'Six weeks… I see. You'll still be doing the rounds, then. Or are you just shopping local? You've done the Volunteer.'
Leo saw Nick hesitating, and said, 'I wouldn't want him going to that old flea-box. At least not till he's sixty, like everyone else in there.'
'I'm exploring a bit,' said Nick.
'I don't know, where do the young things go these days?'
'Well, there's the Shaftesbury,' Nick said, naming a pub that Polly Tompkins had described as the scene of frequent conquests.
'You're not so much of a pubber, though, are you?' Leo said.
'He wants to get down the Lift,' said Pete, 'if he's a bit of a chocoholic.'
Nick blushed and shook his head dumbly. 'I don't know really.' He was very embarrassed, in front of Leo, but undeniably fascinated to have his taste guessed at and defined. He felt he had only just guessed at it himself.
'When did you meet Miss Leontyne?'
That he knew exactly, but said, 'About three weeks ago,' feeling more foolish with his quick straight answers to chaffing questions. He didn't flinch at the girl's name for Leo, and he had sometimes laboured through whole conversations calling Polly Tompkins 'she,' but he'd never found it as necessary or hilarious as some people did.
'That's what I call her,' said Pete, 'Leontyne Price-tag. I hope you've got your chequebook ready.'
There was nothing to say to this, but Leo muttered dutifully, 'There's not much you don't know about price tags, is there, Pete.'
Nick tittered and watched the affronted look fade from Pete's drawn features as he smoked and gazed at the dreary tapestry. It could have been one of those items which never sell, which the dealer ends up almost giving away because they seem to bring bad luck on the whole shop. He remembered that Pete had been ill, though he didn't know in what way. 'I've got this fucking great bed,' Pete said. 'I can't shift it.' The phone rang, and he went off into the back room. 'Have a look at it.'
The bed had been taken apart and the fluted poles, the ornate square frame of the canopy and the head- and footboards inset with painted rococo scenes were leaning up against the wall. 'Let's have a look at this, then,' Leo said, wandering over and briefly stroking Nick's arm as he passed; he was being sweet to both of them, he surely didn't really want to look at the bed. They didn't want to move anything in case it all fell over. Nick peered at the faded gilt and the unpolished inner edges that would normally be hidden. All his life he'd looked at furniture from odd angles, and he still had his childhood sense of tables and sideboards as elaborate little wooden buildings that you could crawl into, their bosses and capitals and lion-heads at face height, their rough under-surfaces retaining a dim odour of the actual wood. This was a very grand bed, but there was worm in the frame and apparently it had no hangings with it. He felt the old impulse to put it together and get into it. Leo squatted down to look at the picture on the footboard. 'This is nice,' he said. 'What do you think?'
Nick, standing behind him, gazed down on him as he had on their first date, when he was fiddling with the bike. Then he looked away, almost guiltily, at the wide-skirted ladies and their lovers in doublets, plucking at lutes; the trees that were blue and silver. Then he looked down again, at where Leo's beltless jeans stood away from his waist. He had lived and lingered through that glimpse a hundred times since their first meeting, it was almost more powerful and emblematic than the sex that had followed: the swell of Leo's hardened buttocks, the provoking blue horizontal of his briefs. So to be offered a second look had a double force, like the confirmation of a promise, and Nick's hesitation was only the twitch of wariness he felt at any prospect of happiness. 'It's very nice,' he said.
Leo shifted slightly on his heels. 'Can you see?' he said.
Nick was grinning and sighing at the same time. 'Yes, I can see,' he said, in a murmur that shrank the conversation away from Pete into heady subterfuge.
'And what do you think?' asked Leo brightly.
'Oh… it's beautiful,' Nick whispered. He checked the open door to the back room before he stooped and slid his hand in and verified that this time there was no blue horizontal, there was only smooth, shaved, curving Leo. A second or two, and then Nick straightened up and put his hands gently round Leo's neck-who tipped back against his legs for support, and rolled his shoulder a couple of times against Nick's hard-on.
'Mm, you do like it,' he said.
