11
He was inside me.
We’d started off slow, with me reminding him that he was still under doctor’s orders, but then his fingers had gone wandering and then his tongue. Then he’d licked the length of my cock and asked – with lips still wet and gleaming – “May I fuck you?”
And now he was in, and I was moaning, dilating, spread out and pinned to the mattress like a butterfly. I lifted my hips as he filled me, realising that my body had been waiting for this, wanting this, since the very first time he kissed me.
“Still okay?” he asked, leaning forward to take his weight on his hands. When he pushed again the angle was different and I felt him against that thrilling, secret spot inside me. The sensation rippled up from the base of my spine, tightening my balls and shaking the last inhibitions loose in my brain. I arched and cried out, lost to common sense and reason and everything but him and the way his cock moved inside me.
I begged him not to stop. He went harder and I moved to meet him, astounded by the way he looked at me. Like I was a gift or a miracle. We had set out to make love, and here we were, reeling in our feelings as we pounded our way to the peak.
“You are so fucking beautiful,” he said, his narrow white hips hard against me, his balls slapping where my bruises started. I couldn’t believe someone who looked the way he did right now was saying that to me.
“So are you,” I said, and as I spoke I felt the last of my control snap. I started to come on his downstroke, and the ripple inside me was so slow and exquisite that I ended up babbling frantically as I spilled over - “Don’t stop fucking me, don’t stop fucking me…oh God.” I was tight and shuddering and I know I felt as amazing to him as I did to myself.
“I’m coming,” he whispered. “I love you so much. I’m coming…oh Jesus…”
He stiffened. I saw his expression soften and then he fell forward, skewering me with a couple more deep thrusts before he relaxed. My toes were tingling and my spine felt like it had melted. He slipped out and flopped down, face-up, on the bed beside me.
We lay there in silence for a while, listening to our breaths slow. He kissed my shoulder and rubbed his cheek against me like a cat.
“Oops,” I said, thinking of how much medical advice we had just ignored.
“Oops?”
“That was…energetic. Are you all right?”
He made a soft, satisfied sound and patted me on my sticky belly. “I’m having a hard time imagining any way I could be better right now,” he said, and sat up. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I watched him pad across the room to the bathroom. Like most redheads he blushed easily, but one of the things I had found beguiling about him from the start was the way that his thin, fair skin turned a post-coital flush into a full body glow. The blush went down past his nipples and all the way down to his pubes. He looked so sated and smug that I fancied even his belly button was smiling at me.
I heard the toilet paper holder rattle, and water running. Then I heard the electric toothbrush whir.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Mm?” He stepped out, stark naked, the toothbrush still in his mouth, although he’d turned it off so as to hear what I was saying.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “You’re going to be all clean and minty fresh when you come back to bed, and I’m just…sticky and filthy.”
He took the toothbrush out of his mouth and gave me a bright, Colgate smile. “I like you sticky and filthy. Do you have any idea how sexy you look right now?”
In spite of myself I could almost believe it. I got up from the bed, shooed him out of the bathroom and cleaned myself up. When I came out he was lying on his side in the four poster bed. He held out the duvet for me. “Get in here,” he said.
I dived under the covers with him, and we rolled around happily. When his lips found mine my breath was as irreproachable as his own; that spare toothbrush head had been a great idea.
“We should get a bed like this,” he said, looking down at me. “It suits you.”
“Better than yours?”
He scrunched up his nose, so that I could see the remains of old freckles in the creases. “Hmm. I wouldn’t go that far, although you do look pretty damn good in it.” He leaned down and nuzzled his stubble against my jaw. “Or maybe it’s because you’re so well fucked right now. You’re all dark and glowy.”
“Am I?”
“Oh yes. It’s very sexy.” He kissed me softly on the mouth. “Did anyone ever tell you that your eyelashes are verging on the ridiculous?”
“Yes, actually. It’s one of the few perks of being a hairy person: you get good eyelashes, even if you have to spend half your life waxing.” I ran my fingers over his model smooth chest. “I have no idea what you see in me.”
