Richard said, “I’d better answer it. Get yourself up into bed. You’ve had one fuck of a day.”
Mark complied and thudded up the stairs. He was happy to have instructions and it was only when he groped his way into his rom, with Richard’s low voice on the phone fading out below him, that he realised he still didn’t know what was happening tonight.
He shut his door, left the light off and, quivering like a teenager, threw off his clothes. In the dark, alone, he even felt embarrassed by his erection. Might all be for nothing. The frosty moonlight still came down from the round window. So here he was again, waiting in the dark.
He pulled the chair to the window and looked down at the snowy city. The weather was worse than he thought. The park beyond the houses was like a mixing bowl of wet meringue. The trees were picked out in irritable black exclamation marks. And there were two human figures, arm in arm, quite a distance away but distinct all the same. Their walking was easy, easy.
Mark put the antique chair back in place and lay on the bed. The house was still, silent, and he shook with fatigue and wretchedness and the threat of anti-climax.
He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them he saw that perhaps that trick with time was happening all over again.
Because the white gloves were hovering in the air above him. At the foot of the bed they spread their fingers in greeting. He seized up in terror, having forgotten this point in the previous night.
He had forgotten so much. So much.
And here they were again. One reached down to stroke his foot. With an elegant gesture the other turned a pirouette in mid-air and landed on his stomach, gave a quick caress and returned to its mate.
Mark found he couldn’t speak.
The hands pressed fingertips together and seemed to think. This was like watching a magic show.
The room was about to spin round, he felt. He pushed his own hands down on the mattress to weigh it down. And he watched. Watched as, just like a magician, one of the hands apparently reached into the other’s invisible cuff and produced…a bright pink disc, the size of a fifty pence piece.
It roved about the air in circles, to make sure it had Mark’s attention. Then deliberately the hands brought the pink disc down until it was level with Mark’s head as he lay. He looked down the length of his body and the bed as the white fingers worked dexterously.
There ought to be musical accompaniment, applause and a spangly assistant. Because surely this was magic?
The pink disc turned inside out. It was swelling out, a stretched luminous pink. Now it had an odd strawberry shape. The fingers tugged and rolled and the shape grew. At last it described a thick, long-familiar cock erect in glowing fuchsia.
The hands displayed their palms in triumph, back at their natural height. Ta-dah!
You must remember this, the gleaming cock implied as it bobbed through the dark toward him. A kiss is still a kiss…
Stealthily the hands reached out to him and with them, following inexorably—since there was indeed some invisible connection between these members—came the cock. Mark was thinking, This must be real. The way the erection swayed and dipped and slapped against the invisible stomach. Only a real one looks this absurd.
The hands clutched his shoulders, then there was a weight on his chest, the warmth of a body, as the luminous pink thing jabbed its way blindly towards his mouth, shuddering as it nosed up to him.
Mark reached his hands up to the empty air and touched it. It pulsed and squirmed under pink rubber. He gently stroked at the dark and felt solid, stiffly haired legs. The chest was taut and clenched for his explorations, but he could see the doorframe through it.
Insistently, the cock wavered under his nose.
Not yet, Mark thought. Not by a long chalk. First he wanted to ask something.
“Tony?”
The question fogged the air.
And then there was a knock at the door. It opened and admitted a shaft of yellow light. “Mark?” Richard asked and stepped quickly inside. “The phone. Sally’s been calling us from—”
By the hall light Richard could see Mark stretched out in his gaudy nakedness. And then he saw the hands and cock poised above him. He fell against the doorframe.
Mark felt the bedsprings jolt and sing as the body on top of him launched itself across the room. He sat up stiffly to see the gloves double themselves into neat little fists and knock Richard flat with two quick jabs.
The hands turned to survey Mark. The condom had sagged by now, hanging dolefully. One hand snatched it off with a snap and flung it angrily at the bed. And then the hands were gone, slipping out of the door, into the light.
Mark jumped off the bed to see to Richard.
He was bleeding and gasping and had to be helped over to the bed. “So you saw him,” he said. “You saw him, after all.”
“Sit down,” Mark said and hugged him to him.
In the mussed-up covers they embraced. They were both shaking badly. When Richard scraped his back with his watch, Mark remembered he was naked. Between them, between his own exposed tattoos and Richard’s new bruises, his erection was back and squashed uselessly. It didn’t seem to matter. With a sudden certainty and blocking out whatever other doubts he had, Mark said, “He’s not coming back tonight. I know Tony of old.”
Mark got up from the bed and clicked the door to. Gently and mindful of the fresh bruises, he stripped Richard off, wiping the blood from his chin with the already stained shirt.
Then he wrapped him under a sheet with his own body and, quite slowly, he made love to him with a
