The Rectum is a Tomb

by SekritOMG

It's summer in 1980s London, and Stan is blissfully unaware that after the rentboy comes the flood.

2. Chapter 2

Hello again! If you've bothered clicking on this chapter, thank you so much! I'm still pretty nervous about this story, so I really appreciate that you're still reading it. I'm thinking it will be about 10 chapters, but nothing is definite yet. Still, things are coming together. I hope you're excited, because I'm excited. I would also like to thank the amazing Foodstamp for beta-reading this for me, especially considering I delayed posting this for a week after I asked her to get it back to me. But it's here now, and that's what matters, right?

Enjoy!

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When we were in our second year, Kyle and I developed the idea that conflating nearly every queer we came across at school with feminine pronouns was not merely hilarious, but an ingenious sort of pseudo-ironic social commentary on our ever-expanding network of contacts, most of whom were sexual. Soon enough, everyone was a she.

We developed this even farther, sorting our acquaintances, friends, and lovers into full-on power groups within this insidious little nomenclature:

1. If we judged a lad effeminate, or he bottomed during sex, or we found him impractically risible in any sort of masculine role, it was 'Miss' for him, and if we were overly familiar with him he'd be reduced to 'Miss' and his first initial.

2. Sticklers, or ballsy-macho sportsmen, or those known to top, or anyone closeted, we dubbed 'Madame,' and again with the first initial.

I think, in the 1960s, sophomoric as we were — which is to say, incredibly — this felt very inventive and edgy for us. We thought it so cruel that the first time Garrison caught us doing it, he scoffed at us and told us we were rather unoriginal.

"It's been done, boys," I remember him saying, arms crossed. "Why don't you stupid lads get over yourselves already?" He was never a very nice man, so it's not as if we were shocked that he was cruel. We just missed our joke, and thinking of ourselves as original. "You might as well wear signet rings on your pinkies and paint your nails," he added. "I mean, for crying out loud."

We actually knew of one lad who did paint his nails, and one who wore a signet ring on his pinky. The former was Butters; the latter, Eric. I suppose they were our friends, but then again, so much of who your mates are depends on how you define the term, no? Is it about the quantity of time you spend with them, or the quality of that time? The nature of that time? The fact that you all went up and down together?

There was a time in my life when I hadn't known Kyle, but that time seemed distant and empty in comparison. I did not think that there was a single chance in all of temporality that we might not have been close. With his exception, I was sure that the rest of these people I called 'friends' would not have been such if the circumstances had been different. You see, I did not really like Butters and Eric. We studied together at school, and had similar sexual proclivities, and lived in the same city now, and frequented the same clubs and pubs, bathhouses and gyms. We wandered the Soho streets and London parks together, cruising one another, forming visceral bonds with each other, although not so much lately. I think it is safe to say that my affection for them, such as it was, was based entirely on our having been queer together in the same course at school. Well, that, and the four of us had the same aversions.

Saturday nights began for us at Kyle's flat. It was hardly convenient, but Kyle insisted we begin there at 8 on the dot for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Tonight it was poached salmon and crème fraiche on blini, and individual pies. Unfortunately, they were shepherd's pies, with ground lamb inside tossed together with cubed chunks of carrot and peas, topped by mash and served in heavy ceramic ramekins. To drink, he was chilling three bottles of cava and had lined up three crystal flutes. Kyle's stemware always looked lovely on his gleaming black marble counters, light-catching and dear-looking at they were. He worked in an industry in which gorgeous things were handed to him all the time. The champagne flutes, I'm sure, were a gift from Baccarat or Lalique, a thanks for pitching their products to other ignorant nouveau-riche faggots who wanted to drink on Saturday nights before going out.

I have very little ability to characterize Kyle's cooking. To be fair about it, I'm not sure it was cooking at all, but food preparation, as might be apparent when you consider the case of the salmon blini. I suppose he might have poached the fish himself, but it was far more likely that he went to Fortnum & Mason after work and bought everything served here. I could see him, in his fussy little way, fumbling into the lift with a bag of plastic containers, removing them one by one to the counter, dumping the contents into various pieces of china, or a cast-iron skillet. Kyle heated everything in a cast-iron skillet. This was one of several skills he picked up from his mother, and I don't know if it was a particularly American trait to cook things in an iron skillet, but he loved grease; loved watching it congeal in an empty, cooling pan. I knew he would have bitten his thick lower lip while he prepared everything, wondering if he had enough ice for the cava.

The problem with this scenario was that pies in the oven reminded me of miserable lunchtimes at my mother's house, my nieces and nephews tugging at her skirt while she hacked onions. "Be a dear, Stanley, and take them to the park, will you?" I can hear her asking in my mind. In the same irrelevant way that speaking to Wendy on the telephone reminded me of Kyle masturbating, Kyle serving pies reminded me of my family. Horrible. I don't know if it was this or the fact that I'd eaten a bacon avocado sandwich after rather rough, dry sex with a faceless bloke in the sauna after my swim that afternoon, but I wasn't so hungry at the moment.

On the other hand, Miss B was content to eat blini after blini. Kyle was the type to make 30 blini for three of us, and carefully recommend after setting down the silver platter that we each have 10. "Oh, I'm not so hungry," I said genially at this calculation. "I think I'll just have one." This made Kyle raise his eyebrows, because he was very annoyed by the prospect that, as it now stood, there were 29 blini for two of them, which wasn't going to come out to a fair division. So I conceded, "Well, all right. It won't hurt me to eat two."

"So, 14 for each of us," Kyle said wistfully, edging a glass plate toward Butters. "I hope you'll eat your share, ducks. They don't keep well. And I've been meaning to watch my calories this week!"

"This is lovely, fellows," Butters said. "I can't imagine a nicer Saturday evening."

"You haven't got a very well-developed imagination then, have you?" I asked. "Because we do this every Saturday evening."

"But there isn't always blini," Butters insisted.

"Well, so last week it was stilton and apple tarts" — which I knew Kyle had just bought wholesale from some pastry shop, but felt inclined to mention anyway, like this was all some great credit to his hostessing skills — "this week, blini. I mean, really, Butters, don't be so impressed."

Kyle proffered me a glass of cava. "I think I'd prefer it if you let him remain impressed."

"Well, it's lovely, all so lovely," Butters complimented as I sipped my drink. Kyle handed him a drink as well, and he merely held it as he blathered rather inconsequentially about his horribly boring week. We'd last seen him the previous Saturday night, unsuccessfully flirting in the hallway that led to the backrooms at Camp with an impeccably dressed older fellow who looked about 40, maybe 50, wool-crepe suit in late June, which usually meant money, although more and more frequently these days it seemed to suggest 'drug addict.' That said, Butters was a rather responsible fellow who could take very good care of himself, and I am sure that he struck out with whomever he was attempting to get into the pants of, and took a bus back home to Southwark, where he worked in an antiquarian bookshop. He probably spent Sunday reading the papers and walking his bulldog, making sure to be home and in front of the telly in time for the nightly film on ITV. Perhaps he went to some local pub and had a Sunday dinner, or perhaps in an even sadder turn of events he made one himself. I could see him very carefully breaking up a frozen block of peas over a … cast iron skillet. Well, now I could only think of cast iron skillets, which was annoying, since I'm not altogether certain Butters had the upper-body strength to lift one.

The first thing we did was toast to our health, which was amusingly punctuated by Kyle sneezing into his sleeve, nearly avoiding a cava spillage on his cotton T-shirt. After wiping his lips, Kyle very casually asked Butters about the notable absence of Eric. "He'll meet us at the club, you see," Butters explained hastily. "He's preoccupied."

"With what?" Kyle asked nastily. "Cramming Jammie Dodgers into his craw?"

I laughed at this, despite the pedantic nature of the comment. Butters just sighed and rolled his eyes in a put-upon way, muttering something about it not being nice.

"Well, I made him a pie," Kyle continued. "In fact, I thought I should have made him six pies. But I suppose he's too important to show his face in my flat after last week." Last week being when Eric had gotten into a screaming argument with Christophe about nationalized healthcare. "Oh, cripes. You lads don't think it's why Christophe left me, do you? Isn't it possible Eric chased him off? I mean, it was only shortly thereafter—"

"Oh, no." Butters was very quick in these situations. "I hardly think he was judging the company you keep, or anything. Seems to me he just wasn't a very nice sort of bloke, was he? I mean, he's nothing more than a petty thief, is he?"

"Who are we talking about here?" I asked, knowing perfectly well who it was we were discussing. "Eric, or Christophe?"

The stress of this conversation drove Kyle to eat Eric's pie in addition to his own. He washed each bite down with cava, managing to finish about a bottle on his own. Everything Kyle did was fascinating to me after a few flutes of champagne. "It's good he's not here anyway," he said after scraping the burnt mash from under the lip of the ramekin so he could eat it. "That man will only drink fermented bilge. And I think should have gone with a moscato."

"It's all just champagne, anyway," I advised.

"It's just so political, the geography of alcohol." Kyle drank even more cava to facilitate his next thought: "Anyway, champagne is French, obviously, so I won't be drinking that for quite some time."

"You can't just avoid everything French altogether," Butters noted. "It's a fairly prevalent culture, don't you think?"

"Yes, with a fairly prevalent population of two-timing arseholes."

Butters may have been correct, of course, but he did not know that Kyle's determination was like an iron girder — impossible to bend. Kyle would turn up his nose at torchon de foie gras and destroy his LP of the Les Mis soundtrack, take his beloved picture book about Poiret off the coffee table and donate his Givenchy waistcoat to Oxfam; I'm sure they would be glad to get it. Butters did not have my perspective on these things. He could not have known how deeply Kyle was wounded or how his scars would never heal.

