Life After Joe (7 page)

“Do
you
want to get up and get them?”

I stared up at him. He was watching me with a kind of grave merriment, and I realised he was capable of all sorts of mischief, that I shouldn’t take his calm surface for the whole man. I said faintly, “Not in the slightest. Look, we…test one another in the hospital. The interns. I’m okay—somehow. But for you, gorgeous…Not taking any chances. Come on. Shift.”

“Um. At the risk of losing your good opinion of me, maybe you don’t have to…” I frowned in confusion, and he clarified, one corner of his smile tucking up a little tighter, “In my jacket. I never did expect to have much luck in the Powerhouse, but…Well. Hope springs eternal.”

“Oh…” It took me a long few seconds to catch up, but then he was reaching over my shoulder, and I remembered he’d slung his coat round the back of the chair before we’d sat down to eat. I drew an unsteady breath. There was something very erotic in the thought of him getting dressed for the night in his riverside flat, shrugging into the soft leather jacket, making a check in its inside pocket, thinking about what might lie ahead. “Prepared is best,” I whispered, watching half-hypnotised while those capable fingers popped a condom from the packet and drew it adeptly down over my cock. “Don’t worry—your reputation’s quite safe with…”

I couldn’t finish. He had shifted back into position, and I could feel the fluttering gape of his entrance. “All right,” he got out. “Good. As for lube…” I saw him stretch one arm back, reaching blindly among the bottles and glasses on the table. “Oh yes. Luigi’s, extra virgin. Very nice.”

My eyes widened. “You’re fucking kidding, Aaron.”

“I’m really not, Matthew.” Uncapping the bottle, he poured a stream of green-gold oil into his palm.

“Oh God. Call me Matt. Oh God.”

He rode me gently but hard. I could have come within ten seconds of my cock sliding up into his body. The sounds he made as it entered, the spasms in his muscle ring brought my balls up tight, my load starting to strain for release. But I had to hang on for him. He was smiling down at me, pale skin flushed now, mouth a little swollen with arousal. I laid my hands on his thighs, shuddering at the feel of the hard, working muscle, the machinelike rhythm as he shifted up and down, bringing me deeper with every pulse until I’d reached so far inside him he barely needed to move for the impact, the pressure to jar us both closer to orgasm. I felt it start, gasped out a denial and clenched both hands so hard on him I knew he’d be bruised for days, then scrambled down off the peak. “Aaron, come on,” I whispered. “Let me…let me have you.”

“Yes. I want to. I…”

There it was again. That last restraint inside him, holding him back from the crest. Whose memory was he honouring? Whose image rose up just before he came? “Come back,” I pleaded, shifting my grip to his backside to try and draw him down an impossible last half inch. “If there’s somebody…making you feel bad, just…let it go…”

The green eyes clouded. “I told you. There’s no one.”

I closed my eyes in shame. Thought for one god-awful second I was going to lose him. But he had gone over the edge, and when I next could look, he had flung back his hands to brace on the table behind him, his spine arching, a cry leaving him that had bright wires of anger and pain running through it as well as completion. And even as I jerked up to climax, I could have cut my bloody tongue out for what I had said, for questioning this great and enormous good the world had somehow thrown into my lap.

He held me, panting and shivering. My spent cock was still in him, held there by the aftershock contractions of his flesh. For a moment, he gave his whole weight over to me, and I groaned in pleasure; again, as he bent and stopped up my apology with a kiss. “Ssh. I’m not surprised. Not surprised, but…there’s no one, Matt. No one.”

We clung together. When I could, I let go the death grip I’d established on his firm backside, and lifted my hands to stroke his hair. The shirt he’d loaned me was soaked with his come, the skin of my belly beneath it too. God, still warm as blood. He grunted in discomfort and eased up a little, freeing me, and we both rocked with laughter at passion’s indignity. I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of his breath come and go in my hair.

The sound from downstairs was so familiar, so much a part of my old daily life that I didn’t take it in. Three clicks—two soft, one louder. Aaron, whose lovely head had drooped almost to my shoulder, suddenly stiffened and sat up. “Matt.”

I was almost asleep. “What?” I said, instinctively reaching to balance him as he stood up.

“Your front door…”

“What about it?”

In spite of circumstance, he grinned. “Somebody’s coming in, you dope. Who’s got the key?”

