Educating Simon (30 page)

Luther lived up to his word about texting me his address, though he waited until Friday afternoon to do it. I had to talk myself down from some psychological ledge several times, worrying that he'd forget, wondering what I should do if he did. Would it mean that he had just forgotten, which would make me feel completely unimportant? Or would it mean that he'd changed his mind and had decided this was the best way to stand me up? But, finally, a text arrived. Very direct, no frills. The address was first, followed by,
See you Sat 11
.

Saturday morning, after the most fastidious shower I've ever taken, I called a taxi to pick me up at the house; I had the champagne in a waterproof, insulated bag, and I'd thrown a little ice in. It was heavy. No T today.

Luther's flat was really half a house not far from the BC campus. I'd worn my new blue shoes, jeans, a cotton shirt pieced together artistically from large, asymmetrical pieces of different textures of white fabric, and Ned's leather jacket. The short walkway to the few steps up to the door was lined in tall yew shrubs, and I stopped there to turn my phone off; I didn't want a well-intentioned text from anyone to interrupt whatever was going to happen.

When Luther opened the door, he just stood there, looking at me. “You are always so well put together.” He grinned. “Come in.”

He put the champagne on the counter beside the sink and stared at it. “Okay, you non-child, you. Are you good at opening these things?”

“I am.” He set two tumblers nearby. “No champagne glasses?”

“You're kidding, right?”

This was not the most expensive wine, what with the plan to mix it with orange juice, but the idea of pouring it into tumblers was almost too much for me. I barely caught myself before saying something that would have been pointless. “Where's the juice?”

“Let's just have a sip of bubbly first, shall we?”

We clinked glasses together, sipped, set the glasses down, and were in a heated embrace before ten seconds had passed. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, we ended up on the floor. He kneaded my crotch, and it was almost enough to make me soil my new jeans. I cried out, but he smothered my mouth with his until I grabbed him the same way. He pulled away, and each of us massaged ourselves whilst we panted and laughed.

When he could speak, he asked, “There's a saying that goes, ‘Life's uncertain. Eat dessert first.' Ever see that?”

“Can't say that I have. But I hope that wasn't all we're getting for dessert.” Yeah; I'm ready for something more than this.

He chuckled. “No, it is not.” He heaved himself up and held a hand out to me. “Let's have brunch first, eh?”

And we did. He wasn't bad in the kitchen, though either Ned or Mum could have taught Luther quite a bit. But it was fine: asparagus omelette, brioche from a bakery, mixed fruit, and of course the Buck's Fizz, using my champagne and his orange juice—a nice blending of very different substances, rather like us. He'd bought some great-looking chocolates, but I suggested we wait until later; I don't like to mix sweets with champagne.

Food consumed, we sat at his small kitchen table, swirling the last of our drinks, saying little and doing a lot of gazing at each other. Well, maybe not gazing; that implies something soft. This was not a soft feeling. It was hard, direct, and male. Maybe I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to sex, but I sure know what I want to feel like.

Luther took the lead, and that was just fine with me. He stood, held a hand out, and led me to his bedroom. He undressed me slowly, and I just let him, wondering—and worrying a little, though I'm sure I could have stopped him at any time—about what he had in mind.

He stood back and admired me, his eyes falling on my erection. “And the carpet matches the drapes.”

I had no idea what that meant, but I didn't really care. I reached a hand behind his neck and brought our faces together, kissing him before and after I lifted his T-shirt over his head. This felt like such a brazen act to me, but I'm sure it was appropriate in the circumstances. He removed his own jeans, nothing on underneath them, and pulled me onto the bed.

He positioned me gently but deliberately so that when he was settled, we were in what I guess is the famous sixty-nine formation, each of us able to grab the other's dick. I did with my hand what I hoped would feel good to him, imitating what he was doing to me—which felt out of this world—trying to avoid pulling any of the rich, dark hairs that were everywhere. And then everything changed. He'd taken me into his mouth.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I stopped breathing. I stopped moving. My mouth opened wide, soundlessly, and stayed that way until I came, and I nearly screamed as I shot everything against the back of his throat. He swallowed but stayed on me, his mouth now very gently caressing me. I nearly fainted onto the bed and let him go on. Finally he released me, sliding gently off the end of my dick and kissing the tip of it as he let it flop onto my thigh.

