“Hey, David,” murmured Howard, “have you come home tonight?”
“Maybe,” said David.
“Maybe for the first time,” said Howard, though mainly to himself.
Howard looked even better naked than he did when clothed. He was a half-size bigger than David in every respect: height, muscle development—and cock. Though David was pleased to notice that the discrepancy of size in this department was not so great as to be threatening. They were both fully hard by now. Both circumcised. And David noticed Howard’s cock was wet. But, checking with a finger, he discovered that the same went for his own.
“You can fuck me if you want to, baby.”
David’s astonishment at hearing himself addressed as baby by a handsome naked man not two years older than himself only increased his excitement at the novelty of it all. Though he’d never had sex with a man, he wasn’t ignorant of the options that this kind of sex could involve. He’d spent three years at drama school after all, and was now a member of a profession some half of whose male practitioners were gay. He was too choked up to answer Howard in words. He gulped and nodded his head. And even if he’d still had any doubts about what his next move should be, Howard’s own next move would have made all plain. He rolled onto his back, drew up and spread his knees, and with an encouraging smile helped David to roll round on top.
David thought it might be difficult to work his way in but it wasn’t. Howard was relaxed by drinking—and pretty well practiced too, it has to be said. Within moments David was thrusting deep into his insides, and not long after that he came exuberantly. It felt as though a series of waves were breaking over him as he lay facedown on the shore of a friendly sea.
He had tried to massage Howard’s cock. It was staring him in the face after all. But Howard took his hand away. “Better idea,” he said. “Later.”
It wasn’t much later. After a short interlude of stroking and kissing, Howard reached out from the bed to retrieve a packet of condoms from the pocket of his jeans, which were on the floor. With a bit of difficulty he put one on.
“I didn’t…” David began, feeling an irrational guilt.
“You said it was your first time,” Howard said smoothly. “And I believed you. I think I knew anyway though, without being told.” Now he rolled a newly compliant David onto his back and made love to him in a perfect role-reversed replay of what had gone before. With what remained of his reasoning capability David had thought that this would hurt. And yet, despite the hefty size of Howard’s hard-on, both in length and thickness, David’s discomfort was minor and short-lived. He guessed that he was as physically relaxed as Howard had been—thanks in part to the quantity he had drunk. Another thought flashed through his mind: it was as though he’d been born for this moment, as though he’d been looking forward to it all his life. And when, some minutes later, David felt Howard swell and climax deep inside him, he found the hair trigger of his own cock’s workings released again, and his belly milkily aflood, with only minimal prompting from Howard’s friendly hand.
But morning changes everything. Especially when you were drunk the night before. Howard left at first light. David stayed, nursing a headache and more. He had woken to find himself a different person from the one who had woken yesterday.
Romeo,
he thought bitterly. He was appalled by what he had done. He even smelt different. He got up and had a hot bath. It made no difference. He’d let himself be conned, he thought. The way forward made him feel sick. There was no way back.
All day he planned, scripted, and mentally stage-managed his next conversation with Howard. It ought to be in broad daylight, in a public place, the street, a pub. There should be lots of people about, there should be noise. They would see each other, shout, “Hi,” and laugh, then go their separate ways, their laughter an unambiguous symbol that last night had been a random event, not to be repeated: a drunken aberration. They would be able to show that they were still friends, that their friendship was all the better for their one shared moment of eccentric behavior. One day far in the future they might be able to bring it up in conversation over a drink and say philosophically, “Remember that night? What was all that about, then?” All this David and Howard would convey in their laughing greeting when they met next in the sunshine, in the busy world.
That their next meeting could not be like that should have been obvious. They had to meet that evening at work instead. They did not share a dressing room and, though David hoped right up to the last minute they might run into each other in the corridor before curtain-up, they eventually met for the first time onstage, in full Elizabethan costume and makeup, with rapiers and daggers complete. They wore handsome matching smiles, but there was lead in David’s eyes and heart.
After the show David got changed. He stopped being an actor, hung his Romeo and his triumph on a hook, and wiped his role from his face with removing cream. In jeans and trainers he joined the queue in the fish and chip shop like any other young man, indistinguishable from the rest. You might have driven past him on your way home from the theater, still talking about his splendid performance, seen him queuing there and, never noticing, driven on.
David walked home, eating as he went, and bumped into Howard, quite literally, as he was rounding a corner. “Sorry,” he said first, then seeing who it was, added “Hallo,” flatly. He thought,
Fate.