Derek kissed me again. “Stop it. You’re delicious. I love your thick thighs and your round bum and your big brown eyes. And your little beard.” He ran his hands over my body beneath the covers and I melted, sighing at his touch. This was all the romance I’d wanted, and more. He looked at me with that bright intensity of his, sizing me up so keenly that I barely even noticed the deep bruising beneath his eyes and the cut across the bridge of his nose. “You’re so lovely,” he said. “I think you’re twice as beautiful to me, now that I know how you feel on the inside.”
My eyes filled before I could stop them, and he laughed softly and licked the tears from the ends of my eyelashes. “Don’t cry. This is supposed to be a happy thing.”
“It is,” I said. “That’s why I’m crying. I’m so in love with you.”
He snuggled me closer under the covers. “I know,” he said, with a soft seriousness. “I love you, too. I’ve never felt this way before.”
“Never?” I found that hard to believe. He was thirty-seven, extremely attractive, charming. I knew he’d had lovers before me.
“I keep my distance, Toby,” he said, after a short pause. “I play games. Maybe as a means of keeping people at arm’s length – I don’t know.” He sighed softly, his breath ruffling my hair. He kissed my forehead. “Since I was a teenager I felt as though there was something missing in me, some level of emotion that I just shut myself off from, because deep down I knew I wasn’t strong enough to cope with it. And then – of course – I got into politics, which is a whole new level of shallow.” He lay back. “I’ve been alone for a very long time, for so long that I didn’t even know how lonely I was. Until you came along.”
I tried not to cry again, but it was difficult.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m capable of thought right now. I’m so happy I can hardly see straight, never mind think.”
He smiled and stroked my hair. “I’m glad. Don’t you think we’re good together?”
“Oh yes,” I said, as I sank down into his kiss. “So good. So very good.”
*
It was a beautiful wedding. The bride wore white lace and looked at me with interest as I passed her in the receiving line. Afterwards, while everyone was shuffling around for photos she found me and asked how long I’d been with Derek, which I thought was a pretty telling conversation considering it was the first I’d had with any of his friends.
In the ballroom – a pale blue Pride and Prejudice jaw-dropper with five crystal chandeliers and a musician’s gallery – we ate a fancy meal of smoked salmon and samphire, followed by roast lamb in a port wine sauce. The dessert was a pink chocolate mousse, and I’d never even heard of pink chocolate, let alone that it was a fashionable thing. There were red and white roses everywhere and all I could think about was how much this must have cost, which only made me feel even more of a peasant than I did already. This was a slice of Derek’s world, where people were cardiologists and concert pianists and shadow chancellor, and nobody woke up on damp mornings to find slugs had invaded the kitchen floor, or took one brief panicked look at their bank balance and scurried off to write one hundred and eighty thousand words of terrified porn about being penetrated by tentacles.
It was speech time. We’d gone through the groom, the bride, the father of the bride, the best man, and now it was Derek’s turn. Of course they’d asked him to speak; it would have been a waste to invite such a talented public speaker to your wedding and not have him say a few words. Unfortunately he currently looked like he’d been literally dragged through a hedge backwards, but Derek being Derek, he already had that covered.
“Please excuse my face,” he said. “There was an incident with a fox and a car and a tree and I won’t bore you with the details. I did briefly discuss with Gabi that I wouldn’t be offended if she wanted to crop my battered mug out of the wedding photos, but as we all know, Gabi has perfect manners and wouldn’t hear of it.”
Murmur of approval. Derek let the bride soak in it for a moment before continuing.
“We did come to an arrangement, however, and decided to fix the issue with Snapchat filters. So…when you get your keepsake wedding album and you’re wondering why there’s a six foot koala in some of the group shots, then…hi. That would be me.”
He was so good at this. To me – for whom the mere thought of public speaking was the stuff of pantsless nightmares – it was like watching someone walk on water.
“Anyway, we are here on this very special day for Ravinder and Gabrielle, and they asked me to say a few words about love, and what it means.” Pause. “Unfortunately that was extremely difficult for me, because in my world saying that you love someone amounts to making a decision. I love you is, by its very nature, an assertive statement. It’s an actual opinion, and opinions are terrifying to politicians. Seriously, if we encounter an opinion – one that hasn’t been passed through focus groups, policy think tanks and a series of hot takes on Twitter – well, we panic and assemble a select committee.”
