After dropping my draft, I hopped on the Underground. I’d taken the bus there, and tried to walk to Wendy’s, but found myself tiring when I realized that I was near the Holborn stop anyway. I was at Bond Street very quickly, feeling quite wonderful about myself having completed some legitimate if unglamorous work, and having been cruised on the Tube not once but twice. Or, rather, I was cruised once as I made my way through the turnstile, by a man who clearly enjoyed watching me pass through it from behind, and once on the train itself, by a really old sort of gent without any hair who quite visibly had his hand stuck inside his trench coat. He kept winking and nodding at me and at one point, he whistled. If it had just been me and him on an empty car I might have been disgusted, but his attention was precarious and fleeting, caught between the attentions and conversations of a handful of other passengers. In the end, I felt it was a compliment, maybe a comment on my lingering youth. No grey was yet creeping into my sideburns, and I still managed to swim my laps every other day. I felt bad for men like these, for when they were in their prime or even just clinging to it, they were relegated to the toilets in gymnasiums and the back rooms of bars. I myself spent plenty of time screwing in overly moist environs, but I was hardly hiding anything.

 

After disembarking I hustled to my destination, wondering if perhaps it was too rude of me to have neglected to bring flowers or a tart of some kind. Thinking my homosexuality a sign of faultless manners, my mother and sister both often called me to inquire about things like hostess gifts and calling cards. Truthfully, I had never in my life picked up a book about etiquette, and I barely knew what I was doing half the time. I hardly felt I was making a remarkable transgression. Wendy, after all, was truly one of my closest friends, and I came for tea at least weekly.

 

I met Viscountess Black when she was still Lady Testaburger. She was the first noblewoman who found it necessary to speak to me for no apparently reason, out of inkling to kindle a friendship, in genuine warmth. I don’t know why I felt particularly pressed to attend the choir concert that evening, but as a 19-year-old lad I think I felt that the rampant amount of gay sex I was having needed some serious absolution, and yet as a Catholic I was struggling to find a way to rectify what I thought to be my natural habits with what society expected of me. I hadn’t been to Confession or gone with my parents to any formal functions or services since I was 15, when I woke up one Sunday morning after another night of scandalous nocturnal emissions hinging on my deep yet concealed lust for males. Regardless, here I was now. I was entirely unsure of whether I was looking for another outlet for my abandoned faith, or if the idea of a Wednesday night concert in the chapel appealed to me based on the combined merits of the young men singing, and the silken quality of their holy voices rising to a tumescent quality of song. All I knew was that I was developing a taste for religious and operatic music at the time, having bought an LP of La Traviata at a store in town, and lo and behold, the future viscountess sat down next to me, grabbed my forearm, and leaned in to whisper, “I thought buggers immolated in church.”

 

If anyone else had done this to me, I would have been mortified, and stiffened — in body, that is — and gotten up when I overcame my pre-mortis rigor to hurry away as quickly as I could manage. But there was no judgment in Wendy’s voice, just keen awareness. So I smiled, slyly, and said to her, leaning in subtly, “I sincerely hope you’ll refrain from determining personal information about my character until at least allowing me to bend you over the altar, my dear.”

 

“Single men,” she continued, removing a missal from her pocketbook, “who come alone to church concertos on weekday nights instead of studying are almost always either future clergymen or buggers.” She removed her hand from my arm. “And I find you significantly more attractive than a holy man, I’m sorry to say.”

 

“Don’t be sorry.” I was all-out grinning now, pleased to be thought attractive by very nearly anyone, so vain was I at the time.

 

Afterwards, she introduced herself. “Must I call you Lady Testaburger?” I asked.

 

“No, you’ll find me something of a forward-thinking daughter of a curiously liberal countess. You may call me by my Christian name; in fact, I do insist.” She told me she was reading French, and asked me back to her rooms for the first of many teas. “I find buggery fascinating,” she confessed. “Tell me, Stanley. Would you mind terribly if I inquired about your personal life?”

 

“I should only mind if you continued to use the term ‘bugger.’ It’s so very Queensberry of you.”

 

She blushed and apologized, and I did proceed to regale her with tales of my collegiate and current bedroom activities, not that I felt I had to keep them relegated to any sort of bedroom. At the outset her eyes widened, but after a few stories I considered rather shocking, because I’d been shocked by them myself as they were occurring, she eased into it, and I think I am not incorrect to surmise that she took a profound satisfaction from hearing about the romantic-sexual goings-on between two (or more, perhaps) attractive men. Let us say that girls were not a thing I was exposed to quite regularly up to this point in my life, and not because I preferred male company at all — England at this time, in my sphere, seemed to be quite gender-segregated, almost as if the social institution were fostering same-sex illicit relations and preferences. I had an older sister who may very well have been an older brother, as she was aggressive and whiffed out, I think, even before I had grasped onto it that there was something different about me, and readily took me to task for it. I socialized up until then with a majority of young boys, the sons of my father’s colleagues and my mother’s sewing circle members. I was entered into all-boys’ school after all-boys’ school until I landed at Oxford, not particularly eager to meet any women until this one had approached me in the most unlikely of places.