And then I realised he was still hard, still in need. I roused myself ; could I do for him what he'd just done for me? I half sat up as he lay back, his beautiful, thick penis pointing to the ceiling. It curled a little to one side, which I found rather charming. There was an odd moment when I felt a certain reluctance to take it into my mouth, but I soldiered on and did my very, very best to give him the pleasure he'd given me. Within seconds I realised there was going to be a breathing issue, but it took me only one more second to figure out how to work around that problem by lifting my soft palate and breathing out as I took him in.

When he came, his shouting grunt took me by surprise, and I swallowed without having any time to think about whether I even wanted to do that. There was musk, a hint of salt, and a note of chlorine. I had to stop myself from laughing; it was a cum tasting, like fine wine. I released him as he'd done for me, and even as he lay there panting he pulled me onto his chest.

When he could speak, he said, “Oh, Red. You're a quick study.”

“Always have been. But how do you know I haven't been doing this all my life?”

He chuckled. “Oh, a wild guess. I don't want you to misunderstand. You were great. Really, really great. But in my experience, people who've had a lot of sex have moves of their own. They don't tend to imitate someone else's actions. That would be mine, of course, in this case. And that's what you did. But you did it so well!”

Well, I guess that wasn't a bad review.

We kissed, and caressed, and kissed some more until I grew hard again. He pulled a small towel out from somewhere I didn't see and turned me onto my stomach, the towel under my crotch. When he pried my ass cheeks apart with his fingers I had to say, “Wait.”

“Not to worry. I promise.” The next sensation was such an unexpected ecstasy that I cried out. He ignored me and kept using his tongue in a way I never knew anyone would ever do. Within a few minutes I had come all over that towel. Immediately, he flipped me over again and kissed me, hard and deep. I could barely breathe.

I must have dozed for half an hour or so before I felt him get off the bed. I watched him leave the room, naked, and return with the chocolates. We lounged on the sweat-soaked sheets, tasting some of each other in the dark chocolate truffles.

“Champagne truffles,” he said at one point.

I grinned and bit into another one.

There were still a couple of truffles left when he sighed and said that he had something else he needed to do today. I glanced at my watch, which was the only thing I had on: a few minutes before one. Luther didn't have a champagne stopper, so I made him promise to finish the last of the wine today. He said that would not be a problem.

Fifteen minutes later we were standing just inside his open front door, wrapped in each other's arms, kissing deeply, when I heard someone gasp.

I pulled away, my empty champagne cooler dangling by its strap from my arm, and saw a young woman at the bottom of the steps that led to Luther's door. She was around his age, a true blonde, blue eyes, and pink lipstick around the wide open mouth. The look on her face was one of horror.

All three of us were frozen like that for maybe four seconds, before Luther said, “Stephanie. You're a little early.”

I pulled away from him. “What's going on?”

Stephanie said, “Yes, Luther, what's going on? What the
fuck
is going on?”

It dawned on me suddenly that Luther had arranged two dates for himself today. Me for breakfast, and Stephanie for—what, afternoon delight?

I stared at him, not quite knowing how I felt. “You said you were bisexual. You didn't say you were—I'm at a loss for words.”

Stephanie was not at a loss. “You bastard!”

“Now, wait just a minute,” Luther protested. “It shouldn't come as any surprise to either of you that there might be a little cross-pollination going on.”

Stephanie was shrieking now. “Cross-pollination? Is that what you call this?”

It seemed unlikely that anything good was going to come of this encounter. I said, “He's all yours, Stephanie.” I walked past her and out towards the street.

“Simon!”

I ignored him. I didn't have any idea what had just happened, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. It was lucky I wasn't struck by a car as I crossed Comm Ave towards the BC campus, which was the wrong way to go, anyway, if I was headed home. I wandered sightlessly down a paved road that led into the campus and had to step to the right to avoid a large group of students coming the other way. And I found myself staring at a labyrinth.