"Well, I am terribly sorry it all went to rubbish so soon," Butters was saying, patting Kyle on the back timidly, the way Butters did all things.

"So am I." Kyle rolled his champagne flute between his palms. "So am I."

"I suppose you're holding up all right, though."

Kyle stopped fiddling with his glass and put it down. "My mother says I am 'eating my feelings,' whatever that is supposed to mean. The implication, I am sure, is that when I was with Christophe I was starving my feelings, maybe. I don't know what that was, really. Perhaps it was some sick concentration camp trope, like a pantomime of la resistance, or something similar. The point, I believe, is that she really wishes I'd fatten up, and hates seeing me skinny. I hate seeing me skinny, too, although I hate seeing me plump as well. But above all else, I hate seeing myself dumped." He put his head on the counter, nested in his arms. "Nobody loves me," he whined. (His proletariat inflection had a very Eastern Seaboard wash on it; very many things he said sounded like whining, upset or not.)

I decided it was high time I spoke up. "Oh, it isn't true," I offered. I came around behind him and set my champagne flute on the counter so I could stroke his hair. "You are quite loved, darling. Think of your family."

"They haven't got a choice."

"But think of all the poor souls who have no family, or whose family can't be counted on."

"It's not what I mean." Kyle shifted his weight, transferring the burden of his hunched body from his left leg to his right.

"Well, I love you." From below, I felt him heave a sigh. "Butters loves you. Isn't that right, Miss B?"

" 'Course it is!" Butters cheered.

Kyle raised his head and wiped his eyes. "Thanks for the pity, lads." One bottle of cava was left on the counter, about half-finished. He snatched it by its neck and looked at it squeamishly for a moment before clenching his other fist and declaring, "I've got to get dressed! We can't have me going out dressed like some old slob, can we?"

"I think you look lovely," Butters said kindly. He inched an empty ramekin away and picked up a blini.

Kyle looked to me, pursing his lips and tilting his head as if a toddler in deep thought. "Stanley?" he asked weakly, tugging on the hem of his shirt. "Thoughts?"

I shrugged, and crossed my arms. "Wear what you like," I said amiably. "Everything suits you." Except the dull, staid things he wore to work, I felt. Even if they were not particularly slack, his work trousers did not flatter his assets like a well-worn, well-loved pair of blue jeans, or the forest green corduroys he stomped around in every so often at school, which cleaved his behind in two perfectly symmetrical globes.

"Well, I'm off to change, then," he said with a sigh. "There's more cava in the pantry, if either of you must, but it's hardly chilled, so I'd stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes before I put it on ice."

XXX

Butters got a fourth bottle of cava out of the pantry, and I stuck it in the freezer. He was possibly one of the dullest faggots I'd ever met in my life, surpassed only by old Clyde in sheer capability to induce ennui in persons long-known and recently acquainted. Butters looked like a heterosexual nowadays, which perhaps contributed to his lack of activity in the bedroom. He was the only one of us at school to have gone up in a relationship, and gone down in a relationship. In fact, it was the same relationship. Butters did not like to discuss the details, but his father — a distant authoritarian figure who treated his son as if they were both ironic characters in Dickens instead of citizens of the modern era — had shipped him off to a correctional facility when he found his 12-year-old son pleasuring himself to dirty pictures of men, naturally. (On the rare occasion that Butters decided to tell the story, he made sure to include the part about how he'd found these pictures in the top drawer of his old man's desk.)

While in rehabilitation, as he'd coyly refer to it, he fell passionately in love with a boy named Bradley, and six years later when I met him at the English course mixer three weeks into our academic careers, he had Bradley in tow, gushing about their long years of claims of devotion laid out in flowing blue-back fountain ink on onion-skin stationery. It was a bit too twee for my liking, and I never found Bradley particularly attractive, with his pile of straw-colored curls and revolting habit of chewing his nails down to bloody nubs. Once I wore a pair of white trousers to an end-of-term dinner, and in an attempt to be funny, which it was not, he left a trail of bloody streaks on the seat of my slacks when spanking my arse. I loathed him from there on out, having ruined my favorite pair of trousers twice, once by bloodying them and once by causing me to jump into Craig — whom I was regrettably standing next to — who happened to be holding an over-filled glass of cabernet. Butters and Bradley both apologized profusely, offering to bleach my trousers or send my trousers out to be laundered, or to purchase me a new pair of trousers. Sadly for them, the damage was done, and I had to wear something less flattering to my end-of-term date with a delicious first-year whom I'd first seen in a local run of West Side Story. Craig was livid, as the jolt had caused some wine to spill on his grandfather's precious Saville Row suit (as if his damn grandfather didn't own about 60 Saville Row suits). He was furious, and spent the remainder of the dinner hollering at me anyway, despite my attempt to explain that it was Bradley who was to blame. I really disliked Bradley from that day on, which was what made it quite awkward to get the call from Butters six years ago that Bradley had been strangled to death outside of their home while fighting off some hooligans. It was implied, but never directly revealed to me, that the crime was related to his sexual proclivities in some way.

Butters was miserable, of course, but he'd gotten over it. The perpetrators were never discovered, and the local law enforcement eventually wrote it off as 'neighborhood violence.' One might think that having come to Oxford in a relationship and having left in one, he'd never had sex with another man in his life, but that just wasn't the case. We'd all had him, which was in fact the genesis of his nickname; his bowels, we boys found, were a joy to delve into, veritably as smooth as … well, you know. Thus Leopold Stotch became Butters. The moniker stuck, and to this day the only human being I'd ever heard call him by his Christian name was Bradley. At bars, at Camp, whilst cottaging, he could only bear to introduce himself as Butters. Indeed, back when his most compelling outlet had been female impersonation, the name 'Butters Stotch' suited the bill quite nicely. (He alternated this with the significantly less clever 'Marjorine Faithfull.')

After the death of his lover you'd expect him to begin having more sex, or at least sex with a greater variety of persons, but that also wasn't the case. Butters was a rather chunky 36 now with a double chin and a hairline receding quicker than the ozone layer. He was quite friendly and yet so pathetically boring, which was what made sitting alone with him in Kyle's flat particularly torturous. If the four of us had not been so cruelly blackballed together throughout school, I doubt I'd ever have spent time with him.

Thinking of questions to ask him was about as grueling as pretending to be interested in the mechanics of geological study, or the intimate details of one of my sister's pregnancies. In the case of Butters and his bookshop, I did my best to play along as he spoke about the antique books market, but at a certain point it all became too much and my eyes began to glaze over in frustration. To appear interested, I had to make a few concentrated inquiries. "Well, there can't be too many of those, can there?" I forced myself to ask about a first edition of The Hobbit.

"Oh, you'd be surprised what people hang onto, what they bring into the shop," he reassured me.

"And why would someone want to get rid of a first-edition of anything?"

"Oh." Butters coughed into his hands. "Excuse me. We haven't all got the storage space you've got. Books are deceptively bulky."

I had the feeling I was meant to be insulted by this. "I have a fair share of books, you know!" I replied. "I didn't take an English course because I hardly read at all."

"No," Butters agreed. "But, as I said, you inhabit a great, big, cavernous space — a virtual library, for what it's worth. I should only wish to hang onto all the books you've got. Then again, I don't think you've got a first-edition Hobbit lying around."

"No," I agreed. "But what a dreary thing to have sitting around the flat, am I right?"

"Oh, no, it's uniquely fascinating." If there was anything I could believe about Butters, it was the sincerity of his words. I am certain, for example, that he did find first editions of Tolkien luxuriantly fascinating. "Did you know that the initial edition of The Hobbit's all wrong?"

"No," I confessed. "In what way is it wrong?"

"Well!" Butters was glowing, obviously looking to regale me with this story. "You know, of course, that an early moment in the novel is Bilbo's encounter with Gollum, which results in Bilbo's acquiring his adversary's magic ring."

"Of course," I agreed. "That is, in essence, the point of the book."

"Oh, but it isn't! You see, at the composition of The Hobbit, Tolkien really hadn't thought of a way to connect the tale to his greater mythology. He wouldn't, of course, until his publisher asked for a sequel to The Hobbit, develop the larger idea that the ring was truly the Ring, capital R, and all that business with Sauron and so on. Of course, you know all about that, as you read it in The Lord of Rings." In fact, not only had I read Lord of the Rings, but I had steadfastly hated it. (Tangentially: In our undergraduate days, it was not unusual to see Professor Tolkien wandering around town, popping into the pub or a library, or on his way to see an old colleague.)

"I'm sorry," I said rudely, setting down my empty champagne flute. "I have no idea how we got onto this topic."

"The point I am making," Butters began, somewhat exasperated, "is that in the first edition of The Hobbit, the encounter with Gollum is different, as the one we are all so familiar with is actually a revision by Tolkien after he composed Lord of the Rings and decided that the ring was not merely a magical deus ex machina but the ultimate sentient evil wedding band."

"Tremendous, Butters. Tremendous. Will you excuse me for a moment?"

"Of course," he said, and I slipped out of the parlor and made my way to Kyle's bedroom, which was down a hallway with a crimson runner and ornate crown molding. There were a few doors here, which led to a guest lavatory, a guest bedroom, an office, a washing room — Kyle had a very nice flat, which was easy to forget because he was so naturally at home in my flat, which I rather liked but wouldn't venture so far as to call 'nice.' At best, perhaps, it was homey. I rather enjoyed it, in any case.

