This is Not a Love Story (12 page)

Julian hesitates before unbuttoning his trousers, and I just watch him because I’m stupid and hopeless and can’t look away.

“It’s been a while for me,” he whispers, staring at his stilled fingers, so vulnerable it physically hurts to see.

It floors me how much being used for sex was destroying him. I can’t bear the thought of him going back out there and selling himself, and I know we will have to find a way to survive without that. But we
will
survive without that.

It’s okay
, I sign. It’s okay if we do no more than hold each other and kiss. It’s okay as long as he’s here with me. This is all I need.

“I don’t mean… I just…
I want you
.” He looks over, and his expression is earnest. “If I don’t… can’t… it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to think that it’s you because it isn’t. It’s me and… I haven’t had a hard-on like this in so fucking long,” he gasps.

His grin lights me up, and I grin back helplessly as I shove my jeans down and step out of them. I don’t even give him time to stand up straight after he has stepped out of his own before I press myself against him, and we fall into the bath.

We lie face to face, his soapy hands on my skin, rubbing slow circles down my back, lower and lower, as he sucks on my ear.

“You’re so beautiful, baby,” he says, the words whispering down my spine as he speaks, causing my body to arch into him, loving the feel of how my cock lines up perfectly in the deep hollow of his hip, and his erection pokes readily into my stomach. “You feel so good.”

His words echo my thoughts, though I’m barely thinking anymore—I’m just a tangle of nerve endings wanting to thrust against his hip and pant openmouthed into his neck as his hand reaches the sensitive skin at the base of my spine and dips lower, his fingers slipping hungrily between…. I push back against him, opening to him, wanting his fingers deep inside me, even though I need him to stop because I’m going to come if he goes much deeper.

His wordless groan as I reach between us, gripping him tight in my fist, is the only sound I ever need to hear. But somehow he shifts our positions. Moves me on top of him, my back against his front, as he leans against the end of the bath and holds me tight.

I twist my head to kiss him as his hand trails lazily down my chest, my stomach, so slow the anticipation makes me blind and… he spreads my thighs, reaching between my legs. I watch with slitted eyes as he grips both our cocks loosely in his hand and jerks his hips, rubbing and sliding against me.

I hold my hand over his to increase the friction, to feel the delicious heat of him, to hear him suck in breath after breath. I feel I’m balancing on the very fucking edge of some glorious abyss, the moment stretching until it stops… and bursts apart as I come in thick spurts. Julian watches me, making this low sound that I know I want to hear again and again, and shudders as I close my palm over the head of him, wanting to feel the pulse as he comes against it and kissing him sloppily when he does.

We slip under the water still kissing, and I wonder dreamily if we could stay like this, locked together in the remnants of an orgasm, feeling as though we are stopping time and creating our own fucking world….

But no matter how hard I try to hold on to the sensation, stay afloat on the fucking
wings
of it, I
know
it’s going to pass—the bath will get cold, we will sleep curled round one another on the hard back-room floor, we will fuck ’til we’re sore and aching and undone, and all the mornings will dawn colder and icier, and the streets will be waiting but unable to take what we have away… but they will
try
… because we are
meant
to be ephemeral, like the brilliant sparks from a fire shooting up into the dark, we are not meant to last, nothing lasts, one moment always follows another… the good, the bad, the awfully, fantastically ordinary… and in the looping darkness there’s only one thing left to hold on to….

I
T
IS
winter. Or the season of death, as my mother used to call it in her twisted Russian accent. She had names like that for everything; her life dipped in black negativity, her only salvation the prayers she mumbled as she turned the rosary beads.

Draped in old blankets, Julian and I wander down the empty embankment looking for a little shelter and a place to sleep. We must look like ghosts shrouded in the darkness, and in a way we are.

The river drifts on, eerily unfrozen beside us. Icy vapor hangs in the air, making the edge of all things seem indistinct and unfinished.

Half an hour ago, we were moved on from our refuge in a deserted underpass by a near army of police—a bare few hours of blissful contentment, curled in one another’s arms is all we get now. It’s some sort of crackdown to clean up the city, they said, as though we’re rubbish to be sanitized away. Where they think we all go once we’ve been moved on, I’ve no idea. Perhaps they’ll find a way to really make us vanish one day.

A few weeks ago, we had a brief respite from living on the streets like this—a gift from a friend in a way—we had a room to sleep in, food we could help ourselves to, a bathroom we could use. But however glorious that respite was, it has only made this harder. Made being trapped out here even more hellish than it was before, because now we can taste again the sweetness of each taken-for-granted moment and be tormented by how far it is out of our reach.

The clock on the riverbank tolls three.

If we were in Russia now, we’d be dead.

Out of nowhere, I hear my mother’s voice in my head and look down at my hand. I don’t know how old I was, but she’d caught me touching myself—there was nowhere to hide in our tiny bedsit—she took my hand and held it up to the flame of the cooker.

If we were in Russia now, they would chop off your disgusting hand
, she’d cried.

And I’d cowered before her, cradling my blistered fingers, too afraid to move.

Julian grabs the edge of my blanket and pulls me over toward him.

“Hey, where are you going, baby? Here is fine.”

It’s just a concrete bench, somewhere people sit on sunny days to stare out at the river, but we can lie tucked away underneath the slatted seat and hopefully no one will bother to disturb us.

“You okay?”

His warm breath whispers against my cheek as we wrap ourselves around each other on the ground, in the perfect dark beneath our blankets. The liquid warmth of his skin, radiating out from under all the layers of clothing, fills me with want, a bone-deep ache to be closer and closer.

“You were miles away.”

