5
On Friday Cerys came into Costa nursing a serious rosé hangover. “Edith Piaf, innit?” she said. “La Vie En Rosé.”
“La Vie En Rose,” I said. “Literally ‘life in pink’.”
“Also works,” said Cerys, peeling the lid from her black coffee. “Everything was bloody pink last night, let me tell you. I haven’t put it away like that since I was last in Cardiff.” She took a sip and grimaced. “God, that’s bitter.”
She grabbed a couple of sugar packets, tore them open and dumped them in. “So where have you been hiding? Other than the BBC, of course.”
I sat on my hands to keep from fidgeting. This was it. This was the conversation. No going back now. “I’ve been seeing a lot of Derek,” I said.
“It sounds like,” she said, managing to weight the words with innuendo.
I swallowed. Took a breath. “I know he’s one of your clients, Cerys.”
She looked annoyed. I’d always found it slightly amusing that Cerys – all five foot two of her – did bondage and domination for a living. She was the size of a pixie, with big brown eyes and that singsong South Wales accent. Hardly intimidating, but every now and again I’d say something wrong and those eyes would turn fierce and I’d get an inkling of whatever it was she brought to the dungeon.
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said, turning brusque. Professional.
“This is different, Cerys. This is me. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
I sighed, already frustrated. I’d mapped out this whole conversation in my head last night and it had dissolved faster than sugar in hot coffee, leaving me tongue-tied and clueless. “I can’t…I can’t relax,” I said. “Knowing about you. And him. And I’m worried and scared, because I can’t seem to control my feelings about it, and I don’t want to lose us.”
She softened and reached out, her hand on my elbow. I don’t know if it was just the stress of it or just having it out in the open, but my eyes started leaking enough for me to need to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes.
“Oh, love,” she said. “You won’t lose me.”
“I might. I could. I’m stupid enough to lose you. I’ve been fobbing you off with excuses since it happened.” I reached for a napkin. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Slow down,” she said. “Since what happened?”
“He came round to my place,” I said. “And asked me to tie him up and put clothes pegs in his nipples.”
She was a trooper, was Cerys. She was used to men telling her their strangest sexual fantasies and she had the poker face to prove it. This was probably nothing to her. “Okay,” she said. “And how did that make you feel?”
Her tone was so psychiatric that I almost laughed in a strange kind of relief. Maybe it was like Derek had said; what she did was basically just another form of therapy. “Strange,” I said. “And aroused. Strangely aroused.”
“Did you do it?”
I nodded.
“And how was it?”
I took a mouthful of scorching tea. “It was…intense. Really intense. Like he just jumped into my bed and invited me to do whatever the hell I wanted with him. It was…I don’t know…erotic, yet absolutely terrifying. He thought I was one of your clients, you see.”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “Oh, I see. So he assumed–”
“–that I was into that. Yep. You should have seen his face when I told him I met you in a cooking class.”
She giggled, and that was so good to hear. It made me feel that we might one day be as cosy with one another as we used to be, before Derek and his kinks entered the picture. “Listen,” she said. “It can be very emotionally demanding.”
“Yeah. I got that. He says it’s like therapy.”
“It is, in a way. Although obviously therapists make a hell of a lot more money than me.”
I took a long breath. This was good. We were talking about it like adults. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am trying to see it that way, but…I can’t help it, Cerys. I really like him and when I think about you two…”
She shook her head. “You need to relax. I told you. That’s the line I never cross. Even if he wasn’t gay, I don’t have sex with my clients. It’s illegal enough as it is, without getting done for prostitution. Just think of it as a kind of physical therapy; it’s not that different.”
“But it is different,” I said, increasingly annoyed with the whiny, jealous part of me that couldn’t seem to make the distinction. She had a point. If he’d been seeing a psychiatrist or something similar he would have regularly made himself emotionally vulnerable to a paid professional, and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. “It’s…spanky. It’s kink.”
She sighed, and I could tell I was exhausting her patience. “Look,” she said. “If you’re that desperate to understand…”
I held up a hand. I knew what was coming next. “Okay,” I heard myself say. It was like one part of my brain had rushed ahead and made what seemed – on the surface – a perfectly logical decision, but there was a delay of a couple of seconds while the other part of my decision making processes screeched up behind it in a cloud of dust and started shrieking things like ‘ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?’