They were loving this, almost as much as I was. He was a marvel to me, so effortlessly charming and sexy and clever that I could hardly believe he was mine.
“So,” he continued. “In desperation I went looking for things that less political people had said about love. I went through the canon of English literature from Douglas Adams to Jane Austen and back again, but I kept coming back to this one piece. It’s Shakespeare, which may seem like a basic choice, but let's be honest - the man always had the best words.”
He folded his notes, took a quick sip of wine and began. From memory.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.”
Under the edge of the tablecloth, I surreptitiously Googled the text, curious to see if he was actually going to get this right. God, that took some nerve, to recite from memory in front of such a large crowd.
“O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests, and is never shaken.” He glanced down at me and I almost swooned. “It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”
He looked back up, but paused, and I could see the blankness come over his face, the brief light of panic in his eyes when he realised he’d forgotten the next line. It was that same total, raging fear that had roared up out of nowhere that time when he couldn’t find the cheese grater, and I was suddenly desperately afraid for him.
“Love’s not time’s fool,” I hissed, like a prompter lurking just beneath the stage lights.
“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
Oh thank God. He’d got it. Just the couplet now.
“If this be error and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
Applause, another toast to the bride and groom.
“Why didn’t you write it down?” I said, when he’d sat down and I’d remembered how to breathe again.
He tried to give me his usual cocky grin, but there was still a skittish look in his eye. “Where would be the fun in that?” he said. “Why did you have the poem handy, anyway? Were you expecting me to fuck it up?”
“No. I wanted to see if you’d get it right.”
“How is that different?”
“It is,” I said. “Trust me. And stop being so insecure.”
I wasn’t sure what he’d been playing at, perhaps trying to prove to himself that his memory was still flawless despite a bump on the head, but I wasn’t going to get into that now. Now was when the good part of the wedding got started, when there were no more ceremonies and speeches and photos and everyone could concentrate on getting good and drunk.
Everyone drank and mingled. Throughout the evening I met with a variety of rich and clever people, like Rav’s sister, the brand new MP for Bath. There was an earnest little man from Padstow who talked in a polemic vein about wind power and whom I later discovered was the owner of the largest wind farm in Cornwall. I met doctors, authors, and an intense young woman named Alice who did ‘conceptual sculpture and installations’ and reminded so much of Maude Lebowski that I spent half the conversation waiting for the word ‘vaginal’ to cross her lips.
A small, grey-bearded man grabbed hold of Derek’s elbow. “Hello,” he said, catching sight of the bruises. “Good lord. How are you?”
“Oh, you know,” said Derek. “Car accident turned most of my frontal lobes to paté.”
“So completely normal then?”
“Yes,” he said, turning to me. “Toby, this is Steven. He’s a policy wonk back in Whitehall.”
“Hi,” I said, vaguely remembering his face from somewhere.
“I imagineer solutions,” said Steven, and it all clicked into place. This was Steve Prescott, the previous prime minister’s ‘ideas guru.’ He had a reputation as a crackpot and sometime conspiracy theorist.
“Imagineer,” said Derek. “You only wish you were on a Disney Corporation salary. While you’re imagineering, do you think you can imagineer the Brexit Secretary’s head from his lower intestine? I’m not sure what’s going on, but he seems to have confused negotiating with starring in an informational film about the dangers of date rape. Keeps screaming ‘NO MEANS NO’ regardless of what’s being said to him.”
“I think you’re giving me too much credit,” said Prescott.
“True. You’re no longer the mad oracle you used to be.”
“And you’re even more aggressive than ever,” he said, with a grin. “You know there was a rumour going around that you were mellowing?”
Derek snorted. “Me? Never. I taste blood and I keep going. I’m like a shark.”
Steve Prescott shook his head. “You enjoy this?” he asked me.
“What?” I said, unclear as to what I was being asked about.
“Politics. The raw, cut-throat variety.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I suppose so.” I didn’t, particularly. From this perspective it looked like a whole lot of pointless dick-waving.
He narrowed an eye. “I know you from somewhere. Wait, were you at the Party Conference last weekend?”
“Yeah. For the Independent.”