 

In the midst of our conversation that evening, she stopped me, and poured herself another cup of tea. “I hesitate to point this out, Stanley, because I think you are unaware of it, but I think it’s all for the better if I do,” she began. Setting the teapot down, she swallowed the first of many swallows. “It appears to me that even as you recount for me your various sexual exploits, the narrative always returns to this friend of yours.”

 

This made me nervous, and I was not used to being made nervous by girls, or really at all anymore, so I said, “That’s right, I guess.”

 

“Is he your boyfriend?”

 

It was an odd, odd question for me. She was asking about Kyle, of course, whom I’d met almost immediately upon entering Magdalen. It was true that I spent about 80 percent of my time with him, and the bulk of my stories did end with either a comparison to some of his virtues or quirks, or his reaction to whatever trick I’d just turned, judgmental or not. Usually he was judgmental, and quick to write off any boy I’d had as unworthy of my time. And yet he wasn’t my boyfriend, and later would commence carefully carrying on his own rather tumultuous affair, which I’d had something of a minimal hand in bringing about. It was as if the emotional role he filled was annoying Wendy, and having just made what I thought would be my second very good friend, I told her, “No, he is certainly not my boyfriend.”

 

“Well, well.” She sipped some tea. “Far be it from me to speak on the subject, but I should say you’ve got it bad for him.”

 

“Well, so what if I do?” The truth was, I had it bad in some way for just about every good-looking boy I met. It didn’t take a lot of wheedling to get me to admit, however, that I had it worst for Kyle. If only my first-year self had declined to summer with him, perhaps it might have ended in a fling or something.

 

“I don’t know if there is any kind of direct correlation, but I feel the need to tell someone this,” she began, before proceeding to tell me she’d just illegally had an abortion. “I think I actually wanted to have it, you know. But I knew, I knew somehow.” She paused. “The bloke, you see. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t either of the important things. Namely, he wasn’t titled, which is sort of sad. Isn’t it? That I would break it off with a lad I rather liked for that? I just think it’s so, so miserable. Maybe I shouldn’t care. But, you know, my father. He hasn’t got a son, you know. I don’t know about his peerage; I know it shall die with him. But I’m sure he wants to at least see it stay with his genes. Some common bastard legacy wouldn’t do, you know.”

 

“That’s horrible.”

 

“I know, I know.” She swallowed again.

 

“The second thing,” I reminded her. “What’s the other thing that he wasn’t?”

 

She had been looking into her teacup, but she took this moment to draw her eyes away from it and focus them back on me. “Ah, that.” She sat up straighter, seemingly recovered from her little pity party. “He wasn’t straight, as they say.”

 

I groaned. “You’re meaning to tell me you just had the child of some homosexual commoner aborted.”

 

“Well, yes,” she said. “I told you I was fascinated by bug—” She caught herself. “Homosexuals.”

 

“And yet you convinced one to have sex with you.”

 

“I suppose so, yes.”

 

“Does he know about this whole … mess?”

 

“Oh, heavens no.”

 

It may seem unlikely, but I assure you that I didn’t ask her who this man was, or where he had come from, or what happened to him. I had known Wendy now for very nearly two decades, and I was not lacking in acquaintances, but in Wendy I felt I had a friend to whom I could tell mostly anything, and she would want to hear it, and very rarely recoiled. She, however, had a handful of very close female friends, all of whom were either in possession of courtesy titles, through their fathers, or married to a peer or an heir or something. Very moneyed, very high, very all of it, really, and I didn’t know any of them too well, although like I said, I attended tea and sometimes dinners with these ladies at least monthly, if not more frequently, depending, of course, on my schedule. At the outset it was bothersome that she seemed to view me as another girlfriend with a single crucial difference, but I knew, truly, that she cared for me, and valued my opinion. It was, in fact, I who had gotten her where she was now, and it was remarkable that up to this point she didn’t feel the need to turn on me in hostility for condemning her to her current misery.

