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  Anthony pulls his cock out, or I pull his cock out, I don’t know, but I feel myself fumbling with his zipper and he’s breathing really hard, and there’s something else there, I don’t know, and he slides back on the couch, kind of slides down so he’s lying across it, so I can lower myself into position. I lean in to kiss him again, but I don’t, I slide down him, his body — his neck, his T-shirt — feel his flesh against my nose, my cheek, feel his stomach, kiss it, and I’ve moved almost all the way down his body now and I’m on the floor, kind of, and Anthony’s above me. I take hold of his cock and he says my name, ‘Calvin’, not even says it, sort of whispers it, and lean down and kiss Anthony’s cock and he whispers it again, ‘Calvin’, but this is different now, closer, but further away, and I look up at him, look up his body and see him, his eyes half closed, his mouth half open, his top teeth, just the way he looks, I mean … I want him to own every part of me, I want him to consume me, I want to be his property, I want him to take me over and consume me, so I close my eyes, move down towards his cock, and the feeling totally takes me over …

  131

  what this means: It’s not even the act of going down on a guy, not as such. If you break it down, analyse the act in itself, the physicality of it, it’s not particularly significant. On its own, Anthony’s cock in my mouth doesn’t really feel like anything much, it’s just a piece of meat, warm, and it tastes of sweat, salt and something else I can’t quite describe, and that’s it, period. In a purely physical sense it means nothing. It could be any boy’s. What it means, really, is that it’s his, that I can do this to him, make him feel good, that I can make him say my name in the dark. That’s half of it.

  The other half, I know, is when I’m sucking him off, I belong to him. I’m just here because he wants someone to make him cum. I could be nothing at all. I’m only here to suck Anthony’s cock; he can do whatever he wants with me and I’ll let him. That’s the other half. It’s this kind of submission that’s so intense it’s like a drug, and while I’m doing this, I feel like nothing at all, I disappear, I’m totally erased. Gone. I like that.

  132

  ‘Calvin,’ he says again, and I respond by going faster. I lick the head of his cock, lick all the way around it, and I’m suddenly aware of his hand on the back of my head. I’m kind of flushed, my cheeks feel hot but I keep going, and Anthony pushes himself further into my mouth, all the way in, and I gag for second but it makes me want to keep going. I lick it, suck it, let him keep pushing himself in. I swallow a couple of times and almost choke but I keep going, and one of my hands is on the arm of the couch, I think, the other in the small of Anthony’s back, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, it’s getting hard to breathe, but I keep going because Anthony is so hot and I want to make him feel good, and as I move backwards and forwards on his cock I tell myself, it’s more than just a piece of meat, it’s Anthony, he’s so hot, he’s so hot, I have to do this to him, I have to make him …

  133

  … Anthony’s grip tightens, his whole body bucks upwards. ‘Calvin.’ He’s breathing out, hard, and I can feel him start to cum. I hold my mouth around his cock, and he bucks upwards again once twice, and then it starts to fill my mouth, the hot taste of it. I feel it behind my teeth, filling my mouth, and Anthony cums in three short bursts. He totally fills my mouth now, and I hear him breathe out again, very heavy; his whole body relaxes and he lets go of my hair and I let his cock slide out of my mouth. Before I can decide what to do — I’m still there, kneeling on the floor, kind of flushed, kind of disoriented, before I can swallow or anything, he pulls my body up, and we’re in this awkward position, it would normally be uncomfortable but considering the circumstances it’s not, and he leans in and kisses me, and his cum is still in my mouth, but it mixes with his saliva, and warmth, the warmth of our two mouths together, and he’s kissing me very hard, we’re moving against each other, in opposite directions, and I feel like I’m about ready to melt, and he keeps kissing me and eventually I can’t tell what’s cum and what’s saliva but it doesn’t matter because …

  134

  Did he feel anything?: I’m thinking of those pictures on the net. Of Jeremy. Did he feel the same as I did when he was with Anthony? Did he feel anything?