“Okay,” I said, ignoring the shrieking. “I’ll do it.”
Cerys stared at me. “Just so we’re clear,” she said, “Are you saying that you want to come in and do a session?”
“If you think it will help me understand, then yes.”
“I think it will,” she said, and shook herself like a dog that had just had a bath. “I feel like I should be recording this moment. Are you actually agreeing to let me get my hands on you at last?”
“I…think so?” The shrieking still hadn’t entirely receded. “Is this a terrible mistake?”
She patted my hand. “No. It’ll do you a power of good. Trust me. You’ll come out of it with a much better understanding of your relationship with Derek.”
I exhaled. “Relationship. Wow.”
“That’s what you’re having, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the first time I think the R-word has come up, now I think about it. Why? Am I coming off as really serious about him?” It had been less than two weeks in total.
“Quite serious,” said Cerys diplomatically. “You’re agreeing to be tied up in a bondage dungeon, after all.”
“Please tell me you’re joking. Do you have an actual dungeon?”
She laughed. “Wait and see. And wear a thong. It gives you modesty and me access.”
I covered my face with my hands. I could feel my cheeks glowing. “Oh my God.”
Cerys fished in her bag and pulled out one of those fancy planners that cost twice as much as other ones because they have some kind of inspirational Facebook glurge in big curly letters on the cover. “I have a window on Monday.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I’ll be in Eastbourne. Tory Party Conference.”
She blinked. “Jesus. You’re covering that shitshow?”
“I am. For the Independent, no less. Promises to be a thrilling four days of watching Boris and Rees-Mogg attempt to out-Brideshead one another.”
Cerys shuddered. “Oh, that should be interesting. There’s only room for one cartoon toff in a political party.”
“Exactly. Unfathomably posh cage-match time.”
“It’ll be like Showgirls,” she said, and did the Nomi Malone hand thing. “Boris is Cristal and Jacob is Nomi.”
“Oh God. Stop it. Why would you fill my head with the picture of a pole dancing Jacob Rees-Mogg?”
“Imagine him doing the pool scene.”
I recoiled. “Stop! What the hell is wrong with you?”
She giggled again and flipped the pastel pages in her planner. “How about Friday?”
“Provisionally, yes,” I said, and then realised once more what I’d just agreed to. “Why am I doing this?”
“Because you’re freaking out about your boyfriend being into BDSM and you need to learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Boyfriend?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are we not using that word?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Relationship. Boyfriend. You’re making it all sound very serious.”
“Isn’t it?”
I breathed slowly and deliberately, afraid that if I didn’t I might just hyperventilate and pass out right there in the middle of the coffee shop. Yes, it was serious. Maybe too serious for something so new, but all I could think of in that moment was how much I had loved simply going to bed with him the other night. No sex, just both of us naked and wrapped around each other as we dozed off. And I remember thinking that maybe this was the point of it all, all the frantic fumbling and groaning and heartache we called love. It was all so we could get here, to this peaceful place where we had someone who trusted us enough to fall asleep in our arms.
“Yes,” I said. “I think it is serious.”
For once Cerys’s famous poker face failed her.
“I know,” I said. “It’s too fast, isn’t it? Just pinch me and remind me what happened the last time I had a mad fling with someone.”
That was Olivier, half-French and seven years my junior, my rebound fling after everything fell apart with Gareth. Olivier was a textbook beautiful mess, an aspiring actor who ping-ponged between auditions and frequent despair. He was always borrowing money, but at first I didn’t care, because he fucked like a mad angel on coke and didn’t spend hours – like Gareth – in long explanations of why that particular cupboard would be a far more sensible place to keep the coffee cups.
“He was an overgrown theatre kid,” said Cerys, who had once likened Olivier to a dose of herpes. “Incapable of processing any human emotion that hadn’t been passed through the meat grinder of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.”
“True,” I said, remembering the constant earworms from Evita. “He did have terrible taste in music.”
“Derek is an adult,” said Cerys. “Not a malignant narcissist with his hand in your pocket.”
“You sound very sure of that.”