 

The crux of the issue was this: As the end of school neared, and the prospect of going down loomed, I was making it on a semi-regular basis with an incredibly handsome black man. I knew him, as I knew almost all of my group of friends at this point: We were reading for the same English degree under the tutorage of the same man. I don’t think any of us liked to brag about being one of Garrison’s boys, but the majority of us in the year sitting the exams intended to do nothing with the education we’d just gotten. I had my half-baked ideas about writing, and Kyle had almost instantly asked his father to find him a job with some contact of his, so long as it made a lot of money. But the well-heeled sons of lords and ladies would never in their wildest dreams require an education for any kind of practical reason, set as all of them were for life with endowments real or imagined.

 

Token was one of these lucky fellows who wasn’t in need of much in life: gorgeous, utterly gorgeous, in a rather shamefully oriental way. I was most interested in his cock, of course, marveling at its naturalistic heft — it was almost how I imagined being transported to the feral Africa of my grandfather’s colonial days must have been, having that monster stuck up in me like a spear. He was soft-spoken and self-confident, and a bit self-conscious, aware as he was of how awkward it was to be a member of an incredibly small segment of the population. If Kyle ever asked what it was we were getting up to in his rooms at nights, I merely demurred and told Kyle we were studying, and then as a sick joke I might make an offhand reference to Conrad or something, implying something a bit less innocent than simple reading, and perhaps Kyle got the message about the moist mess that was the jungle in those tomes, poisonous plants and rivers included.

 

Not to become too bungled up in Kyle’s readings of these situations, I will cut to the point: Token was under pressure, lots of pressure, to bring home a noble bride from school, and as could only be expected by anyone who’d had the great fortune to become acquainted with his smooth, ripe masculinity, he had been failing in this task. His father was that rare breed of peer, a nobleman with a calling, and the elder Lord Black’s business-like approach to these situations only served to stifle his son’s efficacy. I could not imagine what it would be like to hide my own yearnings from anyone. At my worst, I simply chose not to speak about my sexuality, and hoped taking it off the table or deciding not to advertise it was good enough in the few situations where it might have a negative affect, such as at a social function engineered by my father, or a meeting about some of my nonliterary work. Token, on the other hand, was quite boldly hiding the entire thing from everyone, except the men he made mad, rushed love to, and the floundering, faithful wife he knew through me. Which was not to say Wendy’d never strayed; of course she had. But, as the years marched on, her general attraction to anyone seemed to cool, as it did with most women, and now her unyielding, impossible task was to give her husband an heir, and the earl a tangible reason not to fret over the future of his dynasty. So far, at this she was failing.

 

Our teas, particularly teas at which I was the only guest, went like this one did. A servant — I hardly paid attention to them, unless they turned out to be a particular boy I might like to fuck, and then that was the endpoint of my attention — led me to the parlor, where I was sat at a table set for tea, and forced to wait until the viscountess felt like joining me. Usually it did not take long, and tea was poured, and I was given my choice of very stout little tea sandwiches, which I would purse my lips over and point to on a silver, doily-laden tray, declaring, “That one!” and then moving onto the next and deciding, “That one!” again until I had enough tea sandwiches. The cook at Black House made a really delicious Coronation chicken, exactly the way I liked it — very smooth, spiced, no currants. I knew it was slightly racist of me to think so, seeing as it was another continent entirely, but the whole colonial thing reminded me of the viscount himself, the way he tasted exotic and filling at the same time. Wendy had some very, very good teas indeed — lapsangs and oolongs and things she just fixed together in her boredom. I felt bad that I was the one who got her stuck here: contemplating how to convince a man who had tried quite remarkably hard and failed to love her to give it another try, and then another try, until their congress made something of itself. The only thing that ever came of my congress was laundry bills, and I never wanted it to amount to anything else. The idea of being expected not just to perform but to perform terrified me.

 

“I think today is just a horrible day,” she almost immediately after the sandwich-distributor had left us. Over the past couple of months, I’d noticed her beginning to take sugar, which she never had done in the past. “I mean.” She licked some crystalline remnants of a sugar cube off her thumb. “Do you ever just think things have gotten as bad as they can possibly get?”

 

“I don’t quite don’t know what to say, dearest. I mean, it’s sunny today, after all. I didn’t think it ever would stop raining, but it did, didn’t it, so this must be the start of something wonderful.”

 

“What is being started, though, I wonder?” she asked me.

 

“Well, as it happens, Kyle’s broken it off with that horrible Frenchman.”

 

She rolled her eyes. “Ah, yes, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time now until he comes around and asks you to marry him, isn’t it?”

 

I flinched. “That’s hardly a nice thing to say. I’m just telling you what’s been going on with us lately.”

 

“There is nothing ever going on with you two, Stanley. Getting drunk off sherry and making fun of other people’s problems aside, I’m sure he loves you, but he’s a miserable man who wants very badly to always be miserable, and he will have to be dragged out of his misery kicking and screaming, you see.”

