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  Tom’s face lights up. “A Parisian backroom,” he says sexily. “And?”

  I shrug. “I didn’t go down.”

  Tom is already gulping down his beer. “Come on,” he says, wiping his lips and standing.

  I frown. “I’m not really …”

  But Tom has grabbed my hand and is already pushing off through the crowd. “Oh come on!” he says. “You can’t miss the opportunity to see a Parisian backroom.”

  The blue lighting downstairs is low. At some intersections the light is so low you have to feel your way around the corner. When my hand touches an arm tucked in a recess, I shriek.

  “Try to shriek in manly way,” Tom whispers, laughter in his voice. “I know it’s hard, but …”

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “Body parts on the right – beware.”

  Tom pushes on my shoulders and we advance a few feet. “God!” he whispers in my ear. “He had his dick out. I touched his dick.”

  “Nice,” I say.

  At the end of the series of rooms my eyes start to adjust to the lack of photons and I start to make out … yes, that’s it, two guys … making out. A short one with his jeans around his ankles, and a tall skinny guy in a leather shirt.

  “Um,” Tom says quietly, sliding behind me and nuzzling my ear. “Live porn. I love these places … there’s something, I don’t know, something almost tribal about it.”

  “Yeah,” I say thoughtfully. The atmosphere is electric with sex. No doubt thanks to the beer; my moral censor is keeping schtum.

  “For someone who didn’t want to come,” Tom sniggers, sliding a hand down my jeans. “You sure feel like someone who … wants to come.”

  I snort.

  Tom slides a hand under my sweatshirt and fumbles for my nipple, and then with the other he twists my head around and forces his tongue into my mouth. “Kiss me,” he murmurs.

  The kiss and the sensation of his hand sliding across my chest makes me melt and under the influence of beer and whatever chemical is released in the brain during arousal, I forget pretty much where I am – the whole thing just feels irresistibly erotic.

  Tom releases my nipple and starts fumbling with my belt. “No!” I say. I think I sound fairly convincing.

  “Let me do …” Tom says, carrying on regardless, “what I want to do.”

  “But …”

  “Shhh,” he says, sliding his fingers around my dick. “It’s my birthday, remember?”

  It feels great, but when he forces my jeans lower and my dick springs out, I become hyper aware of the fact that we’re kind of in public here.

  “No one’s here,” Tom says, anticipating my protests. “Except those two – and they’re much too busy.”

  I glance over at the couple opposite. The shorter of the two has now turned around, and the other guy is starting to fuck him.

  Tom kisses me again, and his tongue in my mouth, his hand on my dick, his fingers on my nipple, it all conspires to produce a rush of adrenalin. My eyes flicker half open, my dick pulsates. “Oh God that’s good,” I exclaim.

  “I want to fuck you,” Tom says.

  “Jees Tom,” I say, “Not here! Can’t we …”

  “Here,” he interrupts.

  Tom rarely wants to be the active partner, and he rarely acts this dominant. And the terrible truth is that I like it. I like it so much that I don’t fight it. Instead, I pull a condom from my jacket pocket and hand it to him. I feel small and held, and dominated. And it feels surprisingly good. And so, for the first time in my life, I fuck in public. It’s not very public, I tell myself. There are only a couple of guys lurking in the shadows, and the couple opposite are now way too busy – thrusting and groaning – to notice us. But something about the taboo of the whole thing makes it – terrifyingly – by far the best fuck I have ever had.

  As Tom starts to pump into me, I close my eyes and shudder, a little at the cold, but mainly with ecstatic arousal. Tom nuzzles my neck and pulls me tight with his arm. “Oh God,” he says.

  A movement to the right catches the corner of my eye, but I forcibly remind myself that we’re in Paris, that we don’t know anyone. Tom fumbles for the other nipple and then spits in his hand and starts to rub my dick. Just for a second, he freezes. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s enough to make me open my eyes.

  The Lucky Strike Viking is standing less than two feet away with his jacket open and his dick hanging out. He grins at me and says, simply, “Can I?”

