I took another gulp of cava. This time it tasted like mouthwash.
Except this was supposed to be my day. So I let my friends sweep me off to the tapas place where we had mojitos, and sharing plates, and baklava with yogurt and honey.
(No missed calls. No texts.)
Then to Tesco, where we bought Pimm’s and lemonade and more cava. And finally back to St. Seb’s, where we found a spot in the graveyard and lazed there in the dappled sunlight through that long, long afternoon.
Idle talk and laughter. Nobody seemed to expect me to be anything other than utterly dazed.
Nik even let me lie with my head in his lap, his fingers stroking absently through my hair.
(No missed calls. No texts.)
I was lightly Hemmingwayed for most of the afternoon and slaughtered at the point we were meant go on to a club.
(No missed calls. No texts.)
We ended up at Oxford’s only full-time gay bar. Despite being about 60 percent ethanol by this stage, I felt weirdly…unpartyish.
Like I wanted to go to bed.
Which was probably just…anticlimax or something?
But I did a few shots and went to wriggle about on the dance floor. It helped. Made me feel a bit more…real again, a bit more like me, as though my edges were solid, not wibbly.
It certainly didn’t hurt when a guy detached himself from his mates and got all up close and personal with me. It was hard to tell because my vision was blurry and he was saturated in disco rainbows but I thought he was probably hot. Tall, blond, posh. Some kind of athlete if his thighs were anything to go by.
He was not aggressive, precisely, but sure of himself.
I wasn’t entirely convinced that was preferable.
There was this particular type of arrogance that Oxford bred: a shiny invincibility, I half envied and half disliked and had been, I suppose, on some level attracted to. It wasn’t until I’d met Caspian that I’d understood the difference between internal conviction and external complacency.
These boys—for, yes, they were boys really—had never had anything bad happen to them their entire lives. Probably believed it never would. And, probably, they’d be right. There was likely nothing Mummy’s money or Daddy’s contacts couldn’t get them. Or get them out of.
But Caspian (no missed calls, no texts) had earned his confidence.
And this Andy or Rupert or Harry or Marcus was a bloody poor substitute for Caspian.
But he was here.
Touching me. Clearly wanting me.
Which surely made Caspian the substitute. The substitute for a real fucking person.
I tried to slither enthusiastically up to my new friend, except I wasn’t entirely steady, and I fell into him instead. Did the job though. His hands slid from my hips to my arse and urged me against his crotch, where I obligingly ground for a while.
Couldn’t feel much. Just a bumping of bodies. Not even in time to the music. Or each other. An awkward, ill-matchy business.
“Want to go somewhere?” Not exactly a loverlike whisper so much as a bellow in my ear, but it was enough.
“Sure.”
He took my elbow and steered me across the dance floor and out a fire door. Into the alley that ran between the club and the sandwich shop next door, where the bins hunched in the gloom like openmouthed toads.
It smelled of stale smoke and refuse.
My stomach promptly tried to eat itself. And it was a wonder I didn’t vomit immediately.
