3 Laurie

Thirty-seven years old, and I was hiding in my own bathroom from the teenager I'd brought home with me. The teenager at whose feet I'd just been kneeling. Whose pleasure I wore like a garland, and whose taste still lingered in my mouth, salty, sharp, and sweet. And, oh God, I knew nothing about him and I'd taken that risk. Mild though it was, I should have known better.1

I thought I heard my front door open, then close.

Thank God. Thank God. He could have looted the place for all I cared, as long as he left.

Sinking to the floor, I tried to still my shaking and told myself that what I felt was relief. To a degree, it was. I feared what I might have done if he'd stayed. Crawled back to his feet, possibly, and begged him to touch me, hurt me, use me, whatever he willed. Let myself be utterly undone by a boy who had barely laid a finger on me.

My throat warmed beneath the memory of his hand.

He had left me so full of aches and empty spaces, my skin too tight to contain it all, and I hadn't even asked his name. I had meant to keep him just another stranger, someone I could allow to wring from my body something of what I craved in return for a shadow play of submission. But what we'd almost given each other was something else.

No wonder I'd fled. What could there possibly be between that fierce, fragile creature and me? Had I ever been that earnest or that helplessly young, so much raw skin and burning need? Making me burn, too, with its strange power.

Against the protests of my knees, I made it to my feet and into the shower, turning the dial until the water beat down like hail. If I had thought I could silence in a clamour of sensation whatever it was he had woken in me, I was wrong. I rested my forehead against the tiles and shuddered and wanted and felt eerily weightless amidst the steam, until I found myself again in the dull familiarity of my own hand. Such a hollow thing, my own pleasure, without something—someone—to give it meaning.2

After everything I'd done, or not done, I didn't deserve to think of him, and I had that much self-discipline, at least. At least, not until after. And then I caught myself imagining that small, slim figure disappearing into the dark.

He would be fine. There was absolutely no reason he wouldn't be.

Close to twelve thousand car-occupant casualties in London this year. Five thousand pedestrians, four and a half thousand cyclists. About twenty-three percent of our trauma calls were knife- or gun-related. Last week alone, I responded to six stabbings, one requiring a prehospital thoracotomy, and two shootings, though the first had been a hoax.

But he would be fine. And even if he wasn't, I would have no way of knowing. We were strangers.

I turned off the shower, dried myself, and pulled on a dressing gown. I was tired, but restlessly so, like a bell tossed upon the wind, and I wandered my own house like a stranger.

He had left no trace at all. Not even where I'd knelt and watched him touch himself, and broken on the edge of his words. I crossed to the bookshelf and took down a random volume of Dance from amongst all the medical textbooks and journals, flipping through it as though seeking my future in the family Bible: this relic, this talisman that Robert had forgotten to take with him.

I made myself a cup of tea and didn't drink it.

Then I climbed to the top floor room. ("That's very Bluebeard of you.") Stood for a while at the centre of its emptiness, waiting for it to mean something and listening to the rain. I lost all track of time. And, finally, I cried. Because, the truth was, the room no longer meant anything at all. It was simply a space between four walls, and I was lonely and alone. Tired and sad and sick with yearning. And I'd treated someone badly, for no reason other than selfishness and fear, which was never who I'd meant to be. So much shame and loss and frustrated lust. Bitter indeed.

* * *

I was crawling into bed when my doorbell rang. At first I thought it was a mistake and shoved my head under the pillow in order to most effectively ignore the buzzing, but it didn't stop. So I reclaimed my dressing gown and—reluctantly—went to answer.

On the doorstep was an exceptionally bedraggled nineteen-year-old. Every line of his thin body was pulled so tight he almost seemed to be vibrating, but his wet-lashed gaze was fixed on the ground. "Look, I'm going to need that account number, okay?"

"My God, what happened?"

"I didn't want to take your fucking whore taxi, okay?" His furious eyes met mine. "But there's no Tube, and the buses are shite, and then it started to rain, and then my phone ran out of battery so I couldn't use Google Maps anymore, so I had to come back."