The streamlined fussiness of Kyle's habitat seemed contradictory — very traditionally showy, and yet carefully set up that way. I suppose to fully understand, one might have to be familiar with Kyle's thought process. He loved designating responsibilities to other people, yet he hated intruders. He loved entertaining, yet he would so much rather be entertained. He relied on me to escort him from one adventure to the next, if one could call these things adventures. After I'd ended things with Gary, and was feeling rather down about it, we'd gone to Thailand. In short, the trip was like this: Kyle was uncomfortable in the very muggy weather, and did not like noodles very much, at least not at every meal. I did not enjoy drinking sickeningly sweet things, so various alcohols mixed with various nectars didn't really please me. We spent several days completely trashed on the narcotics we'd brought with us, having copious amounts of inebriated sex. After we ventured out of the hotel, we spent the second to last day seducing underage locals (in my case) or bored fellow tourists (Kyle's) until we were so fucked out we could barely stand. We spent the last day sleeping, and I brought each of my sister's children back an embroidered silk wallet, which cost me about half a quid apiece.

I gently rapped on the double-doors to Kyle's bedroom, and he bid me enter. I didn't know what was taking so bloody long, but when I got inside I realized that he was sitting at his vanity with his head in his hands again, looking very miserable despite the fact he was dressed to the nines in a pleasingly tight pair of denim trousers that rode absurdly low.

"You slut," I said, slipping a hand down his slacks, making sure to let one finger run down his pronounced crack. "These slacks are so obscene it should be illegal."

He raised his head. "Are they? I surely wouldn't want it to be too obvious that I'm on the prowl."

"Oh." I took my hand out of his pants and stuck it in my pocket. "Are you, now?"

He sighed, and got up to face me, crossing his arms over his chest. He was wearing a very nice green sweater, with a draping collar, but for some reason it was apparently too short to cover his arse. Kyle had not always been a good dresser, but he had come over the years to develop his own style, which I found interesting and titillating, or perhaps it was merely the idea of fabric gently brushing against his skin that intrigued me. "I suppose I am going to forever be on the prowl," he said sadly. "It's just a fact of life, isn't it? We become romantically aware of ourselves and the people around us, and then we proceed to spend the duration of our lives groping around in the dark for something or someone, in most cases someone, to fulfill this unspeakable need that can barely be described. Do you know what I mean?"

He looked across at me, his green-brown eyes steady, studying my face. I thought he might be looking at my lips. I knew what he meant, and yet I did not — I was no longer looking for someone; in fact, I'd found him, and he was standing across from me, and I could see a strip of flesh between the top of his trousers and the hem of his sweater reflected in the vanity. (For the record, Kyle was not so gay as to purposefully go out and purchase a vanity. He was, however, gay enough to use the vanity that had come built into the woodwork in his bedroom.) The issue for me was that of all the men I had made a very earnest attempt at partially domesticated normalcy with, none had lived up to the standards by which I envisioned Kyle to live. Knowing this, it was hard to be honest with him. I was hardly about to say, 'Yes, darling, you are my unattainable; won't you come move into my flat with me? I am the fulfillment you've been waiting for.' So instead, I cautiously said, "I do."

"I do too." He shook his head remorsefully. "I do too." After grabbing a tissue, he blew his nose, and then said, "I'm sorry, I've been off contemplating what it will be like to spend the duration of my life in self-loathing. Did you need something? All this solitary misery must seem terribly rude."

"Oh, no," I said. "I'm well. I just couldn't stand to spend another moment with Miss B, listening to her go on and on about old books."

"Why, sweetheart, I thought you adored old books."

"And maybe I do, but there are few less interesting things in life than speaking about them with a fussy sort of widow who deals in these things for a living."

"That's a wonderfully cruel thing to say, Stan Marsh!" Kyle sat back down at his vanity, mouth open in exasperation as he dug around a drawer, not pausing until he uncovered a pair of tweezers. "She might be drier than Out of the Silent Planet, on the outside, but she's got a sweet spirit that I readily admire. And don't you call her a widow!"

"Well, what can I say? I'm low on sympathy tonight."

Kyle grunted, frowning as he plucked his eyebrows. "I should have done this before you both came over," he admitted. "I'm just running so late." With a groan, he dropped the tweezers, and turned around to face me. "What do you think?" he asked. "Too heavy-handed?"

"I thought you looked fine before."

"Well, thanks. As much as I appreciate your company while I dress, though, I find it terribly rude of you to have left poor old Miss B just sitting there to rifle through my Poiret tome."

"Yeah, well, she can handle herself."

"I don't know how you can be so pitiless."

"Well, she seems just fine," I insisted. "I mean, we all lose people. You just lost Christophe."

"Christophe may no longer be sharing my bed and soiling my linens," Kyle began, nodding toward the bed for emphasis, "but he is alive, which means he is likely milling about somewhere. He will continue to frequent the same spots I do, and he's clearly comfortable with that nasty radical MP I mentioned earlier. You know the one, Gregory?"

"I have never met him," I confessed.

"Well, you know of him. I asked my mother to do some checking, yeah? You know, or tell me what she knew about him? Well, turns out he's been holding up some censorship bills of hers, making little dreadful speeches about fairness and all that."

"Who is he kidding?"

"Not my mother, that's for sure! He sounds like a complete bastard. In any scenario, my point about him is this: If I ever want Christophe for some reason, if only to gaze upon him, all I have to do is go down to the pub, or track down Gregory and make an inquiry. I should hardly commit to describing how I felt about Chris at the time we were cohabitating, because I certainly did not love him. I've loved once, and frankly, the endless search to reproduce it has been exhausting."

For a moment, I paused. I'd never heard him say he'd loved anyone before, or to have singled the matter out so readily. I wasn't sure to whom he could have been referring, as there would have been several pretenders. Craig? Eric? He'd just said it wasn't Christophe. I badly wanted to know, and yet thinking about it was exhausting and disappointing. He was still babbling on about it, but I wasn't paying very close attention.

"Kyle," I interrupted. "The point?"

"Oh, the point. Let's not forget that. The point, dear, is that as many times as I've had my heart broken, all of these men are still very viable, do you know what I mean? I believe I could have them again, if I liked." He looked very sad. "But Butters," he said in a hushed voice. The cross of his arms seemed like it had suddenly gone from stern to protective. "Well, he's at quite a loss. He wasn't left, not the way I've been left."

"Or I've been left," I reminded him.

"Sure, or that. You know, she was more like … abandoned. In a very real way." Kyle paused dramatically one last time, and then concluded in a very breathy way, "Forever."

"Seems like a long time."

"Well, do you ever think she might meet someone again?"

"I don't know, darling. I'm not in the business of projecting her love life."

"Well, let's try to help, if we can. Oh, right." Kyle glanced behind himself and noticed his keys on the vanity, picked them up and made a protective fist around them. "These'll come in handy if I need to get back in here."

"Planning on abandoning the flat?" I asked.

"Well, no, of course not." He slipped his keys into his front pocket. "But I try to keep alive the possibility of going home with someone else entirely." He was about to shut off the vanity light when he paused, and said to me, "Please say you'll do me a favor."

"Anything, darling."

He breathed deeply as a preface. "If I run into old Clyde, please don't let him have me again."

I obviously scowled, and he saw this and amended his request.

"Oh, all right, I suppose I should rephrase that. Please don't let me do anything more with him. Everything but the meager two minutes of thrusting he can manage is so severely draining. I simply don't want to do it."

I had to think of something to say. "And here I thought you were enthusiastic about the whole thing."

"Well, it's his cock, dear," Kyle explained. "It's a beautiful specimen, and there's something savory and nasty about it, something I can appreciate. But it's him, you know, I cannot stand him." With a rarely seen humility, he clasped his hands. "So, please, dearest, I am begging you. I cannot let my self-esteem drop any lower than it already has this week."

"Well, certainly," I said. Inwardly I felt numb, not quite sure of how I should feel about it. On the one hand, it was wonderful that Kyle hated old Clyde about as much as I did at the moment. On the other, his admitted compulsion to saddle himself in other men's laps would always be disturbing to me.

"Thank you, Stanley. You are consistently my savior."

After that, he turned off the vanity lights. We collected Butters, and caught a cab.

XXX

Perhaps a month after I had met Wendy, we were having tea with some regularity. It seems at university one's time is all leisure, and I was enjoying her friendship to the hilt. Her bitter melancholy was amusing, and we seemed to share musical leanings, at least more so than Kyle and I did. Wendy had theatrical taste at the time, delighting in the choral voices of 50 young men on high and imposing organ chords pulsing through her high-end speaker system. Likewise, she found the minimalist twangs of the so-called Mod sound intriguing. Wendy was quite sleekly Mod herself around age 20, sporting opaque tights and short dresses with broad collars of bold, thick fabrics. We made quite a pair, walking along the river arm-in-arm, her with her knee-high scuffed boots and me with my sickening peroxide-bleached hair with creeping black roots. She liked to joke that my hair was nearly as long as hers, which swung around the small of her back wildly when she moved even slightly. Actually, my hair was not quite that long; it seemed to hover around my ears, although sometimes I became lazy or felt particularly glamorous and let it get down to my chin before I let Kyle cut it for me. At the time, Kyle's own hair was a big red shrub, henna-ed imperceptibly and teased to abnormally excessive heights and shapes. In the post-modern world, this sort of hair might only be perceived as artistic, but in staid Oxford at the time, it was a direct marker of deviant sexuality. In fact, it was when my father first saw me after I'd bleached my hair that he realized that I was gay. He was livid, and as he was with a colleague at the time, entirely humiliated. I am sure he had half a mind to beat me, but my mother, with her persuasive powers of diffusion, talked him out of it, and it took only a year and a half or so of this for both Kyle and me to grow out of it and return to hair of a less outrageous nature. The damage was done, though.

