Life After Joe (6 page)

It was two in the afternoon before either of us stirred again. This time my waking thoughts were free of Joe, even of Rosie—of anyone but Aaron, draped over my stomach, sound asleep where he’d dropped after our last round. His weight was solid, made breathing a sweet struggle to me, and I inhaled luxuriantly, running a hand down his spine. He moaned, stretching, and I waited in smiling apprehension—not to say disbelief—for him to feel that, despite our last exchanges, I could have gone again…“God, Matthew,” he muttered, pushing up and looking at me, jade eyes still half lost in sleep. “I’m flattered, but…”

A snort of laughter shook me. “I know. Don’t know what’s wrong with me. Or…or so beautifully bloody right with you.”

His expression changed. I tensed a bit. It wasn’t something you said to a one-off lay, was it? But then he smiled, and I realised the one thing we hadn’t done in all that grappling and fucking was kiss, and he leaned in towards me and rectified that, so tenderly and thoroughly I didn’t know what to do with myself. My eyes closed on hot tears. My hands clasped helplessly on empty air, and I brought them down unsteadily to cup the back of his skull. I opened my mouth, shuddered as his tongue slipped inside, but somehow even that was less erotic than benediction, and a moment later he lifted up and said, “You’ll starve if I don’t give you some breakfast.”

I thought about it. I found I was seeing the inside of my empty flat, and for the first time without lonely pain. I said, “Do…do you have the whole day?”

“Er…yes.” He sounded surprised to be asked. “Ten or so, actually, if you’re…not otherwise engaged.”

I grinned and let it slide. He was kidding or overly optimistic. Rosie was never gonna wear that. “Well, I’ve got six cupboards full of groceries at home. A proper table and everything, and I’m not a bad cook if you fancy making it lunch.”

He loaned me some clean clothes—after a second shower, the shirt and jeans I’d shed the night before smelled rough—and made me sit down with toast and tea while he got ready. On the sofa, curled up with one of the Mailers, I wondered why he hadn’t let us share the shower. Well, maybe some things were too intimate even after a night like that. A pity, I thought, feeling a shift and a heat inside my borrowed jeans, smiling at the ridiculous effect even thoughts of him could have on me. It would have been fun…

Of course, if I wanted to know more about where he drew the lines and why, all I had to do was go and pick up his mobile, which was within arm’s reach on the table beside me. It had beeped and buzzed a couple of times since I had sat down. Unwillingly, I saw her: Rosie, in her sunny kitchen, frowning anxiously while she composed her texts. She wasn’t anyone I could hate, or even dislike, any more than Marnie had been. She was dark haired and pretty. I even felt sorry for her, sending cautious messages to her man, who should have been home hours ago, trying to track him down without annoying him…I wouldn’t do something as unsubtle as opening up the fresh texts, but the old ones would tell me enough. Useful information gained for free. Ultimately making life so much fucking simpler…

I shook myself, retracted my hand and took a good grip on the thick half of
Oswald’s Tale
. Freely gained? Jesus, how was betraying Aaron’s hospitality and trust not going to exact its price? Even if I got away with it, I’d know what I’d done. I’d never touched Joe’s phone or e-mails in all the time he had been building his new life elsewhere.

That had hardly been fair trial of my virtue, though. I’d never had reason to look. On reflection, Joe’s poise was incredible. Two years and never a flicker of difference in his behaviour towards me. I’d bought his lies wholesale—his poorly mam, down in Yorkshire, where his family now lived, keeping him away a couple of nights a week. His weariness when he got home. Poor Joe. I knew how much he loved his mam. I’d sat up waiting and folded him into my arms when he returned.

Acid burned up in my throat, Aaron’s good toast threatening a return. Fuck. I never thought about this stuff. Joe’s betrayal had been subtle and complete. No point in an autopsy, picking over all the points at which my life had slowly died. There were probably hundreds of them, hundreds of explanations, revelations, things I’d thought odd but dismissed. I could drive myself crazy with just one or two. Already I’d spilled my tea, jolting halfway off the sofa as if something had stung me, and given serious thought to doing something I knew to be utterly reprehensible…

Aaron appeared in the doorway, towelling his hair. He was naked, and the sight of him full length in daylight made me lose a breath. “Are you all right?” he said. “You look like a ghost.”