"Where were you trying to go?"

"Tabernacle Street."

"Shoreditch? That's miles away."

His shoulders jerked into a frustrated little shrug. "Six, according to Google."

"I never meant—"

"You never meant what? Seriously? What didn't you mean?"

I had no answer for him. He was right. "I'm sorry."

"Save it…just like…save it." He sounded flat and tired and sparkless. My handiwork. "And get me a fucking taxi. I want to go home."

I hated myself, and the part of me that was cowardly wished for a simple solution: an exchange of pain for forgiveness. But life didn't work that way, and fucking up was forever. "I really am…" And then I stopped. Selfish again, keeping him there in the rain while I protested my sincerity. He had no reason to believe me, no reason to care. I'd given him none. "Of course. Do you want to wait inside?"

"Doesn't matter. I'm not getting any wetter."

"Please come in. I don't want you to catch cold."

He jammed his hands deep into his pockets and glared up at me. "Yeah. Right."

At that moment, he sounded very much the teenager, and I wished I hadn't pushed him to it by treating him so carelessly. I stepped away from the doorway, and—after a moment—he came inside, bringing with him a rush of cold, damp air.

"Shit," he muttered, shuffling his feet in their saturated Converses. "Your carpet."

"I really don't care about the carpet." The echo of my own words hurt.

I closed the door, flicked on the hall light, and reached for the phone.

"Oh my God." Whatever was in his voice—the warmth, I think—took me utterly by surprise. And the next thing I knew, his wet body was shoved up against mine, his freezing hands cupping my jaw as he dragged my face down to his. "Fuck. I knew aftercare was a thing."3

I blinked at him helplessly, not even thinking to pull away. "W-what?"

"You've been crying."

"I…"

"Dude, I can tell. Your eyes are all red."

His were the colour of damp irises. Glorious. And I was mortified.

"It was me, wasn't it? Shit."

I managed something that might have been a smile. "Don't flatter yourself, Junior."

"What's the matter, then?"

What could I tell him? That I missed so profoundly something I might never even have had. And that the things he wanted were the things I wanted, and I couldn't find them either. Horrifyingly, my eyes prickled with fresh tears.

He threw his arms around me and hugged me so tightly. That silly, too-earnest, too-beautiful boy. After a moment, I bent down and pressed my face into the damp skin of his neck, breathed in rain and mist and a touch of sweat, and hugged him back. Until he was shaking slightly against me, and the cold had saturated us both.

"I fucking hated you," he muttered.

"I'm sorry."

"Like who the fuck does that? Explodes your brain and then chucks you out."

"I'm so sorry."

He pulled back and touched the corner of my eye with the tip of one icy finger. "It was me a little bit, wasn't it?"

"Yes," I told him. "It was you. A little bit."

"Good. I mean not…good good. But I kind of needed to know it mattered."

"I'm sorry I tried to pretend it didn't."

He peered at me as though he was trying to see through frosted glass. "You're kind of sorry a lot."

I nodded. "When I'm a dick, yes." I didn't want to get into the complexities of apologising. The terrible powerlessness of being unable to do anything except wait for mercy you couldn't earn and didn't deserve. I hated being forgiven almost as much as I feared rejection. It felt too much like a debt you couldn't pay. Instead, I said, "You shouldn't be standing around in wet clothes."

"Why?" He gave me a sullen look. "What are you going to do? Get me out of them?"

The words were more challenge than flirtation but, oh God. A child should not have been able to make me blush. Except he wasn't a child. Which was why I was blushing.

"Mate," he went on, "it's fine. We're not in the eighteenth century. I'm not going to, like, catch a chill and die on a chaise longue."

"I could put them through the tumble dryer, if you want?"

He scowled. "Look, I didn't want your whore taxi, and I don't want your pity tumble drying, either."

"Actually, it's a guilt tumble drying."

"Wow, you're really selling it."