It was the Wendy of these formative years who introduced me to Eric Cartman. I suppose I should feel less guilt at having been responsible for getting her in with Token, because every time I met up with Eric I remembered that she had introduced him, in all of his destructive bad nature, to my life. I can see her with her fairytale hair and very blunt bangs pouring me a cup of tea over a dainty screen, the clumps of leaves catching as she told me very straightly about her friend Eric, whom she'd met in her French course, as they were working with the same tutor, a funny man named Mackey with a risible verbal quirk she made fun of on occasion.

"The problem, Stanley," I recall her saying, setting the pot back down, "is that Eric's not a true scholar. He's a rower, you see, and I think foreign languages are just out of his grasp."

"That's really a shame for him, then," I said after I sipped an Irish breakfast.

"Yes, well. He's on the chopping block, I'm afraid, and he'll be asked to go down if he doesn't find another course."

I blinked. "So?"

"So, I may have told him about you, and that your father held a professorship in the geology department. And … well, I may have implied that you'd be able to get him into a geology course."

I demanded to know why she thought I'd do this.

"He's a great friend," she claimed. "It would mean so much to me. I just … well, let us suffice to say that I owe him a great deal." Little did I know that as far as Eric Cartman was concerned, everyone owed him a great deal. I was not in the habit of pressing her, so I did not beg for more information on why exactly she felt she owed Eric Cartman anything. As I was about to discover, he was a petty bully.

The very moment he looked at me, with my straw-colored hair and pastel-colored pants, he immediately burst out laughing. "Wendy was correct about you, all right!"

"And just what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?"

He wiped his eyes. "Oh, nothing. Except that you are, hands down, singularly the biggest, most obvious homosexual I have ever seen in my life."

I was at a juncture. Should I help the man, or should I turn my nose up at him and forsake Wendy? I sniffed, and asked, "She said that about me?"

"Well." He was large, even in those days — but this was a broad, well-built largeness, the result of many intensive hours spent exercising, rowing for his college, to be exact. "She certainly said you were handsome."

I noticed his pink blush, his thick lips; his neck was strong and he held himself with a kind of pride that I had never seen before. It was the signet ring that gave it away; with his short, neat hair and baggy, collegiate clothing I'm not sure it would have been apparent, even with the come-on.

"So are you going to help me, faggot, or not?" he asked.

I helped him, all right — against my better judgment. Perhaps I was soft in those days, or just overly emotional. Perhaps I was still too new at this to be numbed by physical affection — or, as it was with Eric, fornication that almost lacked affection. He crashed into me like a plow, without any lubrication at all, even the slightest hint of spit. It was raw, and I bled profusely, which softened his thrusting, but by that time my asshole was stinging so intensively I could barely make out the feeling of being fucked. Kinder than I should have been, when he was finished I used the mingled, loose solution of my blood and his seed that slopped out over my buttocks to lubricate him.

Fantastic, no, but by the time it was over he'd somehow convinced me with mewling and slapping to speak to my father on his (or was it Wendy's?) behalf.

My father saw in my tense expression what was going on, and I felt a bit sorry for him. Never when he was a younger man did he expect his queer son to plead with him to let one of his failing lovers join a geology course. It took only the first three weeks of the next term for my father to give up on him. Eric had no aptitude for work; forget languages or geology. As a last resort, I introduced him to Garrison, who did not blink at any pretty boy who wanted to read English. And Eric was, if nothing else, pretty; he got his looks from his mother, a busty daughter of German immigrants. I quickly learned that Eric's grandparents had come into the country with Liane in 1943, their visas expedited as they were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In short, they were Nazis. Liane I met once, at a commencement ceremony — she was an insanely attractive woman. Eric had no discernable father, and I figured out within hours of meeting his mother that she 'supported' herself mostly on her looks and, at times, on her back. For whatever reason, this did not bother Eric. They had the same doe-like eyes and the same propensity for voluptuousness.

Soon, I was not the most obvious homosexual Eric had ever met. "Varnish, really?" he asked Butters the first time I introduced them. Butters clung to Bradley and explained that he performed drag shows for tips on Friday nights at the local queer pub; Eric only guffawed at him and called him a faggot. Upon meeting Kyle, Eric wasted no time dissolving into fits of laughter: "You are the ugliest Jewess I have ever met!" he cried, and Kyle had slapped him. "Oh, you have no idea how to hit a man, do you? I can teach you, you know. I'll spank your arse until it's the color of your hideous hair. I bet you'd like that, wouldn't you, Jewess?"

In light of this, I told Wendy that after having gotten Eric into two separate courses, my obligation was fulfilled. "And I'm done sleeping with him, too, I can certainly tell you that much," I added. "If he fails anymore courses you'll have to find another of your queer friends to help him. I'm through."

"But don't you enjoy it?" she asked, ignoring my addendum.

I told her I didn't. I hadn't been with him since that day, and wasn't hung up on it at all. Kyle, regrettably, found that he did enjoy sleeping with Eric. Oh, he would act infuriated about it, claiming all sorts of things: "I cannot stand him! If he calls me a 'Jewess' one more time I shall call up my father and have him enact a military tribunal and have all the Cartmans thrown out of England! They can be deported to Israel and tried and executed for all I care!" But ultimately, he thoroughly enjoyed Eric spanking his arse, up to the day when Eric left him. It was Kyle's first relationship, and his first heartbreak. Sometimes, when two of your friends break it off (regardless of how little you actually liked one of them), you wonder which of them got the raw end of things. Kyle, of course, had been trying to find some happiness all this time, chasing every man who looked like bad news. Eric, on the other hand, hadn't managed to find a man since.

XXX

"What's the surprise, then?" Kyle asked Eric immediately.

We'd found him ensconced in a large booth near the back of Camp, an organdy curtain concealing the table from direct view. In front of him were six empty pints and one quarter-full, which I presumed he was working on. Eric drank Guinness, always preferring heavy stouts to just about almost anything else, pronouncing the rest of the alcoholic corpus 'faggy.' (I often wondered what exactly about whisky was so faggy.)

"Patience, Jew," Eric growled. In a swift motion he swept up the pint and tipped the last of his beverage into his mouth. His size made it difficult for alcohol to affect him, but seven pints was a lot so early in the evening, even for Eric. "All will be revealed."

"Well, move your monolithic arse over so the rest of us can have a seat, then." Kyle began trying to shift Eric further into the booth, but moving him would have been a Herculean task.

He chuckled derisively at Kyle, and shook his head. "Pathetic," he said. "You have absolutely no upper-arm strength."

Butters and I looked at each other, knowing where this discourse was headed. On cue, Kyle roared back, "And you're so morbidly obese your behind has got its own constituency!"

Eric did not miss a beat. "So I'm sure it's just a matter of time before your bitch Jew mum moves in and runs for parliament!"

They had done this act solidly since their first meeting. The year or so during which they formalized their relationship had been no exception. Listening to it was exhausting. Whatever his personal accomplishments, Kyle could not resist the siren's call of bantering with Eric. He wasn't wrong; Eric was so enormously fat that the pursuit of inventing new ways to insult him about it had become boring about 10 years prior. When there is no more fun in concocting delicious metaphors to describe a man's girth, you know things have become humorlessly dire. Part of me was quite glad to have fucked Eric long before he let himself go. Problematically, he was a man of appetites — and I do mean just about every appetite one could imagine. When school ended and he stopped rowing, he had no counter-balance for them, and everything just went to hell. About the time that Eric began bothering Kyle about the end of the affair with Christophe ("Actually, I think you're one up this time, Jew — lord knows you're too cheap to support an unemployed Frenchman"), Butters turned to me and said, "I really think I need a drink," which was just about the best thing I'd heard him say all night.

"You're not the only one," I agreed.

"So, let's get one, then?" he asked me, and I was about to drag him off toward the bar when a golden-haired young man who as almost certainly not old enough to be in a gay nightclub on a Saturday night shoved his way past us, holding two pints. He immediately caught Eric's attention.

"Ah, yes," Eric said warmly, gesturing at his lap for the blond boy. "Surprise, gentlemen."

"Oi, Eric," the boy said cheerily. He wedged his way onto Eric's lap. I noticed that his feet were planted firmly on the floor, as if he were simply using Eric's great thigh as a balance while he postured. When Eric just tensed his lips without answering, the boy shrugged and handed him one of the two beers. "Here's a Guinness, love. I kept the change." His words were mired in a very faint Irish lilt. "Who's this lot?"

Taking the stout, eyes narrowed, Eric finally decided to answer him. "This lot are my friends," he said, scanning Kyle, Miss B, and I as if we might suddenly decide to pull revolvers from our nonexistent holsters and gun him down. "Although lord knows I do hate them, and they'll be lucky if I haven't found better models by the morning."

Butters lowered his eyes. "Oh." He sniffed audibly. Little things like this, much as they were to be expected, sort of got to him. "Why, you know that isn't a particularly nice thing to say, Eric."

"I don't give a bloody fuck," he said. He took a sip of his pint and not-so-subtly snaked his free fingers into the blond boy's shaggy hair. "Go suck a fat one, Butters, I mean it."

"Well, I for one have been meaning to divest myself of you since I met you," Kyle said imperiously, and about half a minute too late.

