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  Maybe he just wanted everyone. He’d be useless in his job if he couldn’t turn it on. Maybe he went somewhere else in his head, saw someone else, the way Melchior, drunk, had told me he did before our separation. I have to think about Sabrina to get it on with you, George, so it’s no good, is it? Not anymore.

  My erection died. Not a graceful wilt but a sudden total fail. The loss of it made me feel sick, castrated, because every other part of me was aching with want for this man. Then shame hit, and I struggled out from under him, trying to turn away.

  He grabbed me—not gently, with a solid power that made me ache harder still. He got hold of my left hand and ran the pad of one warm thumb across my knuckles. “Still married.”

  The only evidence left was the ring mark, a pale ghost on my skin. No-one had noticed in the winter, but now, at the end of a sunny May, it was standing out like a bloody wail for help. Sometimes I borrowed a ring of Drew’s, but for this trip I’d forgotten. “No,” I said. “Not for over a year now, or I wouldn’t be doing this. Drew would never’ve—”

  “I don’t mean here.” The thumb caressed my fingers again, and then Silver patted my chest just over the heart. “I mean here.” The swiftest ruffle of the hair at the top of my skull: “And here.”

  Nonsense. My head and my heart were as single as the rest of me. I just wished my dick would get the message too, because I was mortified now, lying here frustrated and flaccid after my tigerish leap. I struggled over onto my back, and he let me, somehow without lifting off me his muscular, anchoring weight. “Look, Mr Silver,” I said. “I was married for twenty years to a guy called Melchior Heath. You’ll have heard of him. He’s a concert pianist. A couple of years back, he decided he wanted to be a dad, and he met Sabrina Dalgleish, the model. You’ll have heard of her too, or seen her on the front of Vogue. We separated amicably. She’s about to have his baby, and... I’ve got the divorce papers over there on my computer, all ready to read through and sign. That’s what I was going to do when you showed up.”

  “She’s about to have the kid? You left it until the eleventh hour, didn’t you?”

  I should’ve shoved him off me. “The lawyers took ages. I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “So whatever’s going on here, given that I am gay and I do fancy you, it’s not that.”

  God, how he coloured to hear himself admired! That was some trick of the trade, wasn’t it—that kind of freshness? If I couldn’t keep my flag up for him, other demons were alive and well in me. I almost asked him if he blushed for all the boys. Before I could open my mouth, he made himself comfortable on my chest, rested his chin on the back of one hand and asked, looking me straight in the face, “Do you suffer from impotence, then?”

  As if he’d been my doctor or a shrink. For a moment outraged choked me. And then—possibly because of his sheer cheek, the one-off novelty of our relationship, the fact that I’d never see him again—I found myself talking. “Melchior’s ten years younger than I am. We were fine until I found out the grass was looking greener to him somewhere else.”

  “Was he unfaithful?”

  “Not physically. I wouldn’t have shared a bed with him, wouldn’t have even tried to get him back. But I thought, as long as he was still living at home with me, still... sitting opposite me at the bloody breakfast table, we stood a chance. But I couldn’t fuck him.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  He was squashing the breath out of me. Melchior had never weighed more than a cat wet through. I allowed myself a groan. “Aren’t you? I was. I’d never had any problems before, and I just thought—well, I’m hitting that age. I’d love to blame it on my ex, but here I am with you, limp as a boiled carrot.” I clamped a hand across my eyes. “Fuck it.”

  His weight disappeared. I hadn’t realised the comfort of it until it was gone, and I kept my hand in place so I wouldn’t have to see him straighten his clothes and start to get ready to leave. The bed creaked as he stood up. Deprived of vision, I listened acutely to his progress across the room: four padding footsteps, then the click of a catch. Casting back over my half-hour’s knowledge of him, of Silver, what he carried and did and owned, I remembered a soft leather holdall. He said—and his voice was soft leather too, comforting with just that enthralling edge of tough—“I’ve got just the thing you need.”

  Oh, shit. What? A packet of Viagra? Some arcane bloody device for reviving the libido of ageing men—whips, feathers, chains? The silence in the room became taut, and from his end it was richly laced with amusement. Somehow I’d already learned his breathing well enough to know when he was trying not to laugh. I opened my eyes.

  ***

  The room-service sandwiches arrived. We ate them, and then I sat with my escort on the hotel-room sofa, a coffee table in front of us, and played chess until the small hours.

