I walk across to the wall behind my iMac, run my hands over the surface. Feel the thin crack in the plaster. There’s a second staircase here. A hidden one. Antoine and I used to play in it when we were kids. Used it to hide from Papa, too, when he was in one of his dangerous moods. I am ashamed to admit this, but there were a couple of times when I used it to watch Ben, peering into his apartment, into his life. Trying to work out what he was up to. Wondering what he could be writing so busily on his laptop, who he was calling on his mobile—I strained to hear the words, but caught nothing.
Though he snubbed me, it seemed he did have time for the other residents of this place. I found them in the cave one afternoon when I came down to do my washing. Heard the laughter, first. Then Papa’s voice: “Of course, when I inherited the business from their mother it was a mess. Had to make it profitable. Have to be creative now, with a wine business. Especially when the estate’s no longer producing and it’ll all turn to vinegar soon. Have to find ways to diversify.”
“What’s going on?” I called. “A private tasting?”
They stepped out of the wine cellar like two naughty schoolboys. Papa holding a bottle in one hand, two glasses in the other. Ben’s teeth when he smiled were tinted from the wine he’d drunk. He held one of the few remaining magnum bottles of the 1996 vintage. A gift from my father, it seemed.
“Nicolas,” Papa drawled. “I suppose you’ve come to break up the party?”
Not: Would you like to join us, son? Care for a glass? In all the time I have lived under his roof my father has never suggested the two of us do anything like their cozy little wine tasting. It was salt in the wound. The first proper betrayal. I’d told Ben what sort of man my father really is. Had he forgotten?
Ben grins out at me from the photograph on the screensaver. And there I am grinning away next to him, like the fool that I was. July, Amsterdam. The sun in our eyes. Talking to Jess has brought it all back. That evening Ben and I spent in the weed café. Telling him all about my birthday, the “gift” from Papa. How it was like a catharsis. How I felt cleansed, purged of it all.
Afterward, Ben and I wandered out into the darkening streets. Just kept walking, chatting. I wasn’t sure where we were going; I don’t think he had a clue either. Somewhere along the way we’d left the touristy part of town and the crowds behind: these canals were quieter, more dimly lit. Elegant old houses with long windows through which you could see people inside: talking over glasses of wine, eating dinner, a guy typing at a desk. This was somewhere people actually lived.
You couldn’t hear anything other than the lapping of the water against the stone banks. Black water, black as ink, the lights from the houses dancing on it. And the smell, like moss and mold. An ancient smell. No queasy clouds of weed to walk through, here. I was sick of the reek of it. Sick, too, of the crush of other people’s bodies, the chatter of other people’s conversation. I was sick even of the two other guys: their voices, the stink of their pits, their sweaty feet. We’d spent too long together that summer. I’d heard every joke or story they had to tell. With Ben it was different, somehow—though I couldn’t put my finger on why.
This quiet: I felt like I wanted to drink it in like a cold glass of water. It felt magical . . . And telling Ben all that stuff about my dad—you know when you’ve eaten something bad and after you vomit you feel empty but also kind of cleansed, almost better than before in some indefinable way?
“Thanks,” I said again. “For listening. You won’t tell anyone, will you? The other guys?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “This is our secret, mate. If you like.”
We were walking along a part of the canal now that was even darker; I think a couple of the lamps had stopped working. It was deathly quiet.
You know those moments in life that seem to happen so smoothly it feels like they’ve been scripted in advance? This was like that. I don’t remember any conscious decision to move toward him. But the next thing I knew, I was kissing him. It was definitely me that made the first move, I know that—even if it was like my body moved before my brain had worked out what it was going to do.
I’d kissed plenty of people. Girls, I mean. Only ever girls. At house parties, or drunk after a formal, a college ball. Fooled around. And it wasn’t unpleasant. But it had never felt any more intimate or exciting than, I don’t know, a handshake. It didn’t disgust me, exactly, but the whole time it was happening I’d found myself thinking about the logistical things—like whether I was using my fingers and tongue right, feeling a little queasy about how much saliva was being passed back and forth between us. It felt like a sport I was practicing, maybe trying to get better at. It never felt like something exciting, something that made my pulse quicken.
But this—this was different. It was as innate as breathing. It was strange how firm his mouth seemed after the softness of the girls’ I’d kissed—I wouldn’t have thought there would be a difference. And it seemed so right, somehow. Like it was the thing I had been waiting for, the thing that made sense.
I took hold of the chain around his neck, the one I had watched so many times appear and disappear beneath the line of his shirt, the one with the little figure of the saint hanging from it. I gave it a little tug, pulled him closer to me.
And then we were moving backward into the darkness—I was pushing him into some secret corner, falling to my knees in front of him, again every movement so fluid, like it had all been written out in advance, like it was meant to be. Unzipping his fly and taking him in my mouth, the warmth and hardness, the secret scent of his skin. My knees stung where I knelt on the rough cobblestones. And even though I had never allowed myself to think about this, I must have thought about it, somewhere in my subconscious, somewhere in my deepest thoughts hidden even from myself, because I knew exactly what I was doing.
He smiled, afterward. A sleepy, lazy, stoned smile.
But for me, after that rush of euphoria, there was an immediate descent. I’ve never had a comedown like it. My knees hurt, my jeans were damp from something I’d knelt in.
“Fuck. Fuck—I don’t know what happened there. Shit. I’m just . . . I’m so wasted.” Which was a lie. I had been stoned, yes. But I’d never felt more clear-headed in my life. I’d never felt more alive, either—electric, wired—so many different things.
“Mate,” he said, with a smile. “It’s nothing to be worried about. We were a bit pissed, a lot stoned.” He gestured around us, shrugged. “And it’s not like anyone saw.”
I couldn’t believe how relaxed he was about it. But maybe at the back of my mind I’d known this about him; this side of him. I’d once heard someone at Cambridge describe him as an “omnivore”; wondered what that meant.