  I open my mouth to say, “No,” but Tom covers it with a hand and replies for me. “Yes,” he says. And I let him. I feel owned. I feel liberated of responsibility.

  Lucky Strike steps forward and slides two hands under my sweatshirt, and starts to play with my nipples. Tom removes his and slides it around my waist again, pulling me closer. I swallow and think that this is crazy; that I should stop it.

  But having two men playing with my body – Tom inside me, his arms around me pulling me tight, his tongue slithering between my ear and my mouth, and the magnificent Viking fiddling with my nips, is almost too much to bear. My body starts to tremble.

  Lucky Strike – his hands still on my nipples – sinks to his knees, and he slips his mouth around my dick. I flinch, but Tom says, “No. Let him.”

  I wonder vaguely if it’s safe and tense up, and then as the mystery man starts to deep throat me, I close my eyes and shudder and give in. Tom starts to thrust harder and Lucky continues to slide my dick down his throat. “So deep throat does exist,” I think. I always somehow thought it was a myth; or something only porn stars or people born without gag-reflexes could do.

  The sex washes over me, and the result is drug-like. My eyelids flutter half open: I feel used and abused and at the same time dominating, as if the whole world is here for my pleasure, just to satisfy me. And because Tom is seemingly masterminding it all, pushing it forward for his own birthday pleasure, I feel lifted of the moral responsibility for whatever happens next. And though there is a vague shadow lurking in the corner of my mind, ever watchful and already promising to criticise all of this as slutty and unbelievable, the experience is so sublime, so like some kind of religious revelation, or as Tom says, some tribal ritual, that I find myself powerless to do anything but submit, and so, in semi-public, in the middle of Paris, with a growing group of onlookers, I shriek and groan my way into the longest, most pumping, most Earth-shattering orgasm of my life.

  Tom comes mere seconds after me, grunting loudly in my ear. Lucky releases my dick and my nipples and stands before me, grinning from ear to ear. “Nice,” he says, simply, wiping his lips. Then, surprisingly, his links his hands behind Tom’s back and hugs us both, resting his head on my shoulder for a while. And then he steps back and vanishes into the shadows.

  “Wow,” Tom sighs, buttoning up. “Now there’s a birthday present.”

  “Yeah, well … Never let it be said that I cramp your style,” I say, pulling up my own trousers, suddenly hyper aware of where I am and what I have just done, and determined to cast responsibility for it as Tom’s.

  We return to the bar for another drink, then I suggest we return to the Cox. I need, for some reason, to get out of here.

  The Cox is still apparently being run by the placebo group of an antidepressant drug trial, but the place is now as empty as Quetzal, so we go there instead. At least we can chat to the smiling barman.

  Finally, at three a.m., we head back to the hotel through the almost-deserted streets. I still can’t quite work out what I feel. Maybe I’m just too drunk to work it out. There are moments when everything you believe about yourself, everything that morality teaches you to believe about everyone else, collides head on with the empirical fact of everyday life. I’ve avoided anything except one on one sex pretty much my whole life. But the truth is that the sex I have just had was simply mind-blowing. It wasn’t lovemaking – which has its own codes and its own wonderful qualities. But in purely sexual terms, well, it’s incomparable; it’s on a whole different plane of e
xperience, a plane that I just didn’t know was possible without drugs.

  And yet, a sickly unease has taken over my stomach. I’m pretty sure it’s guilt, but guilt about which crime? Surely no one was hurt, no one was lied to … But yes, that’s the feeling. All-pervasive, sickening guilt. We humans! We’re such strange creatures.

  It’s still Tom’s birthday, and he is happily tripping along beside me, so it’s clearly not the moment for any philosophical debate, so I just smile back and stumble on. But I can’t help but wonder – where do we go from here? I can’t help but feel that something has shifted, not only in my self-image, but also in our relationship, in the power balance between us. And I can’t work out yet whether that’s good or bad.

  Post Mortem

  I have never been much of a believer in blackouts – those supposedly alcohol-induced memory lapses. Every time in my life anyone has claimed not to remember doing something, it has always seemed to have more to do with convenience and guilt than alcohol per se. But this morning, as I wake up, as I notice first my pounding headache, then the desert dryness of my mouth, then finally Tom’s sweaty stomach against my back, and his voice, “Ugh, the price you pay for a wild night huh?” I honestly don’t remember how we got back to the hotel.