“I thought it might be you,” said Howard with as little enthusiasm.
They stood together in a shop doorway, sharing David’s chips. “I don’t know what to say,” said David.
“Doesn’t matter,” Howard said.
“I meant about last night. I behaved a bit out of character. I don’t usually do…you know…the things we did.”
“You don’t usually give in to spontaneous natural desires, you mean?”
“I don’t mean that. Fuck you, Howard. What I meant to say was, I shouldn’t have behaved the way I did. If I gave you misleading signals, then I’m really, really sorry. Please accept that.”
“Misleading signals? A hearty fuck, jubilantly given, and another one just as enthusiastically received…If those were just signals I’d like to know what constitutes a declaration of…of whatever.”
“You twist my words,” David objected. “I’m not gay.”
“Okay. No problem. You’re not gay. You slept with a man last night. Live with that. You’ll be in good company. All over the world a million men are doing just that—living with that apparent contradiction, and that’s just since last night.” David smiled in spite of himself. “Well, I can live with that too,” Howard went on. “And I still think you’re gorgeous.”
David hadn’t known Howard thought that. He hadn’t mentioned it before. It made David feel slightly better. “Those chips weren’t enough,” he said. “Guess we’d better go back and get some more.”
Outside the chip shop, a fresh bundle of supper in their hands, David said, “May as well go back to my place to eat them, I suppose. Since it’s just round the corner. What were you doing round here anyway?”
“Coming to call on you.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. To try to put things right between us, I suppose. That is, if I could. Maybe just to talk, to say hallo. Oh, here’s a wine shop. I’ll call in and get a bottle to keep us company.”
“In case we run out of things to say?” David meant to sound sardonic but it didn’t quite work.
They didn’t run out of things to say. They talked until the small hours and until the bottle of wine was a distant memory. David said, with what he wanted to be a weary sigh, “I suppose you may as well stay over if you want to. We don’t have any surprises for each other anymore.” Standing face-to-face beside the bed they began to undress each other, and neither was in the least surprised to find the other displaying a full and frank erection when at last their most intimate reaches were revealed.
This night they made love to each other more gently, more tenderly, yet somehow more intensely as they each fucked each other—just as on the previous night—and then got fucked, turn by turn.
They stayed in bed till nearly noon, then spent most of the next day together. In the evening when they met onstage again their eyes shone bright and clear once more, and it was those of Juliet that Romeo’s gaze could not meet.
In the days and weeks that followed, the theater company came first to realize and then to accept that they had become a couple. Even Sian knew a
fait accompli
when she saw one. And little by little David began to understand that for the first time in his life he was falling in love. He knew Howard deeply now: physically, through their bedtime sexual explorations, and personally, emotionally, through their conversations, through just being together. And everything that David knew about Howard was now wonderful. He would have died for him. Nothing that had gone before, with any of his girlfriends, had measured up to this. And yet he would have to part from Howard—he had no illusions about this—when the run of Romeo was ended. Howard had a boyfriend in London, and Howard would go back to him. He always did.
David had a girlfriend in London, but he would not be going back to her. Their phone conversations were growing more distant by the week. Both of them knew, without David having to explain anything, without her having to ask painful questions, that when they met again they would be meeting only in order to part. It would not be an easy meeting, David knew. However much as they might try not to hurt each other, both would get hurt; that was the nature of things; but it would happen anyway.
First love—at twenty-three! The love against which all that followed would be measured. David had discovered from being in love with Howard that this meant infinitely more to him than playing Romeo, more than his acting career, more than whatever golden panoply of talent he might possess. His life was changed utterly and nothing would ever be the same again.
David walked into the theater bar. The last performance of
Romeo and Juliet
was finished. The room was full of holdalls, flight bags, and backpacks. Howard’s was among them, David’s not. He alone had had his contract renewed. He would be playing Konstantin in Chekhov’s
The Seagull
. There was the chance of a London transfer…
Howard had bagged a couple of well-paid commercials, with a little help from his agent, and would soon be smiling encouragement at the consumer from a corner of the consumer’s own living room. Right now he was sitting across the barroom from David, his luggage between his knees. David called across. “Pint of best?” He’d reached the front of the bar queue.
“Small whiskey only. Lots of M6 to cope with.”
David went and sat with him. “I don’t want you to go. I shall miss you.”
There were people all around them. David didn’t care whether they heard or not. It was a common enough Saturday night scene.