Page 50 of For Real

So I say, “Laurie gets me, Granddad. He really does.” I mean, okay, he’s not going to keep my frog poetry. But the least understandable bit of me—the part that wants to make him suffer and cry and beg because I like him—he understands. And that’s not nothing. Hell, it’s practically something. “I think you’d like him.”

“Well. We’ve definitely got something in common.”

“Huh?”

“You…you plonker.”

I laugh. It’s a good day when you’re being called a plonker by your granddad.

But that’s also when I realise Laurie is never going to meet my granddad.

Because my granddad is going to die, and Laurie isn’t really my boyfriend. I can tell him to get on his knees for me, I can tell him to fuck me, but I can’t bring him here. I can’t introduce him to the person I love most in the world. And I can’t expect him to be there when I lose that person for good.

Granddad’s looking pretty tired, so we don’t talk much after that. When he first got ill, I used to read to him a lot, but when we kind of realised he wasn’t going to get better, we quietly gave up on novels. He likes whodunits but imagine how rubbish it would be if he died…like…in the middle, never ever knowing whodunit. Now I read him poetry. Just so he has some words to take with him, and my voice to keep him company in the dark.

I read him Rapture. Or bits of it anyway, which you probably shouldn’t do because it’s meant to be a cycle, but I want him to have only the love and not the loss, which is wrong again because you have to have both. Except I can do this for him now because he’s dying. Because the loss is already happening.

I like the poems at the beginning best. The poems at the end scare me a bit. But I guess if you want “You,” there has to be an “Over.” And for every “Hour,” there’s “Grief.”

I think of Laurie while I’m reading.

I wonder what it’s like to be in love and—zing aside—how I’ll know. If this could be love. Or if it’s just sex and infatuation. And if it matters.

I know I’ve only been with him twice. That I hardly know the guy.

But I also don’t know how you fall in love, except by wanting to.

So maybe that’ll do. For now, anyway.

* * *

I see Laurie on Sunday this week because I had to work the weekend, but the moment I get through his door, he pins me against the wall, and we end up fucking in the hallway.

Because that’s just how we roll.

It’s so good, the way he touches me, like he’s been waiting for me all week, and everything comes spilling out of me, how happy I am to see him, how much I’ve missed him, and how much I want him, along with about eighty gallons of come. Which means my clothes end up in the washer, and me in the bath, him with me this time, and I float hazily in the water and under his hands. It’s only when I’m standing on his doorstep at half past five the next morning, because he has to go to work, that I realise that the time is gone. And Laurie too, back to the rest of his life. Leaving me sore and happy and empty all at once.

And next week: rinse and repeat, with, y’know, a few variations, which are mainly how and where we fuck.

And it’s not that I don’t want what we’re doing. Because I do. I want it so much I can hardly think straight. And it’s not like we don’t talk. Because we do. And it’s not that he’s not nice to me. Because he is. He’s nicer to me than basically anyone who doesn’t have to be because family and shit.

But it’s like there’s a line in his head or something. And I can have everything up to the line. But nothing after it. I’ve seen glimpses over it. The night we met. The night he scraped me off his doorstep. Sometimes after sex when he lets me hold him. Enough, basically, to make me want to live there, on the other side of him.

Except I don’t know how to get there. And I’m afraid of pushing—again—in case I lose what I’ve got.

This is turning out to be the theme of my fucking life. The thing is, there’s nothing I can put my finger on. There’s nothing for me to complain about. No way for me to challenge him. The best I can do is hope for those moments when he forgets the line is there, and make him feel so safe, so perfect, so fucking cherished that he’ll never want to cross back. So he’ll see that this is where it’s real.

But the only way I have of getting there is sex.

Which, y’know, is okay. If I’ve learned anything, it’s how to work with what I’ve got. And, let’s face it, the sex is a-maz-ing.

I like it all the ways we can imagine—and he can imagine a lot—but I like it best when I’m on my back, so I can look up at him and touch him, and we can kiss, softly or savagely or however we like. Sometimes I kind of hold his lower lip between my teeth so I hurt him while he makes me come. It makes him go fucking feral and then helpless, utterly helpless, his body enslaved to the simplest touch of mine.

Once, when we were going at it sort of slowly, for the togetherness of it, our bodies becoming one in slick, deep strokes, I reached up and put my hand against his throat, not pressing or anything, just resting there, and the sound he made. Jesus. It came into me like his cock. And all he said was, “Oh, Toby,” but it was the way he said it. His voice breaking as if I’d finally touched his heart. Except afterwards, it was sealed up tight again. Out of my reach. As usual.

So, in another week or so, I wait until after, when he’s quiet and lax and soft-eyed, and ask him straight: “Laurie, are you doing this with anyone else?”

He rolls over with a groan. “No, darling, I’d probably be in hospital.”

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