  “Um,” I mumble, trying to piece together rare fragments of the evening. A bar full of big guys, another full of cute guys, and now a hangover and a sick feeling in my stomach. It doesn’t, somehow, quite add up.

  “What time did we get back?” I ask. “I don’t remember anything much. God my head hurts.”

  “Four-ish I think,” Tom says. “Mine hurts too – bad beer.”

  “Um,” I mumble. “I remember – salty. The beer was salty in the last place. Where was the last place?”

  “Quetzal,” Tom says. “But the salty beer was in … Wolf was it? The Lucky Strike bar anyway.”

  I cough to clear my throat. “Lucky Strike?”

  Tom slides an arm around me and pulls me tight. “Yeah, you remember the Lucky Strike guy I hope? He was the kind of the highlight.”

  “Lucky Strike,” I repeat. It means something to me but I can’t say yet quite what.

  “The guy’s jacket – the German guy. I think he was German anyway. He was wearing a bike jacket with a Lucky Strike logo.”

  In my mind’s eye, I see the Lucky Strike logo, and then moving out from that the jacket, the chaps, the blond haired chest, the face, the body, the lips …

  “Ugh,” I groan painfully, as the image of part of my body between those lips comes back to me. “Oh God,” I groan.

  Tom sniffs and coughs. “That’s what you said last night,” he mumbles, an amused tone in his voice. “Over and over again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so excited, you were trembling all …”

  “Tom,” I interrupt. “Later, OK?”

  Tom snorts. “Sure,” he says. “Whatever.”

  Over breakfast in the tiny café opposite the hotel, jumpstarted into consciousness by double espressos, I silently remember everything.

  “You OK?” Tom asks, his mouth full of croissant. “You seem funny.”

  “Hangover,” I say. But it’s not the whole truth.

  Tom nods. “OK,” he says.

  “I feel funny about last night,” I add – an understatement. “I couldn’t remember when I woke up, and now I do, and, well, I’m not quite sure what to think about it.”

  Tom frowns at me and sips his coffee. “Are you angry with me? Do you think I made you do …”

  “No,” I interrupt. “No – I wanted to do everything I did. But the drunken me and the sober me don’t always agree about what’s good, what’s constructive.”

  Tom rolls his eyes. “You worry too much,” he says.

  I shrug. “You’re probably right.”

  “Anyway, constructive for what?” Tom asks.

  I shrug. “For us.”

  “For us? It’s not like we cheated on each other.”

  I nod slowly. “I guess not,” I say. “But sober me doesn’t think that random drunken sex with strangers in darkrooms is the strongest foundation for a long term relationship,” I say. “Plus I just feel slutty really. Good old Christian guilt.”

  Tom shrugs.

  “You don’t think that at all then?” I ask, a little jealous of his peace of mind.

  “I thought it was fun,” he says. “But I guess I don’t really believe in the whole constructing thing anyway so maybe it doesn’t affect me so much.”

  I frown and sip my coffee. “What do you mean you don’t believe in it?”

  “Well … it’s a hetty thing, isn’t it?” he says. “All that stuff about building stability and lifelong partners – it’s just about having kids really. It’s like you say, a Christian thing. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with our lives if you’re honest.”

  I rub a hand over my forehead, which feels clammy, and then over my eyes. I stare out of the window for a while. I watch a Muslim woman in a headscarf opposite, she’s begging, her face racked with a theatrical demonstration of her suffering. The weeping-moaning-whining technique – it’s supposed to provoke sympathy but it makes me just want to tell her to get a grip. Eventually I turn back to face Tom, wrinkle my nose and say, “I see what you’re saying, but surely we’re allowed to have long term relationships too, right?”

  Tom tips his head sideways. “Look, I don’t have a very romantic view of things, it’s probably better not to …” His voice fades out.