'I love it,' said Nick.
When Pete came back in they were loafing round the room with their hands in their pockets. 'You won't believe this,' he said. 'I think I've sold the bed.'
'Oh yes?' said Leo. 'Nick was just saying what a nice piece it was. But he says it'll take quite a bit of work, don't you, Nick?'
Their final few minutes in the shop had an atmosphere of ridiculous oddity. It was hard to take in what the other two were saying-Nick felt radiantly selfish and inattentive, and left it to Leo to wind things up. The furniture and objects took on a richer lustre and at the same time seemed madly irrelevant. It must have been obvious to Pete that something was up, that the air was gleaming and trembling; and it wouldn't have been beyond him to make some tart comment about it. But he didn't. It struck Nick that perhaps Pete was really over Leo, realistic and resigned, and he noticed he regretted this slightly, because he wanted Pete to be jealous.
'Well, we must get our lunch,' Leo said. 'I'm hungry, aren't you, Nick?'
'Starving,' said Nick, in a kind of happy shout.
They all laughed and shook hands, and when Pete had hugged Leo he pushed him away with a quick pat.
So there they were, out in the street, being nudged and flooded round by the crowds, and heedlessly obstructive in their own slow walk, which unfurled down the hill to the faint silky ticking of Leo's bicycle wheels. It was all new to Nick, this being with another man, carried along on the smooth swelling current of mutual feeling- with its eddies sometimes into shop doorways or under the awnings of the bric-a-brac stalls. There was no more talk of lunch, which was a good sign. In fact they didn't say anything much, but now and then they shared glances which flowered into wonderful smirks. Lust prickled Nick's thighs and squeezed his stomach and throat, and made him almost groan between his smiles, as if it just wasn't fair to be promised so much. He fell behind a step or two and walked along shaking his head. He wanted to be Leo's jeans, in their casual rhythmical caress of his strolling legs, their momentary grip and letting go. His hands flickered against Leo time and again, to draw attention to things, a chair, a plate, a passing punk's head of blue spikes. He must have come first, out of all the men Leo had auditioned. He kept touching Leo on the bottom, in the simple pleasure of permission. Leo didn't reciprocate exactly, he had his own canny eye for the street, he even raised a sly eyebrow at the sexy shock of other boys going past, but it didn't matter because they were a kind of superfluity, the glancing overspill of his brimming desire for Nick. As they dawdled through the crowd Nick saw himself rushing ahead through neglected years of his moral education. This was what it was like!
Under the fringed canopy of a stall he saw the down-turned profile of Sophie Tipper, studying a lot of old rings and bracelets pinned on a ramp of black velvet. His first thought was to ignore her or avoid her. He felt his old envy of her. But then Toby rolled into view behind her, leaning forward with a little pursed smile of vacant interest-very like a husband. He rested his chin on her shoulder for a moment, and she murmured something to him, so that Nick had the uncomfortable feeling of peering at their own heedless self-content. They made a necessarily beautiful couple, somehow luminous against the dark jumble of the market, like models in a subtle but artificial glare. Nick turned away and looked for something he could buy for Leo; he longed to do that. He saw all the reasons the impending social encounter might not be a success. 'Hey, Guest!' said Toby, loping round the stall, grabbing him and giving him a firm kiss on the cheek.
'Hi-Toby… ' Their kissing was a new thing, since the party, somehow made possible and indemnified by the presence of Sophie. And it seemed almost a relief to Toby, as if it erased some old low-level embarrassment about their not kissing. To Nick himself it was lovely, all the warmth of Toby for a moment against him, but unignorably sad too, since it was clearly the limit of concessions, granted in the certainty that nothing more intimate would ever follow.
'Hello, Nick!' said Sophie, coming round and kissing him on both cheeks with beaming goodwill, which he put down to her being such an up-and-coming actress. He wanted to introduce Leo, but he thought something wrong might be said, based on his excited gabble at Hawkeswood, when he was stoned. It was one of those inevitable but still surprising moments when mere wishful thinking was held to account by the truth. He said,