 

“I don’t know that you can really assess Kyle like that,” I said drearily, knowing quite well she was correct. “He’s not your friend. You haven’t sat up nights with him discussing his love life.”

 

“No,” she huffed. “I’ve been taking my temperature 60 times a day to try to predict when I am ovulating!”

 

This made me smile, as her prickly comments usually did, and I asked, mouth full of curried chicken, “Are you, now?”

 

“As it happens.” She threw back her shoulders. “Can you tell? Do I look … rosier?”

 

“You look very fertile to me, Wends.”

 

“Well, then maybe you can … say something to Lord Black, maybe, ask him to have a go at it.”

 

“I concede to speak with Token about it,” I conditioned, “if you soften your position on Kyle. He’s everything to me, you know, simply everything.”

 

She lowered her eyes to her teacup, just as she did when peeling back layers of self-protection to display her vulnerability all those years ago, confessing to a near-stranger about her recent termination. Then, she lifted them again, peering into me with the force of a desperate mother. “Am I nothing to you?” She managed to rasp this out fine enough, then she threw back her raven hair. “You’ve hardly been very fun lately, Stanley. Surely you must know that.”

 

“It’s not as if you’ve been a great party either!” I protested. “Look at us, sitting here eating sandwiches and whining.”

 

“Fuck anyone new lately?” She asked this rather playfully, entirely because she knew I always answered.

 

“Oh, hardly. Just a lad from the club I took in the showers after a swim. Well, him, and that Asian bloke who hangs around with Craig” — I always made a point of sneering when I said ‘Craig,’ contracting my voice into a nasal tone of mockery — “you know, I think his name is Kevin.”

 

“Don’t know him,” she confessed, now eagerly absorbed in fussing with her hair. “Hangs around with Craig, you say?”

 

“I don’t know, for a rather high and mighty bloke, Craig keeps the spottiest company. I think I’ve seen him out with a real headcase lately, you know, some blond who I am very sure is coked up within and inch of his life.”

 

“That boy.” Wendy stiffened, sitting up straighter in recognition. “I don’t know his name, but I know him, dear. He’s been over with Craig before to have dinner with Token. I really think they just call him ‘Tweek.’ Ironically enough.”

 

“Really!” I exclaimed. “How horrible! It’s almost as if being called just ‘Sodom’ if one were gay or ‘Fatty’ if one were overweight.”

 

“Well, Craig isn’t very creative. He’s really just something of a thug. I don’t know how Token manages to stand him.” I think Wendy knew as well as I did that how Token managed to stand Craig was that Craig brought his new boy over, and the three of them I’m sure took recreational drugs and copulated together. But no need to mention this to her; her day was obviously bad enough as it was.

 

One of many reasons Wendy and I got on so well was our ceaseless ability to perpetuate a conversation. Before either of us knew it, our talk had devolved into minutia and trivialities: I’ve eaten this, I’ve fancied that, so-and-so is quite a wanker, I think this new telly personality is a homo. You wouldn’t think it from the grandiose room in which she took tea, but Token and Wendy owned a television, and she spent well enough time staring into the spangled void of the BBC, or rather, they both did. You may imagine they didn’t, but Token and Wendy got on very well. Dare I say they were friends? Yes, I suppose they were. Even though their lives were on differing orbits, they still circled the same satellite, so to speak, living in the same home and (generally) sharing a bed. They breakfasted together and dined together and drank together, went out together, took holidays together. I suppose it was everything a marriage was meant to be, with the annoying exception of sexual attraction on the part of the husband. And yet, from time to the time they did have sex, particularly in what must have been their conceptual middle years, somewhere after their post-university wedding (which was covered quite extensively in the press) and prior to their respective fourth decades. Their union was half founded on the necessity of producing an heir, and half on the absurd idea of keeping up appearances. I believe it came down in many ways to Token’s laziness. He could, after all, have periodically taken out a series of social- or class-climbing starlets and cast himself as a philanderer — but then, that would have involved careful calculation, or some kind of effort on his part, anyway, and certainly socialization with class-climbing starlets, and I somehow did not see Token as the type to enjoy that process. I suppose then, for him, ‘married man’ was a much better cover than the alternative.