“Ah,” said Prescott knowingly, making my stomach lurch. “That’s what that was all about.”
“Ignore him,” said Derek, squeezing my waist. “He listens to entirely too many rumours.”
“Right,” said Prescott. “Like the ones about Russian collusion in the referendum vote?”
“Fine. You were right about that one.”
“Or the one about Donald Trump, two Russian hookers and a tub of piss?”
“Well, obviously that’s not true,” said Derek.
Steve Prescott drained his glass. “No. The tub is clearly an invented detail.”
“I heard it was three hookers,” I said. “And that they were actually Estonian.”
We all stopped talking at once and sort of sighed, the kind of sigh that was becoming more and more familiar these days. “This is political reality now,” said Prescott. “Somehow we slipped into the weird timeline.”
Just then a dark haired woman came up and was introduced as Alina Prescott, Steven’s American wife. “Why aren’t you dancing?” she asked him.
“You know why,” he said, waggling his empty glass. “Haven’t had enough alcohol yet.”
“You’re no fun,” she said, and turned to Derek and I. “What about you guys? You dance?”
“No,” I said. “Again, it’s an alcohol thing. I need at least four more drinks before I start flailing around the room to Beyonce.”
“You English are so uptight,” she said. “What’s that dance you all do that everybody hates but you’re not allowed to get rid of because of tradition or something?”
“Oops, Upside Your Head?” I said, making Derek and Prescott crack up.
“I think she means Morris dancing,” said Derek. “But yeah. That, too.”
“I want to dance,” said Alina, looking pointedly at her husband. He rolled his eyes at us, but he took her hand and followed her lead onto the floor.
“Let’s find some more booze,” said Derek. “If I get you drunk enough, will you dance with me?”
“I might. Do you think the band know any Kesha?”
He laughed and led the way into the Card Room, where there was a bar. Derek had a whim for something called a Godfather – “because what else would you drink at a wedding?” – which turned out to be whiskey and amaretto poured over rocks. It slid down with worrying ease.
“What now?” he said, as we perched with our drinks at the side of the room.
“What?”
“You have that bunny in the headlights look again. The one that says you’re worrying about something.”
“That’s because I am,” I said. “What do you think Steve Prescott meant? About Eastbourne. He sounded like he knew why you were there.”
“Oh, he probably does,” said Derek, sitting back and stretching his legs. There was still confetti clinging to his sock. “But nobody gives a shit. A week is a long time in politics in normal circumstances, but especially these days, with that whole time distortion thing that seems to have set in with the Trump presidency. You know – that thing where there are so many awful things happening at once that you think a fortnight has gone past but it’s actually only Tuesday.”
I took a sip of my terribly alcoholic drink. It tasted like the kind of thing Lucille Bluth would order on a cheat day. And I kind of liked it. “It’s like Steve said,” I said. “We’re in the weird timeline. Or the wrong parallel universe.” A strange, amaretto-scented thought suddenly occurred to me. “Oh my God. Maybe this is all my fault.”
Derek squinted. “How could this possibly be your fault, Toby?”
“Maybe we’re in the wrong timeline. You know how in any given parallel universe episode there’s always one character who doesn’t usually have a beard but has a beard in the parallel universe?”
He started to laugh. “You’re saying you broke the universe by growing a beard?”
“Maybe. I started growing this beard almost a year ago. In November. I remember because I had the whole conversation with my mother about donating money to Cancer Research instead of – her words, not mine – ‘growing some moustache that makes you look like a sex offender.’”
Derek threw back his head and cackled. “I can’t wait to meet your mother. So I take it you didn’t grow a sex offender moustache?”
“No. I grew a full beard instead. Figured I may as well be honest with myself that it wasn’t about Movember and more about how I couldn’t be arsed to shave. Eight days after I stop shaving, the guy from the US version of The Apprentice becomes president. What if my hair follicles accidentally plunged us into the beardy, weird universe where everything is wrong?”
He sipped his drink. “And what about us?” he said. “Are we part of the wrong timeline?”
“No. We’re the part that carries on from the right universe, somehow. We’re the ones who are figuring out that nothing is right in this one, because on some level we know deep down that I’m not supposed to have a beard and that Hillary Clinton is supposed to be the President of the United States right now.”