I felt like one, I wanted to tell him. My life had died, and since then I had haunted its old scenes and routines, bloodless and unreal. “I’m okay,” I said, trying for a wide, deflecting smile. “I’m sorry. I spilled a bit of tea on your carpet…”

“Doesn’t matter. It matches the wreckage you made of my bed.” He came across and crouched beside me, the towel held unselfconsciously, concealing nothing. “Matthew, I should have asked you this last night. The pills you took—could they have done you any long-term damage? Have you seen a doctor?”

I am a doctor.
I closed my mouth on that. It was facile and lame, and he didn’t deserve it. His gaze on me was warm. I remembered him last night, thanking God for sparing the life of the drunken stranger that was all I could have been to him then. He had treated me as if I meant much more than that, given his affection as if I didn’t have to earn it. As if it were just there. “No,” I said. “They were just temazepam. I’m not even sure I was trying to off myself, to be honest.” I glanced at his mouth. It was beautiful when he was listening, the lips slightly parted. I kissed him, lightly but with a shudder of fervour across my spine, as if I had wings that were trying to unfurl. “I’m okay, I promise. Thank you.”

***

He wandered around the living room in my flat. I’d told him to relax and have a look around. Unlike his, the room was rich with evidence of previous lives, and I leaned in the doorway, drying my hands on a tea towel, watching him. I’d put a quick casserole on, turning down his offer to help. I felt strange. Part of it was sobriety. On the rare occasions when I bothered to cook these days, I did so with a wineglass in one hand, though it might as well have been the bottle for all that was left when I finished. I’d offered him a drink when we arrived, frightened at how badly I had begun to want one. He’d asked for fruit juice, and I’d told him that just because I wasn’t didn’t mean he couldn’t—astonishing myself, because I couldn’t recall deciding that
I wasn’t
at all—and he hadn’t made a fuss; just acknowledged this weird new development with a nod and observed that solidarity could help.

He paused by the photograph of me and Joe on Tynemouth Sands, one of my favourites. He’d bought me a surf class for my birthday, and we’d spent an hour crashing off the rented boards into the perishing cold North Sea. We were bruised and bleeding from sand grazes and blazing with happiness. He had his arms round me, his fingers in my hair. It was taken about eighteen months ago, something else I hadn’t thought about. Marnie had just moved to Newcastle to be closer to her job. Joe’s mam had just fallen ill. His presents had been of their usual thoughtfulness and generosity.

I didn’t understand. I went to sit down on the edge of the sofa, nursing my own glass of fucking useless fruit juice, which I now strongly wished to dump into a quart of vodka. Aaron smiled at the photo. People often did. That much joy was infectious. He moved on, now looking at the small framed shot on the bookshelf, glancing to me for a permission I could only give by a nod. He picked it up and turned it to the light, matching faces. Joe and me again, this time on the football field. He had me in a friendly neck-lock. We must have been about ten. After a moment, Aaron looked at me, frowning. He said, “Either this is your brother, or…”

“No. That’s Joe, my ex. We were together for…” I tailed off. We’d hardly been precocious. Hadn’t had sex until we worked out what sex was, well into our midteens, but that had been a technicality. “He lived up the road from me. I can’t remember when we weren’t.”

“Until…?”

“Six months ago. June.”

He set the picture carefully back on the shelf and turned to me in silence. Oh God. That look would finish me. There wasn’t a trace of pity in it. It was searing compassion: hot, wordless, man-to-man. “It’s all right,” I tried, aware that though my voice was steady, huge tears were hitting the knees of my jeans, a flood I hadn’t given permission to start and was completely powerless to stop. “I’ve been filling my time in—you know, drinking, fucking around…”

“Swallowing handfuls of pills. Okay.” He came and sat next to me. He put his arm around me. “Okay, yeah. In the circumstances, all that seems pretty reasonable.”

Did it? This view of things had never occurred to me. I thought I’d just been an arsehole. A coward who had fallen over at his life’s first real adversity and lost control of everything. His arm tightened—gently, not demanding, leaving it up to me whether I leaned in towards him. Whether I surrendered. He raised his other hand and pushed my fringe back, and I reflected, as his mouth brushed warmly at its roots, that he’d found a place on me that even Joe had never kissed, the widow’s peak. The gesture sent shivers through me. My eyes closed. When he leaned back on the sofa, I went with him, turning my face to his shoulder.