 

I had lost track of the time, and how long I’d been gossip-mongering with Wendy. I told her a particularly long story about the boy I fucked at the club, to which she could only marvel, “It’s swimming, dear; it always makes you so horny.” I agreed, claiming it was the water sluicing between my thighs during laps that had an aphrodisiacal effect. “Of course, of course.” She nodded along with my assessment, and I refrained from telling her that Kyle thought the same thing. Kyle was not a swimmer, not at all; he hated water, found it unnatural. Some questioning on the matter would easily reveal, I knew, that exposure to cleaning chemicals and the moisture of the post-swim steam and the air-drying effects of the locker room would force his hair to revert to its primitive state, gnarled and wild and uncontrollable. Certainly he would tolerate a sit in the hot tub, with his chin high above water, or at least covering nipples, where it was always easy enough to slip your hand into the crotch of a fellow next to you, provided he gave you a perverse nod when you tip-toed into the gurgling water. Perhaps, newly shorn and looking to be aroused past his melancholy, Kyle might take a swim with me? It was possible but improbable; Kyle preferred activities that barely exercised him, or did not cause him to sweat; I think working on his hair once a day was exhausting enough. I became mournful for a moment thinking of the loss of it, and I believe Wendy saw this in my eyes and she asked, “What are we moping about now?”

 

So I told her about Kyle’s hair.

 

“Well.” She grasped her teacup again. “I’ll drink to that!”

 

This irked me. “His hair is really—”

 

She interrupted me. “Whatever you are going to say, Stanley, do not say it. This is a pyrrhic victory for me. It’s been 20 years of listening to you go on about his damn head and whatever’s growing on it. I’d think you were his barber.”

 

“And it’ll grow back,” I concluded, grinned at her. “That’s the beauty of it!”

 

“Yeah, okay.” She shrugged, and lifted her eyes to some specter above my head. “Home so soon, dearest?”

 

She may have been talking to me in some dull metaphorical way, but very quickly I internalized a strong hand on my shoulder. Either Wendy had taken it up with some African lover whom she had a granted a set of keys, or the viscount had found his way, unexpectedly, to tea — he did not usually; he tended to spend his days away from the home in any manner of ways, brushing up on the policy he would so need when he took his seat later in life, or looking after business dealings, most of which sounded vague and unappreciable to me.

 

“Hello, Wendy.” His voice contained some quirk of enthusiasm for her name — but, more for mine. “Hello, Stanley.”

 

I rose — interpret freely. “Viscount,” I said warmly, taking his hand. “What an unexpected delight.”

 

“Yes, yes.” Wendy pushed her chair back from the table, but did not get up. “Slow day out there?”

 

Token shrugged. “A bit, I suppose. But you told me you’d be having Stanley for tea, and I figured, why not come meet him?” He raised his eyebrows unenthusiastically. “It’s been too long.” I fought the temptation to say, curtly, “Well, no, dear, I definitely saw you out last Saturday, at Camp, and at the Bucky on Thursday, too.” But this was not generally something I would say in front of one’s wife.

 

He was wearing, as he always did, pitifully fitted trousers, so that it was entirely impossible to glean anything about the state of his arousal, or lack thereof, at the moment. I think that had been one of the appealing things about Token, as a boyfriend — I was never quite sure what he wanted, or when he wanted it. He had a very tight-lipped approach to everything, which perhaps was why he liked having someone to know his routines and be shocked when he broke them suited him just fine — excellently, in fact. I think he was in tune with my hasty downward glance, though, and he gave a curious, quick wink. For a moment, we gaped at each other, neither of us looking at the viscountess, trapped in sort of a staring game to see who would move a bit first, my mind racing with the idea that he’d come to see me; perhaps he wanted me to write something for him, but what could he possibly need written? No, that was ludicrous. I knew what he wanted. While we were performing this little formality, Wendy interrupted us.

 

“Pardon,” she said stiffly, standing up as well. “I think you’re trying to take my tea guest away from me, my lord.”

 

“I’ll be brief,” Token assuaged her, rather ineffectively. I could see her nostrils flaring. She dropped her napkin on her seat, and tugged at the hem of her skirt.

 

Torn here between my friend and the opportunity to make up for my lost trip to the coffee shop earlier, I shook my head. I bit my lip. If it had been any other man’s stifled beard, I don’t believe I would have paused. “Well,” I said, discreetly brushing away Token’s hand as he tried to take me by the elbow. “I thought … I thought I was to speak with him.” Her hands, hanging pathetically at her sides, clasped together tensely.

 

She swallowed, and fell back into her chair. “Don’t be long.”

 

“I shan’t be.”  I blew her a kiss. “I never am.”

 

She smiled at me wanly, and turned her head away.