“Oh Christ.” I lurched to my feet. “Lou. The guy in the club last night, the…the one who’s not my boyfriend.” I glanced around. I wasn’t too bad—hauling up my pants and zip covered most of the damage, apart from the wet patches—but Aaron, this beautiful, inexplicable new phenomenon in my life, was naked from the waist down, and the idea of Lou clapping eyes on him like that made me feel sick. “Stay here,” I whispered. “I’ll sort it.”

Not just Lou. Before I could reach the kitchen door, I heard another voice, then a four-beat clatter of feet on the stairs. I saw the crown of Lou’s head, and I planted myself in the doorway. “Yes,” Lou was saying to the neatly suited stranger following him, “it’s nice and airy, isn’t it? The living room’s just to your left. The main bedroom is straight ahead, and…”

He jolted to a halt, clutching the banister. His companion almost ran into him. “Bloody hell, Matt. I didn’t know you were home.”

The best defence was offence. Even as the thought occurred, anger twisted in me—why should I damn well defend my presence here? Defending Aaron was another thing. I leaned my shoulder on the door frame, filling as much of it as I could. They’d have to go through me. “You could have called.”

“I’ve been calling you all morning. This is the agent from Reid’s. I told you he’d be coming round…” Lou’s startled gaze left mine and travelled to the open bedroom door. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You know, Joe and Marnie aren’t asking you to do any of this apart from keeping the place tidy. It looks like a bomb hit. Please tell me you’ve cleared up the kitchen, because…”

Lou was pretty solid. I did my best to block him, but he had the advantage of momentum and temper and knocked my arm aside. I swung round to follow him. “Lou, you bastard—”

But there was no need to worry—or at least no reason apparent from Aaron’s elegant slouch in the kitchen chair. He was fully dressed and had somehow contrived to look as if he had been there for hours, drinking coffee and reading the papers. From where I was standing, I could see Lou’s face. The change in expression was fascinating, if not pleasant viewing. Like a landslide. From irritation, through a brief blank as he took Aaron in and then…disgust, a disappointment, as if despite everything, he had been holding out hope. I found myself wondering how long that had been going on. Me, Joe and Lou. We loved him, of course. He was part of our world. But always on the outside…“Okay,” he said slowly, never taking his eyes off Aaron. “Kitchen looks all right. But for the future, can you let me know if you’re gonna bring home one of your…”

Aaron sat up. Then, unhurriedly, he got to his feet. He wasn’t that much taller than either of us, but as I’d seen before, he could make that inch or two look like ten. Lou went white. Aaron said pleasantly, “One of his what?”

Lou took a step backwards. As soon as he did, Aaron turned his attention to me, and it was like the beam from a powerful flashlight, dropping the rest of the world into darkness. “You don’t want to sell this place, do you?”

“No. I’ve got no fucking choice.”

“Okay. I tell you what. Go and grab the things you need, and come over to mine until it’s sorted.”

I stared at him. I think if I hadn’t been leaning on the wall, I’d have dropped to my knees. He was so bloody beautiful, so real. Lou, his mouth hanging open, looked like a cardboard cutout in front of him. “That…that could take ages.”

“Fine by me.” He walked past Lou and past the poor estate agent, whose eyes were wide. He took me gently by the arm. “Come on. You’ll be out of the way, and…” He paused, glancing back, sweeping Lou with those unsettling green eyes, as if he knew him inside out. He looked almost amused, and his voice became more devastatingly mild with every word. “And if Joe, Lou and Marnie want the place tidied up, they can come in and do it themselves.”

It took me less than a minute to fill a holdall. I did so as steadily as I could. I had to do something to match Aaron’s poise and not let him lead me out of my flat as if it were the wreckage of a crashed plane. I managed pretty well: walked past the agent and Lou in the hallway with my face straight and my gaze front and centre. I heard Lou say my name in what sounded almost like alarm, but I didn’t look back.

Out on the pavement, Aaron’s arm went round my waist. I seized his hand. “Thank you.”

“It’s quite all right. Jesus, Matt—if they’d bust in five minutes sooner…”

I looked at him. I suspected my expression was absolutely grim, but something about it was making Aaron smile. I flashed back to our grinding, white-hot culmination on the kitchen chair—the passion that seemed to have fed on the slaking we’d given it earlier—and shook my head. “They’d have had to bloody wait till we were finished.”

