and his face was no longer mocking, his mouth wasn’t smiling. It was wet, and a little open, his tongue just showing behind his teeth. So close. An inch—less—from mine, and there was only one thing I could do. So I did it.

  Chapter 3

  I was often angry with Phil; but the infuriating thing was that he brushed it aside as if I was joking and his charisma helped him to get away with it. I soon found that our relationship was easy, amazingly easy, to maintain. Not that I would ever call it a relationship. I couldn’t let my mind go beyond my own hemmed-in, hospital-corner boundaries. I was a husband, a father. A man. I wasn’t having a relationship with another man; it was laughable. I looked on it as a series of ‘episodes,’ and I called it that in my head. I refused to call it…what it was.

  We continued our friendship as if nothing had happened that August night. Or rather, Phil continued as if nothing had happened, and I stumbled through the holiday wearing wine-blinded blinkers and feeling hot and sick every time Phil walked in the room. We were not alone together in the same way again that holiday and, as far as I know, neither of us wanted to be; Phil was his normal self, while I was too confused to even allude to it again. I made sure we weren’t alone, making excuses to spend more time with Valerie, going shopping with her, spending hours on the beach just with her. At night, Phil went to bed when Claire did, and I was careful to do the same with Valerie. If anything, the thought of what Phil and I had done made me reach for Valerie’s body with a fierce enthusiasm that surprised us both, and several months later, upon our return to England, she thought she was pregnant again.

  I was greatly relieved when she found that she wasn’t. I felt a rush of guilt whenever she said that the holiday was like a second honeymoon, and it hurt me to see how happy she was when my attention to her was caused by something that she could never understand. I didn’t understand it—so how could she?

  But afterwards, I couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get away with those episodes with Phil, and I suppose it’s because people don’t look for aberration where there is an established routine. Everyone knew that Phil and I were best friends, and no one saw anything but that. If we were five minutes longer getting changed after golf, if we disappeared into the rough to hunt for a lost golf ball, if (and most dangerous of all) we bumped into each other at work, or somewhere in our respective houses, no one saw. No one suspected.

  The first episode after France happened at the golf club early one Sunday morning. We sat on a slatted bench side by side and, as I bent to lace up my shoes, Phil touched me on the back of the neck, his fingers teasing in the short curls. I flinched at first, still unused to gentle touches from a man, and glanced sideways, knowing what he meant before he spoke.

  “There’s no one but us,” he said. “Next pair’s not due to tee off for an hour.”

  I think now, looking back, that it was the public aspect of it that gave it an edge. I suspect for Phil the danger meant more than the act itself. He never arranged for us to get together at a business convention, where we would have been private. For him, it was all about the fear of discovery, and I have to say that this was part of the groin-churning excitement for me, too.

  I straightened up and leaned towards him, keeping half an eye on the door, but he turned his head away. “No time,” he whispered. “I’m hard, Eddie, so hard. I need it.”

  I was getting that way, too. I hardened to just hear him talk like that, and I loved it, for all my prudish denials. I’d never heard anyone say those things and I wondered if I would ever be able to demand the way he did. It made him dangerous and exotic to my stockbroker brain. I wanted to kiss him again, the way I had in France, to kiss him until he groaned into my mouth, but he was insistent. “Suck it,” he ordered, pushing my head down. “You can do it.”

  I could, and I found out I wanted to. It was terrible but wonderful. I actually gagged at first, not from his length, but because of what was in my mouth and what I was doing to it. But as soon as Phil’s fingers tightened in my hair and he made that same noise that he had in France, I forgot everything but doing what came so unnaturally-naturally, wanting to give him more, to make him make those sounds again and again.

  Out on the course, he switched back to Phil the best friend. I was always amazed how he could turn his sex drive on and off like he was two entirely different people. He played as well as ever, waved at the other golfers as they filtered onto the course and showed nothing in his face or his manner that said he’d been fucking his friend’s face an hour earlier.

  At first I found it difficult. I wasn’t, I found out, the sort of man who could switch from one thing to another like he could. I wanted more than my head in his lap, his fingers wrapped around my cock. I wanted to hold him, to kiss him. I wanted to talk to him about it and, after a few months, I plucked up the courage on the train.

  He was buried in the FT, his legs crossed. “Markerim will go through the roof this week,” he said. I was glaring angrily at the winter landscape, wishing it would snow in England sufficiently so we wouldn’t have to traipse to Switzerland with Valerie and her still-slightly-cool-to-Ed parents.

