Junction X (15 page)

I nodded.

He looked me straight in the eye. “You want it too?” He looked suddenly unsure. “Tell me.”

I hesitated, still tongue-tied; he looked like I’d hit him. So I said urgently, “I—I do.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I was lost. He seemed to know the script, while I had no idea how this was supposed to go. All I knew that I couldn’t
not
see him, touch him, kiss him. Everything else took second place—
everything
. So why couldn’t I tell him that?

“I want you to tell me that you want me, and that this isn’t something…something and nothing, something stupid. Not some game.”

My stomach tied itself in knots. “It’s no game.” I spoke slowly and very quietly. “Kisses—and this—aren’t enough. I want to be with you, Alex. Alexander.
Really
be with you.”

“Tell me.” He was vicious in his demands. Callous boy. “Tell me what you mean.”

“I want…” Back then, I didn’t have the words he later taught me, slang and fashion, but he had to have an answer. “You. I want you. Skin. Skin to skin. All of it. I want to be part of you.”

He cut his way through, a razor of crude wisdom. “You want to fuck me. Say it.” His hand moved to the front of my trousers, which were getting cold, and my cock answered his call. “Say it.”

“I want to fuck you.” The words were filthy, dirty, wrong. Words I’d not said since I was a child myself—but, once spoken, they couldn’t be taken back. And I did. I did. I did. God help me, I did. I still do, Alexander. I still do.

“Good,” he said, with a tender squeeze, his mouth against my ear. “I
want
you to fuck me. Fuck. Me. Find us somewhere. And you can.”

Chapter 11

There are secrets and secrets. Some you can push down and the guilt travels with you; you might catch a glimpse of them here and there, but they’re buried deep under ice, where they remain. But some secrets tattoo themselves on your skin, and Alex was that kind of secret. I felt my guilt showed in my eyes, in my face. In the way my heart raced, in the way I was sure I paled every time Alex’s name was mentioned. I checked the mirror a dozen times a day to make sure his name wasn’t stamped on my forehead, as stupid as that sounds.

Why hadn’t I felt that way with Phil? I could give you theories, excuses, nothing more.

Perhaps men who are unfaithful to their wives with other women feel the same way. I don’t know. For them, I suppose, there are more outward traps that can give them away. Traces of strange perfume, the cliché of lipstick stains, a handkerchief with strange initials, a receipt to a restaurant, a hotel invoice. Little things that were hardly likely to trip up someone in my position.

The next few hours after the disastrous car journey (and for many days after that) I found myself vacillating between desire and terror. When I’d composed myself enough to enter the house after asserting to Alex that yes, I wanted to fuck him, I ate a solitary dinner, as Valerie was at some committee meeting or other. Mrs. Tudor had stayed on to see to the children and she’d made me toad-in-the-hole, just as I liked it. But I could hardly eat it, and I only escaped her watchful eyes when she took my half-eaten meal away, grim disapproval on her face.

I glared at the television for a while, but it was a new quiz programme about university graduates and everyone on it reminded me of Alex. Not that they were blond and beautiful, far from it, but they were young men and they were students. It was enough.

I didn’t know how people could stand the emotion. Was
this
what love was really like? Was
this
what I should have felt for Valerie? This madness in my mind that made me want to walk out of the house and knock on the front door of Alex’s house just so I could see his face, his smile? I had visions of sitting in the car outside his house so I could watch his light go off like some love-struck fool…but apart from being idiotic, I didn’t know which was his room, anyway.

On impulse, I stuck my head round the kitchen door, told Mrs. Tudor I was going out and drove to Phil’s. I wasn’t really expecting him to be in. As I drove, I imagined that Alex was there in the dark with me, his body pressed up against mine, his hair against my cheek. It was all too easy to do, and heady, like thick red wine. I had stepped into Wonderland and I was drunk on delights I could only imagine, for realising them seemed impossible. My arm trailed along the back of the car seat as if he were there, as if I were pulling his body closer. Even at that early stage, I felt like he
should
be there. I was addicted. I had no idea how bad the craving would get.

I was so steeped in my fantasy that by the time I pulled up on Phil’s drive, I had to wait a few moments to recover. I suddenly realised that I had no memory of the drive itself or the mechanics of it. All I could remember was my own invention, the warmth and the feel and the scent of Alex, invisible and intangible, in the dark. It took Phil opening the front door and flooding my car with light from the hallway before I came to my senses and slid out, leaving the shade of Alex behind me.

Phil looked a little more together than he had, and genuinely pleased to see me. “Come in,” he said.

I lurked in the shadowed drive. “Come to the pub,” I said. I didn’t want to go in; the light was too bright. I didn’t want him to look me in the eyes, to see my secret ingrained into every line on my face.

“All right.” He turned away to get his jacket, and I went back to the car and waited for him. “Where to?” he said when he got in.

“I don’t care,” I answered, turning the car toward the town. We drove in a purring silence. A tension built up in my mind, tighter and tighter the further we went without a word between us. Perhaps he was expecting me to ask how he was—I normally did—or perhaps he was expecting me to touch him. I wondered why he hadn’t touched me, although I was grateful that he hadn’t. I tried to imagine reaching out to him, the way I had with the imaginary Alex earlier and I just couldn’t even see me doing it. Whatever Phil and I had started one night on a wine-soaked beach in France was gone as completely as a popped soap bubble.

“Where are we having this pint, Eddie,” he said, pulling me out of my reverie, “London?”

