Page 21 of For Real

“Toby.” Wow, I hate it when he’s this gentle. “We can’t do any of those things.”

I really, really don’t want to sound petulant, but I know I will anyway. “Why not?”

“Because I’m thirty-seven, for one thing.”

“And people who are thirty-seven don’t fuck or talk or go for walks? That must totally suck.”

“Not with nineteen-year-olds.”

“You know, if this was ancient Greece, you’d be buggering me senseless by now.”

“Yes, well, we no longer live in a world of socially mandated pederasty.”

I nearly go, And you say that like it’s a good thing, but for fuck’s sake, it’s not funny. I’m nineteen and I’m not a kid. I know what I want, and he wants it too, so why is it suddenly not okay? “Your main objection is some vague perception of social stigma? Not, like, not fancying me or not wanting to fuck me?”

“It wouldn’t be right.” He pulls the duvet up to his chin, like he’s trying to hide under it. It’s kind of cute, or would be if he wasn’t trying to hide from me and a bunch of true stuff. And that’s when I catch it—the faintest tremor in his hands. Fuck yeah.

“And what we did last night was?”

He goes all red. “It was…different.”

I’m kind of hovering on the edge of cross now. I mean, it’s nice he doesn’t want to exploit me or whatever, but fuck it, I’m so ready to be exploited. I lean a little closer to him. I’m being way too intense, but I can’t help it. “Are you telling me what we did before wasn’t sex? Wasn’t intimate?”

He stares at me, all rainy eyes and wildness. Lost, just like me. Then he shakes his head because he’s not a liar. I knew that about him from the first.

“So, what’s the big deal?”

I guess he’s trying to figure it out because he’s quiet for ages. I want to smooth the frown lines from his face. Then he says, “In five, ten years, when you’re closer to my age, you’re going to look back on this and think, ‘What the hell was I doing?’”

“Whatever age I’m at, I’m going to look back on this and think, ‘Fuck, yeah.’”

“No, you’re not. Someday, you’ll be me, and then you won’t think, ‘Wow, intriguing older man.’ You’ll think, ‘God, what a sad, lonely bastard, sleeping with teenagers.’”

“So you’d sleep with me if I was twenty? That seems pretty fucking arbitrary.”

He gets that look I’m starting to recognise, amused and exasperated at the same time. I reckon I’m in with a chance as long as amused nudges ahead of exasperated. “You know it’s not that simple.”

“Maybe not, but it doesn’t have to be unspeakably complicated either. Can’t you just see yourself as…I don’t know, the gay male equivalent to a cougar or something?”

He blinks at me. “What, an ageing queen?”

That idea’s so impossibly crazy I actually laugh. And, after a moment, he laughs with me. “And anyway,” I press, “it’s not like you habitually go around banging younger guys, right?”

“The room I told you not to go into? It’s full of twinks.”

“Aww, I thought I was special.”

“You know you are.” He sounds like he did last night, wrapping me in a towel and telling me I’m beautiful.

It’s not like it’s true or anything. But I believe he believes it.

And that’s…that is special.

So there’s no way on fucking earth I’m letting this guy out of my life without knowing what he feels like inside me. It’s that simple.

“Okay.” I hold up my fingers and begin ticking them. “Way I see it, your main objections are social stuff, when nobody will ever know, and worrying what I’ll think about you in however many years’ time when you’ll totally have forgotten I exist anyway.”

“Toby…”

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