Whether you were on your knees or not, people still had their ways to flay you. I drew in a breath, and it shuddered in the space between us, like my skin to his command. "If I hadn't made you leave, I would have waited there, at your feet, and begged for anything you wanted to do to me. And, afterwards, I don't know, maybe you would have stayed the night, and maybe we'd have washed your clothes. It's nothing I wouldn't have done before."

He shoved his hands squelchily into his pockets. "I seriously prefer that version. Especially the begging bit."

"Well, I'm not begging to dry your clothes. Just offering."

After a silence that contained the rise and fall of at least six or seven civilisations, he nodded. While he was working off his shoes—without stooping to untie the laces—I went to get him a towel.

When I came back, he was still standing in my hall, his socks balled up and stuffed into one hand. He seemed very small in his dampness, somehow, and his knobbly, naked toes were oddly beautiful.

I imagined his hand in my hair, pushing me down. How it would feel, that moment of instinctive outrage, and then the long, dark slide, the shame and the pleasure of being not-quite-forced to do the things I wanted. I would lick the gleam of rainwater from the arch of his foot.

I led him down into the kitchen.

"Raised ground floors do my head in." His footfalls landed softly on the wooden floor. "It's like this is a basement, but it's not a basement, and you're not on the same level as the street, but you are on the same level as the garden. How the fuck does that even work?"

"Space-time dilation," I told him gravely.

I was gratified, so ridiculously gratified, to hear him laugh.

He hovered by the staircase as I opened the door that hid my washer-dryer and fiddled with the programme wheel. "Uh, this is a really nice room." He sounded painfully uncertain.

"Thank you."

"And you've kind of got your pans on a…hangy thing."

I nodded.

There was about a fraction of a second of silence, even more uncomfortable, if possible, than the conversation. Then he gasped. "Holy shit. Is that an AGA?"

"Hmm?" I glanced at the warmly slumbering behemoth, which was absurd because it made it look as if I didn't know the contents of my own kitchen. "Oh. Yes."

Wooed, perhaps by "iconic design, exceptional quality," he padded into the room wary as a wild colt and, with a lingering look at the cooking range, finally made his way over to the washing machine. His fingers curled under the hem of his T-shirt and tugged. Then he froze. "You're not going to watch, right?"

"God. Sorry. No."

I spun away, a strip of pale skin seared across my vision like I'd stared straight into a camera flash. Then came the swoosh of fabric, the scrape of a zip, and finally the slam of the washing machine door and its slowly gathering hum. Turning back, I found him robed waist to ankle in towel and waist to neck in goose bumps, hugging his own elbows and shaking.

"F-fuck, it's c-cold." He made a dash for the AGA, one lean, lightly muscled thigh briefly exposed at the join of his makeshift garment.

Traces of rain glistened still on his chest, throat, and upper arms. There was a barbell in the shape of an arrow through his left nipple and a rash of fading acne marks across his collarbones. He looked unbelievably fragile just then, all bones and youth and awkward angles. But there was something else as well, a deep steady flame—conviction perhaps, or courage, an instinct of valour that too much living could so easily strip away. I wanted to be on my knees again. I wanted to let him burn, as free and wild as our hearts could bear.

"Can you stop staring? I know it's not much to write home about, but it's what I've got to work with, okay?"

"Sorry." What else could I say? You're beautiful. Please let me…please… When he was half-naked and trapped in some stranger's house? "I think the spin cycle is about an hour. Would you like something? A warm drink? Another towel? Some clothes." Good God, why hadn't I thought of that earlier? "I'll lend you some clothes."

"Yeah, that'd help. Just need to get dry and warm up."

A drop of water, silver-edged in the half-light, slid slowly from the tip of a clump of hair, hung suspended for a moment, and then landed on the side of his neck. He flinched, and it burst into infinite, infinitesimal tributaries, rushing this way and that across his skin.

"You could have a hot bath?" I offered. "If you wanted."

He shuffled. "You don't have to. I mean, I know you feel guilty and shit, but this is too much. You could just go to bed or whatever, and I'll get my stuff when it's ready and call that taxi."