  I’d never seen a set like his. He said he’d had it made for him in Russia, where traditional elk-hunters carved both board and pieces out of horn the beasts had shed. Some tiny warning glimmer in his eyes prevented me from asking if trade took him out that far, his reputation international, and then he explained that the dark pieces were made from freshly shed horn, and the lighter ones from weathered finds. The board was large enough for a comfortable spread, but he’d unfolded it from a palm-sized velvet pouch. The squat, determined-looking queen and all her fellow courtiers and pawns had emerged from within the board’s padded folds.

  I’d thought I was too old to go falling in love with objects—had lost that nest-lining, home-making impulse long ago—but I really did covet this. Half-hypnotised by the charm of the carving, I went to work with my best game.

  He beat me the first time. It wasn’t like being trounced by Melchior. Silver made faces, growled, flung himself back on the sofa, yelped like the fox he was at a smart move from either of us. He left me all the time in the world to work out my next gambit. How Melchior would chivvy me, pace restlessly around the room! I’d never really minded—that was just his style, and sometimes the ten years between us had made a difference. In some ways I’d thought of him as young. Made allowances. Nothing wrong with that, I reflected, digging my bare toes into the carpet while I dreamed up an ambush of Silver’s remaining bishop. It was just nice to be with someone who was playing for fun. “Check,” I said in surprise, palming the bishop in pleasure at its smooth, polished weight in my hand. “Oh. Look, Sil. It’s mate.”

  “What?” He leaned in. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his tie, but otherwise was fully dressed and unalarming, as if he’d come here tonight with no other object than to play chess with me. “It is not.”

  And there was a thought. “Did Andrew tell you I liked this?”

  “Who?” He was still examining the board for a way out. “Oh, your brother? Are you wondering why I brought the set?”

  “A little.”

  “I always carry it around. You never can tell who’d care for a game.” A strand of hair fell forward over his brow, disturbing the neat cut, and I couldn’t help but think I’d never seen a lovelier sight across a chessboard. “What if I knight to queen’s bishop three... Oh, no. You’ve got me blocked. It is mate, you sod.”

  I leaned back, folding my arms. Laughter shook me. I’d called him Sil, and he hadn’t batted an eyelid. He’d called me you sod, as if we’d known each other for years. He’d kept me quietly topped up with champagne—from the bottle he’d brought with him, not the mini-bar—and some of its shifting sparkle had got into my blood. “Do you want to go again?”

  “If you like.”

  He would have, too. If I’d wanted, he’d have sat here with me all night. If I wanted something more, his steady gaze on mine told me I could have it.

  I’d won, but I laid my king down for him. He smiled at the gesture. “What does that mean?”

  “My brother was right after all.”

  “About what?”

  “About what I might like for my birthday.”


  He lifted the coffee table a couple of inches forward so it was no longer a barricade between us, and the whole little elk-horn army had to stand down. I’d read somewhere, or seen it in a movie, that men and women in his line of work didn’t kiss, that they kept that last intimacy for girlfriends or boyfriends at home. I gave a twitch as he leaned in. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t you like to?”

  “I thought you wouldn’t.”

  Again, that deep glimmer. Not a warning this time, not at all. “I’ll tell you a trade secret. I avoid it if I can. Sometimes it’s too much, you know, even in my game—to be up that close to a stranger. I feel different with you.”

  I bet you say that to all the boys. The cynical thought flickered past me and dissolved. If he was flattering me, I was flattered. If he was turning on the charm, I was charmed beyond measure, melting, blown away. “For the record,” he continued, laying a hand on my face and drawing me in, “you’re the only john who’s ever given enough of a shit about me to ask.”

  I closed my eyes. God, he was right about the nose-to-nose too much of kissing a stranger! I’d last done it twenty-odd years ago. With Melchior, I knew every inch of the terrain, just as he’d known mine, and we’d forgiven each other the occasional late-night curry or lunchtime tzatziki. There’d been onions in the room-service toasties, I remembered, and almost jolted back out of Silver’s embrace until I recalled that he’d eaten them too. Then his mouth met mine, and everything fell away.

  He was tender as sunlight. He eased me against the back of the sofa. My hands flailed uselessly at the shuddery pleasure of his kiss, which was bold now we’d cleared the preliminaries, open, seeking. Then I seized his shoulders and hung on. “Better,” he gasped, pulling back for an instant, dropping an assessing touch down between my legs. “Feels more convincing. Built to last.”

  “Silver, don’t stop. I want...”

  “What? I’m all yours, all night. So what’s it to be? A roll-around here, or back to bed where I can fuck you?”

  Sweet Jesus. I nearly had an equal and opposite reaction to my former wilt. I clutched him, breathing back down off the edge of a desperate premature come. “The bed,” he said, not as a question, a devil’s smile lighting his face. “Look at you—shocked to the bone at a bit of bad language, and your cock up like the Cornhill maypole. I bet Melchior never says fuck.”

