Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"All right, this'll do," said Leo, propping his bike against the larch-lap screen. For a moment it seemed he was going to chain it up again, then he stopped himself and left it there with a regretful laugh. Nick tried the door of the hut even though it was padlocked. Beside it there was a shadowy area where a flatbedded barrow was kept, and a broken bench; there were laurels, and a yew tree hanging over; the dusty sour smell of the yew was mixed with the muted sweetness of a huge compost heap, a season's grass cuttings mounded high in a chicken-wire coop. Leo came up to Nick and hesitated for a second, looking away, trailing his fingers over the warm cuttings. "You know, these composts get really hot inside," he said.

"Yes… " Nick had known this all his life.

"Too hot to touch-like a hundred degrees."

"Is that right…?" He reached out like a tired child.

"Anyway," Leo said, letting Nick's hand slide round his waist, putting his arm, his elbow, round Nick's neck to pull him close against him. "Anyway… " His face slipped sideways across Nick's as he breathed the word, the unguessed softness of his lips touched his cheeks and neck, while Nick sighed violently and ran his hand up and down on Leo's back. He pushed his mouth towards Leo's, and they met, and hurried into a kiss. To Nick it felt simply like a helpless admission of need, and the shocking thing was the proof of Leo's need, in the force and thoroughness with which he worked on him. They pushed apart, Leo faintly smiling, Nick gasping and tormented just by the hope that they would do it again.

They kissed for a minute more-two minutes, Nick wasn't counting, half-hypnotized by the luscious rhythm, the generous softness of Leo's lips and the thick insistence of his tongue. He was gasping from the rush of reciprocity, the fact of being made love to. Nothing at the pub, in their aimless conversation, had even hinted at it. He'd never seen it described in a book. He was achingly ready and completely unprepared. He felt the coaxing caress of Leo's hand on the back of his head, roaming through the curls there, and then lifted his other hand to stroke Leo's head, so beautifully alien in its hard stubbly angles and the dry dense firmness of his hair. He thought he saw the point of kissing but also its limitations-it was an instinct, a means of expression, of mouthing a passion but not of satisfying it. So his right hand, that was lightly clutching Leo's waist, set off, still doubting its freedom, to dawdle over his plump buttocks and then squeeze them through the soft old denim. The prodding of Leo's angled erection against the top of Nick's thigh seemed to tell him more and more clearly to do what he wanted, and get his hand inside his waistband and inside the stretched little briefs. His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a boy's, his fingertip even pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that Leo let out a happy grunt. "You're a bad boy," he said.

He moved away from Nick, who clung to him, then let him go with a sulky laugh. "I'm coming back," Leo said, and edged off past the shed. Nick stood for a little while, holding himself and sighing, alone again, aware of the unending soft roar of London and a night breeze hardly dipping the dark leaves of the laurel. What was Leo doing? He was getting something from the slim side pannier of his bike. He was amazing with his habits, he was fabulous, but then Nick's skin prickled for a moment at the thought of himself out here in the dark with a stranger, the risk of it, silly little fool, anything could happen. Leo felt his way back, shadow among shadows. "I think we might be needing this," he said, so that the rush of risk flowed beautifully into the mood of adventure.

Next day Nick wandered for lost half-hours through what he'd done, taking the tube of gel, that was folded back neatly, three-quarters empty, and peering at it in the gloom with relief and embarrassment; turning Leo round in his arms and unbuttoning his jeans as if they were his own, and prising his broad blunt hard-on from his pants as he eased them down, and pushing him forward to hold on to the bench as he knelt behind him and paid the kind of homage with his tongue and lips that he'd dreamed of paying for years to a whole night-catalogue of other men. He loved the scandalous idea of what he was doing more perhaps than the actual sensations and the dull very private smell. He twisted his own pants down to his knees, and smiled at the liberated bounce of his dick in the cool night air, and kissed his smile into Leo's sphincter. Then when he fucked Leo, which was what he did next, a sensation as interesting as it was delicious, he couldn't help laughing quietly. "I'm glad you think it's funny," Leo muttered. "No, it's not that," said Nick; but there was something hilarious in the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck, and ran down his arms to his fingers-he felt he'd been switched on for the first time, gently gripping Leo's hips, and then reaching round him to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body against him. It was all so easy. He'd worried a lot the night before that there might be some awful knack to it-

"Mind that shirt," Leo said: "it's my sister's."

That made Nick love him much more, he couldn't say why. "Your arse is so smooth," he whispered, while his hands stroked hungrily through the short rough hair on his chest and belly.

"Yeah… shave it…" said Leo, between grunted breaths as Nick got quicker and bolder, "get arse-knit… fucking murder… on the bike… " Nick kissed the back of his neck. Poor Leo! With his arse-knit and his ingrowing beard he was a martyr to his hair. "Yeah, like that," he said, with a sweet tone of revelation. He was leaning forward on one arm now, and masturbating in a pounding hurry. Nick was more and more seriously absorbed, but then just before he came he had a brief vision of himself, as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London shone in on him: little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest's boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill garden at night. Leo was right, it was so bad, and it was so much the best thing he'd ever done.

Later Nick sat for a minute on a bench by the gravel walk, while Leo took a piss on the lawn. It wasn't clear whether the tall stooping figure in wlnte shirtsleeves had seen this. Leo sat down beside Nick and there was a sense that some last, more formal part of their date was to be enacted. Nick felt abruptly heavy-hearted, and thought perhaps he had been silly to let Leo see how happy he was-he couldn't stifle his sense of achievement, and his love-starved mind and body wanted more and more of Leo. The air seemed to jostle with nothing but the presence and names of Nick and Leo, which hung in a sad sharp chemical tang of knowledge among the sleeping laurels and azaleas. The tall man walked past them, hesitated, and turned.

"You do know it's keyholders only."

"I'm sorry?"

The mingled light from the backs of the houses revealed a flushed summer-holiday face, soft and weak-chinned, perched at an altitude under thin grey hair. "Only this is a private garden."

"Oh, yes-we're keyholders," the phrase subsuming Leo, who made a little grunt, not of lust this time but of indignant confirmation. He set his hands on his knees in a proprietary attitude, his knees wide apart, sexy and insolent too.

"Ah, fine… " The man gave a squinting half-smile. "I didn't think I'd seen you before." He avoided looking at Leo, who was obviously the cause of this edgy exchange-and that for Nick was another of the commonplace revelations of the evening, of being out with a black man.

"I'm often here, actually," Nick said. He gestured away behind him towards the Feddens' garden gate. "I live at number 48."

"Fine… fine…"-the man walked on a couple of steps, then looked back, doubtful but eager. "But then you must mean at the Feddens'…"