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

a present, or hold a virgin book in your hand? I remember, during the war, being given what seemed to me to be a huge slab of chocolate. It was heavy and thick in my young hands and the foil was so beautiful that I couldn’t bear to rip it. My parents thought I was funny, but I kept that chocolate for weeks before I finally tore it open. “The war will be over before that boy eats it,” my mother often said.

Once you start something, there is no mending the gold foil. The ribbon on the box will never be quite the same again, will never tie the same way. That’s how I felt, in that endless moment, staring at him as he grinned back at me from the bed.

Is there any point putting down what happened next? Should there be a record of it? My hand falters, but my mind pictures him so clearly. Were I able to paint more than stick figures I could do more justice to him with a painting than words. But I can’t not share it. Somewhere in albums and boxes, there are photos of Alex, but they are family portraits, not images of the young man who was later to cling to me, his hair damp with our exertions. Perhaps in those dusty albums he is waving from some beach in Wales; perhaps he kicks a football across a muddy field. Maybe he’s pulling open some brightly coloured Christmas present. The pictures show a son, not a lover. They don’t show Alex as he truly was—and as I’m the only one who ever saw that side of him, perhaps I have a responsibility to write down what he was really like. However hard that is. However self-indulgent.

His skin was surprisingly pale, for all that we had just had a warm and sunny summer. Not white or pink, but holding a light pale tan. His arms were a little darker, the forearms browned but the skin shading lighter as the eye travelled to his shoulders. His figure was slighter than it had felt in my arms, but gave the promise of growth; his shoulders seemed a little wider than they needed to be, accentuating the angle of his torso as it swept towards his hips. His legs were long and slender and beautifully muscled, sprinkled with golden hair which became almost so fine as to be almost invisible by the time it reached the crease where his legs stopped and his backside began.

The soles of his feet were particularly grimy, which made me smile. I had been standing there in some kind of trance, worshipping a young man with grubby feet.

I knew I loved him. I wanted to tell him that night, but I was Edward Johnson.

“Come in.” He propped himself up on his elbows, tipping his head around, pleading with me. “Please.”

The word caught me in the pit of my stomach and I walked forward. I felt large, in a clumsy adult way, suddenly uncomfortable to be in his room. If it had been decorated in a boyish fashion, I don’t think I could have entered it at all, but due to the Charles’ newly-moved-in status, it was pretty impersonal. There was nothing much more than a piece of horrible art in a green frame; a shelf of books, some school, some classics; and a medley of garish comic strips pinned up on one wall.

“Ed?”

My attention returned to him immediately. I dropped down to my knees at the end of the bed and leant over to kiss the base of his spine. He lay down flat, his face buried in his pillow and groaned. He smelled of Pears soap.

“Edward,” I said, my lips feeling as if they were burning against the warmth of his back. “You gave me the idea. No one’s ever called me Edward.” That wasn’t true. Valerie had said it just one time.

His voice was muffled, deep in the pillow. “It’s like keeping things for best and never using them. More. Please.”

I took him by the hips and pulled him gently down the bed. His legs went either side of my waist. Then I touched him as I’d never touched another person in my life. My fingers trembled as they felt the curls on the back of his neck; I spread my hands wide and eased them down his back. His body shifted, pushed against my palms. My thumbs teased the little bumps of his spine, and when my hands reached his bottom, I squeezed, smiling at my own enjoyment. His hands gripped the bedspread. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. I don’t even know why I said that.

“I know,” he said. He pushed himself up onto his elbows again and looked back at me. “That’s not it. I’m not china. Touch me. Every day I’ve imagined you here, doing this to me. And more. Every day. You had fewer clothes on in my head, though.”

He caught hold of my wrist and pulled hard. I had no choice but to pitch forward onto the bed beside him. Time blurred. I felt that everything was out of sync, that I was growing or the room was shrinking; it was a peculiar feeling. We lay on the narrow bed face to face, and he pulled my hand down to his cock. “There. I want you to touch me there. And other places. Everywhere. Don’t you? Don’t you?”

I took hold of him and he gasped in pleasure. I knew what I was doing there, at least. I ran my thumb around the head while my fingers drummed at the length of him, then my hand dropped between his legs to cup his balls, then slid further to massage the skin behind them.

Alex swore and fumbled with my fly. His face was flushed, his eyes tightly closed.

“No,” I said. “Not now.” I wanted to wallow in the giving of pleasure, to drown in his open mouth, the sounds he made.

As he