Life After Joe by Harper Fox Read Free Book Online Page B

from its confession. A stupid mistake, a blip. A secret I’d thought to take to my grave. He’d think I was a nutcase at best. At worst, a hysterical drama queen he was about to escort back to the lift and press the Down button. “Matthew,” he repeated fervently, and put out a gentle hand to my face. He brushed his thumb across my lips. “Thank God it didn’t work. Thank God.”
    ***
    He sat with me on the edge of his bed. The room was very plain, just a square lit by apricot neon from outside. He had his arm round my waist, exerting no pressure, just keeping me close. He watched as I finished off the glass of water he’d poured me, then reached for the bottle on the bedside table and poured me another. “What was it?” he said. “Pills?”
    I hadn’t thought I was thirsty, but the fresh tang of untainted liquid had clenched my throat with desire, and I’d drunk till my lungs cramped. “Mm. Just sleepers. Was out for a whole day straight. Don’t know why the fuck I’m so tired now.”
    “Chemical sleep’s different to natural.”
    “I know. I…I’m a doctor.” This revelation, given the state of me, struck both of us as funny, and I was relieved to hear his laugh. “Or I will be if I don’t screw up my foundation year. Aaron, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you.”
    “Why’d you do it?”
    “Impulse. Stupidity. It’s all gone now. I’m fine, really.”
    He shifted and ran a hand across my hair. “Yeah. You look it. Kick your shoes off and lie down.”
    I frowned. “You didn’t bring me back here to tuck me up. You saw me with Nicky the other night. You know what I do.”
    “I saw what you did then. I assume it’s not a nightly performance…”
    “Well, I’m not, like… in rep, but—that was tame, believe me, compared with…” I shut up. His hand was on my shoulder, then my chest. In any other circumstances, being gently forced down onto the bed by him would have overwhelmed me with desire. As it was, all I could feel was the shattering relief of being horizontal, of not having to fight anymore. I tried to bat his hands away when he reached to ease off my shoes. Then my head hit the pillow. I stayed with the moment long enough to feel the brush of his hand across my hair, once and then again. I struggled briefly. It wasn’t safe to pass out cold in a stranger’s house…The caress came again, and I surrendered.

Chapter Five
    Light from the water. I lay for a long time watching the dance, not in any hurry to fit it or myself into my waking world. There didn’t seem to be any urgency. It was Saturday. I knew that much.
    The room was strange to me. Normally that would have triggered alarms. No matter what depravities I’d initiated the night before, I got myself fast out of morning-after bedrooms. One guy, who had still thought himself straight when he picked me up at the Dog, had beaten me raw when my continued presence in his bed gave evidence to the contrary. Even lacking aggression, breakfast scenes were seldom nice. Daylight faces, awkward silences. Even the sound of another man’s respiration in the bed next to me made me nervous…
    But this sound, like the dancing water-light, was different. It kept me in a halfway world, drifting. I didn’t have many good memories from home, but we’d had a rainwater barrel, hadn’t we, under the pipe beneath my bedroom window. And one of the street’s few trees had shifted in the summer wind…
    Light from the river. Aaron breathing softly beside me. I surfaced, voluntarily for once, smiling. I sent one hand on an exploratory mission to the buttons of my shirt, my belt and my zip. All neatly fastened. Further, no sourness in my throat from a stranger’s come—no ache in my jaw or my backside from letting myself be used when too drunk to have a proper pain threshold. Untouched.
    Nevertheless, there he was. I rolled cautiously onto my side and propped myself onto one elbow to look at him. He had shared the bed in the most