***

I lived with Aaron for a week in the Quayside flat. If I say it was the best time of my life, that doesn’t quite cover it, because up until the previous June, my life—the adult part, anyway—had been rich and good. Joe had made me happy in a thousand ways I could never dismiss or forget. But it was as if Aaron opened the windows. The air in his mass-produced little apartment was breathable in a way I had never encountered before. I can’t describe the difference even now. With Joe, I’d moved along an expected track in a world I helped create from day to day. Aaron—I don’t know; it was as if he carried a larger universe around with him, stars in his black hair, far horizons in his eyes.

He was dead serious about his engineering degree, and if he let me drag him off to bed two or three times a day—on top of bruising, increasingly uninhibited interactions at night—he put in long hours at his desk in the living room too, turning over pages of the huge textbooks, his face grave and abstracted in the pale light from his laptop. The sight of him reminded me of a time when I, too, had happily lost myself in study. I made one brief and targeted run home to pick up my medical books, making sure no one was there, looking neither left nor right. Aaron made no comment when I lugged the pile of texts into his living room—just smiled and pulled up a chair for me on the far side of his desk.

I went to see my supervisor at the hospital on Monday morning. Lou had been right. I’d been sailing close to the wind, and it took a lot of persuading and a fairly clean breast of my crimes to convince her I was serious about my career. She set me a batch of catch-up assignments large enough to take my breath away. Well, I knew I needed to prove myself again. When Aaron saw the essay list, he whistled, took the sheet from me, kissed me until I was seeing flashing lights from anoxia, then declared a moratorium on sex until the work was done. This proved a marvellous incentive. I put in forty-eight hours straight, and we spent the next day in bed making up for lost time.

It was almost a shock to realise Sunday was Christmas. I’d worked A&E wards over previous festive seasons and watched the suicide bids roll in. Nothing like a month or so of consistent reminders, from TV, colleagues and shop windows, that this was the season of family joy, to knock the lonely down, and I’d wondered how the hell I was going to get through. One of those firsts, like Joe’s birthday and my own, that could rock the foundations. As it was, I took my courage in my hands and asked Aaron to come to my flat on the twenty-fourth and stay over for Christmas Day. We ought to be safe from viewers and surveyors then, and I could make us a proper elaborate lunch. Lay my ghosts about being there, and then for preference lay Aaron, right down on the hearth rug which had been Joe’s favourite place for a fuck, and where, weirdly, he had chosen to end us.

Aaron accepted. Despite everything, he seemed a bit surprised to be asked, colouring a little with pleasure. That was another thing about him—he was wonderfully easy to please. He wouldn’t take a penny for my food or keep, so I slipped out to the Laing Art Gallery and bought him a top-end reproduction of their
Interior of the Central Station
by Dobson and Carmichael. It was a shot in the dark, but somehow I just felt it was him. I had it framed that afternoon and remembered my DIY skills to do a nice job of getting it hung up on his living-room wall before he came home. His reaction was perfect—silent astonishment, a perusal of the soaring pillars and fan vaulting from all angles and then his hand going out, blindly reaching for mine.
“God, Matt. You got this for me?”

And on Friday, I fucked it all up. Aaron got a phone call early in the morning, on the landline by his bed. I was too sleepy to stir and didn’t lift my head while he asked the caller to hang on. To wait while he picked up the call in the other room.

He was being considerate. I sat up, wrapping my arms round my knees. I heard the living-room door open and very quietly close. When he came back to bed, he was pale. I waited for him to talk, and when he didn’t, something kept me from asking. He put his arms round me but shivered out from under my returning embrace, dived down the bed and put his mouth on me. Sucked me off almost feverishly, moaning and swallowing deeply when I came. When I reached for him, he said, “Can you keep it for later, love? I’ve got to go out today.” It was his first endearment. The first time he hadn’t looked me in the eyes.

