Junction X by Erastes (digital ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I remember knowing that it was wrong. And I remember holding that glass close to me on that first night as if this secret—my secret—were captive in the glass and would be easy to keep. Yes—it was wrong and I just didn’t care.

Trashy novels would state that my world changed in an instant, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t see the world change. You don’t, if you are standing too close. I don’t know when it started to change, but I remember knowing when it had. It was like standing in a field after the densest fog has finally lifted and finding out, after thinking that you were so good at navigation, that you are not at all where you thought you were. You find you are not safely in the wheat field where you started out, but high on a cliff with cormorants below you. It was dizzying, disorientating. It wasn’t until after I realised that I felt a strong physical and mental attraction for Alec that all that confusion I’d been feeling meant something. Stupid? Naïve? Yes. Yes. All those and more.

What then, I remember thinking, am I going to do about it?

Nothing, of course. The implications of “doing anything about it” were unthinkable. A thirty-three-year-old man turns to a seventeen-year-old boy and says…what? You’re beautiful? I haven’t been able to get the image of your face, your lips, your legs—God help me—out of my mind for days? One shout to his father and Edward Johnson’s perfect life would end there. What Phil and I, consenting adults, did in secret, was no one’s business. Even though that wasn’t true either. But Alec was untouchable.

Untouchable.

The word echoed around my mind as if I’d shouted it. Untouchable. No one could know. Most certainly Alec himself must never know.

Was I then mad then, to make excuses to see him? I was already concocting schemes to do this. Other fairs. Model villages.

Would it not be better to break the connection and treat him as the teenage son of a neighbour? It should be his father I was cultivating. I should be inviting Albert to evenings at the club, introducing him up and down The Avenue. I should be planning dinner parties with just the four of us, perhaps thinking about a joint Christmas. I shouldn’t be thinking of ways to take Alec out of The Avenue in my car, just so I could be alone with him.

But God help me, I was. And it made me feel alive.

Later that week, I finally got back in touch with Phil. One of the reasons we hadn’t seen each other since Claire leaving him was that he’d been throwing himself into his job—which is what I suspected he’d do and what I’d probably have done in his circumstances. I asked him if he wanted me to come over to his house, but he told me that he had arranged client meetings in pubs and clubs the length and breadth of the commuter line. I couldn’t help but smile. Claire’s departure might have knocked the bottom out of Phil’s world, but if he was really working the way he said he was, the firm would benefit from his family tragedy.

On Friday, he surprised me by being on the train, and as soon as the doors slammed and the whistle sounded, he slid next to me and kissed me. I was too startled to do much more than let him. Phil instigating a kiss was unheard of. He pushed me back onto the cushions. My hat tumbled to the floor and he had my cock out of my trousers before I could think straight. It didn’t take him long to get me off. It never did.

To show my appreciation, I put my paper on the floor, knelt on it fastidiously and gave him the best blowjob I was capable of. We said nothing about it, but he ruffled my hair afterwards before asking my opinion on the chances of sugar cane going down that winter.

I wanted to talk to him about these feelings I had for Alec, but of course I didn’t. I was confused enough as it was, and I worried what his reaction would be. I longed just to say ‘Do you…? Should I? How can I?’ But of course I didn’t. I didn’t even have the words to ask him how he was managing on his own. I pushed my cowardice away and invited him for a round at the weekend.

“Can’t,” he said, “I’m booked solid, but I can do Monday evening.”

“Probably better,” I replied. “It’ll remove the temptation to get drunk.”

“It won’t remove mine,” he muttered from behind his paper. “I’ll ring Bryant and Rydell and see if they can make a foursome.”

The train slid into the next stop and I retreated behind my Times, but I didn’t concentrate on the news. I was imagining what it might be like to be alone with Alec in an empty train compartment, wondering how it would feel if instead of the solid adult-ness of Phil, my hands could wrap around Alec’s slender frame. I was so engrossed in my imagination that I forgot that my hat had rolled under the seat and was almost to the barrier at Waterloo when I realised and had to hare back to fetch it.

It was like that throughout the rest of the day. My thoughts spent more and more time in a fantasy of what—if things had been different in a way that even I couldn’t imagine—it would be like if my episodes were with Alec, and not with Phil.

It was the sweetest torture, and Sunday week seemed a lifetime away.

Chapter 9

We were about half a mile down the road when I wondered about the wisdom of bringing the twins, for all of their convenience as a smoke screen. First, there had been a fight about who would sit in the front seat, but I quashed that almost immediately. Not only did I want Alec