I propped my hips against the farmhouse table in the middle of the room. "I don't think so."

"Why? Do you think I'm going to nick your AGA if you leave me alone?"

He made me smile, and it felt so strange, standing there in my kitchen, talking to an angry boy in a towel, and wanting to smile. "If you managed to steal it, you'd deserve to have it."

He huddled in closer, still shivering. It would have been so easy to fold him in my arms, and warm him with myself, but also utterly impossible. Wrong, even. And I couldn't help internally cringing from whatever it was—my own hypocrisy, perhaps—that made kneeling naked at his feet acceptable, when a simple gesture of comfort was not. The truth was, it was easy to deny the intimacy of the first (though, in fleeing from him, I had failed to do so). Much less the second.

"So. Look." His hands curled into fists. "This bath, right? Is there bubbles?"

It had been a long time since I'd taken a bath—I usually preferred, or perhaps defaulted to, showering—but I recalled some bottles tucked into a corner. "Probably."

He gave me a haughty look. I had no idea how he managed it, my little, towel-draped prince, but he did. "Well. All right, then."

So we trooped upstairs, and I ran him a bath and poured half a bottle of Radox Nourish into the water.4

"Dude."

"What's the matter?"

"Like a capful is the recommended human average."

He was right. By the time I thought it prudent to turn off the taps, the bath was mostly a pile of bubbles.

"I'll, err, leave you to it," I said. "Take as long as you like."

"Aren't I keeping you up? Isn't it really late?"

"It's probably about three in the morning, but I have tomorrow off." I could see him on the brink of asking a million personal questions. "So," I added quickly, "it's fine."

His drying hair was curling again at the ends, and he twisted a longer piece absently round a finger. "You don't want to keep me company?"

"I'd really better not." I was actually slightly proud at how calm I sounded.

"Don't flatter yourself. I meant talk to me, not soap all my dirty places."

Rather than lose myself in imagining the way his water-slick skin would ripple beneath my hands, I gave him a sharp glance. "Yes, you did."

"Yeah, all right, I did." He held my gaze for a moment, and then glanced away, the corners of his lips twitching cheekily upwards. "But what are you going to do, throw me out? Oh wait."

I shouldn't have laughed. It would only encourage him. "There's no mercy in you at all, is there?"

That brought him straight back, his eyes like arrows, cobalt-tipped and deadly sharp. "There is. There's lots and lots." His voice had taken on a husky edge. "When I'm properly motivated."

"Well, I'm not motivating you anymore." I, on the other hand, sounded like an exasperated schoolteacher. "So get in the damn bath."

"You'll stay though, won't you?"

God. How could he turn so quickly from wicked to vulnerable? It made me dizzy and sweetly helpless, these bonds of silk and mischief. "What's next, a bedtime story?"

"Do you have Winnie-the-Pooh?"

"If you don't get in the bath, I'll drown you in it."

He gestured imperiously. "Turn round, then."

I sighed and did as directed.

I heard the towel fall. Then there was a splash, followed by a yip. "Shit. It's hot."

"Traditionally, baths are." I risked a glance over my shoulder, and when it inspired no squeal of outraged modesty, tucked my dressing gown into place, and sat down on the marble step that led to the sunken bath. It was less undignified than the toilet lid, but I still felt strangely like the…attendant, consort, plaything of some capricious, adolescent god-king.5

And some part of me thrilled to the notion.

I imagined the unforgiving chill of the marble beneath my knees. The tug of chains at wrists and ankles. Perhaps the pinching weight of clamps…perhaps…perhaps other violations. He would want his toys adorned.

Oh God. What was I thinking?

The steam in the room was suddenly unbearable, and I twisted, trying to get comfortable in a cocoon of clinging heat.

My guest, my shame, my fantasy princeling, was tucked at one end of the tub, legs drawn up to his chest, so all I could see were the pale humps of his knees and shoulders rising from the bubbles. He grinned at me. "I wouldn't really make you read Winnie-the-Pooh."