"So why don't you do it, then? Make life a bit sunnier for the both of us, wouldn't you, instead of piddling around here like Butters' sissy bulldog?"

Butters struggled forth with, "Now, that's crossing the line, Eric, I mean really…"

Sighing, I took a final look at the boy, who had against all odds managed to worm the fingers of one of his hands into Eric's back pocket. He had a smug look on his face like he was quite proud of this whole position, and I don't entirely mean the way his threadbare denim-clad arse was enthroned upon our friend's knee. With his rosy lips carefully pressed into a subtle O-form, he looked at me, and for the moment our eyes locked I was thrown. His were blue, aquamarine-ish, the green invading his pupils much like it invaded Kyle's. I managed to all but spout out, "And who's this, then?"

"Oh." Eric managed to put down his Guinness. "Yes, how rude of me. Gentlemen." He paused for a moment, just to build on the irritation. This was a specialty of his, to be sure. "This is Kenneth. Say hello, dear." With his free hand, he prodded Kenneth in the thigh.

"Hullo," he said. "Kenny's fine. I prefer it. And I'm sure you're none of you as bad as Eric says."

"Like fuck they're not," Eric grumbled. "The Jew in particular is especially horrid."

"Which one is the Jew?" the boy asked, unguarded.

Eric heaved a sigh of great exhaustion, snatched up his glass again, and then said, "The one who looks Jewish," as if it were that simple.

Kyle tensed. "Oh, that's it," he announced, throwing his hands up. "I'm off for a drink. You're worse than Hitler, Eric, you know that, don't you."

"Keep reminding me," Eric entreated.

"Come on, Stanley." Kyle grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me toward the bar. For a moment it occurred to me that we were leaving Butters behind, and that he had wanted a drink, but I quickly forgot about it.

XXX

I ordered a whisky. It was not my Saturday evening regular, but my mood was too fragile to chance anything out of the ordinary comfort a stiff serving of whisky provided. It was a drink with a strong character, a stable sort of masculinity. I felt a little tipsy, and knew I was overthinking things. When Kyle ordered I gave the bartender a card to open a tab. It had already been a long night.

We stood there, stiff-lipped and not speaking for several minutes, even after we got our drinks. A dance floor of men with either more motivation or fewer cares than we had throbbed away before us. Every so often, a wayward limb jutted awkwardly out of the crowd. Kyle sighed in between sips, his eyes hooded and his posture rigid. I kept a hand on his lower back; I don't know why. Most nights out we did not dance; dancing was primarily an engagement for the young, and although the vast majority of the Camp population was in our demographic, we were still at the peak of the acceptable range. Any older, and we would have had to have spend our nights out at a dingy piano bar or some café, kitsching it up like Quentin Crisp on some Shaftesbury corner, avoiding the annoyed glares of younger men who could only assume they'd never turn into us. Both Kyle and I were deeply afraid of this happening.

Out of nowhere, the pensive nowhere I was lost in, Kyle asked, "Well, what the fuck?"

"I don't know." I put my lips to the rim of my glass.

"It's been years since Eric's had anyone. Decades!"

"Perhaps he's had a few, and he just hasn't told us."

"That's complete rubbish. This is Eric we're discussing. He can't keep a thing to himself. He can barely resist getting Butters on the phone to describe the consistency of everything he eats and how much it cost. If he ever had a boy since school, he'd have mentioned it."

I had to concede this to Kyle; Kyle did know Eric rather well. But, I had to remind myself, so did I. While Eric managed to retain some of his shapely sportsman physique, he hadn't displayed any success in bedding lads. Certainly the thought of sleeping with him now would make anyone's skin crawl.

"I simply do not understand," Kyle concluded. "Help me figure this one out."

"Let's not waste our breath." I gestured, in fact, to the boy himself, as he was headed right for us.

Kyle stiffened when approached, and I dropped my hand from his waist.

"Time for another drink," the boy said. His words were far too chipper for the dim, smoky room, even if the soundtrack was generally danceable, with the Beat preaching caution overhead. Behind us I heard the bartender singing along, "Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it," but he didn't have a very good voice, so I blocked it out. Needlessly, as it happened, because while Kyle glared at him, the boy asked for an IPA, which forced the bartender to stop singing.

"So," the boy said after placing his order, and asking to put it on my tab, "Is this a typical night out in your circle?"

"Sure," Kyle said, looking away.

"Well, no, not really." I indicated our table. "We all begin drinking at Kyle's flat. Usually Eric comes along. And usually he's rather unaccompanied."

"Oh." The boy shrugged, and reached behind himself to take his pint from the bartender, who gave him a cushy wink. "Yeah," he said after an initial sip. "He hasn't mentioned anyone else, really."

Kyle snorted. "Small wonder," he said.

"What's the problem?" Kenny asked.

"You're so young," I marveled.

"And utterly gorgeous," Kyle added. "What's a gorgeous young lad like you doing with a fat old lump like Eric, anyway?"

"I'm not that young, and I'm not that gorgeous," Kenny said, but he said it in the sort of way that told us he didn't believe it. He coughed into his sleeve. "As for Eric…" He sighed. "Well, I like him. He's got something … I don't know what." He paused. "Well, that, and he's paying me."

"Paying you?" I sputtered out. "Good god, of course. Of course, you're too pretty not to be a prostitute, aren't you?"

"Ha!" Kyle slapped me on the back. "I knew it! No one in their right mind would want to be trapped under all those rolls of fat. No one! Unless they were making money off of it!"

"Oh, I do like him," he said, somewhat convincingly. "He's cruel, but quite funny. And he's very youthful. He's like a madman. It's exhilarating."

"But—" I remembered I had to swallow my mouthful of drink before speaking, and did so. "But would you want to be with him if he weren't paying you?"

He answered in a heartbeat: "Well, no, of course not."

"Oh, this is too delicious." Kyle reached up with his free hand to twist a curl of hair, and remembering he had none, pouted and decided to work on his drink. Kenny looked at him curiously. "What?" Kyle asked impatiently, between sips.

"Nothing."

"Ah, so." I was trying to be talkative. It is hard to continue on a conversation with someone you've just learned is being paid for sex and company by your very spiteful, very rotund friend. "How old are you?"

A moment passed before he answered, "I am 23."

"Oh, right. Well, you know Eric will be 38 next month, of course."

"Of course." He nodded awkwardly.

"Where did you go to school?" I asked while he was in the middle of a gulp of lager.

He shook his head enthusiastically before swallowing. "No," he gasped out, when he had an empty mouth. "I didn't."

Kyle chose this moment to jump back into the conversation. "Well, Eric read English with us at Oxford," he announced. I had always found it fascinating that the only time Kyle was likely to offer praise to Eric (however indirectly) was when he was in the company of someone whom he seemed to think even lower than Eric. It was as if he were saying, Eric is about the worst human being I know, and yet you're worse than he is, and should be ashamed. Congratulations. With a few more drinks in him, he might just start saying that. Only time would tell.

"Ah, didn't know that," Kenny said. He was either too stupid to know he was being insulted, or was purposefully choosing not to acknowledge it. "He really hasn't told me much about himself, or any of you." He heaved a sigh. He began to reach for his pocket and halted. It was an odd oasis of awkwardness in the desert of our conversation. Then he added, "Well, except that you're together, of course. How long has it been?"

This made me choke on my whisky, and Kyle actually spit what he was drinking at the moment back into his pint. I felt my heart seizing, though, and I felt Kyle tense next to me.

"We certainly are not!" he exclaimed, so loud that even over the operatic old Genesis tune playing overhead, some tough-looking bloke at the bar next to him gave him a dirty look. Kyle noticed this and snapped out a very unconvincing, "Sod off!" before returning to our conversation. "Oh, he told you that, did he?" Kyle asked. "Well, that's, that's just fabulous."

"So," Kenny said. "It hasn't been very long?"

"This is just ridiculous!"

I was still struggling to catch my breath.

Kyle kept on at it: "We are not together. We have not been together. I just ended a semi-domestic relationship, and Stanley's no slouch either. I don't know what game you're playing, or more likely, what game he's playing at, but I assure you, it's not amusing to go around falsely assuming whatever you like about people!"

"Yes," I wheezed. Obviously these surprise inquiries into my fictional relationship with Kyle were irritating my asthma. Moreover, Kyle's reaction wasn't exactly in line with my continuing fantasy that one day we might get together.

"Are you all right?" he asked me, finally noticing that I wasn't breathing so easily.

"Fine," I managed. Kyle set his drink down — it was almost empty, anyway — and took mine out of my hands.

"Here," he said, beginning to rub slow circles on my back. "Is that all right, dearest?" I nodded, and he turned back to Kenny. "So you go back and tell Eric, your lover, or employer, or however he wants you to figure into his life, that it's not funny, and he just barely avoided giving Stanley an asthma attack."

"Terribly sorry," he said with a shrug. "How horrible for whichever of you likes the other one more!" And then, with the drink I bought him in hand, he left, presumably to head back to the table.

"Really!" Kyle huffed. He was still rubbing my back.

"I'm fine."

"No, you're not, you're wheezing all over the place."

"I went swimming today," I explained.

"Well," Kyle said. I loved the shade of pink his cheeks turned when he was frustrated. "I keep telling you the swimming's no good, dear. Look at what it's doing to you. The slightest implication that we might be together sets off your asthma."

"Really," I tried to assure him. "I am fine. I was just caught off guard. By any number of things." I added.

"Oh, right, of course. And while we're on the subject? That boy is not 23."

"I know. I suppose the question shouldn't now be, 'How old is he,' but rather, 'Is that lad even legal?'"