A few years ago, my dad and mum and I had gone to France. We'd stayed in Paris, but one day we took a trip to Chartres Cathedral. Dad had particularly wanted to walk the labyrinth on the floor of that historic building. But when we got there, there were chairs set up all over the nave where the labyrinth was, and he couldn't walk it. We sat in the chairs, and I asked him why labyrinths were important to him.

“Lots of people confuse the labyrinth with the maze,” he opened. “They're completely different. A maze deliberately sets out to confound you. There are dead ends, irregular trails that feed back on themselves, all kinds of ploys to make you lose your way. A labyrinth is exactly the opposite. And the number of circuits, and the patterns they form, are significant in both Sufi and Christian traditions, so it spans East and West.”

He got up and moved to a spot outside the labyrinth. “You enter here. And you follow the path, which in this style of labyrinth is extremely complex. Unless you're very, very familiar with the shape, it's impossible to anticipate when you're going to be sent in one direction or another, or when you'll be led halfway around the outside of the circle. But if you keep going, you'll eventually walk over every single spot, and you'll end up in the centre. The way out is the reverse.”

As he'd spoken, I'd tried to follow the path with my eyes. The chairs made it challenging, but I quickly realised that even without them there I couldn't have predicted the twists and turns.

“It's like life, Simon. Unless you're looking at the pattern from overhead, you can't quite know where it's going to lead you. But if you have faith, if you put your trust in the big picture and keep putting one foot in front of the other, you'll get to where you need to be.”

As I stood there on the BC campus, staring at this labyrinth shaped just like the one in Chartres, I was surprised that this description was still there in my brain. I hadn't thought about it since Dad had said it, but there it was. And it seemed as though he had just told me the same thing everyone else had been telling me for months. Put one foot in front of the other. Shift weight. Repeat.

I stepped towards the large open space and read the information that told me that the labyrinth was dedicated to the twenty-two BC alumni who had died in the attacks on September eleventh. There was no one walking it, and no one on any of the benches around the outside of it. I had the entire thing to myself. I tossed my champagne cooler on the ground, put one foot in front of the other, and moved forwards.

Somehow I knew it should be a slow walk. There should be contemplation of some kind, something to think through on the way to the six-petalled rose shape in the centre. I kept my eyes on the stone segments that made up the path at my feet and let my mind wander.

Of course, it went first to Luther, to what had happened, before and after Stephanie had arrived. Before? That was easy. Luther had been gentle, sensitive to my inexperience, and he'd made sure I enjoyed it thoroughly. It had been all about sex, but it had not been all about fucking. He'd pleasured me, and he'd taught me how to pleasure him. I could be pretty sure that almost certainly, every time Luther and I got together—if that happened again—there would be sex. And I had to expect that before long it would go beyond what had happened today to something much more invasive. Maybe it wasn't the end of the world that the sex today had been special only to me. But wouldn't I want that next important step to matter to both me and my partner?

Stephanie. What had she expected? It seemed obvious that she'd been invited for a specific time. Which means there had been something specific planned. Did he have more chocolates hidden away? And would he have offered her the remains of my champagne? Was he going to take her out someplace? Before or after they had sex? And would that act happen on the same sheets?

As for my own feelings . . . He'd told me he was bisexual, and he'd made it clear that no one should expect anything resembling love or commitment, and I had been in agreement with that. So why was I feeling so—I don't know, betrayed?

At the centre of the labyrinth, hands in my jacket pockets, I stood still and took a few slow, deep breaths. I turned slowly around, looking first at the tall, leafless trees along one side of the space and then at the stone building on the opposite side. I tried to remember anything my father had said about the centre of the shape and what it meant. The only other thing I could recall was that the outer ring, the eleventh circuit, is supposed to represent the first exhalation of the universe, of God, of The One, when he/she/it sees itself as both object and subject. I was going to have to give this some thought; I couldn't wrap my mind around it at the moment, despite the fact that the labyrinth was designed to foster exactly this kind of thinking.