If he’d told me
today
would be all day, I might have been all right. I was at first, even after Lou texted me to say there’d been an offer on the flat. I put in a shift on the children’s ward and handed in my assignments to Dr. Andrews, who received them with a raised eyebrow and a nod of acknowledgement. When I got back to the flat, the early-winter dark was down, and I half expected Aaron to be back, brewing up his jet fuel–strength coffee in the kitchen, stepping silently behind the door to ambush me, a trick that just got better with the playing. But the rooms were as dark as the night outside. The only source of light in the living room was his laptop. The lid was up, a screen saver of geometric forms rolling over the screen.

I sat down at the desk. I must have brushed the mouse with my elbow, because the saver flickered off. I suppose if I’d been thinking straight, I would have worked out that a man with real secrets to keep would never have been so careless as to leave his e-mail open. But I was stupid. I got up and walked around the flat’s confines. Aaron had asked me, with a casual ease that enabled me to answer, if I would like him to chuck out the odd bottle of wine and scotch he kept around the place, but if I was going to stay on the wagon—and it seemed I was—I thought it best not to create false environments, and all this week had drunk juice and mineral water without a second thought.

I poured myself a glass of wine and sat back down. It was only one, I told myself. And I would only read one e-mail. One wouldn’t hurt.

***

It was late when Aaron got back—late enough for me to have gone to bed. I lay on my side, my back turned to the door, feigning sleep while he moved softly round the room. I waited for the dip of the mattress beside me, but it never came. After a while, I heard the click of the bedside light being turned off and the soft closing of the door.

Alone, I cracked open my dryly aching eyes and saw by streetlight what he had left me—a big glass of water, complete with ice, and a bowl by the side of the bed…Almost too numbed out and sick to care, I turned my face into the pillow. I hadn’t, then, hidden my tracks. A week of sobriety had lowered my resistance, and I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the empty wine bottle. Left it beside his computer, probably. Beside the open e-mail.

You couldn’t read just one, of course, any more than I could have stopped after one glass of the velvety red Hardys. Like most people, Aaron and Rosie e-mailed in replies to each other, creating a string, so even though I’d only opened one, I’d read down through nine or ten of their exchanges before my vision blurred.

I didn’t remember much of the content. Who would, with love letters? There wasn’t much to be remembered, although Rosie must have been on his engineering course, because after some of the outpourings, there were incongruous sidetracks into hydrogen fuel-cell technology and what they each thought of each other’s ideas regarding supercavitation, whatever the fuck that might be. Other than that, the letters were just what you’d expect—meaningless, except to the parties concerned. God, they loved each other, though. Rosie’s exclamations over Aaron’s beauty, his kindness, his power and courtesy in bed were all things I’d have liked to tell him myself. Aaron’s responses, though more restrained, were full of affection and more lyrical than I’d have given him credit for. He spoke to her in a way I couldn’t imagine him ever speaking to me, and it broke me, cracked me quietly along the faults I’d thought might be healing.

I fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of them. Sometimes she was the Rosie of my imagination, dark and slender, lying in a nice suburban bedroom with her arms held out for him, smiling a welcome. Then she flickered and morphed and turned into Marnie and then Joe, and Joe fucked Aaron hard from behind and looked up straight into my eyes where I stood helplessly watching and snarled,
You don’t deserve him, you fucking loser.
I woke up choking and sobbing, struggling upright in the bed. Oh Jesus. What had I done? I disentangled from the sheets and stood, head pounding, stomach hot and tight.

I thought that he had gone. When I saw his elegant shape stretched out beneath a blanket on the sofa, my head spun with relief. To my astonishment, when I crept across the dark room and knelt by him, he pushed up on one elbow straightaway. “Matt,” he said hoarsely. “How are you feeling?”

There were no words to tell him how bad. I just bowed my head, closing my eyes on hot tears as he moved his hand over my hair. I got out, “I’m sorry,” and he grabbed my armpits and hauled me up to sit by him. I shivered, and he put the blanket round my shoulders. “Don’t make a deal of it,” he murmured. “Just start again tomorrow if that’s still what you want. Clean slate.”

I leaned into his arms. He meant the bloody booze. Maybe that was all there was for him to mean—maybe I’d got away with it, left his computer as I’d found it. My head ached fiercely. I’d forgotten what a red-wine hangover felt like. It was sweet beyond belief to let my brow rest in the junction of his neck and shoulder, where the skin was smooth and cool, and his sun-on-sand fragrance most intense. Leaning his chin very softly on the top of my skull, he said calmly, “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”