I sensed some kind of trap, but I had no idea what form it might take. "I'm glad to hear it."

There was a brief pause. He trailed a finger idly through the foam, making ribbons. "I'd make you read something else."

I was determined not to ask him what. That would have been entirely foolish.

"How about…" His eyes gleamed at me. "How about… ‘Thou shalt blind his bright eyes though he wrestle, Thou shalt chain his light limbs though he strive; In his lips all thy serpents shall nestle, In his hands all thy cruelties thrive.'"6

I curled an arm over the edge of the bath and hid my face in the crook of my elbow. I couldn't bear him to see me right then, stripped tenderly to the bone by the blade of his voice.

"‘In the daytime thy voice shall go through him, In his dreams he shall feel thee and ache; Thou shalt kindle by night and subdue him. Asleep and awake.'"

The sound I made, muffled though it was, echoed off the tiles until it seemed infinitely loud, infinitely helpless. I had no idea what he was reciting, but the words hooked into me like thorns.

And, yes, for his wishing and for his pleasure, I would have recited them. For my merciless, smiling prince.

"What's your name?" he asked.

And, in that moment, I was his, so I answered, "Laurence Dalziel. Most people just call me D."

"At the club they called you Laurie."

"My friends call me Laurie," I corrected him sharply.

"I'm going to call you Laurie."

I lifted my head. "You call me what I say you call me."

"It was aspirational."

"We're not going to be friends."

He blinked at me through a coal-dark fringe of water-heavy lashes, and I felt like a prick. "Please." His eyes got very big. "Please can I call you Laurie? I like it better."7

The kid was dangerous. But I'd known that all along. "Oh all right." It wasn't a graceful surrender but, then, they never were.

He splashed me. Playful conqueror. "I'm Toby. Toby Finch."8

I didn't know what to say—it seemed a little late for pleased to meet you—so I just nodded. Toby. His name was Toby. It seemed as though I'd always known it.

He uncurled without warning and disappeared under the bubbles in a flurry of skinny limbs and gleaming skin. He surfaced again, a second or two later, shaking the water from his hair, and lay back with a sound of absolute sensual abandon. "Being warm after you've been cold is totally the best feeling ever."

Like pleasure after pain. And I was as hard as a horny teenager, just watching him enjoy himself.

He stretched out, straining a toe towards the taps and not quite reaching them. "This bath is epic. I can't remember the last time I had one. I mean—" He flailed into a sitting position, this time shifting enough of the bubbles that I caught sly glimpses of him beneath them, the shadow of his pelvis, the curve of his calf, the ridge of his ribs. "I do wash and stuff. We've got a shower at the loft."

I wasn't supposed to be encouraging him. "You live in a loft?"

"Yeah, at the top of this tobacco factory conversion thing. This guy gave it to my mum."

"Someone gave your mother a loft?"

"Yeah." He lifted an arm out of the water and peered at it. "Look, I'm going all pruney."

I suspected him of none-too-subtly changing the subject, but I let him. As I'd said, we were never going to be friends. "Time to get out then."

He did the now familiar turn around gesture.

I rose, then sighed. This was getting ridiculous. "Toby"—his head jerked up at his name on my lips, and indeed, it was sweet to say it—"Toby, do you really think I'm going to be so overwhelmed with lust at the sight of your naked body I won't be able to control myself?"

To my horror, he went bright red and curled into a tight ball at the bottom of the bath. "God. No. I'm just…I'm just shy, okay? Jesus."

"You're…what?" I repeated stupidly. The boy who had called bullshit on me at a BDSM club, brought me to my knees, told me all the things he wanted to do to me, shown me need and want and naked ecstasy, and come back to me through a rainstorm because, while he was proud, he wasn't stupid…he was shy?

He pressed his forehead against his knees and said nothing. So I took a fresh towel from the heated rack and opened it out, holding it between my outstretched arms. "I'll close my eyes."

"Okay. But no peeking."

"I promise."