  “Eddie?” He hated it when I didn’t answer him immediately; perhaps he liked to think that I was hanging on his every word.

  I sighed and turned round. “Depends if they decide to make an offer on Arkinhol.” I didn’t get excited; we both knew the criteria needed for the stock to rise, and we both had clients that would want to buy if so.

  “What’s wrong?” He dumped his paper on the seat and leaned forward. “Valerie? Children all right?”

  I stared at him evenly. When he was like this, being the concerned friend, it was hard to believe that sometimes he was so horny he couldn’t take no for an answer. I hardly knew how to say what I wanted, but I needed to speak of it, to bring it out in the open between us. “It’s about…us.”

  The atmosphere changed immediately. He sat up ramrod-straight and a look came over his face, one I’d seen in meetings when his suggestions had been disparaged. It was a face wiped of all emotion. I stumbled on, regardless, feeling my cheeks grow hot as if I were a child again and caught out in some pettiness. “Not…us, exactly.”

  “Spit it out, Ed.” His voice was cold, as if I’d already insulted him.

  “What is it? I mean…what do you think it is?” I was so stupid back then. I didn’t even have the words, words I learned later from the unlikeliest of sources. “Are we queer? Are you?”

  He picked up the paper and snapped it into submission. Once again, I saw something in his face I didn’t recognise, something I didn’t like, and I wondered if Claire had seen that face—or whether his girlfriends had, those girls who’d been so desperate to keep him. “Of course not. Now shut up, Eddie, do. The gingerbread twins will be getting on soon, and they’d never understand what you were on about. God knows if I do, at times.” His voice was acerbic and I felt I’d been slapped.

  I never brought it up with him again. And yes, I let him continue with his needy little episodes. Weak? Yes. But I was as needy as he was by then, addicted to the touch of hot hard flesh and the rare times he’d let me kiss him. There was no way, while he still wanted some kind of contact, that I was going to say no. And he knew it.

  So, four months after he’d left The Avenue, here he was again, zipping himself up and looking smug and sated while I was still letting him run the show. I sat there staring moodily out of the window as the train rattled on towards London while the carriage filled up and the dark-suited men around me caught up with the markets. I was as hurt by Phil’s four-month silence as by his sudden reappearance. I felt that he’d only missed my mouth on his cock, not all the other things I thought we’d been to each other over the years. I wanted to shout that at him. I wanted one more dark hot night, a step back in Mr. Wells�
�� time machine. This time, I’d make it different. This time when I pushed him up against a wall, I imagined that I’d punch him and leave him there. Better still, I wouldn’t let him push me down onto the sand. Or I wouldn’t walk down to the beach. I wouldn’t take that cigarette.

  Who was I kidding? Only myself, I suppose.

  We walked from Waterloo into the city, as usual. I hated the Underground, and although Phil fell into step beside me and I should have been pleased to see him, should have caught up on our news, I was silent and troubled. The train journey had paled into insignificance against my wife’s mood and the reception I’d get tonight if I played squash and got home late.

  The day, as it turned out, had other plans for me. The market was as stubborn as cold treacle and a lot of deals went as hard as they could go. I finished the day hot and bothered, having made a profit on the trading but only just and only by skipping lunch and working till the last bell. One good thing about my work was that I could usually lose myself in the daily battle of wits—me against the numbers, me against the clock. I wasn’t the best—there were men who had better cars, better houses, better wives—but I was good.

  I remember Alex asking me once why I wasn’t higher up on the ladder, if I was so good. I didn’t know the answer then, but now, when I look back, I wasn’t just unable or unwilling to brown-nose my way into the Board’s attention like Phil had. I suppose I could have cantilevered Phil into pushing me forward, as galling as that would have been. But no. I was happiest where I was. I loved the trading floor.

  I didn’t see Phil again that day, and I wasn’t surprised. He’d stayed away from me since moving from The Avenue, and we didn’t move in the same circles at work anymore. I walked back to the station on my own, lost in thought, winding down from the stressful day and letting my thoughts mull over my relationship with my best friend. The resumption of our episodes had left me feeling more resentful towards him than ever, although it was his neglect rather than his casual use of my mouth that morning that galled me the most. Next time, I swore to myself, if there is a next time, I’ll tell him no. And mean it.