Chapter 3
I was often angry with Phil; but the infuriating thing was that he brushed it aside as if I was joking and his charisma helped him to get away with it. I soon found that our relationship was easy, amazingly easy, to maintain. Not that I would ever call it a relationship. I couldn’t let my mind go beyond my own hemmed-in, hospital-corner boundaries. I was a husband, a father. A man. I wasn’t having a relationship with another man; it was laughable. I looked on it as a series of ‘episodes,’ and I called it that in my head. I refused to call it…what it was.
We continued our friendship as if nothing had happened that August night. Or rather, Phil continued as if nothing had happened, and I stumbled through the holiday wearing wine-blinded blinkers and feeling hot and sick every time Phil walked in the room. We were not alone together in the same way again that holiday and, as far as I know, neither of us wanted to be; Phil was his normal self, while I was too confused to even allude to it again. I made sure we weren’t alone, making excuses to spend more time with Valerie, going shopping with her, spending hours on the beach just with her. At night, Phil went to bed when Claire did, and I was careful to do the same with Valerie. If anything, the thought of what Phil and I had done made me reach for Valerie’s body with a fierce enthusiasm that surprised us both, and several months later, upon our return to England, she thought she was pregnant again.
I was greatly relieved when she found that she wasn’t. I felt a rush of guilt whenever she said that the holiday was like a second honeymoon, and it hurt me to see how happy she was when my attention to her was caused by something that she could never understand. I didn’t understand it—so how could she?
But afterwards, I couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get away with those episodes with Phil, and I suppose it’s because people don’t look for aberration where there is an established routine. Everyone knew that Phil and I were best friends, and no one saw anything but that. If we were five minutes longer getting changed after golf, if we disappeared into the rough to hunt for a lost golf ball, if (and most dangerous of all) we bumped into each other at work, or somewhere in our respective houses, no one saw. No one suspected.
The first episode after France happened at the golf club early one Sunday morning. We sat on a slatted bench side by side and, as I bent to lace up my shoes, Phil touched me on the back of the neck, his fingers teasing in the short curls. I flinched at first, still unused to gentle touches from a man, and glanced sideways, knowing what he meant before he spoke.
“There’s no one but us,” he said. “Next pair’s not due to tee off for an hour.”
I think now, looking back, that it was the public aspect of it that gave it an edge. I suspect for Phil the danger meant more than the act itself. He never arranged for us to get together at a business convention, where we would have been private. For him, it was all about the fear of discovery, and I have to say that this was part of the groin-churning excitement for me, too.
I straightened up and leaned towards him, keeping half an eye on the door, but he turned his head away. “No time,” he whispered. “I’m hard, Eddie, so hard. I need it.”
I was getting that way, too. I hardened to just hear him talk like that, and I loved it, for all my prudish denials. I’d never heard anyone say those things and I wondered if I would ever be able to demand the way he did. It made him dangerous and exotic to my stockbroker brain. I wanted to kiss him again, the way I had in France, to kiss him until he groaned into my mouth, but he was insistent. “Suck it,” he ordered, pushing my head down. “You can do it.”
I could, and I found out I wanted to. It was terrible but wonderful. I actually gagged at first, not from his length, but because of what was in my mouth and what I was doing to it. But as soon as Phil’s fingers tightened in my hair and he made that same noise that he had in France, I forgot everything but doing what came so unnaturally-naturally, wanting to give him more, to make him make those sounds again and again.
Out on the course, he switched back to Phil the best friend. I was always amazed how he could turn his sex drive on and off like he was two entirely different people. He played as well as ever, waved at the other golfers as they filtered onto the course and showed nothing in his face or his manner that said he’d been fucking his friend’s face an hour earlier.
At first I found it difficult. I wasn’t, I found out, the sort of man who could switch from one thing to another like he could. I wanted more than my head in his lap, his fingers wrapped around my cock. I wanted to hold him, to kiss him. I wanted to talk to him about it and, after a few months, I plucked up the courage on the train.
He was buried in the FT, his legs crossed. “Markerim will go through the roof this week,” he said. I was glaring angrily at the winter landscape, wishing it would snow in England sufficiently so we wouldn’t have to traipse to Switzerland with Valerie and her still-slightly-cool-to-Ed parents.
“Eddie?” He hated it when I didn’t answer him immediately; perhaps he liked to