More splashing. Behind my eyelids, I tried not to imagine the shimmering rush of water droplets down his body. Then I felt him—not so much the shape of him, but the heat of him—and I closed the towel around him, realising only at the last moment that I was now effectively hugging him.

He made another of his unabashedly happy noises. "That's so nice."

"Are you a virgin?"

I opened my eyes. Startled at myself, more than anything. Why the hell had I asked that? And so bluntly. It was absolutely the opposite of my business.

He went rigid in my arms and yanked the towel away, spinning round to glare at me. "I said I was shy, not sexually stunted."

God, what had I started? "You're still very young. It's actually perfectly normal—"

"Jesus, I'm not a virgin. The first time I had sex I was fourteen."

Something flared inside me, as hot and sharp and sick as acid. "Toby, I—"

"It's not what you think. It was my best mate at school. We said we'd take turns, so I let him do me, but then he wussed out and never spoke to me again." He shrugged. "But I've got laid since. A bunch of times, actually."

He sounded so proud of it. As though he was still keeping count. "I'm sorry I…doubted your promiscuity. It's just, well, you've seen me."

"Yeah." He stared up at me, still holding the towel tight around his neck. "Yeah, I have."

"So, what's there to be shy of?"

He sighed heavily and rather patronisingly. "Maybe the fact you look like you, and I look like me?"

For a moment, I had no idea what he was getting at. I half thought he might have meant old. And then I remembered the praise he'd lavished on me. At the time, I'd attributed it to a kind of power-intoxication and the heat of the moment, but I had, once again, misjudged my boy. He'd meant everything. Every word. Of course he had.

"Oh Toby." I hardly recognised my own voice. "You do know you're beautiful, don't you?"

He was red again. "I'm okay. Not like you. Not like I'm supposed to look."

"How are you supposed to look?"

"I don't know…taller, stronger, more muscular. Less acne."

"Toby, Toby." It was like some terrible enchantment. The more I said his name, the more I wanted to. "Please. Let me…" I had no idea how I was going to finish that sentence. But it didn't seem to matter.

My hands had covered his, and the tightness of his hold, almost imperceptibly at first, began to relax. I saw, felt, sensed the tension leave his body.

"Yeah," he whispered, sounding almost drugged. "Yeah."

The towel slipped, exposing one shoulder, a little of his upper arm, and the sweep of his clavicle with its dark-red rosettes. His eyes, pupil-dark and hazy, did not waver from mine.

God help me. For whatever reason, he trusted me.

I could probably have stripped him and seduced him, and he would have let me, but I was powerless with tenderness. I dried him, uncovering him piece by piece, blotting up water with the towel, my fingertips, occasionally my lips. I stroked his slender muscles, his fragile bones. I kissed the inflamed places of his skin.

He quivered. "Fucking hate it."

"It's not severe. Are you using a benzoyl peroxide cream or gel?"

"Tea tree oil. My mum doesn't believe in chemicals."

"Just as effective."

He didn't reply.

"They're not ugly, Toby." I ran my fingertips very gently over a rash of spots just above his nipple. "They're just there."9

"Yeah, well." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Given the choice, I'll take not there, thanks."

"They'll fade with time."

"And if they don't?"

"Well, then it'll just be you and the other eighty percent of the country."

He growled, clearly unsatisfied by this answer. His mouth was so close to mine. Kissing close. To distract myself—and him—I draped the towel about his hips and knelt down on the carpet. He made a rough little noise, his eyes growing even darker. I slid my hands about one of his ankles and lifted his foot onto my thigh. With the trailing ends of the towel, I collected and banished the water that clung to him. Each and every drop, one by one. I did the same to his other foot, then began working my way up his legs, through the crisply curling hair on his calves, over his knees, to the smooth planes of his thighs, their silky-soft interiors.

"Fuck." Toby was shuddering against my hands, and his erection had become undeniable. "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck."

"Are you…all right?"

"Yeah. It's just, like, this is the sexiest night of my life."