“So in the right universe we’re together?”
“In the right universe we’re probably married. And already living in Downing Street. I don’t know. Oh, and Bowie’s still alive and Rupert Murdoch isn’t.”
He screwed up his nose. “I like the right universe. How do we get there?”
“Not sure. I’m thinking that’s probably a job for a physicist…what?” He was scrunching one eye shut, as if he was in pain. “Are you all right? Ice headache?”
“I’m fine,” he said, but he’d gone worryingly pale. “It’s like a migraine that keeps threatening to come on but doesn’t.”
“Maybe we should get you checked out.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. “Oh my God, Toby – not now. Headaches and memory loss are normal when you have a concussion, remember? You practically memorised the NHS Choices webpage, for fuck’s sake.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “We should have had a couple of sedate little handjobs and a pot of chamomile tea, not…”
Derek leaned in and kissed my ear. “Full on fucking?” he said. “Well, that was on me, to be fair. If I end up having an aneurism from it then it’s my fault, not yours.”
“Derek, stop saying things like that. It’s not funny. You have no idea how horrible it was being stuck in Eastbourne trying to cover the PM’s trainwreck speech when all I wanted was to be with you. I was so afraid for you.”
He kissed me on the mouth. “I love you,” he said. “But you’re really neurotic. You know that, right?”
I sighed. “Yes. It’s been said.”
He set down his glass. “Saying that, I am quite tired. I’d normally be a lot drunker by this point at a wedding.”
“You want to go?”
“I think I might have to. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No. Not at all.” It had felt like another long day, and I relished the thought of getting out of my suit and curling up in the four poster bed with Derek.
He looked around for the bride and groom, but they were nowhere to be seen, so we headed back through to the ballroom. Derek paused in the octagonal lobby and cocked an ear, and then I heard it, over the blare of the party in the ballroom. Someone was playing the piano in the Tea Room.
“She just can’t help herself,” he said, and took my hand and led me inside.
Rav was standing by the side of a huge black piano, while Gabi – slender as a reed in her white lace gown, her feet bare on the pedals – was playing a tune that I actually recognised as by Couperin, coincidentally the one Baroque composer I’d plucked out of thin air in the wake of Jacinta’s weird introduction.
“Les Baricades Mistérieuses,” whispered Derek, as we stopped in the doorway to listen. I was glad he didn’t interrupt; it wasn’t like I got to watch a concert level pianist doing her thing on a daily basis. It was a beautiful piece, somehow perfectly Baroque and yet very modern at the same time, with the impression that the notes were somehow chasing one another through the tune, seeking something.
She came to the end of the tune and Derek applauded as he made his way across the Tea Room. “That was fantastic,” he said. “Although you do know they’re having a wedding party for you in the other room, don’t you?”
Ravinder laughed. “Tell her,” he said. “We spent a fortune and all she wants to do on her wedding day is work.”
Gabi shook her head. “It’s never work to me,” she said. “Besides, I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t have a go on a piano of this quality.” She turned on the piano stool and retrieved her shoes. “How are you two doing?”
Derek sighed. “You’re going to have to excuse me, Gabi. I’m a brain damaged mess.”
“No, go ahead,” said Rav. “Don’t hang around because you feel you ought to. Sleep’s kind of vital when you’re recovering from a brain injury.”
“Toby keeps thinking that I’m about to drop dead any moment,” said Derek.
“I’m just concerned.”
Rav held up a finger in front of Derek’s face. “Follow my finger,” he said, moving it to one side and the next. “Okay. Good. Close your eyes and touch your nose. Good.”
“Am I going to die?” said Derek.
“Well, yeah. Eventually. We all are. Sorry to piss on your ambitions of becoming immortal God Emperor and Great Britain at all, but you’re still mortal. The good news is that you’re unlikely to cark it from a brain injury any time soon.”
“There,” said Derek, turning to me. “See? He’s a doctor. Do you feel better?”
“Yes,” I said.
Rav gave me a look. “He’s a horrible patient,” he said. “You have my sympathy.”
We said our goodbyes and walked out into the cool autumn night, hand in hand.