 

~

 

Black House was like most stately, vaguely regal London residences of well-groomed lords and ladies: deceptively narrow on the outside, the slim façade of a townhouse, quite easily mistaken for smaller by American tourists who only ever saw these things on the New York streets — cases in which I found the proportions very immediate and revelatory; the length of the face of a house on those dirty little streets was the width of the interior, say. But the viscount and viscountess lived in a residence that opened up in many ways to a seemingly impossible breadth. The first two floors were very straightforward, very blatant, with large, showy chambers for reception, like the parlor overlooking the square in which Wendy usually held teas, and a formal dining room. Expectedly, the basement was for servants’ quarters and the kitchen, and probably some storage. The house had been in the Williams family’s possession since their receipt of the Viscount Black title, about a century back, possibly for service to the crown, or rather, probably for service to the crown, but I never asked, and never checked into it. Where people got their honors was an unfairly dubious premise to me, as I had and expected none. Nothing my father had that wasn’t tangible enough to be shoved into my flat would expire with him, and they weren’t things I wanted anyway: academic chairs, educational accomplishments, a CV swollen with publications and appointments. I suppose anyone assessing Randy Marsh based on these materials alone would see him as a distinguished geology scholar, and would never be fortunate to observe his wonderfully amusing-in-a-sick-way pathos, the drunken nights of fisticuffs at pubs, his somber disappointment in his only son, his baffling approval of his daughter’s early departure from college to marry her art history lecturer. I saw the crown molding and ornate plasterwork lining the grand staircases of Black House, and sighed; I was fairly certain we were going up to Token’s study, occupied by his father before him, and proceeding him, another three generations of noble heads of household. What was aggravating for him, I knew, was that the inheritance of this residence hinged on his ability to impregnate my friend. I shook it off noncommittally, resolving to speak with him about the matter before this meeting had concluded.

 

We reached the fifth floor, which featured a toilet, Token’s study, and an adjoining library, cramming with some new and some very ancient books. I had thought he was taking me into his study, but he turned very suddenly at the top of the staircase instead of marching straight on into the office, bringing me into that book-full room with its built-in craftsmanship, supporting shelves and shelves of knowledge. There was a chair in the center of the room, with an ottoman, and I wondered about which far-back ancestor of Token’s thought it was sufficient to put a single chair in here. Then again, I wasn’t aware of any couples for whom reading was a particularly joint activity. It didn’t matter. He crossed his arms, and leaned against a bookcase. “Well, my friend,” he said in his clipped, warm tone. “You’re looking well.”

 

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, thanks. You too, I guess.” I cleared my throat. “Did you … need something from me?” I cringed, inwardly. This was all so very awkward.

 

“Hmmm.” He tugged me over by one of the button holes in my light blazer, which I didn’t relish wearing in the warmer months but as I’d just come from handing in an assignment, I had been on my most professional alert. “She told me you were coming over for tea,” he said wetly, wasting no time in undoing a couple of my shirt buttons. “I thought, what a lovely time to catch up.”

 

“About that. I think we need to discuss something.” Contradictorily, I wasted no time, opening the fly on his trousers as I spoke.

 

“What, pray tell, do we have to discuss?” After tugging the shirttails from my trousers, he began to unbuckle my belt.

 

“Wendy,” I choked out, feeling his hand make contact — balls first, then cock. It was merely a brushing, as he slipped his hand out of my briefs nearly as soon as I’d mentioned Wendy’s name, and cupped my chin with both hands, running a thumb against my jaw, both of us breathing very heavily, as one might only expect in this situation.

 

Following a very rough, very tense kiss, he spoke against my lips: “You know she knows, Stanley. We’re hardly being illicit.” His lips were on mine again, or rather, my bottom lip was between his, being sucked briefly, while I struggled to tug down his own knickers.

 

Extracting my lip from his jaw, I reminded him that I knew this, that it wasn’t my gripe. He pushed me down by the shoulders, and I had to continue the rest of the conversation from underneath the outline of that streamlined, majestical stalk of his. Unlike other members, it was uniquely dark with indiscernible blushes of warm and cool contrasting colors, brought in by a really functional pump system, like the opposite of all colors at once. It was something I had always appreciated. I was hardly a particular size enthusiast, unlike multiple men I knew, who would very gladly get up off one cock and go sit down on another if the opportunity aroused itself, pun possibly intended. I would say this about Token’s physical condition, and then resist from dwelling on it: I wouldn’t allow myself to be penetrated by very many, but he was always on the short list of exceptions, so much I appreciated this tool. So I gave it a liberal licking, coating the thing with my own saliva, not really sure what kind of lubricant if any he had sitting around in the library of all places. I can’t imagine anyone being bored by an extended description of this act, but Token was a fairly courteous type, proving that his breeding was good for something. He’d never forced me to take more than I could swallow, so to speak; he did not drill himself into my throat like any other party I was giving such allowances of dominance to would. As I worked on the head a great deal, I readily took note of the fluids gathering at the tip of his prick, the way the skin was curling back in anticipation. With a swift jerk to my own cock, about which I was feeling slightly neglected, he pulled me up by my armpits, so that I was leaning backward against the armchair.