It was a question neither of us could answer at the moment.

After ordering new drinks, we decided to head back to the table. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied old Clyde, and, just my luck, he was chatting with Craig — and that towheaded excuse for a date he kept cropping up with lately. I groaned, hoping Kyle wouldn't even notice that Clyde was at Camp.

He just asked me, "Is it really all that horrible, the idea that we might be together?"

I didn't know what to say. So I said, "Look, old Clyde's here."

Kyle shook with slight disgust. "Remember what I asked you? I mean it, Stanley. Please keep me away from him."

"Of course."

The moment we got to the table, Eric announced, "We've decided we'd like some cocaine now," like he was ordering a round of drinks or a plate of sandwiches or something. It was refreshing, though, that he tended to dispose of all euphemisms and slang terms and just cut to the punch, letting 'cocaine' roll off his tongue as if it weren't illegal (or expensive).

"Who, you and your eight stomachs?" Kyle asked, slipping into the booth.

"No," Eric growled. "Myself and Kenneth and Butters."

"Oh, I'm quite all right, thank you, no drugs for me tonight," Butters said.

"Shut it, Butters."

I slipped into the booth beside Kyle.

"Well, I'm looking forward to getting to know you all," Kenny announced awkwardly.

Eric rolled his eyes and snorted. "The Jew is a depressive size queen, Butters used to impersonate Marianne Faithfull until his boyfriend was murdered, and Stanley fancies himself the next Waugh, but his work reads like the instructions for applying a rubber." He took a great gulp of his drink, consuming a third of the pint in one chug. "There," he huffed, wiping his lips. "I just explained everything to you. That should have saved you a few hours."

"You all seem so interesting," Kenny said with a laugh.

Butters stuck up his hand as if he were in a lecture. "I was a period piece, really," he explained. "I did a mean Julie Driscoll 'Season of the Witch,' actually, and—"

"That's enough, Butters. He doesn't care about your storied drag career."

"What do you do now?" Kenny asked, ignoring Eric, who sighed and rolled his eyes and looked off in the distance as he couldn't be bothered. "Oh, and I'm dreadfully sorry about your boyfriend."

"Oh." Butters blushed. "It's fine, he was … well, it's been a bit since then. I work in a bookstore now."

"Oh, all right, fancy that." Kenny answered with all the disinterest of someone who obviously did not read. I took this as a cue to talk about myself.

"Eric's got one thing off, though," I said jovially. "Rubber instructions are more interesting than anything I've written."

"I shouldn't say that," said Kyle. "I've got no interest in using a rubber, and I rather like your writing."

Now I blushed. "That's kind of you to lie for me, darling."

"Oh, now, I do mean it."

"And that's what I adore about you."

Kyle blew me a kiss over his cider, which he proceeded to sip from.

"They're always doing this faggy stuff," Eric announced, turning to Kenny. "It's sickening, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't say that," Kenny said with a smile. I had half a mind to say something about Eric's apparent claim that Kyle and I were an item, but decided against it. Perhaps with Kyle sitting next to me getting into the details of how we weren't would have been too painful. In any case, I cleared my throat disruptively, and felt Kyle's thigh shaking against mine. Maybe he was nervous about all the things we were dancing around.

"So," Eric said slyly. I noticed one of Kenny's arms was twisted around one of his. The boy was resting his chin on Eric's shoulder. He didn't look disgusted at all, which was the reaction I generally expected of contact with Eric. He was being paid for his work, though, and if I knew something about prostitution (which, as it happens, I did), it was that the key to earning your keep was to avoid acting disgusted, because any number of fat older men might want you to not be disgusted by them, and if they were looking to repulse potential tricks they might as well just try their luck in the dating pool. While I was staring at the boy, Kyle was drinking again, slowly and curiously, still massaging my lower back. I didn't balk at this, and soon enough we were all staring at Eric expectantly as he asked, "Who's in?"

The boy answered first: "Me, of course."

"Yes, of course," Eric mumbled. Then he looked to Miss B. "Well?" he asked.

"Oh, but I don't want any."

"Goddamit, Butters, buy in."

With a deep sigh, Butters reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. He licked his thumb and then cautiously flipped through his money as if it were a card catalogue. Too many years of working in a bookstore, maybe, or perhaps without Bradley's income he was actually worse off financially than before, despite the fact that he now had a real job — and I wasn't sure dressing up as a lady and singing throwback tunes from our university days really netted Miss B all that much pay. Still, he pulled a twenty out of the wad and asked, "Will that suffice?"

Butters had never learned, in all his years of dealing with Eric, that the way to approach these things was not to ask, but rather, to announce something more along the lines of, "That will suffice."

Predictably, Eric sighed and said, "No, Butters, that will not suffice."

Of course, Butters didn't do what I would have done, which was say, "Yes it will," and shut Eric up. This was the very sort of thing I loathed about Butters. He was so averse to conflict with anyone that he would let himself be led through this test of Eric's will against his own general dislike of recreational drugs (other than alcohol, of course). The right thing to do in this situation was either to just say, "Goddamit, no, I'm not going along with this" so Eric would get tired of speaking with you and move on to bullying the next person, or just go along with it and perhaps enjoy a night of electrified anarchy. But that was Butters, the drag queen who gave 'drag' a whole new uninspired meaning. Predictably, Butters folded, and pulled out another twenty, and turned his head away from Eric, who turned his sights on Kyle now.

Turning to me, Kyle stopped rubbing my back and put his drink down. "Shall we go in together?" he asked. "I've got some cash, but if you pay, I'll get it the next time."

I rolled my eyes, because it was unlikely that Kyle would get it the next time or any time at all until one of us dropped dead, or we decided we'd finally gotten too old for nights out amplified by drug use. I didn't know when that was going to happen, but I figured it was slated for around the time Kyle and I both found stable domestic partners — possibly sometime around the new millennium.

"Sure," I said with some cheer in my voice. I tossed some money onto the table like it didn't matter, but inwardly I cringed. I knew there would be a gap before getting paid for the story I'd turned in on Tuesday and the following assignment. The coming week might see me on the phone with my father, begging him for money, trying desperately not to answer his question with an irritated, "It all went to pot! Literally!"

Shuffling the bills together like a bank teller — a position I can assure you Eric had never held, as he found banking too Jewish — he sighed. "Well, whatever this buys," he said aimlessly. He thrust the bills toward me. "Go get it, Stanley. Good quality, this time — I want a nice, clean high, not to be sick the next day like an amateur."

"If you don't want to be sick, maybe you shouldn't snort cocaine, Eric," Butters said wisely.

Eric didn't even respond to this. He just rolled his eyes and made a face at Kenny, like the boy shared some great understanding of how miserable it was to be friends with us. I was hardly going to claim any kind of mystic connection with the lad, but he seemed all right, and it appeared we were getting on fine, so I wasn't sure what Eric was attempting to communicate to him. Then again, his money should at least have bought him a sympathetic smile, which, in fact, did materialize, if not a bit late.

I really wasn't in the mood to leave my comfortable seat, my drink, or Kyle in the hands of a fascist ex, a duplicitous prostitute, and Butters. "Why do I have to do it? I did it last time, didn't I? If you want blow so bad, Eric, why not get off your arse and go fetch it yourself?"

"Stanley, just be a gentleman for once and go do it," Eric insisted.

"I don't see why I should."

Eric was beginning to turn red with irritation at my stubbornness. I protested these things, at times, just to make a point to Eric that not everyone was happy to just follow his orders. But it did happen to be true that I was not really in the mood to go stumbling through the club. Who knew who I would run into? Moreover, the one person I was certain to meet on this trip was Damien, our drug dealer, and I didn't really like him. He was like a rocker to my Mod, I felt — despite the fact he was probably 10 year younger than I.

Well, no, actually — he seemed 10 years younger now, but it occurred to me that in a very threatening way, he was ageless, dark and moody in perpetuity, dispensing narcotics from the women's room in a gay nightclub on Charing Cross … never mind that all restrooms in any such establishment were, by nature, men's rooms in the end. Beyond that, as Kyle liked to put it, "The world is a man's toilet." I think he'd said that to me while he was pissing in some alley in Islington; I may have been shielding him with my coat.

While they were all making faces — Kenneth amused, Eric disgruntled, and Butters sympathetic — Kyle tugged on my sleeve. "I'd appreciate it so much, dearest," he said. He took my hand and nudged me. "Won't you go get me a bit, hmmm? I'd appreciate it."

"I really don't see why Eric shouldn't do it."

"Well, perhaps he should, but he's entertaining his new sweetheart" — even Butters couldn't maintain a straight face at that — "and I feel the need for a buzz."

So I did it. I felt so ambivalent about drugs — loved the effects; hated the process. As I brushed by the gyrating bodies spilling out from the dance floor and into the hallway, I pondered whether I wanted any at all. My relationship with drugs was so … unenthusiastic. I wasn't truly sure if I had one. The clandestine way we discussed procuring and using them was so formal, so aggravating. It just wasn't funny or enjoyable anymore, and I didn't know from where this rage into cocaine had come, but it seemed like everyone was sucking it up like vampires after lymphocytes. If I was becoming old, I'd first noticed it in the way my appreciation and use of drugs had calmed.

There were two men snogging in the loo, and I had to shove them aside to get in. It annoyed me that they were blocking the door, and when I'd gotten past I was confronted by the drug dealer fucking a lad with blond pageboy whose shirt was lifted up to his nipples against the mirror. The slim, pasty curve of his belly was impaled on the ledge of the sink. The boy didn't look too happy about this at all, but who was I to put a stop to it? I just stood there gawking at the two of them as the lad was thrust again and again into the protrusion of the toilet hardware, and Damien was gagging his pink, curled mouth with his dirty fingers. If this boy wasn't bruised all over tomorrow I'd be very surprised.

