Chapter Twenty-Seven

Lucas

A red mist came down over my eyes when I peered through those gates into the darkness of the alleyway and saw Alex on his knees being violated. I had left work at seven, eaten some soup my housekeeper had left in the fridge for me and paced my house, feeling its emptiness and reliving every moment of the last three days. I didn’t have Alex’s number. Why hadn’t I taken it? Was I going to sit at home waiting for him to call or was I going to give him up as I should? I’d pressed my knuckles into my eyes, groaning, memories flashing through my mind of his smile, his sherry-coloured eyes, the way he laughed, his long elegant body lying beneath mine and the way he sounded when I was inside him and I’d thought to myself I might go insane if I never saw him again.

Which was how I came to be at the restaurant like the worse love-sick Romeo ever, fully prepared to ask for a table for one and sit there the way I had on Christmas Eve. Anything to see him again. But instead, I heard muffled sounds from the end of the alleyway and my blood had frozen when I squinted through the gates. That guy hadn’t got the message when I’d warned him off and now he was actually assaulting Alex. I couldn’t breathe or think for the fury sending my blood molten with rage. I scrambled ungracefully over the gate, ripping my coat on a nail at the top and pounded down the alleyway with murder on my mind. It was good job both Alex and Max were there and I didn’t have the bastard alone because I would have without doubt punched and punched him until there was nothing left of his face. My anger and loss of control frightened me. I was still shaking when Alex and Max and I sat down with our drinks. I understood all too well why Alex didn’t want to report it. Who wanted to discuss with a total stranger in authority that someone had made you suck their cock? I hadn’t and Alex didn’t want to, but I felt the irony of the situation. He had wanted me to report my assault and I wanted him to report his, and neither of us were prepared to do it.

Eventually after finishing his drink, Alex pushed his chair back. “I’m going to go home,” he said. He didn’t look at me. I understood I might not be invited but I wasn’t letting him out of my sight until I saw that door close behind him.

“I can drive you,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll just get my stuff.” I watched him walk across the restaurant and noted his dragging gait, the slump of his shoulders and head, and I ached for him.

We drove back to his place in silence. I’d brought the Hyundai today because I fancied bringing a drink with me and not needing to cram myself in half to get into the low-slung car. He let me into his flat and I silently acknowledged that I’d done a good job on fixing the front door.

He dropped his bag on the floor, kicked off his shoes, took off his coat, and walked through to the kitchen. I took my shoes off but left my coat on because it was freezing and because I wasn’t expecting to be invited to stay. He was filling the kettle at the sink went I went through. I watched the tense lines of his body, the shake of his hands. He took a mug from the cupboard and dropped a tea bag in it. One mug, not two. There was a thermostat under the cupboard at the far end. He turned it up to twenty and I heard the boiler fire up. Thank God.

He turned to look at me and my heart sank at the expression on his face. It was fury, distress and humiliation all rolled into one. I never wanted to see it directed at me again. “Why were you there? You shouldn’t have been there.” He clenched his fists and the kettle boiled behind him. “You shouldn’t have seen.”

I stepped forward warily. He was on the edge, a new side to him. “It’s okay,” I said softly.

His face flushed and his eyes glittered. “It’s not okay! It’s not o-fucking-kay! You shouldn’t have seen what he did to me.” He stalked forward and hit me on the chest with a closed fist. “How am I ever going to…? How can I ever…”

I cupped his head. “What?” I asked.

He knocked my hand away. “How can I…” Tears dripped down his cheeks and his voice shook, became a whisper. “You saw. You saw what he did to me.”

I pulled him into my arms. He fought me, slapping and hitting, but it was a weak protest and soon he slumped against me, broken sobs muffled in my shoulder. I held him hard, stroking his head. “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered to him. “It doesn’t matter what I saw. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

He pulled away from me and lurched past me. “I’m going to be sick.”

I found him in the bathroom on his knees, head over the toilet. I stroked his back as he puked, then I wiped his mouth and nose with toilet roll and gave him a glass of water to rinse out his mouth. There was some mouthwash on the shelf and I handed him the bottle. He took a hefty swig, gargled and spat. His face was white, tear-streaked and blotchy. He started to pull his clothes off. I stepped back to the doorway as he turned on the shower, discarded his underwear and stepped naked beneath the spray. The door of the cubicle was glass. I stood there feeling like a pervert as he soaped himself feverishly, then scrubbed violently with a cloth, leaving red marks on his skin, crying all the while. He turned his face up to the shower, filled his mouth with water and spat. When he started to scrub his mouth with the soapy cloth, I decided enough was enough and started to strip.

Naked, I opened the door and bundled him back against the wall. There wasn’t room to swing a cat in that shower. I pulled the flannel away from him and dropped it, wiped my hand across his mouth to take away any soap residue, then lowered my lips to his.

He gasped and I deepened the kiss, tasting soap and his tears. I took his face in my hands and looked at him. “What I saw makes no difference to how I feel about you. No difference to how I want to kiss you.”

His eyes were red and wide. “But wh-wh-what about…” he stammered.

“What?”

“What about when…”

I stroked his cheeks with my fingertips and my touch started to slow his rapid breathing. “When we’re intimate?”

He bit his lip and nodded.

I ran my thumb over his top lip, then his bottom one, then kissed him again. “When you kiss me, when your dick’s in my mouth, do you think about how many other people I’ve done that to?”

He shook his head, eyes wide.

“So why would I?” I asked him. “Why would I think about anything other than I have your mouth at this moment in time? That I’d like to keep your mouth. I want it on mine. I want it on my body.”

He cut me off with a hard kiss. Then we were grappling fiercely in the confined space, bouncing off the tiles and the door, our hands on each other’s cocks, jerking hard, our fists bumping. He cried out, head tilted back and I mouthed his throat, covering his neck in kisses, trying to make him see through my actions that I wanted him, that nothing would ever change how much I wanted him, whether we ended up together or not. He was sunk deep into my senses, my skin, my mind, my soul, and what I had witnessed tonight only made me want him more. Made me want to be the one to heal him, to put him back together, to care for him, to make him new again. To wake up next to him, treat him like a king, be the one he came to when the going got tough. Be his everything.

Too much. Too much. But it was too late. I was head over heels with all caution thrown to the wind.

He spurted onto my fingers, body shaking against mine, his teeth snagging my lip and making me groan. I came a few seconds later, adding to the slippery mess between us and we sagged against the wall, still kissing.

The flat had started to warm up by the time we made it out of the bathroom and into his room where he handed me his dressing-gown and dressed himself in pyjamas. It was a little tight and short around the thighs and his grin told me he liked it just fine. He sat me down in front of the TV and he made us both a cup of cardamom and ginger tea, pairing it with a bag of Doritos Chili Heatwave. My favourite. We sat next to each other watching Keanu Reeves in John Wick .

“I like him,” Alex said, crunching a crisp. “I’ve heard he’s a really nice bloke.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Not enough nice people in the world,” he said with a slurp of his tea. “Humanity is really shit.”

I glanced at him. So far our four-day bubble had avoided the world outside. War, famine, crime, politics and climate change. Stuff that kept me awake and made me despair for the future of our planet. Stuff that kept me from watching the news because it made me want to cry, or often actually did. Especially if it involved children and animals and the broken refugees of war. And now, with his assault, the world outside had shattered our bubble. And showed him the very worst of humanity.

He kept his gaze on mine. I traced his jaw with my fingers. “I know,” I said. “Would you let me try and show you that some of us are not all bad?”

He swallowed. “I already know,” he said in a whisper with his eyes shining. “My knight in shining armour.”