 

“I know she forgives us,” he said with compassion. I think I was intended to agree on this point, but the very truly throbbing head of his cock was circling around my entrance by this point, so I resigned myself to grunt a little affirmation, and almost hopped out of my trousers as I lifted my behind toward his crotch, finally feeling some weight off me as his wonderfully defined arms, the bulk of which I couldn’t see at the moment but just knew was there, supported me from the top as I wrapped my legs around his torso. The effect was that my cock, which was doing nothing more than smearing anticipatory fluid all over his hard, dark abdominals, became trapped between us, which was something I rather enjoyed on the few occasions when I consented to allow myself to be buggered, to borrow an ironic term. I am quite sure that this was the exception ultimate between a man like myself and a man like Token: I was very allowing of deviations from the modus operandi, and he was not. I did not know him to have ever been fucked, or have his asshole penetrated in any sort of way. Even in the handful of lazy, excited months 15-odd years ago when we’d been in some formalized way together, he would not allow me near it. Fingers, lips, tongue, cock, nothing. Not even a jest about a carrot or something was acceptable. I think perhaps if he’d let himself get fucked by someone, even if it wasn’t me, he might loosen up and see things a bit less rigidly. Even I could admit that a great deal of the enjoyment I took from fucking was the intimate knowledge of what it was to be fucked. Let’s call it, say, a reverse appreciation.

 

He was a genial man, but a very stony, very silent lover, which was not to say that his attentions here were without any sort of passion, as that wasn’t the case. He was quite loving about it, as I mentioned before, not interested in ripping or tearing or clawing at me. Certainly he didn’t wish to hurt me, even if I was fairly tough and could take it. I did not generally perform penetration without lubrication, so he took his time, building his pace very slowly, working into me in steady, strong motions, not un-gentle. I spent this time slobbering on his neck, attempting to avoid wetting the pastel collar of his shirt, although I might not have bothered, considering my cock was slipping all over his belly under his shirt anyhow.

 

No matter how often I was fucked, which was to say not with any kind of regularity, I did not like to come with a man inside of me. This was one of those lessons I learned with the Token of our Oxford days; ejaculating mid-coitus left me softening and bored for the remainder of the act, wondering when he might get the idea that I was finished, and now it was becoming unenjoyable, or if not unenjoyable, simply frustrating, in an amusing sort of way. Typically, then, I used my hands to hold myself steady as best I could against the chair I was crushed up against instead of bringing myself off. So, when he finished, submerging himself into me for one last thrust — into my mouth as well, kissing me like he hadn’t been kissing anyone for a while, which I imagined just couldn’t be the case, if he was hanging around with Craig and all, never mind Wendy — we slipped down and he drew out of me. It was only at this moment that I realized he wasn’t wearing a condom, and I reminded myself that maybe I should have asked. Back against the chair, he kissed me, supported me with one hand, and used the other to reach for my cock, which was by this point straining against my blazer painfully. I clenched my cheeks together, not really wanting his ejaculate to pour out and all over the extremely nice carpet. Wendy oversaw the cleaning staff, and I wasn’t particularly interested in discussing it with her. But that just reminded me of Wendy again, so as soon as Token brought me off, as he was kissing around my jawline, I muttered, “You should be doing this with your lonely wife, dear,” although I’m sure in my grogginess I slurred the ‘dear.’

 

“Stanley.” He sat back on his haunches, wiping his mouth. “Don’t let’s ruin a lovely mood.”

 

“No, I’m serious.” I hunched myself up enough to pull up my briefs and trousers, pleased that if I was going to leak, I could now do it somewhat guiltlessly. “It’s not right,” I grunted.

 

“Well.” He stood up, and so did I, and he pulled up his pants before continuing. “I hardly see what’s not right about it.”

 

“Oh, don’t you?” He shrugged. “You’ve got to give Wendy a child, my dear, and here you are wasting it on me.”

 

He soured on this. “Don’t tell me who I need to be giving children to,” he scolded. “If you disagree so staunchly, why go along with it?”

 

“Well, screw it all! I’m no good at resisting seduction! And you know it.”

 

“Not my problem.” He shrugged again.

 

“No, don’t you see? It is your problem! She’s my friend, you know, I love her so. She needs a baby, obviously, and so do you, and time is running out … I feel. Why don’t you gather your strength and give it another try?” I felt somewhat cad-like saying this with his semen trickling in the elastic leg-holes of my briefs, but at least I was back on-point now.

 

“If it’s so damn easy, I think you should give her a damn baby.” He backed up against one of the bookcases.

 

“I think it would be readily apparent that it wasn’t yours based on the coloring, my lord,” was the best I could muster.