Damien must have seen me in the mirror because, without looking, he said in two or three heavy groans, "Just stay right fucking there, Marsh."

I shrugged and hung back. A second pair of lovers thumped into me, not pausing to offer an apology on their way to the open stall. Rubbing my own rapidly bruising upper arm, I backed again the wall and tried to ignore the show in front of me. The boy was squealing, piglet-like and terrified. Damien was soundless and blissful when he came, squashing his lover's face into the mirror's glass with intense, longing hatred. I knew what hatred looked like in a man dying the little death — I'd had sex with Eric.

Damien pushed himself off and out and the (page)boy bent over into the sink. I thought the lad might vomit, the way his hands immediately flew to his stomach, but he was merely protecting the lacerations from the pounding he'd just received. Whatever the case, he was retching.

Stuffing his pale, studded cock back into his pants, Damien stumbled toward me. "What do you want?" he asked — too irritated, I felt, for a man who'd just orgasmed.

"Um." I nervously got the bills from my back pocket and handed them to Damien. "Whatever this buys."

He rolled his eyes. "And I'm supposed to just know what you want?"

He had a point. "Eric's usual. Whatever he likes." I made sure to emphasize the he, because it wasn't for me.

"I don't memorize what drugs people take. I have far more important things to worry about."

"Well, I don't see why you shouldn't. It's your goddamn job, after all."

Before I knew it, he had me around the collar. "How dare you tell me how to do my job!"

I could swear in his fury his eyes were turning red. "Apologies," I choked, feebly swatting at his fists. He released me, and I stumbled before regaining my balance. "Blow, please."

"Pip!" Damien barked, staring at me with his teeth gritted, and the blond boy brought his button nose and grey eyes out from the sink in which he had been sulking.

"Yes, Damien?" he asked. His voice was effusive, but tinged with a tremor.

"Don't just stand there. Get Stanley his purchase."

"Yes, sir. Right away." The lad, apparently named Pip, pushed himself off from the sink counter and limped into the stall that wasn't being used for an incredibly audible act of fellatio. After a moment, Pip returned, and handed me a baggie of white powder.

"This is it?" I asked Damien, scoffing. "You must be mad."

"Well, it's quality product. You want something middling, or do you want something that meets with a standard?"

"Who standardizes these things?" I asked.

"I don't have time for your whining today, Marsh. Pip needs me to administer to his lacerations."

"Oh, no, Damien, I'm quite fine on my own, thank you, and—" A loud moan from the occupied couple interrupted him.

Damien rolled his eyes. "Not now, Pip."

Pip lowered his eyes, and clasped his hands in front of his abdomen, elbows out. He looked like a schoolboy. "Yes, Damien." With a gentle sigh, he hung his head.

XXX

"This is pitiful!" Eric cried when I dropped the baggie into his lap. "This is barely enough for one!"

"Is that one normal-sized," Kyle said as I slid back into the booth, "or one disproportionate fat arse?"

Eric ignored this. "Well, Butters, it looks like you're out on this one."

Butters rolled his eyes and leaned back in the booth.

"Give me," Eric said to Kenny.

Kenny was clearly well-trained, because he ducked a bit for cover and came up to hand Eric a small mirror. From his pocket he procured a credit card, and he began to cut lines of cocaine, neat and symmetrical, queued up like prisoners at inspection. If there was anything of Germany left in Eric's genes, it was apparent in the way he did things: calculating, neat, straight and fussily.

"And no one notices if you just do this in the open?" Kenny asked. "Or minds?"

"You underestimate Eric's sense of caution," I said. "That curtain to your right actually does a fairly adequate job of concealing whatever is happening here, and the bartenders are too busy to watch."

"Ah." Kenny hunched over to inhale his line of charlie, which he did with a neatly wound fiver Eric had drawn from his front pocket. He slid the mirror in front of Eric. As Eric mechanically snorted his line, it occurred to me that I had never taken drugs with a prostitute before, let alone stuck the same 5-pound note up my nose. I wondered if Eric and Kenny had been taking a lot of drugs together, as they seemed to have a shared process.

After finishing, Eric grunted in satisfaction and wiped his nose.

"Not that I'd like to be made an example of, because I surely wouldn't, but you'll notice that everyone's doing it," Butters commented.

"Yeah." Kyle reached across the table to snatch the rolled-up bill from Eric's fingertips. "If I had some image to protect, like Craig, maybe, or Token" – he looked at me pointedly, with knit brows – "perhaps I might care. But what does it matter if anyone sees me doing this in the open? Who am I protecting?"

"Ah, whatever." Kenny rested his head on Eric's shoulder. "Don't over-explain it or anything, now."

I took the mirror in front of me and bent over to inhale my line. After this round, Eric made another mirror's worth of lines, and I declined to take any more. Kyle volunteered to have mine, and I sighed as I told him yes, of course he was welcome.

It was more or less silent while we went through this ritual, but by the time we were done, Kyle was whining and running his lips over my shoulder, begging me, "Oh, why won't you dance with me, Stanley?"

"Because I'm not in the mood," I growled.

"I am," he declared, climbing over my thighs to get out of the booth. "If you don't come with me I will just have to dance with whomever I find."

"Provided they're interested."

"Fine," he said, taking a moment to gaudily and slowly tilt his behind in front of my face and waggle it at great length. "Suit yourself, Stanley!"

He ran off into the crowd.

"And why don't you go after him?" Kenny asked.

Miss B and Eric looked at each other.

"Oh, dear," Butters said, grasping Kenny's hand. "It doesn't work like that most days."

XXX

An hour later, Kyle hadn't turned back up, and I ventured out into the crowd — only to find him plastered to old Clyde at a table nearer to the entrance. He was grinding his crotch into Clyde's, and the old bore didn't seem to be enjoying it quite as much as I would have.

"All right, honey, let's go," I said gently, trying to wrench Kyle from Clyde's slack form. "You don't want to make it with him."

"He doesn't?" Clyde asked. He wasn't being sarcastic. He was genuinely asking.

"No," I said sternly. "Trust me."

Kyle was trying to say, "No, I want to," but he got a bit slurry when he was in his cups, so it was coming out more like, "Nuh, ah wanna," and all the while he was pawing at Clyde's trousers.

"I think he wants to," Clyde informed me, as if this were a sincere discussion about whether or not Kyle might like to go home with him.

"No, he doesn't. You live with your parents. You haven't even got your own flat."

"I'm between flats. I'm thinking I may move out to Shropshire. Go live in the country and all."

"That sounds a wonderful plan, dear, and I wish you luck, but I really think you should leave Kyle out of it."

"Well, he doesn't have to come or anything. I just think he wants to go home with me." This statement was roughly illustrative of old Clyde's problem. Any other man I knew would have jumped on the opportunity to make a pun out of his statement that Kyle didn't have to come. Old Clyde just left it there. He had no capacity for imagination.

Kyle now attempted to break into the conversation. "I don't like him, I just want his cock. You'll give me your cock, won't you? I need it so." Then he began sucking at Clyde's neck.

It was making me ill to watch this.

"Oh, all right." Clyde shrugged at me, and I shrugged back. "Well, how about we just do it in the loo, then?"

I didn't even know who he was asking.

Kyle was rather enjoying himself, I could tell, so in exasperation, I threw my hands in the air. "Suit yourself," I said, although I also wasn't certain of to whom I was saying it.

Old Clyde, despite the situation he was (undeservedly) fortunate to be in, seemed preoccupied by something behind me. I snapped my fingers in his face.

"I think someone is coming toward us," he said, shoving my hand away from his nose.

"Who?" I asked. I whipped around, only to find Kenny trotting over.

"Oi, Stan," Kenny said in greeting. "Eric's wondering where you've both gone off to."

"Is he now?" I asked, rolling my eyes.

"Oh, sure. He's babbling away like I've never heard him before."

"That's the charlie for you," I said.

"Who's Charlie?" old Clyde asked.

I smacked my own forehead in exasperation. Then, realizing that Kenny probably did not know that, in the most pointless and obtuse way, old Clyde worked for the government, I gestured to him. "This is Clyde," I said flatly.

"Clyde Donovan," Clyde said, grinning broadly. "Undersecretary for Passport Services at Her Majesty's Home Office." He stuck out a hand, which Kyle easily avoided whilst drunkenly slobbering down Clyde's shirt collar.

Kenny took Clyde's hand and pumped it slowly. "Kenneth McCormick," he announced, his eyes narrow. Anyone should have been able to discern the mocking tone to his voice, but this was lost on old Clyde, obviously. "Male prostitute. And I do birthdays."

"How do you mean you 'do' birthdays?" Clyde asked.

"I'll tell you for a tenner," Kenny replied. "And I'll show you for 50."

"Er." Old Clyde put a wary hand on Kyle's thigh, which got him to stop licking Clyde's collarbone and cling instead across those boxy shoulders. I will say this about the man: He was not physically unattractive. What he was, however, was physically indistinctive. "I think I'm occupied," Clyde said, ruffling the hem of Kyle's sweater, which earned him an appreciative purr.

"Stanley, really." Kyle tried to wave his hand in my face, but he wasn't looking at me because he was too pressed up against Clyde's chest, and his fingers managed only to brush my neck. "I'll call you in the morning."

At a loss, I bit my lip.