  135

  The sex/love dichotomy, once again: Sex without love. Love without sex. The two concepts have never really connected in my mind. I mean, I’ve never wanted to stick around with a guy after I’ve cum. I don’t mean in a malicious way or anything. I mean that afterwards, after we’ve fucked, or he’s sucked my dick or I’ve sucked his or whatever, it’s like there’s nothing there at all. I know it and I’m pretty sure the guy knows it. It’s just like, we’ve made each other cum, we’ve lost ourselves in each other’s bodies for a few minutes, and that’s, you know, that’s pretty much all there is. When I’m with a guy I’ve just fucked, there’s usually no use pretending. No use hanging around — we’ve both got what we wanted, we should just move on. It’s almost embarrassing to face a guy after I’ve fucked him. I’ve never wanted anyone to hold me, stay with me. Seriously. It’s easier if the two of us just go our separate ways.

  With Anthony it’s not like that.

  136

  Early morning: We somehow made our way to his room last night. I remember the look in his eyes. I remember us being inside one another. The sound of his breathing, and mine, and the two merging so it didn’t really matter who was breathing at all. I can’t sleep any more. Waking up in an unfamiliar bed always does that to me. I’m lying here, half awake, staring out the window. Something in me wants to stay with Anthony. I don’t know what you’d call it. Probably not love. I don’t know. I think it’s too complicated an emotion for that. It’s difficult to say exactly what I’m feeling. But I don’t want to leave. He’s still asleep and I look across at him. With his eyes closed, he looks almost … peaceful. Younger, more innocent. I want him to hold me. I want to stay with him.

  I am thinking: I want to be his boyfriend.

  He murmurs, shakes his head a little. He coughs, just once, and then he breathes out. The smell of his breath is a surprise — it’s nasty, sour almost, probably from all the smoking he did last night, but it’s hard to reconcile with the peaceful expression on his face. For some reason, I see a momentary flash of the photos, of the way he looked then, and in that space of a second, part of me wonders if maybe his breath is the result of some kind of corruption somewhere much deeper inside him. I try to push this idea away, dismiss it as paranoia or a bad comedown or something, but it doesn’t work.

  YOUNG DUMB AND FULL OF CUM

  137

  Four of us at this cafe in the city. The place is, like, trendy or whatever at the moment, the kind of cafe you go to if you want to be seen. And I guess most of the people here — most of my friends, for that matter — fall into that category.

  At the table next to ours there is a woman in an orange Japanese style top. Her hair is cut short and she is wearing a pair of those glasses with the fashionably thick frames. She’s talking to an older guy. He’s bald and dressed all in black and he keeps looking over at our table like he’s checking one of us out. I hope it’s me. I mean, it’s not that he’s good-looking or anything — he’s really old and kind of creepy — but it’s just like, I hope I’m the one he’s checking out. If that makes any sense. But yeah. Whatever. I’m fucked up.

  An album of extremely sultry trip-hop is playing through a set of invisible speakers — Portishead’s ‘Dummy’. It drifts through the cafe like perfume, heavy on the bass, the singer insinuating the lyrics from somewhere way down in the mix. This music is thick enough to drown in.

  I’m still coming down from last night, and the place feels vaguely suffocating. But something feels different. I’m still thinking about Anthony. A feeling not unlike … happiness?

  There are four of us at the table, which is to say, I’m here with:

  1. Margot: Margot looks completely sexy today, as usual. She wears a
jacket with fur around the collar, lipstick that seems a little too dark, her hair done up in pink hairclips like a little girl’s.

  Concerning Margot: About a year ago I was having this big freak-out, one of those ‘I’m fucked up and everything sucks and I might as well kill myself now’ kind of things. You know what I mean. I was over at Margot’s house at the time. I spent ages staring into this mirror and sort of grimacing at it, and after a while I asked her very casually if she thought I was good-looking. ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be your friend if you weren’t.’ That probably shouldn’t have cheered me up, but it did. It’s just an example of the same vague fascism that informs all my friendships.

