Twenty-one

My English Literature mock was the following afternoon. I’d flown through the critical appreciation question with enough praise for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St.Irvyne to fill eight sides of paper.

The second question, on whether the most fascinating characters in Gothic Literature were its villains, I’d managed to, quite miraculously I thought, compare the spectre of Dracula haunting the pages of Harker’s diary with the unravelling psychopathy of Frank in The Wasp Factory.

Whether it was the nightly calls with Caspien – and the way they’d filled the huge gaping void that had stopped me concentrating fully on anything else – I didn’t know, but the last two (French and Maths) had gone pretty well, too, I thought.

Caspien had made fun of the note I’d given to Gideon, though he was happy I hadn’t written anything obscene in it because he was sure Gideon had opened it and read it before giving it to him. He’d brushed off my praise about the painting, calling it a ‘very low-effort undertaking’. The low-effort undertaking now had pride of place on the shelf above my bed. Though, I took it down and put it in the wardrobe whenever Ellie came over. I wasn’t in any way equipped to deal with the questions that might arise from her seeing it there.

Now that her grounding was over, she came over twice a week. On Saturdays, we’d have sex while Luke and Beth were out. Each time I got better, she got a little louder, and I felt a little less guilty about telling her I loved her.

I didn’t always say it, though I was normally inside her when it would slip out from between my lips, gasping and unbidden. I was beginning to think that I did, in fact, love her, but in a way that felt easy and normal and completely unimaginative. I was sixteen, and she was my high school girlfriend, so, of course, I loved her. It took no thought or effort to love Ellie.

What I felt for Caspien was more bewildering, labyrinthine, and like a cryptic puzzle that changed and evolved every time we spoke. More adult, more serious, more frightening.

It was on our fourth or fifth call when he first asked me about sex with Ellie. At first, I’d wanted to lie about it, to deny it was even happening, but I remembered his words on the first call. I was a horrible liar.

Then I thought that sharing it with him could maybe go some way to smoothing over the lines that had been drawn between my feelings for him and Ellie and how they could continue to exist at the same time.

“What...do you want to know?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said casually. “How it feels? If you enjoy it? If she enjoys it. Whatever.”

“I think she does.” I shifted on the bed.

“You think?” he said. “God, I feel sorry for her already.”

“Shut up. She does okay. I know she does.”

He smirked. “Do you, though? They can fake it rather well, I hear.” He’d already said enough for me to know that he’d never had sex with a girl. These things he’d always heard from ‘some’ or ‘they’; the sort of knowledge boys picked up by social osmosis rather than personal experience.

“She doesn’t fake it.” I wasn’t certain about this, but I did know she wanted to have it more than I did. I figured that if she weren’t enjoying it, then she’d be less intent on us doing it so often.

“Then that means you’re skilled or just big. Which is it?”

“Maybe I’m both?” I said boldly. I wasn’t sure I was either, but I clung to the boast like a limpet to rock.

Caspien studied me, a light dancing in his eyes that made me feel pinpricked all over. “I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it.”

I felt the weight in his words like a weight on my dick.

“I suppose you will,” I got out.

He recovered quicker than I did, and then we were talking about the film they’d made them watch in the recreation room after dinner.

A week later, he asked me, “So, do you enjoy it, then? With her.”

I was lying in bed. I hadn’t gotten dressed after the shower. I’d masturbated while thinking about him again; I’d taken to doing it on the nights we were due to talk so I was calmer and less agitated and more prepared for whatever state I’d find him in when he answered the phone. That night, I was wrapped in only a towel and still loose-limbed and hot from the wet heat of the shower. My brain was sated and unguarded.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Christ,” he exclaimed. He was eating red grapes, slipping the dark rounds into his mouth, biting them with one side, before chewing quietly.

I sat up a little. “Look, I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. I mean, it feels good when I...you know, and it feels nice when I...when it starts...”

“Jesus, your descriptive abilities are astounding; Oxford will be lucky to have such a wordsmith in their midst.” He rolled his eyes. “Please tell me you have access to more of your vocabulary when writing words down.”

“Shut up,” I said. “I don’t write about sex.”

“And evidently, you don’t talk about it either.”

“No, I just have it. A lot.”

This shut him up. He stopped chewing and stared at me.

I began to feel awkward under the scrutiny of his gaze. “I mean not a lot, a lot. Just...like a couple of times a week. Not that often, really. Alfie says Georgia comes over every night and wants to do it more than once a night. Which is—”

“Would you still break up with her if I asked you to?” he said right over me.

I stiffened. He put another grape into his mouth, bit down, and then began to chew.

“What?”

“You said once, after I made you come, that you’d break up with her if I asked you to.”

I remembered, of course. But my mind was stuck on the arrangement of those words: after I made you come. After he made me come. It felt hugely significant.

He waited.

I swallowed. “Why would you even ask that?”

“It wasn’t my idea, Jude. It was yours. Remember.”

“Of course, I remember; that’s not what I’m asking.”

“What are you asking?”

I hesitated. “Is...do you? Is that what you want?”

I could not, in that moment, comprehend the idea of him saying ‘yes’. Or rather, I could, but it seemed so absurd to me that he may as well have asked me if I wanted to move to the Himalayas with him and become a Tibetan monk. What was also absurd was how certain I was that I’d do it if he asked me to.

He put another grape into his mouth. “I just want to know if you would still break up with her if I asked you to.”

If you lie, I’ll know. You’re a horrendous liar.

“Are we playing truth for a truth again?” I asked, stalling. “Because if I answer that, then I’ll be wanting one of my own.”

