Page 82 of For Real

As soon as she was gone, Toby grinned. Wriggled his toes. And I let out a long, slow breath that might as well have been a scream.

He got his complimentary tea, and biscuits he picked from a basket, deliberating endlessly—wickedly—between chocolate brownie cookies and raisin oatmeal crunch. As though I wasn’t his captive, leashed by his lightest touch.

He tormented me nearly all the way to Oxford, holding me on the most maddening edge of desire, never enough, never too much. Watching my face for the reactions I couldn’t always suppress and occasionally moving against me more explicitly—a firm nudge to keep me spread, the arch of his foot slipping beneath my balls—just to make me blush or gasp or shake.

He made me powerless, desperate, debauched. His suffering plaything.

I loved it.

He pulled away when the driver announced we were approaching Oxford, which gave me a little time to recover what was left of my mind and my dignity, but even so, my legs felt absurdly shaky as I descended to the platform.

Toby bounced after me. Not a care in the whole damn world.

We could have taken a taxi, but we were in good time, and I’d promised Toby shopping. He stopped for a moment on the steps of the station.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Is this it?”

“Not what you were expecting?”

“I thought it was the city of dreaming spires, not, like, a really bad traffic junction and a random bronze bull.”

I was used to Oxford, but Toby was right. This corner of it wasn’t particularly impressive. The squat grey station, the mess of the Botley Road, the Said Business School with its sandstone aspirations.

“That bull was nearly Margaret Thatcher, so don’t knock it.”14

He gave me a slightly blank look—as though he’d heard the name, but couldn’t place it, or remember if it was important. Which was, frankly, terrifying.

“Ready to go?” I asked, so I didn’t have to think about it.

He nodded, and we set off, past the random bronze bull and the really bad traffic junction, heading towards the centre of town where grey surrendered everything to gold and green.

Toby was big-eyed and eager. Adorable. I wondered what it would be like if we actually went travelling together. Somewhere a little farther afield than sixty miles up the M40. I didn’t care where. How good it would be, just to be with him. To have his silences and his touches, his cruelty and his joy.

Foolishness. It was all foolishness.

Robert and I had kept intending to go away together—for twelve years we’d intended—but we were both too busy and life kept getting in the way. And here I was daydreaming of running off who-knew-where (Prague, Venice, Paris) with a nineteen-year-old I’d known for barely a handful of months.

“I lived down here for a bit when I was a student,” I said, as though I could drown out my own thoughts by talking. “My bedroom looked directly out over the train tracks.”

“Room with a view, huh?”

“Actually, I really liked it. Especially at night, when it was just moving lights and the shadows of people. Gold walls and green grass are nice, but the railway used to make me feel part of something.”

“What, like, industrialisation?”

I smiled. “Life.”

“Aww, man.” Toby’s tone was strangely exasperated.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I fucking love you.”

“Thank you.”

He snorted. “That’s slightly better than ‘all right’…so improving steadily.”

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