“Fuck,” he groaned, and I felt rather than heard the word.
Someone came into the bathroom. I could hear him whistling and pissing, then there were voices and Andrew was kissing me like there was no tomorrow, our mouths sliding wetly together.
He was hard when I found his cock through his clothes but he guided my hand away. “No,” he whispered. “This is for you.”
He flicked his wrist on the next stroke, and squeezed and I closed my eyes and leaned back against the cubicle wall.
One of the loos flushed, a hand basin tap ran, and I groaned. Andrew pushed fingers into my mouth to shush me.
There was a muffled chuckle from someone, and the door to the bar opened briefly, letting in a sudden wash of voices for a moment.
“Be quiet,” Andrew murmured, and he stroked me hard.
There are two ways I come. I can scream and thrash and clutch and groan and in general make a hell of a fuss about it.
Or I can hold still, legs trembling, stomach muscles quavering, keeping quiet.
It was the wrong one, and I think I bit Andrew’s fingers.
He was almost convulsed with laughter by the time I’d finished, and if I hadn’t been hanging onto the wall for support, and trying to collect my scattered wits and clothes, I might have thought it was funny, too.
“Jesus Christ,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Good to know someone is having fun.”
The door to the bar opened again and while I pulled my trousers up, Andrew stood on the toilet bowl and peered over the top of the cubicles. “All clear.” He clambered down and kissed me quickly. “I’ll pick you up at eight from your place.”
I gave him a couple of minutes to mingle back in the crowd, and for anyone watching to become bored with waiting to see who else walked out, before heading out of the bathroom and through the bar to catch the bus back to my place.
There was a fair bit of good-natured ribbing from my housemates for taking a guy upstairs and fucking, then disappearing for the night, but I just nodded and smiled and told them to fuck off back to engineer land.
I stuffed some textbooks and my laptop into my backpack, along with some clean clothes and a razor and toothbrush, then flopped down onto my unmade bed. I hadn’t planned on sleeping, in fact I had a microbiology textbook in my hands, but I fell asleep instantly.
Chapter Twelve
F slung a cheerful arm around my shoulders. “Andrew, you wanker.” He pushed a pint at me with his free hand. “Gonna get fired with me?”
“Absolutely,” I said. Right then, I didn’t actually care about much of anything, least of all losing my job. Matthew was adorable, I was picking him up later, we were going to fuck.
For a man with an over-developed social conscience, I was proving to be easily distracted by a little sex. Perhaps principles were for people who were celibate. Everyone else was too busy fucking to worry about anything else.
“What you thinking about?” F asked, leaning his head closer and ignoring the BMA rep, who was being boring.
“That I don’t fucking care if I’m going to lose my job over this. What the fuck does it matter?”
F shook his head and I began to suspect he was drunker than he seemed. Of course, he could just have stopped off at his car for a couple of joints before coming to the bar.
“Andrew, my sweet boy.” He pushed his mouth close to my ear. “You reek of sex,” he whispered. “Come all over your clothes?”
Fuckityfuckityfuck. There was no way I was going to look down and find out, but it was one detail that had escaped me at the time.
“Think I might just go home,” I said to F and he nodded sagely.
“Smart move there. Leave me here with the BMA rep, why don’t you?”
“Don’t drive.”
He nodded and pursed his lips. “Not going to. Have given my keys to, um, someone. Think she was a blonde.” He looked hopefully around the crowd at the bar, and I left him risking life and limb by frisking people at random, presumably in search of his keys.
F was right, I did reek of sex, and in the car I ran an experimental hand over my clothes. Yep, there was a good reason for the pervasive smell.
At home, I changed my work clothes for jeans and T-shirt, and changed my sheets, too. Food would require some thought, eventually, and possibly a stop for more take-away.
There weren’t crashing waves of noise rolling out of Matthew’s house, but still no one answered when I knocked repeatedly on the door. I eventually pushed it open and found myself staring at a room of scabby looking students, one of whom was pushing an entire piece of pizza into his mouth, while another one sucked on a bong.
“Is Matthew around?” I asked, and a boy shrugged. And the boy proved to be a girl when she lifted her arm and dropped it around the shoulders of the boy … person …
beside her, displaying obvious breast tissue.
“Who?” she asked.
“Matthew. Medical student, gay?” I asked. Henry was going to grow up to be just like this, I could tell.
“Yeah,” someone with wispy facial hair said. “Upstairs.”
They turned their attention away from me, so I stepped over the snaking ADSL cabling and climbed the stairs. Sure, I’d been a drug-fucked student myself, at least for as long as it took for me to work out that I’d fail unless I did some work, but I didn’t remember ever being that out of it.
F, on the other hand, had presumably spent his entire medical degree off his face.
There was no answer when I tapped on Matthew’s door so I pushed the door open carefully. Matthew was asleep on the mattress on the floor, reading lamp on the floor beside him, Medical Microbiology, by Mims and sycophants, on the pillow beside him.
There was an inarticulate shout from downstairs and I pushed the door closed again and kicked my shoes off.
Matthew didn’t stir as I stepped onto the futon and carefully lay down on the bunched-up sheet beside him. He was obviously exhausted; I could wait for him to wake up.
My pager vibrated on my hip, and I ignored it, and got to my cell phone and turned it off before the hospital called to see why I hadn’t answered my pager.
This was what had put me off fucking fellow medical types; it always felt like there was a third person (or on one memorable occasion, a fourth) in the bed with you. Someone who would page you at random, who wanted to swab you for MRSA during sex, someone that thought you actually wanted to work a weekend shift. Nobody in their right mind would sleep with a doctor, not even another doctor.
Not that sharing my life with a musician had actually been any easier. Never share a house with someone who plays an amplified instrument, and if you have to, disable the amp at bedtime each night. That little fuse is your friend. Never travel with someone who insists their instrument has to sit on their lap the whole time, especially if you have a child with them. For that matter, never travel with a child either.
Lying there, listening to Matthew breathe, listening to the rise and fall of voices from downstairs, and the sound of distressed plumbing somewhere in the building, was peaceful.
I wasn’t sleepy; I’d stopped feeling tired sometime during my first year as a fuckwit house physician. The bit of me that was supposed to warn me about exhaustion had burnt out years ago, like an asthmatic’s central respiratory chemoreceptors no longer responding to falls in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in arterial blood.
Some time later—I wasn’t sure how long, but it was long enough that I had become so bored that reading Mims and the sycophants had begun to seem appealing—Matthew stretched and stirred and rolled over to settle against me.
“You’re here,” he said sleepily. Sleepy people are allowed to state the obvious.