We got back to my apartment and opened another bottle. I listened. I had no choice. I tried to appear calm. He delivered his words casually, like canapes swallowed with champagne. My own sepia-coloured movie reel rolled in my head as he spoke.
David explained that he never believed he was a homosexual. He worshipped girls in his classes when he was young, but absolutely no one paid him or Sergi any mind. They were hideous then, he claimed, and foreigners in a xenophobic country to boot. They were simply desperately horny, pimply little bastards who only had each other for company. Sergi’s mother, their father’s first wife, had died during childbirth. So Sergi lived with an aunt in his early years. He became too much to handle as a pre-teen, and his aunt sent him back to live with his father, his father’s new wife and his half-brother.
The first time Sergi and David touched each other, they’d been sitting in front of their television set in their small apartment in Paris. While David’s mother smoked cigarettes in the courtyard and their father banged university students in exchange for discounted books in the back of his shop, the boys gave one another their first blow job.
The television had been turned to one of Europe’s many soft-core porn channels, where shapely naked women lathered one another in the shower. The boys’ virginal cocks pulsed and rose, begging to be set free from their pants. Through the zipper of his blue jeans, Sergi, the taller and more handsome one, released his cock and stroked it wildly to its fullness while he stared straight ahead at the telly. His bottom lip jutted out as he bit down and broke through the violet skin of chapped lips. A rebel strand of wheat-coloured hair es caped from a thick mass of an overgrown pageboy haircut and dipped in and out of the pock hole on his upper cheekbone, a mark left from a severe case of the measles. David’s cock swelled in sync from the excitement of seeing dozens of hardened nipples. The sound of his mother’s voice giggled in the distance while Sergi worked on himself with a passionate energy that David had never witnessed before in his brother. Tense and excited, David took his out too. The boys, both sixteen, sat alongside each other on a couch too small for their rapidly growing limbs. They looked over at one another, glassy-eyed and trembling, as they pulled at their reddened cocks together. Sergi, who always felt he could control David, asked him in a desperate and unequivocally commanding voice to “Kiss it, now.” And David, without hesitation, leaned over and took in the warmth and mixture of perspiration and detergent smell of his best friend and half-brother’s manliness.
David propelled himself up and down on Sergi only a pair of times before David, overcome with emotion, ejaculated burning droplets of embarrassment at the newness of it all. Sergi pushed David off and finished himself off with his own hand, feeling over whelmed with the sight of David’s come and now his own all over his trousers.
With a hand over his mouth, David pointed and laughed at the mess and Sergi, registering what had happened, stayed perfectly still. He gave David a shove and told him to go and get something to clean it up before David’s mother walked in. David brought back some napkins, they cleaned themselves up, and they switched the channel to some American gangster flick.
I realized then that Sergi hadn’t blown David and that, in game theory, he owed him one. But I didn’t want to know any more.
David left for Barcelona a day before New York had its first big snowfall. He had an important engagement to attend back home at the Circulo de Lectores. I assured him I would join him as soon as I could figure out what to do about work. My first days and nights alone again were spent obsessing over Sergi and David. I imagined the wild, sexual adventures that awaited them when they reunited in Spain again.
After the reality that David had left set in, I spiralled from ecstasy to a one-lane freeway towards depression. I had been on a four-month hiatus from its dark fog, and now I was back. I began seeing my shrink again. I told Laura about my feelings of jealousy about David’s experimentations and his intimate relationship with Sergi.
Sitting in front of me, on her hunter-green chair, in a long, flowing khaki-coloured skirt and brown riding boots, Laura was serene. She joined in the Greek chorus of those around me who pooh-poohed my irrational fear of thinking David a closet homosexual.
“This is natural behaviour for men. They’re just as capable of experimenting with the same sex as women are,” she said. She paused and asked, “You’ve been with women, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it different or more acceptable that you did?”
“I don’t know. It’s just different.”
“It’s the same. Just be grateful that he told you,” she said. “This proves a wonderful aspect of his open character. He’s sharing him self, his past, who he is with you.”
“I guess so.”
“He’s chosen you, Anna. Trust him, trust yourself. OK?”
“OK.”
Time was up and having him so far away didn’t help my overactive imagination when I wasn’t seated in my shrink’s chair.
My life in New York was no longer mine for the few months that followed. I lived in an altered state, a time-zoned paralysis as I imagined his fabulous Barcelona life six hours ahead of mine. Six hours ahead on working wonders on his novel, gallivanting with his arty friends, meeting other fascinating, brilliant women, other dashing men.
He’d send me horny one-liners in awkward email English. I click on your clit with my dick. I’d get them at work. He had his 3 p.m. siesta jerk-off while I was hitting my 9 a.m. caffeine-fuelled “what am I doing here?” hour.
One day I found myself completely unable to concentrate on the stories I had to edit. I needed to kill the throbbing between my legs. So I decided to masturbate in the office bathroom. I watched myself in the mirror of the handicap stall, the one with the extra-large sink. With my head thrown back and my mouth pleading to be filled, I let my raised nipples loose from my bra. I thought of his dick rubbing against me and touched myself, my clitoris expanding underneath my fingers. I imagined him and a strange man he’d met in a bar. I pictured him and Sergi in one of their threesomes he had told me about. I saw him and random sexy girls speaking in that castrating Spanish of theirs under the sheets.
As I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the savage woman that looked back, the edges of her mouth sinking, her skirt hitched up under her. I was becoming like them: my lascivious parents.
High on recklessness, I resigned the next day. Without a hint of remorse I asked my publisher, Martin Powers, if he would still allow me to submit articles from Spain on the goings on in the European market. He said yes. I told Martin, who had become a father figure to me (even though at times he was overcome with visible thoughts of incest) that I was going to be working on my next novel in Barcelona.
That night I went home to buy a one-way ticket to Barcelona. I called David to tell him that I had decided to come try it for a while. I could feel his lust and longing through the receiver. He whined and told me to come right then, and I could practically come just hearing his voice, but for that we had to wait another two weeks.
Then the vibrato of that joyous conversation lulled when he told me that my arrival would coincide with Sergi’s, who’d be visiting from Madrid. He was going to be there for two weeks doing a series of talks on his latest tome for Barcelona’s big literary festival, Diada de Sant Jordi.
I pouted over the phone line and told him that I preferred for us to be alone, reminding him that I wasn’t a quiet fuck. It didn’t go down well with David at first. He insisted that he had a large flat and plenty of extra rooms and bathrooms. It took some convincing with old truisms like, three’s a crowd and a woman needs her privacy.