She took a long swig of coffee and dropped the cup into a nearby bin. “Lovey,” she said. “I spank the bottoms of half of government. I know a bloody narcissist when I see one, and he’s not one.” She wriggled off her bar stool and squeezed my elbow. “You bagged a good one. Stop looking so worried.”
*
–i’m in my office.
He knew I was in the area. Unbeknown to him I was even closer than he thought, having just grabbed a quick lunch at the Arse End. Their greasy bar snacks were a far cry from the aspirational, avocado laden lunches that most of my peers were Instagramming, but the cheesy chips were obscenely delicious. Thick cut and deep fried until the outsides were golden and the insides were fluffy, then the whole dish smothered with a sort of fondue goo made from mature cheddar, and topped with two huge, beer-battered onion rings. I tried to keep to the straight and narrow path of virtue, mineral water and stir fried chicken, but every now and then that cholesterol bomb of a bar snack would call to me, promising carby goodness and the serene knowledge that there can be no true pleasure without at least a little tinge of shame.
I could have darted round the corner and up to his office, but I had a belly full of heavy carbs and somewhere else I had to be.
–can’t, I texted. the graun is sending me to do some press thing at the health dept. ever since they discovered that the health sec hates me they send me in as some kind of troll correspondent.
There was a brief pause, and then he responded. well, shit.
I smiled, picturing him impatient and cooped up in that pokey little office, with nothing for company but memories of that time he’d given me rug burn. you’ll just have to think happy thoughts and wank.
It was like I could hear him sigh from here. but i want you.
–i want you, too. Despite myself I started wondering how much time I could make if I hurried, but Derek was clearly having other ideas.
–you know what would make wanking behind my desk worth it? he typed.
–i hate to think.
–porn. quality porn. possibly involving cephalopods.
–lol keep trying.
–i’m serious, toby. i’m bored and horny and i require some top notch porn, as written by a talented and yet shockingly underrated author. something imaginative. something that means i’ll never be able to look at calamari in the same way again.
–you really want that tentacle porn, don’t you?
The phone blooped and I think I gasped out loud. It was a picture of his cock. Thankfully I don’t think anyone saw, but I quickly got up and hurried into the toilets, in case he decided to send any more.
He had his trousers all the way down, his beautiful thighs bare, his fingers curled around the shaft. I realised then that I’d never watched him playing with himself, and I was shocked by how much I wanted to see that.
–do NOT send me photos of your penis, I typed, locking myself in a toilet stall. i could be on a crowded tube train for all you know.
–are you?
–i might be. do you really want your dilz viewed by five different strap hangers on the district line?
–potentially hot. keep going. i’m almost there.
I sat down on the lid of the toilet. I was pushed for time, but I saw a way where I could make the meeting on time and we could still have sex. That dick pic had bothered me in a deep down dirty way that demanded gratification, and I was nothing if not creative.
–ok, I texted. time for you to use your imagination. i’m under your desk.
There was a brief pause, and then he replied. are you seriously on the district line right now?
I giggled. pay attention. i don’t just text filth to anyone, you know. lock your door, drop your drawers and reach for the hand lotion. i’m going to make you come.
He texted me the heart-eyes emoji. you’re incredible.
“Yes, I am,” I said, out loud and under my breath. I felt pretty damn incredible, not to mention sexy. How did we keep coming up with new ways to misbehave?
I started typing. Time to show him that there was more to my talent than just tentacle porn.
–i’m under your desk, between your legs. i rub my beard over your open thighs, kissing them, running my tongue up and down the insides but stopping just shy of your balls. i know you want me to lick you. you want my tongue all over your balls and up and down your thick, beautiful cock, but not yet. wait
Someone came in to the gents. I sat tight on the toilet lid and hoped Derek wasn’t going to send me something with sound. Instead he texted just three words.
–oh fuck me
And then I was the one who had to bite my lip to keep quiet, because I knew exactly how he would say that, how his voice would sound. Part exclamation, part instruction, the words pushed out his mouth by the undulations of his diaphragm.
I held my breath, and kept typing.
–i slide my hands under your knees and pull, and you take the hint and shift until you’re sitting on the edge of the chair, your cock sticking up hard. i start to tease you with my tongue and your breath catches in your throat as you rear up, trying to fuck my mouth. when i swallow you i feel your thighs shudder around me. you want this so much.