  2. Mykal: Mykal is tall and blond and a little foreign-looking. I think his family might be from Russia or something. He goes to school with me; we’ve been out to a few of the same parties and clubs together, and I guess what we have more or less approximates a friendship. Mykal’s really hot, and he knows it, but pretty as he might be, any compliment you could give him would have to be qualified with the words ‘… but dumb’. He’s on antidepressants. His big ambition is to become a composer — ‘An electronic musician,’ he told me one night after he’d dragged me into the corner at one of the said parties. ‘I love keyboards, you know, and computers. That’s real beauty. So pure. I want to create music with meaning, you know, that makes people … feel things deep inside of them.’ I guess I admire his sentiments and everything, but let’s just say that nobody, as far as I know, has ever seen him anywhere near a keyboard, or a computer. As far as I know, all he ever does is take antidepressants and sit around in cafes bragging offhandedly about whichever new guy he’s managed to fuck the weekend before.

  3. Jamie: I don’t know him, he’s with Mykal. An acquaintance of some kind. I don’t bother to ask.

  The afternoon started out at Margot’s house in Ascot. I went there to hang out — I was still feeling the effects of the pill from last night and I needed something to keep me active. I really needed to be around people, so Margot inviting me over seemed like the coolest thing in the world at that point. Mykal was there too, along with Jamie, who I just assumed must have been his latest boyfriend. For Margot to have invited Mykal over, I guess he must be a friend of hers too, or maybe she’s a friend of Jamie’s, I don’t know. This is a group that would never normally mix, put it that way. Mykal spent a lot of time talking about his antidepressants and his ambition to make electronic music. Jamie spent most of it ignoring me. Margot ransacked her older brother’s room for drugs — she found this little baggie of white powder which we were all way too scared to experiment with, and in a stack of sweaters she found a much more promising bag of weed, a moderate portion of which we consumed. She put on some music and we all sat around in the living room listening to that and watching a foreign movie with the sound turned down.

  I think I must have said something unintentionally insightful about one of the actors in the movie because after I said it, Jamie turned to me and smiled. ‘You’re such a writer,’ he said. That stuck with me. I mean, a) because it was, you know, a weird thing coming from a stranger; and b) because Jamie had been ignoring me so comprehensively all afternoon. I could have analysed that comment to death, but I drifted off into the music for a while instead.

  Music: The girl on the stereo tells me that tonight she’s going to hunt me down. I think I might believe her.

  Long story short: We decide to go out into the city. Mykal is the least fucked of all of us, not to mention the only one with a car, so he drives us in. We sort of drift for a while; someone suggests we get sushi, then we have this big argument over which sushi place is the best and we narrow it down to Sushi Central and Omekaido Avenue.

  Eventually we wind up here, in the cafe with the woman in the orange shirt and the guy in the glasses who I kind of hope is checking me out even though he’s really kind of gross. Anyway. Sushi. Fairly mindless conversation. Anthony in the back of my mind the whole time. The weird but certainly not unpleasant mix of the pot and the after-effects of the pill from last night. I’m in a better mood than usual.

  Mykal sits opposite me. He stares off into the distance for a while, then back at the table. He leans in conspiratorially. ‘So … Heard you got with a guy last night.’

  I don’t know how he could possibly have gained this information, but it doesn’t bother me at this point. A likely scenario is that he was also at the club last night, or one of those scene queens he hangs around with (or maybe even an ex-boyfriend of mine) told him about it. Anyway. Not important. ‘… Yeah,’ I tell him. I look to Margot for help but she’s staring out the window and looks as though she’s drifted away somewhere else.

  ‘So …?’ Mykal asks.

  I mean, okay, one way or the other, it’s not really that important to me. I might as well just tell Mykal the story, a) because it will give me a chance to process what happened — I’m still having trouble with that; and b) because hopefully it will make him shut the fuck up and I can turn the conversation elsewhere.

  ‘We were at a party,’ I tell Mykal. ‘In Windsor. At my friend Dean’s house. I think you met Dean.’

  ‘I think,’ Mykal says.

  ‘So I saw this guy and thought I recognised him, and it turns out I …’

  Saw him having sex with a friend of mine on this website?

  ‘… kind of did know him, so we proceeded to get very fucked, went to the Valley and ended up at the Beat, blah blah blah, where everyone always goes, so we took some pills and we got even more fucked, basically, and I went home with him. You know?’