He doesn’t expect a reply. There’s no way I
can
reply right now—my pad is tucked away in the worn pocket of my coat. And he is blind to my sign language in the night. So I press my lips to the first bit of skin I can find and hold them there as he breathes me in and grips me tight. We’ve barely done more than this for a week. Barely more than tangle our hands down each other’s pants and kiss each other sloppily for hours on end, holding off from coming for as long as possible. But tonight I feel a different sort of urgency as I trace the contours of his face with my fingertips, a slow deep desire to be his completely. Though I know he won’t fuck me out here, I want him to.

I bring his hand up and suck his fingers lazily into my mouth. I smile into the blackness at how, even though he can’t see me doing this, it always makes him groan helplessly with need. His hands are warm, and he tastes so completely of himself, so completely familiar… oh God, I need this. I pull him on top of me, my mouth on his mouth as I push my pants down and fumble with the fastening on his jeans.

“Remee…,” he whispers hoarsely.

I just want to kiss away his words, and I slip my hands beneath his waistband and cup the smooth, firm muscles of his buttocks as I capture his mouth.

“Baby….”

I kick off my trousers, along with some of the blanket, and wrap my legs around his waist. Right now I don’t care if we’re hidden, right now I am swept away, I am dust, I am desire.

With certain fingers, I brush the hypersensitive hot skin at the top of his thighs, between his legs, and feel him melt against me. I know without question I can break his resolve, that he
will
fuck me here if I carry on… but, and this is suddenly much more important, do I want to? Do I want to make him do what he’d rather keep sacred, private, out here in the dirt under a bench?

My movements slow, our kisses deepen. I run my fingers up through his shortened hair and arch against him as he strokes my sides.

“It’s not because I don’t want to, baby…,” he whispers, anxiety showing through in his voice.

I shake my head. It’s okay. Because what I want is tempered by what he wants. Because love is a promise I won’t break.

We end up rubbing against each other, Julian sobbing against my neck as he comes—sometimes he does that, though I don’t ask why—my own orgasm triggered by the slick heat of him against my stomach, his voice whispering my name against the shell of my ear.

M
Y
COUGH
gets worse the next day. It wakes me up. I think it must be the dirt we slept in. Maybe I breathed it in in the night. I’ve had this cough on and off for weeks.

Julian watches me with concern as he rolls the blankets neatly together and tucks them under his arm.

His bruises are fading now, the swelling on his face almost gone. It’s only his wrist that continues to cause him problems. The hospital took the staples out last week but, although the skin is pink and healing nicely, the mess inside still hurts. It causes him pain every time he moves it, I can tell.

We don’t talk about what happened when he was taken by Malik, how terrified he was when he was attacked by the dogs and left in a caravan to die and then thrown out of a moving vehicle when the police raided the illegal work camp. Maybe one day we will. I think it’s all just too raw now. And we are still locked in amazed wonderment that we have each other at all. I don’t think this feeling will ever fade.

W
E
HIDE
out in Joe Brown’s cafe all day, Cassey passing us free cups of tea over the counter when no one is watching. It’s somewhere warm, somewhere we know we are welcome.

But by evening when we go outside into the freezing air, I can hardly take a breath without coughing for twenty. My lungs are spasming, my chest aches, and I feel exhausted.

It’s only six o’clock, but the light has been gone for hours. I’m beginning to hate this endless dark. We sit on the wooden bench outside the closed cafe doors, and Julian covers me in blankets and holds me in his arms as I shiver uncontrollably and cough on and on and on.

“I think we should take you to see a doctor.”

He must be worried. He hates hospitals. Plus he knows that I am a minor—whatever age I say I am, I know I look under sixteen—and if the authorities find out I’m on the street, I will automatically be put under the care of the state until my parents can be found. It doesn’t matter what I may want. I have no say whatsoever.

We wait it out a little longer. It’s just a cough, after all, isn’t it? But by the time I’m coughing in an almost constant loop, hardly breathing normally at all, he leaves the blankets lying haphazardly on the bench and half carries me along the road and across the bridge over the river. The hospital isn’t far.

I
CAN
feel the tension in the hard planes of his body as I press against him. I can feel it bunched in the burning muscles of his arm as he holds me up. I wasn’t worried earlier, even though every time I coughed outside the cafe it felt as though my ribs were cracking apart. I’ve had coughs before, but as we reach the middle of the bridge and struggle against the shards of icy wind, I glance up at Julian’s face and see only a clear and desperate anguish.

Julian never makes me panic. He is always the one who takes away the black hole inside me, the one who blocks out the darkness, who stands with no shadow and infects me with his contagious belief that we will be okay, we will always
be okay
.

I don’t want to see this. Feel this.

Shivering and barely able to stand still, we lurch into A&E. This is not the hospital Julian was taken to, but I’ve been here before with Roxy. This place is more central, more packed, and the hurt and injured overflow into the corridors and doorways at this time of day. But even though the place is so busy, there is such a black-eyed watchful silence as we queue for the reception desk—undoubtedly the result of my constant coughing—and we stand uncomfortably in the inescapable channels of freezing wind gusting through the ever-open doors.

I’m doubled over gasping, Julian stroking my back, when I see it. The blood. Dripping out from between my lips to form imperfect red circles on the pale tiled floor.

Oh
is all I can think. But the thought has the weight and shape of a stone.

A stone heavy and solid enough to shatter my glass-like indestructibility, if I were to drop it.

I rub the back of my shaking hand across my mouth and smear the pale skin with bright, bright red.

Julian pulls my hand away, takes it between the warmth of his own, and wipes away the blood with his fingertips. He tries to smile, but his eyes are distraught.

“N
AME
?” T
HE
receptionist doesn’t even look up.