Page 71 of For Real

“Also, I’m not sure cheap takeaway was what the internet had in mind for those kind of dominance games. It’s not exactly anyone’s idea of sexy, is it?”

He flicked his hair out of the way. “Oh yeah?”

So to prove my point, I ended up licking a splash of kung pao sauce from the centre of Toby’s hand—sticky-sweet, full of MSG, and underneath it, the taste of skin. I lost myself in a matter of moments to the unexpected roughness of his palm, its collection of small scars and its deep grooves. It was a worrier’s hand, a worker’s hand, passionate and restless, though temporarily quieted by my clasp. I slipped my tongue between his fingers, which made him yelp, and circled back to trace the fleshy mound at the base of his thumb. Thenar eminence. Mount of Venus.

He made a half-swallowed guttural noise, which came out something like ngh.

I kissed lightly over the planes of his palm. There was nothing but Toby now, his scent and his taste, his raspy, suddenly shallow breathing.

“Holy shit. Now I know why the Elizabethans got so freaked out about paddling with the palm of the hand. That’s, like, fucking lewd, man.”

I gave him my smile too, left there against his skin, in his hand, like a secret. Then I let him go and sat back against the sofa, trying to ignore our now present and matching erections. “Point proven?”

“I wouldn’t say—” he still sounded shaky— “proven. You eviscerated your point. That is absolutely my idea of sexy.”

“I’m not sure that had much to do with the food.”

“Huh. Maybe we’d better check.”

He held out half a prawn cracker, and I eyed it dubiously. But it was Toby, and pleasing him pleased me, so I leaned forward and accepted it. As his fingers slipped past my lips, I recognised the charade and took them as though they were his cock, sucking and licking until he was moaning unabashedly.

When I let him go, he shoved me onto my back and stretched out on top of me, and we unravelled each other gently, kissing and touching and pushing our bodies together through too many layers of clothing. It was far from the most erotically charged experience of my life, but it felt so good, so profoundly, quietly good in a way I would have been hard-pressed to explain.

On my living room floor, time stopped mattering. There was only Toby, hot and sharp-boned and wriggling, his T-shirt riding up and his jeans halfway down as he rubbed himself against my thigh and occasionally my cock. His hair was in his eyes and his kisses were sloppy, and the scent of sweat and arousal muddled awkwardly with the scent of half-eaten takeaway. Denim chafed my skin, and my partially undone shirt was too tight under my shoulders, but still, I came before he did, almost without realising I was going to, the pleasure cresting from some deep, half forgotten place inside me.

Toby dissolved into his usual litany of love and obscenity, jerked, tensed, and erupted all over me. While he made a cursory attempt to clean us up with a handful of napkins, I stared at my ceiling, slightly stunned, wondering how and why dry humping had suddenly come back into my life.

“Oh man”—Toby draped a possessive arm over me—“that was awesome.”

We drifted for a little while in satiation and silence, and I came perilously close to falling asleep, but then Toby tilted his head back so he could look at me and asked, “So, when that red helicopter is whirring overhead…that’s you?”

“Occasionally. At night we use a car. But I only do a couple of shifts a month. Mainly I’m at the hospital, seeing patients there or doing tedious things like paperwork and training junior doctors.”

“Do you only work a few shifts because it’s so…I was going to say ‘stressful’…but I guess ‘intense’ is better?”

He was right; intense was better. After a moment, I nodded.

“What sort of stuff do they call you out for?”

“All sorts of things. Car crashes, stabbings, shootings, industrial accidents, cardiac arrest, falls. We go wherever we’re needed. I was there after the London bombings.”

“Seriously?” He pushed himself onto an elbow. “Oh my God, I was, like, at school.”

“Thank you for the reminder of your appalling youth.” I gazed up at him, less shocked than I should have been at the evidence of the distances between us. Perhaps it was because, right now, there were none. We were simply each other’s, in a world of our own making.

“It felt totally weird, like the day before you break up for the holidays, except the opposite of that.”

I pulled him back into my arms, where he fit and I could keep him safe.

“We were off for the rest of the week.” He sighed, and for a moment he didn’t seem quite like Toby. Smaller somehow, a little bit faded. “I was really fucking scared for ages. And everyone kept saying how brave we all were. Like you have a choice not to be around if someone blows up part of your city using the thing that takes you from one bit of it to another.”

He fell quiet again, and I had nothing to say either. I was too busy being uncontrollably afraid of the world and all the ways it could hurt my Toby, and how little I could protect him from any of it. It was a foolish impulse, selfish and slightly patronising. Pain was simply an inevitability of living, and I had to learn how to trust him with his own, as I trusted him with mine.

“I remember it too.” The words came out hesitantly, almost against my will, an offering of a kind.

His head snapped up. “Yeah?”

“Yes. I remember…I remember walking along the tracks to get where I needed to be. I was walking past people, people who were injured, probably dying, calling out to me and to each other and to God, all of them lost in the dark. And I was ignoring them because…because they would probably die without me, but beyond them were the people who definitely would. And beyond them there were people for whom I wouldn’t even try.”

---