Junction X by Erastes (best autobiographies to read .TXT) 📕

didn’t show it. He curled in tight, my lips touching his hair as I told him everything from the beginning, almost the same way I have here.

When I finished, I was sweating, but he rolled onto his back and pulled me with him and loved me harder and more deliberately than he’d ever done before. I could feel him marking me with his mouth and with his teeth. Though I’d stopped him from doing this before, that night I didn’t. We both knew that he had to do this, for he needed to know that he had something from me no one else had had.

As the year moved along, things became easier at home, as, with his A-Levels looming, Alex was harder to spot, harder to get to. Our meetings became less regular and I felt the loss of our time together like physical pain. I became more on edge than ever, longing for the phone to ring; he sometimes called to ask the twins over to watch the trains run and this sometimes gave us seconds when we would do nothing more romantic than to listen to each other breathe as I waited for one of the twins to thunder down to the phone. Sometimes, though this was much rarer, his parents would be out and he’d say terrible, erotic things to me, which made me hard with lust and which I had to pretend he wasn’t saying.

To escape, I would brave the cold spring to play golf on frost-crisp golfing greens. It was not a good consolation.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Valerie said to me one afternoon when I came home from the Sands. “You working too much or not. At least when you worked too much this spring, you were spending more time with your family.”

She was strange that afternoon, nothing that I could describe, but her whole body seemed to be held in check, her limbs and movements jerky—like she was not thinking about her movements until after she’d made them.

As for Alex, we’d both been ignoring what his absences, his extra work, and those blissful and rare afternoons as we lay on the bed or the floor as he studied, were actually all about. Time and again I wanted to ask him if he’d had offers from the universities but I didn’t, and he never spoke of it. I never even asked him how his interviews went. Perhaps we thought that time wouldn’t move forward if we ignored it.

So much we should have talked about, and so much we didn’t. And then, so much—perhaps—we shouldn’t have.

Once when he had me safe and sated, filled with nothing but the wait for the return of desire, he said: “Do you love her?”

I was silent, and I pulled the sheet aside. His body was edible; stark and angular. His eyes ranged my face, and his eyes seemed black in the half light. He lay with a sullen faked tiredness, like a cat that lies flat before a mouse hole. I reached for his hip, but his hand caught mine before it reached its target and gathered it in to his chest.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said.

“There is no subject.”

“What are you thinking?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Thinking what to say?”

“Yes.”

“Thinking what to lie?”

“…yes.”

“How often do you lie to me, Edward?”

I had to stop from snapping, from being automatically defensive. It was something Val might have said, but never had. He dropped my hand and I moved it up, holding a skein of his hair in my fingers, rolling the strands together, crisp beneath my fingertips, and thought: There is nothing but this. I will remember how this felt all my life. It was like a death, somehow.

“I. Don’t. I don’t lie to you.” I hadn’t. Not until then.

“Do you?”

“Don’t, Alex.” I rolled forward and my hand moved down to his flank, and moved against his skin. I rubbed hard as if he were cold, up and down the endless length from his hip to his knee. He was right. It was prevarication. When my palm was red hot I slid it over the cool cheeks of his bottom, feeling them ripple and clench beneath my hand.

He groaned and tipped up his face. The lamplight made tenuous hollows in his throat.

“Just tell me. Do you love her?”

“All right. Yes.” My palm cooled and my fingers made circles at the base of his spine.

He looked as if I’d slapped him, his eyes huge in their masochism.

“Alex…”

“Tell me.”

I rolled away and he spooned behind me. He felt cold. “She’s my wife.” A hundred images flooded my mind like torn up photos. “I have to,” I said finally, knowing that he couldn’t understand. How could he? What young man with his life before him—can comprehend daily life, daily squabbles, children, measles and the constant fear of inadequacy?

“And Phil?”

“Oh, Christ. It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. No, it isn’t.” If I was sure of anything, it was that. I turned to my left and pinned him beneath me again. I wanted to hurt him for raising phantoms that we’d both left dormant so long. We’d come this far without bringing the outside in, and here he was, lifting the lid of the box with the vicious curiosity of a child picking at a scab.

“Phil’s nothing.” I said. “Nothing. If you believe nothing else I say—believe that.”

I pushed his arms back over his head and tangled my fingers in his. I can still feel the pressure on my hands now. He just looked up at me and, though we were chest-to-chest, hip-to-hip and cock-to-cock, it was if he were beyond arm’s length and drifting away. As if he were the older. The wiser.

I put my mouth over his, but it wasn’t to kiss him. It was to stop him saying the words that somehow he’d already said. I took the breath from his lungs and my hands tightened in his hair. Don’t say it,I begged him silently, beneath closed lids. Don’t. Be dead. Don’t ask me. Forget.