"Well." Kenny cleared his throat. "Come on, then. Buy me a drink, won't you?"

"Sure." Swallowing regretfully, I followed him to the bar.

XXX

By 5 a.m., most of Camp had emptied out. Butters had long since departed, claiming he had to go home and look after Desdemona, his pet bulldog. Kyle had left with old Clyde, and I wasn't sure where they'd gone — Kyle's flat? Clyde's parents' again? Maybe they were just sloppily humping in someone's private garden; maybe they had been arrested for it. The thought of Kyle out there with old Clyde made me incredibly sad, and a little bit angry, both at myself for letting it happen and at Kyle for being too stupid to control himself despite my best attempts to halt it. I think I was most furious at old Clyde, however, for absconding with my boy and being so innocently clueless about how horrible the whole thing made me feel. It was hardly worth making a great fuss over, but I made sure to heave as many whimsical sighs as I could fit into an hour.

Eric was passed out and slumped over the tabletop, drool puddling from his greedy lips in an incandescent blob. This left myself — and Kenneth, of course, who was contractually (despite the absence of a contract) bound to remain wherever Eric had passed out until Eric woke up again. I was beginning to see the upshot of this deal — the boy received a place to live, top-notch rations, entry into posh locales, pricey narcotics, and some pocket money each week, and all he had to do was wait around while the great lout exhausted himself by overindulging. Perhaps once in a while Eric would want to have sex, but it seemed like a lovely little deal to me. I was beginning to wonder why I hadn't eschewed an education and run off to the capital to find a desperate older man to dote on me and essentially pay me to look pretty back when I was Kenny's age — however old that was. Then again, of course, my youth had been splotchy, gawky, and full of self-doubt and self-loathing. (Photographic evidence had long since revealed Kyle's years from puberty up to our meeting as bespectacled and full of really horrific-looking dental contraptions, the same type that made my sister so angry in her day.)

I don't know what moved me to sit there with Kenny while he waited — for that matter, I wasn't so sure what he was waiting for. Why not just take Eric back in a taxi? No matter. I kept ordering whiskies, and the edge had come off his high by then, so that we were having a rather lucid conversation that was only slightly influenced by intoxicants.

"You lot and Eric aren't so chummy, are you?" he asked.

"On the contrary, I think we're quite chummy." I tried to explain the difference between a friendly acquaintance you denigrated yourself to go out with, and an actual friend. "What we aren't is mutually respectful. Or, well … I suppose there is a lot of tension in the group, or rather, between him and everyone he's ever met. But you don't throw your friends off after 20 years, ducks, you just don't do that. It's so much neater to meet once a week to drink together and very tensely disagree about everything."

"Well, if you don't mind me asking." He drew a cigarette out of his back pocket and put it to his lips. "Do you smoke?" he asked, nudging the pack toward me.

"No. Sort of stopped that when I graduated and had no pocket money."

"None of you smoke, besides Eric?" he asked.

Eric was a great admirer of cigars, but cigar smoke was rather masculine for a night out at Camp, so he tended to keep it to his office and den. Possibly the park, too, although I tried to confine the time we spent together to Camp, so I didn't really know. "Well, Miss B is too uptight for nicotine. Kyle does tend to go on and off depending on whether he thinks it's liable to get him into or out of a relationship."

"Ah." He inhaled and exhaled, smoke circling his lips in great lashes and tendrils. "And is Kyle trying to get into or out of a relationship at the moment?"

"Honestly?" I sighed. "I don't know what the fuck he's doing. But then, neither does he, I'm sure."

"Ah."

"Ah," I repeated. "You … earlier. Eric wasn't really looking for me earlier, was he?"

"What?" Kenny tapped some ash off of his cigarette and onto the floor. "Oh, no. He wasn't."

"So why did you come get me?"

"You looked miserable, is all." He gave me a grin, then stuck his cigarette back between his lips to take another drag. I looked down at his little mess of scattered ashes on the laminate bar floor, and I noticed there were holes in his black canvas trainers. He caught me doing this, and asked, "What?"

"Oh." I shook my head. "Sorry. Just staring off."

"Yeah, you look about as pleased when you were talking to that Clyde bloke while he was making out with your boyfriend." He must have caught my pained expression after this, because he immediately appended, "I'm sorry, my mistake. Friend."

"Yeah, well. You might take some care with that."

"Uh huh." He jammed his cigarette butt out on the bar. "So, what do you got against Clyde?"

I shuddered. "He's just boring, boring and awful. Haven't you ever known anyone who sucks the enjoyment out of any given situation? He's like that. We've known him since school, and he's always been like that. It's like he hasn't developed at all since he was 18."

"And you're just so evolved."

"No, I'm not. We read together, you know, we all had the same tutor at school. Me and Kyle and Butters and Eric and — and Clyde, and the rest of them."

"The rest of who?"

"Ugh." I waved my hand around. "Practically everyone. That tall bloke with the blond on his arm, did you see him?"

"Who, the two who were snogging in the bathroom stall when I went in there?"

"The one with the short hair who was wearing a suit, who is always accompanied by a nervous-looking boy. I don't know the boy's name, but the bloke's name is Craig. He was in the same year as us. My friend Wendy's husband, Token, he was in the year, too. Token, I mean — Lord Black. And Craig he's — his father is … well, he's a peer, that's all you need to know. These are powerful people, you know."

"See, in my position..." He cleared his throat. "When you're the one taking money for sex, you know, you've got all the power."

"Oh, I don't think that's true."

"Yeah, well. Give it a go and see how things change. Except I imagine you're above it, really."

"I should think so, or at least hope so. I'm your senior, for one thing, and a baccalaureate, and a published author. I've my own flat and I've had a handful of serious relationships. So really…" I took a sip of my drink — more for punctuation than for thirst. "Don't take it personally."

"No offense taken. I've gotten a lot of shit in my time, though, and I know how to handle it. Do you know what I mean?"

"Shit for what? I mean, what for? For being a prostitute?"

"Oh." He sighed. "You're a nice man, aren't you? Caring all about me? I'll tell you, not many people are this concerned about me back home."

"Home? Where's home?"

"Guess," he said, slamming his fist on the bar.

"Well, you obviously sound Irish."

"Yes."

"So, that's where you're from?"

"The streets of Dublin," he said with a smile. Then he added: "Or the slums of Dublin. Whatever's the nasty part of Dublin, that's all you need to know."

"Don't you have a family?" I asked. I immediately regretted my phrasing, because I knew well enough that everyone has a family; does one get on with his family, is the better question.

He rolled his eyes at me. "Well, yes, I've got a family. Haven't spoken with them in a bit, but they're all out there somewhere. … I suppose by 'somewhere' I mean Dublin, because it's not like they've got the means to get the fuck out."

"And how'd you get here, then?" I asked.

"Well, I'm a fucking prostitute, how do you reckon I get places? A businessman from London wanted to fuck me, and I told him I would if he took me over. It's the only time I ever took something other than cash for my services, by the way. And you know what? Best pay I ever got."

"Wasn't Eric, was it?"

"God, no. I've been here for like nine months now. I just met Eric on Monday."

"Oh? And how did that go?"

"That?"

I nodded.

"Yeah, that was fine. I was blowing a bloke in the loo at the London Stock Exchange — oh, don't make that face at me."

"What face?"

"That face! You think I don't know what that face means?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." I was telling the truth.

"That judgy, 'You're a whore' face. I know what face."

"I wasn't making any such face!"

"All right," he said with a smirk. "You don't know you're making it, perhaps. Point is, I was blowing a bloke in the last stall, and he left before me, and when I came out a few minutes later, Eric was standing there, and he gave me a round of applause, and asked how much for a go, right?"

"Oh, god." I rolled my eyes.

"Yeah, so, you're making me drag this story out for forever. I give him one, and he pays me double, and he asks me where I'm living. So I tell him I've been renting a room in Bethnal Green. We get to talking, he asks me if I'd like to move in, and he'll pay me steady wages, plus room and board, to come on as his 'assistant' — only, see, the thing I'll mostly be assisting him with is erections."

I shuddered. "Yes, thanks. Think I got it."

"Wonderful." He sighed, and extracted another fag from his packet. "Sure you don't want one?"

"Yes, positive," I said.

So he shrugged, and began to smoke. "I meant a blow job." He shrugged again. With the cigarette in his mouth, he brushed his hands together. "Well, Stan, it's sure been a treat."

"Stanley," I corrected him. "It's never 'Stan,' just Stanley. I cannot stand that first syllable on its own. It makes me feel like a bad stereotype of a postwar American husband, driving home from the city after a lengthy toil at the office."

"Oh, fine then, Stanley." There was a willful, snooty jab in his flat-tongued pronunciation. "No husbandry for you. Or wifery, I suppose,"

"Nope," I said with a grin. "None for me."

"Well." He finally stubbed the end of his cigarette out on the bar. There was no harm in this; it was a glass surface. "Be seeing you around, Stanley. I take it you don't see Eric outside of this place?"

I shook my head.

"Well then, it'll be until next week, won't it? Unless, of course, I run into you in some backroom cottaging."

"It's possible." I shrugged. "Doubt Eric would like it, though."

The last thing he said to me was accompanied by a downright sinister smirk: "Eric doesn't like most things. But that doesn't mean I won't do them."

For his sake, I hoped that he wouldn't. Eric was ruthless, and I wished this boy understood that. At the same time, though, a great part of me wished that he never had the misfortune to discover it.

---

Again, thank you for reading. Feel free to let me know if something isn't working. (Or if something really is.)