Another trouble with breakups—the instant loss of the dozens of daily touches, the background tapestry of comfort, given and received. You can screw your way through half a city’s population and never get that back. I had been starving for it without knowing. I pressed myself to him, feeling his embrace close round me, hard and strong, so tight my ribs popped. Grief went through me, but this time instead of crawling like sickness, it seemed to ring like bells over hard-frosted fields, plangent and clear. It wasn’t spineless, was it—not cowardly, pathetic, any of the other names I’d been calling myself? To weep for Joe, for this kind of loss; even briefly to want to die of it.
“Pretty reasonable,”
Aaron had said. My throat filled with hot salt. “Poor bastard,” Aaron whispered. “You’re in bits, aren’t you? Poor sod. You’ll be all right; you’ll be all right.”

***

We had lunch when I was capable of raising my head again, of speaking and making sense. He was nice about the casserole, which somehow hadn’t burned, and we sat for a long time, talking about some of the stuff we hadn’t had a chance to cover so far, what with all the street fights and fucking. He told me he’d gone out to the rigs straight from university, attracted by the money, the chance to leave behind a childhood in deprived western Cumbria that was as unpromising as my own had been. He’d enjoyed the cash and the experience and slowly come to realise the damage the oil industry was doing, its ultimate destructiveness in a world running dry of fossil fuels. He admitted without shame he was biting the hand that fed him, but hoped to do better in future—was using his off shifts to work towards his degree in engineering, studying the structures needed to make alternative energy sources more than a nice idea.

It was good to hear him talk. We washed up together afterwards, looking out across the wintry roof garden I’d tried to keep alive for Joe. We were keeping to safe subjects—for my sake, I knew, to let me find my equilibrium. I’d cried until my sinuses were raw, and my chest was still aching, shuddering on deep in-breaths, a side effect I hadn’t experienced since childhood. To make it easier on him and show him I could be calm, I volunteered the circumstances of Joe’s leaving, told him I was selling the flat. He listened quietly, and I heard myself eventually say, “And…you? Anyone in your life at the moment?”

He took his gaze from the cold grey afternoon beyond the window, where it had just started to snow. “No,” he said, folding a tea towel onto its rack. “Not at the moment.”

And that was the problem with information legitimately gained. You had to trust the source. I didn’t see how those clear eyes could lie to me, and I nodded, smiling uncertainly. “Good.”

“Is that good?”

“Mm.” I put my hands on his waist, pulled him towards me and kissed him. “Yes. That’s good.”

The bedroom was too much for me. Only as we stumbled through the door, kissing frantically, did I finally work out that the last time I had seen it was when Lou had turfed me out of it the night before, and the night before that, if I hadn’t lain down in the rumpled bed to die, I certainly hadn’t gone there to try and stay alive. And for Christ’s sake, it was Joe’s. I’d never brought anyone home. If two men could be said to have a marital bed, that had been ours, and I wasn’t bloody ready. I stiffened in unwanted resistance. Aaron said, “Okay. Okay,” clearly putting two and two together, and turned me around.

He steered me back into the kitchen. If he was seeking to distract me, he did it well—pulled out a chair for me and sat me down, then lithely straddled my lap. He picked up the kiss where he had left off, bracing his weight on his thighs and moving sinuously over me until my cock heaved up as if I hadn’t been screwed six ways to sunset barely four hours previously, as if I’d never had it before in my life. He took a moment to dismount and strip off his briefs and jeans, and stood before me, hot as hell in his unbuttoned shirt, stomach muscles rippling in the fabric’s shadows, shaft blooming up dark with blood. “Lift up for me,” he said, and together we pulled my trousers and underwear down my thighs far enough.

It took me a second to work out far enough for what. Events were moving too fast. And I’d stupidly thought, because he had taken the driver’s seat for our first couple of rides—because he was refinement of the stereotype—that was his preference: that he would not like to be fucked. Now he took hold of the top bar of the chair and sat back down across my lap, moving with a slow grace it dried my mouth out to watch. He let his weight down, and my shaft found its target straightaway, despite the difficult angle. “Yes,” he gasped. “Push up. Fuck me.”

I obeyed, lost. Only his dry tightness and the sound he made when the head of my cock tried to broach him brought me back to recall of my manners and the basics. “Christ, wait! We need some lube. And…a rubber, for God’s sake, you idiot. I…I haven’t been good.”