  I finish my coffee and wave at the waiter and then point at the cup. Through a couple of circular gestures I transmit the concept of same again and turn back to Tom. “No go on,” I say. “We never talk like this.”

  Tom raises one shoulder in a half shrug and sighs. “It’s just, you know, if you’re honest, well, the probability that we’ll be together in twenty years time, it’s pretty low really, isn’t it? Gay men don’t really do that stuff. I mean there are no kids binding us together. Even ten years is pretty good going. Even five.”

  I nod slowly and scratch my head. “I see,” I say. I stare back out at the street. The beggar is shuffling on down the hill. I think of the words of a shrink – the first shrink I ever saw, before I came out. They were the words that had pushed me rebelliously into finally dealing with my sexuality. “Homosexuals don’t have loving relationships,” she had said. “They have sex; sex in bars, sex in back streets, sex in toilets.”

  “It’s like the Buddha said,” Tom continues. “The only thing that’s permanent is impermanence, and the source of all suffering is trying to hang onto things as they are. You’re better off just trying to have fun. And sex is fun. And it’s supposed to be.”

  I stare at Tom and blink slowly as I try to gather my thoughts.

  “Well, he didn’t say the last bit,” Tom adds. “That’s more my take on things.”

  I nod again. “Yeah,” I say vaguely. My brain feels grey and glutinous; analysis of Tom’s mini speech seems challenging and complex. The idea that Tom and the shrink in some way agree depresses me. And it all seems too important, too critical even, for me to do the subject justice. Trying to think about it here, now, with a hangover, this far from home, strikes me as downright dangerous. So I let it slide into the grey swamp of my hangover.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say, glancing at my watch. “Let’s have this conversation another day. When my head isn’t pounding like a steam hammer.”

  Tom nods and smiles weakly. “Yeah,” he says, sounding relieved. “Or not at all. I don’t know what I’m saying this morning.”

  I turn my watch to face him. “Twelve-twenty. Right now what we need to do is get back to the hotel and get on our way,” I say.

  Tom nods, smiles gently at me and reaches out for my hand. “I guess so,” he says. “And hey – thanks for a great birthday.”

  I swallow and force a smile. “You’re welcome,” I say, wondering what this particular birthday will come to mean. It seems that only time will tell.

  A Qu
estion Of Belief

  The conversation with Tom festers deep within like an infected wound. I don’t say anything, but as the days pass, as we wait for news of the gîte, I can’t help but calculate the sum total of our recent conversations: that Tom is looking for work in the UK again, that Tom is staying with me, not for me, but for the gîte, and now seemingly, that Tom doesn’t believe in long-term relationships at all.

  Part of the problem of course – and I am aware of this – is that there’s too much time to think about it. Nothing much else is happening. Chantal is as absent as her husband, and her lawyer seems to have taken a vow of silence. Jenny’s never at home when I call, and this all conspires to leave Tom and me tiptoeing around each other, avoiding almost every subject worth discussing. I feel like I’m drowning in slow motion.

  By Wednesday, I can’t take it anymore, and so when Tom gets back from the pool, I’m waiting for him. “Hiya,” he says brightly as he pushes in the door. He looks red-faced and healthy after his swim.

  I watch him hang his new parka up.

  “Great coat, but actually a bit hot for Nice,” he says. “It’ll be great for the mountains though.” He frowns at me. “Something up?”

  I shake my head. “Nah,” I say. “Not really. But I do need to talk to you.”

  Tom crinkles his lips comically and crosses the room to join me. “Have I done something bad?”

  I shake my head again and smile. “No,” I say. “Not at all. But, well … you know the conversation we had in Paris? Just before we came back? Well, it has been playing on my mind. I wondered if we could talk about it – in a constructive way. I don’t want to fight.”

  Tom settles beside me and crosses his legs defensively. “Sure,” he says. “I knew that would be eating away at you, but I wasn’t sure whether to bring it up.”

  “I …” I start, but I’m not sure what to say.

  “I didn’t mean … I mean, it wasn’t a death sentence or anything,” Tom says, stumbling. “For us. I just … if I think logically about relationships, any relationship, well, I suppose I don’t believe that they last.”