And because it was what I had wanted to do before, and perhaps what I should have done, I slid a hand around his leg and let my head rest a moment against his knee. I closed my eyes. His fingers moving lightly through my hair, and everything was still and dark and silent. And good, so very good.

Time curled around us both and held us tight.

"Y'know," he said at last, "my clothes are probably done."

It was a long journey back to my feet, and I was suddenly exhausted. I drew the towel up and tucked it round his shoulders. "Would you like me to call you a taxi?"

He turned his face briefly towards the window, where greyish light seeped beneath the blind. "I reckon the Tube will be running again soon."

"I don't want you wandering around on your own in the early hours of the morning."

"For fuck's sake, I'm not a kid. I wander around on my own all the time. Nothing's going to happen."

About a hundred and seventy homicides committed in London per year on average. About seventy thousand assault-with-injury offences. Approximately four thousand incidents of gun-enabled crime, approximately twelve thousand incidents of knife-enabled crime. "I know, but I'd still rather you took a taxi. Or…" The word was out before I could stop it.

"Or?"

"Or…stay the night. What's left of it."

His eyes narrowed, and I realised I had once again made myself vulnerable to his unsubtle machinations. Worst still, there was no hiding the fact that I'd done it quite deliberately.

"Stay where? On your sofa?"

"I have a spare room."

"Thanks, but I think I'll take my chances with the Tube."

I made my voice as stern as I could manage. "Don't manipulate me, Toby."

He grinned at me, utterly unabashed. "I'm not manipulating, I'm negotiating. You don't want me to get the Tube home. I want to stay with you. With you."

Oh, but losing to him was its own terrible pleasure. "If you stay with me, nothing is going to happen."

I'd expected (hoped?) that he might protest, but he just nodded, and so eagerly I wondered if I'd folded to an opponent with a handful of nothing. The idea troubled me less than perhaps it should have done. "All right. This way."

And so I took him into the bedroom I had once shared with Robert.

Toby let out a low whistle. "God, man, your house."

The time I had lavished on it seemed entirely lost. The hobby of another man. I gave him a little push towards the bed.

He dropped the towel and dived into the sheets, but not before I caught the pale flash of his haunches, the dimples at the base of his spine.

I flicked off the light so I didn't have to watch the shapes his body made beneath the covers as he wriggled himself into a comfortable position, then I stripped off my dressing gown and climbed in gingerly beside him.

He was still wriggling, making odd little purring noises at the back of his throat and tucking himself so firmly into the duvet I wondered how I was ever supposed to get him out of it again.

I didn't usually sleep on my back, but I thought it prudent to lie that way.

"G'night, Laurie."

"Do you need an alarm?"

"No, s'fine."

God. When he was tired, his voice had that husky edge it took on when he was aroused. It had been quite a while since I'd shared my bed with someone. I'd forgotten what it was like to have that awareness of another body. I almost thought I could hear the flicker of his eyelashes. Feel his heart beating.

Which was impossible because he had settled on his side, facing away from me, his whole body compressed into a tight little ball.

I listened to him breathe, until it grew slow and deep and even, and then risked rolling over myself. I didn't even feel him move, but there he was pressed right up against me, his back to my chest, his arse snuggled against my thighs. He made a sleepy, contented noise that could only have been entirely calculated.

I wondered if he was smiling.

I put an arm over him and pulled him to me, my hand closing almost instinctively over his wrist to keep him there.

In for a penny… When in Rome…etc., etc.

A soft pulse of desire went through me, not for sex or pain or humiliation or some other release, but for this, this quiet closeness. Someone to hold in the dark.

He must have felt it. The way I stirred against him, the way my breath caught. I waited, helplessly and half-afraid, for his response, for him to turn and cover me, kiss me and take me. I wouldn't have resisted. I would have welcomed him, in all his sincerity and obstinacy and his youthful ardour for forbidden things. But he hadn't lied when he'd promised me mercy. His fingers twisted back to brush my hand, and he settled his body into the curve of mine, giving me this instead.