I realised how far we’d come, past the seafront and almost as far as we could go without having to turn around. This was the bohemian section of our local area, filled with fishing sheds, cobbled streets and tatty fishermen’s pubs which had become the haunt of the local student population. I drove into the tiny car park of The Lobster Pot and we said nothing to each other until we were seated, with our pints, in a dark corner booth.

“So, what’s up?” he said, finally. The foam had stuck to his lip a little. Once I would have wanted to kiss it away.

I was prickly—unnecessarily so, I realise now. I’d sought
him
out, after all. “Nothing.”

“Crap.” He put his glass down with a thump and the barmaid looked over at us, startled. I remember she was wearing pink and her eyes were beautiful but ruined with black clumps of mascara which stuck to her eyelashes like soot. “I know you well enough.”

I could have bluffed it out. I could have said nothing at all, but I knew that I was going to tell him; I had known it from the first moment I’d told Mrs. Tudor I was going out.

“We shouldn’t have lost touch before,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder why we ever bloody moved.” He looked at his drink as if he hated it. “Come on. You and I could always talk.”

His eyes were soft and I was pleasantly warmed by his concern, for all that he was deluding himself. We’d never really talked. “There’s nothing…wrong exactly. I’ve…” I could have stopped right there. “I’ve met someone.”

He looked at me as if I’d said I was a Martian, his face frozen in the look of intimate regard he’d been holding. Slowly, his face went blank as he sat back. Far too late—for the ice had already broken beneath my feet—I realised that I hadn’t considered that he might take it badly, given his own circumstances.

“Forget it,” I said. As if he could. “I shouldn’t have… I…you and Claire.” I couldn’t say anything and I could feel my ears growing hot with embarrassment.

“I’m still registering the shock,” he said finally. “I thought you and Val were…you know she’ll kill you, right? With her bare hands. Or a tennis racket. Just make sure she doesn’t find out.” He laughed then.

A peculiar feeling swept over me—I could not have said what it was, although it felt like emotion draining through my body, taking the strength from my legs. I don’t think I could have stood up at that moment. I hadn’t realised he’d be so amused, and I wished I’d said nothing.

“You dog, Eddie. It’s always the quiet ones.” He leant forward a little and licked his lips. If I hadn’t known before now that I no longer desired him, I would have done then, for in the gloom and with that leering expression, he looked brutal. “Come on, then, tell me everything. Where did you meet her? It’s not someone from the typing pool?”

He was my best friend, and yet he didn’t know me at all. In the seconds that followed, as I stared at his mouth, red and open in expectation of the tittle-tattle he waited to hear, I realised he’d
never
known me, had never cared enough to think about his actions. I don’t know why I was surprised, now when I look back on it. I’d always accepted that he was an opportunist, a climber. I was just someone he clambered over on his way up. This didn’t come to me all at once, of course; it filtered through to me over the next couple of weeks.

He tried to get me to talk, and trod on my toe under the table. “Come on,” he said, “you can’t leave me in suspense like this.”

I grabbed the empty mugs and went back to the bar. I felt sick. There was one person in the world that I believed I could confide in, I thought. One person I knew would understand. I hadn’t been planning on giving out any names, but I’d wanted to talk about Alex to someone. What’s the point of being infatuated if you couldn’t talk about it?

While the barmaid filled the glasses, I pulled myself together and, by the time I went back to the table, I had it under control.

“You’re a tease, Edward Johnson,” Phil said, with a smile that meant more than it seemed. “I’ve always thought so.”

I was lying to my wife and lying to myself, so what harm could lying to Phil do? I looked him straight in the face and gave him the conspiratorial face I’d seen on other men. Sharing a dirty little secret. Giving him what he wanted. I was good at that. I could sell; that’s what I did.

“No. No one at work. No one you know.” It was a good start and, so far, true. “I’m not sure where it’s going.”

“Going?” He looked amazed. “Christ. Ed, you are amazing—you take everything so seriously. You’ve got a beautiful wife, great kids, good job. You’ve got me—and now you’ve got a bit on the side?”

“Shut up!” He was too loud and I wanted to hit him. Hearing Alex (even mistakenly) talked of in that way made me angry.

“And you are worrying about it already? How long has this been going on? You still haven’t said where you met her.”

“And I’m not going to, either.”

“You can trust me, Ed. You know that. We keep each other’s secrets.”

“It’s not been going on long, a few weeks.”

I could see his mind working, and I was grateful he wasn’t as privy to my movements as he used to be. There weren’t many places I had the opportunity to meet anyone except for work. Or the wife of a client. Let him think that.

“And?” he demanded. “What’s she, you know,
like
?”

His skin is hot and when he kisses me he closes his eyes and his fingers curl. I want to see if his toes do too.

I could continue to tell the truth, grateful that the word for fair haired men was the same for fair haired women—if spelled differently. “Blond. Slim. Nice eyes.”

“You have such a thing for blondes,” he laughed. “I bet she’s got no tits and no hips, either. Like Valerie.”

I want to hold his bare hips in my hands. I want to kiss the hollows, trace his hipbones with my fingers

I laughed in spite of myself at that. “No. You are right.”

“And have you?”

 
I glared at him.

“Oh come on, don’t go all chivalrous on me. You wouldn’t have told me this much if you didn’t want to tell me it all.”

“No, we haven’t. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Why the hell not?”

“There are…obstacles.”

“Ahhhh.” He sat back, his face suddenly world-weary. “She’s married.”