–yes. i do.
–you taste like flesh, like lust itself. i’m hard and aching for you. if we had more time i’d like to pull you down and fuck you bareback on that awful carpet. hands and knees and rugburn. but we don’t have time, so we’ll have to make do. you hand me the lotion you keep in your desk drawer for boring afternoons, and i slather it on my fingers. your balls are already tight and when i slide a fingertip behind them i can feel your cock jolt to even greater hardness in my mouth.
–don’t stop.
I wasn’t about it. He was maybe two hundred feet away from me but I was as focused on getting him off as I would have been if I’d been kneeling in front of him. I heard the toilet door swing shut; I was alone again, and I took the opportunity to undo my jeans, easing a little of the pressure on my tormented crotch. Unfortunately I’d never got the hang of one-handed texting.
–i’m teasing your tight, tender arsehole with a fingertip, circling slowly as i suck your cock. but you’re getting impatient, pushing too deep and making me drool. it’s getting good and sloppy down there, my beard wet with spit and pre-come. you thrust again, and this time when you sink back my finger slips inside you. you bite your lip to keep from crying out as i push inside you with a second finger, opening you up the way i open you up with my cock when we’re in bed and we have all the time in the world.
I shifted on the toilet lid and felt moisture on the inside of my underwear; I was leaking in my eagerness to be touched. I pictured him on the edge of his seat, his trousers around his ankles and his long-fingered hand at work on himself, his pale thighs quivering, straining towards release.
He texted just one word. please.
–i can feel the tension in your thighs, the heaviness in your balls, the shiver inside you under my fingertips. you’re leaking into my mouth, brackish and a little acrid, and i know the taste. i know it means you’re about to come.
Bloop.
He sent video this time. His gasp echoed around the tiled walls as I watched his cock spill over onto his fist. He’d unbuttoned his shirt almost all the way to the top and his thighs were bare, so that he looked a thousand times more naked than if he’d been wearing nothing at all. So naughty. The camera shook in his hand and he raised it up so that I could see his face, looking directly up at me. He was flushed and smiling, his eyes dark and full of filthy promises.
“You just wait until I get my hands on you,” he said, and blew me a kiss from the tips of his sticky fingers.
I yanked down my jeans and gasped at the first touch of my hand. My right hand. My first lover, the one that knew me better than any other. I came like a teenager, hard and effortless, with the sound of his climax still ringing in my ears.
My phone shivered again.
–you might want to delete that. obviously.
I laughed and wiped myself off. shame, I typed back. you look so sexy. i want you so much.
–same here. god, you’re talented. i can only dream about what kind of red hot smut you must be writing.
–lol nice try. i’m still not telling you where to find the tentacle porn.
I ducked out of the stall and washed my hands. I caught my eye in the mirror and immediately started worrying about the flush on my cheeks, the telltale redness of my lips. When I walked into the press event at Richmond House, would they immediately clock me as a man who had just been masturbating in a pub toilet?
My phone went again.
–wait. you’re not seriously on the district line right now, are you?
He’d left it a bit late to worry about that. of course not, I replied.
–oh. good.
–i’m on the circle. :p
*
Later, much later, I sank down in Derek’s bed, listening to the slow thud of his heart returning to normal. It was a big bed, with a sleek, backlit headboard with the bedside tables built in. A grown-up bed, I thought. Not like the times I’d tried to sleep with Olivier on a single mattress on his floor. No, this was the kind of bed you bought when you were an adult who had his shit together and knew the value of a good night’s sleep.
It was wonderfully comfortable.
“What are you smiling about?” said Derek.
I looked up. “I’m in your bed.” I said. “Again.”
“I know,” he said, ruffling my hair. His eyes were sleepy-sexy. “You look good in it. It suits you.”
“Thank you.” I shuffled upwards and kissed him. “It’s a very nice bed. Big. Comfy.”
He held out for more kisses, his tongue warm and rough. He still tasted faintly of me, and I of him. I remembered that he’d liked my bed because I could tie him to it, but we hadn’t done anything like that tonight. Instead we’d just stripped off all our clothes and curled head to toe for a deliciously slow sixty-nine. “One thing that puzzles me,” I said.
“Mmm?”