  By the time I get all this out, I have to take a breath.

  Mykal raises an eyebrow. Grins. ‘So was he hot?’

  What I want to say: He was so beautiful that just looking at him made me want to die. I would have, like, killed myself if he’d asked me to. I’ve never been so into a guy. Ever. It was scary.

  What I actually say: Yeah.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell Mykal. ‘He was pretty cute.’ I look over at Mykal’s friend. ‘Kind of like Jamie,’ I add, even though it’s a lie, just to see if it provokes a reaction.

  It does. Jamie grins at me and Mykal sort of flinches. I smile.

  ‘So,’ Mykal asks quickly, ‘what was his name? You catch it?’ He says this with a wink which is both conspiratorial and kind of nasty at the same time. Whatever. This has put Mykal on my list of ‘People Who Are Not Worth The Effort’. He may have been on there already, come to think of it. It’s kind of a long list, but anyway, y’know … Over it. Mykal sucks.

  ‘Yeah, his name was Anthony.’

  Mykal narrows his eyes for a second.

  ‘I don’t think you’d know him,’ I continue.

  Before I can start to pick Mykal’s reaction apart, the waitress approaches the table and we all look up at the same time, distracted. Her hair is black, streaked with this incredibly bright, almost alien shade of red and tied up into two loose twists behind her head. Her name tag says ‘Isabel’. She’s wearing a lot of eyeliner. Isabel kind of resembles a raccoon from Venus, but in a weirdly cute way. If you’d seen her you’d know what I mean.

  ‘How are you guys doing?’ she asks, looking down at me. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

  ‘Could I have another long black?’

  Isabel seems to find this funny. ‘Yeah, sure.’ She pulls a pencil from her black apron, and as she’s writing it down, she asks, ‘You’re going hardcore, are you?’

  ‘Didn’t get much sleep,’ I tell her.

  She smiles knowingly at me. I tell her that the Portishead album they’re playing is extremely cool. She looks at me like she has no idea what I’ve just said. Oh well. Over it. She asks if my friends want anything else. Mykal has long since eaten all the chocolate sprinkles off the top of his coffee. He asks Isabel if she could bring him any more of those. She laughs and tells him sure, okay, whatever, then leaves.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘Anthony.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell hi
m. ‘Anthony. I don’t think you’d know him.’

  ‘No,’ he says. His expression says otherwise.

  A number of possible scenarios are forming in my head:

  a) Mykal has gone out with and possibly slept with Anthony.

  b) Mykal has gone out with and possibly slept with Anthony.

  c) Mykal has gone out with and possibly slept with Anthony.

  For the next few minutes I am thinking about this. I am not listening to the conversation. I am not able to.

  Isabel is back with my coffee and Mykal’s chocolate sprinkles. She tries to pour them over his coffee, but Jamie stops her, motions with his hand like he wants her to put them there instead. He and Mykal grin at one another as he holds his hand out. Mykal takes the cue and leans forward to lick the chocolate sprinkles out of Jamie’s hand.

  Jamie purrs. Mykal continues to lick his hand long after all the sprinkles are gone. We’re drawing looks from the people at the next table.

  Adorable. Jamie is kind of cute actually. On any other day I could probably be forced to try it on with him. Of course, the way things are now, with Anthony …

  ‘So,’ Mykal asks. ‘Anthony. You think you’re going to see this Anthony guy again?’

  ‘Seeing him tonight.’

  Which is true. I am seeing Anthony tonight.

  138

  Flashback to this morning: I’m sitting at my computer. My phone is sitting next to me. I’m swivelling around, playing with that little squishy frog thing that’s meant to relieve stress. I’m not stressed. It’s hard to say exactly what I am. I’m still buzzing totally. I only got back from Anthony’s house, like, an hour ago. It’s weird — whenever I’m sleeping over at someone’s house, I always get the urge to leave as soon as I wake up. It’s like I physically can’t make myself stay. Not even this morning, not even when it was Anthony. So yeah. I woke up. Then he did. We kissed once. I left and as I was leaving he promised to call me.