 

“Well, it’s not quite so simple,” he tried to explain. I think his cheeks were flushing; I could feel the warmth of his guilt creeping around his countenance, whereas it had already settled in mine. “I can’t…” He sighed. “I used to be able to, and I just can’t anymore.”

 

“Well.” I wasn’t very sure what to say to this. Here I always assumed he was capable of providing the necessary service, and it seemed I’d been mistaken. “Well, that’s bollocks. There might be another way. Hadn’t you better speak with a physician? The breeding of England is of interest to someone in the medical community, I should wager.”

 

That made him angriest of all the things I’d said. “Why don’t you just leave?” he asked. He continued on with great sarcasm:  “Go have tea with your friend. I think I should just sit here and contemplate each failure I’ve committed.”

 

“It doesn’t have to—”

 

“We’re done, Stanley, thank you,” he concluded, pointing toward the door. “I’ll do my work now, and keep your words under advisement.”

 

“I think you should!” I finished lamely. “Thanks for the fuck, dearest. I might have enjoyed it with a bit of lubrication. That, or elbow grease.” He made a nasty gesture at me, and I made sure to shut the door.

 

On the way out, Wendy glowered at me. “Have fun?” she asked bitterly.

 

“Well,” I stammered, unsure of how to ease this. “You know…”

 

“Oh, I know,” she agreed. Then she put her head in her hands. I do not think she got up from the table the entire time I was away. I thought briefly for a moment about sitting back down, but did not. Just when I was thinking of quietly slipping out, she spoke again. “How could I be angry at you?” She lifted her head from her hands, but kept her eyes shut rubbing her temples. “You haven’t betrayed me.” She laughed briefly, and sighed. “I suppose I haven’t been betrayed at all, really. That would imply I’ve had expectations broken, which I haven’t. But! How instantly depressing that this is how I expect it to be?”

 

“Dearest.” I walked back over to the table, and knelt beside her. I put my head in her lap. “I wish I hadn’t, you know. I certainly don’t enjoy it with him, anymore. Which is not to imply we’re doing it often, because I think that was really the first in quite some time.”

 

Wendy stroked my mussed hair. “I think I have come to the conclusion, after all these years, that affluence breeds discontent which bleed idleness. Don’t you think?”

 

“Maybe?” I raised my head. “I hope, for your sake, my dear, that you have some luck soon. I should hate to see you get on like this. Motherhood would become you, I feel.”

 

“Thank you.” We both stood up, and she brushed her skirt off. It was creased with lines that I’m sure had slowly formed over the hour or two she had sat at the table; I did not doubt it had been expertly pressed before tea. “I shall speak with him, I guess. It’s just so … well, he’s not bred for baring it all, anyway.”

 

“Nor are you,” I reminded her. “Nor am I.”

 

“Well.” She shrugged. “Let’s do have tea again next week, dear.”

 

“I’m sure we shall.” I took one of her relatively soft, angular hands, and kissed her palm. “Until then, my lady.”

 

Wendy swallowed. “Until then, Stanley.”

 

~

 

I stopped for a drink at the Bucky on the way home. Was it on the way home, really? When one’s time was all leisure, it seemed all things were on the way somewhere.  In retrospect, it seemed that it had not really been on the way, but I’d started off walking, which was usually the case, and found myself in the neighborhood, so I went in for a drink. On my way out of the pub, two whiskies later, a group of three American women asked me if it was a pub I had just been in, or a bordello.

 

“A pub,” I assured them. Then, in my best faux-American tone of mockery, I added, “Gonna have some bangers and mash?” The insult was lost on them, and they found this hilarious.

 

“Oh, he’s just precious!” one of them exclaimed.

 

Another asked if she could snap my photograph. “Pardon?” I asked, not really able to gage the surreality of this request. While I was trying to form a sentence that rightly captured the sentiments of “What the devil are you on about?” and “No,” she took it anyway.

 

“I think this’ll be worth something eventually,” the photographer remarked. Her earrings were shaped like parrots. “The way things are going we won’t have any left after a couple of years.”

 

“Yeah,” another agreed.

 

“What are you talking about?” I asked, my recoil only halted for confusion.

 

The one with the parrot earrings looked at me, darkly, and said, “You be careful out there. There’s a lot of icky stuff crawling around these days.” Her companions nodded in agreement.

 

“Thank you, ladies.” I sniffed. The summer air smelled like a mowed lawn and wet, heady dirt, the poisonous, trite perfume worn by the three middle-aged women crowding me, and cedar planks, for some reason. It was a very odd scent. Lately as I wandered around town I’d been detecting roses and ashes. But this was explainable, of course, because London was blooming, and this summer, the heat had proven its tendency to give way to fires. Perhaps Kyle was onto something, then, with his meditation (or obsession) on the escape routes from my flat.

.