“How are you supposed to tie anyone to this headboard?”
“You don’t,” he said. “Don’t look in the spare room, will you? I haven’t figured out how to tell you about the sex swing yet.”
I laughed and he rolled me over onto my back. I wrapped around my legs around him and sighed as he kissed my neck. It was starting to get dangerous now, and I’d been grateful to have my mouth full before; with each new moment of happiness I got closer and closer to blurting out those three little words that could – if uttered at the wrong moment – conceivably wreck everything.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I said. “If I wasn’t kinky enough for you? If you were bored?”
He laughed that lovely baritone laugh of his and looked down at me in confusion. “Bored? With you? Mr Tentacle? No, I don’t see that happening.” He rolled onto his side, taking his weight off me and pulling me gently by the hip so that we lay nose to nose across the pillows. “Not after what you did to me this afternoon. I thought this sexting business was just for kids.”
“Kids? Derek, you’re thirty-seven. You’re not that fucking old.”
“I know,” he said. “But the average age of a member of parliament is around fifty, and I spend most of my time dealing with people who are knocking on seventy. Which is what Eastbourne is going to be like, by the way, so I hope you’re prepared for that.”
“I’m sure I’ll cope,” I said, stroking his instep with my toes beneath the covers. “What are you going to do while I’m in Eastbourne?”
“I was going to send you pictures of my penis.”
“Oh. Well, I look forward to that.”
“I aim to please. I’ll try and fit it in between looking for your tentacle porn. I think I’ve narrowed you down to a handful of suspects now. Just out of interest, do you hire a professional cover designer?”
Professionals. There was a thing. My renewed anxiety must have showed on my face, because his smile wilted and his expression turned watchful. “What?” he said, running the backs of his fingers across my cheekbone. “What are you thinking?”
“Cerys,” I said. “Are you going to see her while I’m away?”
“No.”
“Okay.” That seemed easy, but my stomach was still squirming strangely.
Derek sighed. “Toby, talk to me. You’re not all right with this, are you? Do you want me to stop seeing her?”
“Yes. No.” God, why was this so complicated? “I don’t know. I don’t want you to…” Once again I couldn’t articulate how I felt. “I talked to her. And I can see her point of view.”
“Which is?”
“That it’s not really that different to you seeing a psychiatrist. Except that psychiatrists don’t insert fist sized dildos into people’s bums.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said, “What some psychiatrists get up to, but yes. I take your point. Would it make you feel better knowing she’s never inserted anything into me?”
“A bit, yes.”
He sighed again and kissed me. “We’ll stop. I won’t see her any more. Okay?”
“No.” I couldn’t ask him to do that, not in the light of what I’d just agreed to.
“No?”
“I don’t want you to stop seeing her if it’s going to make you stressed or unhappy or take away something that gives you a way of blowing off steam. I don’t know enough to give you those things in a relationship. I’m trying, Derek. I’m trying to be an adult about this.”
“Well, stop being an adult,” he said. “And tell me what you want. Please. Can’t you see I’m bad at this?”
“Bad at what?” He couldn’t have been talking about sex.
“This,” he said. “Us. I’m terrible at relationships. Something in me always gets carried away and I go too fast and fuck things up. I plunge in without thinking; I think that’s why delayed gratification gets me off so much.” He pulled me closer. “I like you. I really like you, which is usually the point when my lunatic instincts kick in and I start making grand gestures and a total fool of myself.”
“You’re not,” I said, thinking of Olivier. “Believe me, you’re not.”
“I don’t mean to put pressure on you, Toby. I’m just saying that it would be helpful to know exactly what you want.”
It was my turn to sigh. “Fine, but it’s a long list of demands.”
“Is it?”
“God, yes. More of a backstage rider, actually. I need white Egyptian cotton towels, fresh arrangements of seasonal flowers, a specific room temperature of exactly nineteen point four degrees centigrade, a slushie machine that dispenses nothing but Cheeky Vimtos, and absolutely no hydrangeas. I loathe hydrangeas.”
He propped himself up on an elbow and raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” I said. “You get angry when you’re nervous: I crack jokes.”
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “If you don’t want to tell me what you want…”
God, I was making a mess. “I want this,” I said. “Us. More of it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”