I thought I was being very clever. That I’d outsmarted him. But then he smiled that small cool smile of his and I knew even though I hadn’t said it out loud, I’d given him the answer.

“Never mind,” he said.

He never asked me again.

A few nights after that was the first time we did more than talk on the phone. I’m not sure how I was ever clear-headed enough to hold a conversation with him, given how desperately I longed for a repeat of what had happened the day before he left. But when we took things to that next stage, it felt so entirely natural and inevitable, that I could see it was always going to happen. This was the pre-determined destination.

It started quite innocently.

We hadn’t even been talking about Ellie and our sex life, there was no obvious warning for it at all, and so I didn’t even know that it would lead there until it was far too late to stop it.

It started like this:

“I had to fight him today,” Caspien said.

We’d been talking about Costa Rica before, and so I was confused. He did this, jumping from subject to subject like a gymnast across a spring floor—gracefully and with skill. My own skill was in keeping up with him.

Most of the time, I was only half-listening, hyper-focused on the side of his neck, the way his hair flopped over those small girlish ears, or that tormenting point at the end of his nose. I had decided that all noses should be shaped like this; I didn’t quite understand the biological engineering of a nose, but the end of it should have a maddening little divot on its point like Caspien’s did.

“Fight who?” I blinked, turning my attention fully to his words now.

“Hannes.”

I searched my brain. Had he told me about someone called Hannes before? Forgetting something we’d talked about was always a fear of mine because I never wanted him to think I didn’t listen. Then he’d stop calling. I’d never see him again.

All of my fears then led directly back to the same place: Never seeing Caspien again.

He put me out of my misery. “The Austrian ambassador’s son.”

I remembered. “The one whose nose you broke with the hockey stick.”

“Lacrosse. Yes, Hannes. Hannes Meier.”

“You fought him?”

“In Fence.”

Fence he’d told me about. Fence I’d only seen in movies. They wore masks and all-white clothing and held rounded-ended swords, which they thrust at each other in very specific moves with very specific names. I’d Googled it after he’d hung up that night.

“Making you fight him with a sword after you broke his face doesn’t seem like a very sensible idea.”

“No, probably not. Except I’m sure that was the point because he’s better at it than I am.”

“He beat you?” I couldn’t imagine Caspien being beaten at anything.

“Yes. He had me on the floor with his épée at my throat, and the weirdest thing happened; I got hard.”

My cheeks burned, and I felt a low familiar thickening between my legs.

“I suppose it was something about being on my back on the mat with him standing over me. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But I liked the feeling of it.”

“Of being on your back?”

He smiled a little. “Of being on my back. Of being...bested. It doesn’t help that he has the nicest cock I’ve ever seen.”

I coughed, choking on my hot chocolate. I sat up. “You’ve seen his cock?”

“Of course. Communal showers. Not that I look, well, I mean I look in so far as I have to have my eyes open, but he struts around with it out constantly because he knows how nice it is.”

“There are nice ones?” I asked. I wasn’t aware until that moment that cocks were supposed to be anything other than utilitarian. That they were more than just appendages that fulfilled a variety of tasks. I didn’t know, beyond the usual discussions about size, that the aesthetics of cocks were even a thing.

He gave me a look as though I were the dumbest creature he’d ever known. “Do you consider all pairs of tits the same? Forget it; of course you do.” He rolled his eyes. “His cock is nice, yes. And he knows it. And this is exactly what I was thinking of when he was stood over me with his épée pointed at my throat. If we’d been alone I’d have likely offered to suck him off, but we weren’t, and so it’s been on my mind all day.”

I felt a curl of something hot and sour in my stomach. The image was exciting and tormenting at the same time.

“But you hate him.”

“What has that got to do with sucking his cock?”

I remember feeling foolish for thinking that it had a lot to do with it.

“Oh, I suppose when she does it for you, she’s looking up at you with those big stupid loved-up eyes and telling you how much she loves you. But it is possible to have your mouth full of someone’s cock and loathe them with ninety-nine percent of your conscious brain. The other one percent is hard and ferally turned on.”

Ferally turned on.

At that moment, I could not have remembered a single instance of Ellie sucking my cock had any kind of sword been pointed at my throat.

I swallowed. “Right, well. I need to go.” I needed to go because things had gotten very serious down below, and I was in danger of embarrassing myself to a point I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back from.

“Where are you going?” he asked, frowning.

“Um, nowhere. I just need to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Jude,” he said and it was in this quiet, weighty voice that froze me in place. “Are you hard?”

When I couldn’t respond, the very corner of his mouth softened, a light flicking on in his eyes. I let out a slow breath.

“Show me,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

There was a beat, and then another, and then Caspien was shifting. His dick appeared on the screen a few moments later and I sank back into my bed and stared. He wore black shorts but he’d pulled the waistband down and hooked them beneath his balls. He was half hard. He wrapped his hand around the base of it and stroked it a few times. I kept staring. A moment later, it was gone, and his face was back.

“Now, your turn.”

It had been easy to convince myself that what Caspien and I did on those calls was no more than what other boys did when they compared each other’s dick sizes after P.E. It was also very like what I did when I was alone, and so having another person witness those things seemed no more than a novelty.

But after the second call, where Caspien and I watched each other stroke ourselves until we came on our stomachs, those moments we shared began to consume me.

Every time I looked at my dick I thought about how Caspien had seen it, and how he had told me, sounding quite impressed, that it was bigger and prettier than Hannes Meier’s. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was considered cheating on Ellie, but the idea of her finding out – of anyone finding out – what Caspien and I did together terrified me so much that I knew it couldn’t be entirely innocent.

Still, I made no move to put an end to them.