  Only when he stubbed his toe, or found a critical concert review in the Times. Sexual connotations had gone out of the word for us long ago. And Melchior was civilised, as I was: we didn’t speak to each other like that. Silver said it like a delicate punch to the ribs. Heat was flickering over my skin, a readiness for action I hadn’t felt in years. “No, he doesn’t,” I said roughly, my voice crackling like dry wood. “Come on, then. For God’s sake do it. Fuck me.”

  He steered me across the room. He put his hand in the small of my back, which somehow felt more devastating than his tongue had in my mouth. By the bed, he dropped his grip to my belt and drew me to a halt. “You started unwrapping me a few hours ago. Do you want to finish the job?”

  I did. I didn’t want another tussle with collars, cuffs, ties and zips in the bed. Swallowing hard, I unfastened his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders, catching a gleam of his smile as he put out his arms like a kid and let me do the whole job unaided. His chest was broad, furred with salt-and-pepper wings that diminished to a line down his belly, rich against his even tan. I guessed that he spent a fair amount of time in the gym: he was elegantly ripped, not too much muscle development, everything compact and taut. “Lovely,” I said helplessly, suddenly aware of my muffin-tops, the year of comfort-eating I’d spent in my sister-in-law’s hospitable kitchen. “Silver, are you sure?”

  “About what?”

  “That you want to fuck someone like me.”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he put my hands on the buckle of his belt, leaned back a little and shivered as I undid it. I pushed his trousers and boxers down over his hips, and he laid one hand on my shoulder to balance himself while we parted him from his shoes and socks. I suppose I could have pretended to be looking elsewhere than the jut of his cock, but there wasn’t much point in that now, and I frankly stared as he stepped free of the last of his clothes and stood in front of me. “Now you,” he said, but before I could get started on my shirt—the one I suddenly hated for being too tight in the armpit and girth, the one I wore for places like this, where no-one would look at me twice—he took my hand. “Wait a minute. Touch me.”

  He meant his cock. Paralysis struck and he guided me, drawing my hand in until I had to unclench my fist and take hold of him. Ah, he was strong and straight, hot with beating blood beneath his fine skin! I ran my palm downwards, caressed and cupped his balls, and he pushed his hips forward, letting go of a fractured breath. “That feels so good. I can hardly wait for you.”

  Between us we skinned me out of the wretched business suit that I’d festered in all day, which had almost invaded my flesh like an ingrown toenail because I wouldn’t get measured up for a new one, no matter how much Drew had begged. Because he’d offered to pay for it, too, and that was unbearable. Discarded husbands should lose weight, not give themselves and their expanding waistlines a break by buying new. I almost cried out at the cruel stupidity of my own heartbroken thinking, which I’d never even realised until now. You wouldn’t treat anyone else this way, Drew had said, watching me wear out and grow out of the things I’d brought from home. I know he left you, but he didn’t leave you poor. What about all your nice stuff in storage?

  Silver dropped to his knees. He kissed the place where my belt had welted the top of my hip, and then he kissed my belly, one sensitive inch below the navel. “You,” he said, “are bloody delicious. Now, do you want to do me, or—since it’s your birthday night—would you rather lie back and be done?”

  I turned his wrist so I could glance at his watch. “It’s after two in the morning. Bit late for birthday treats.”

  “Still.”

  I ached to get fucked. I’d had a lonely year of it. Taking the lead with Silver would be hot as hell, and I did like to be on top, but I longed to be in his hands.

  I didn’t have to tell him. He read it all in one smiling look. He let me help him up. He took a moment to fold back the quilt, to reach into his holdall for condoms and lube. “Spread that out,” he said, handing me a towel. “I’ve worked in housekeeping. No need for me to make things any worse.”

  Oh, God, the trick towel, my mind supplied from some long-gone eighties porn movie. I pushed the stupid thought out of my head. Names, labels, mud to sling... None of it mattered. I was about to hit the sack with someone who cared about the people who worked here, and that was sexy as fuck. In the morning, I’d tell him about my idea for the service-lift redesign...

  He pushed me down onto the bed, and I forgot about everything. There wasn’t much space for rolling around. I didn’t need any. I’d found out where I wanted to be, and he pinned me there, kissing my nape and shoulders. I stifled a groan in the pillow. His fingers probed the crack of my backside, pushed down and in, spreading lube. The smell of industrial laundry powder filled my head, combining with the heat of our bodies to a weird aphrodisiac, and I wished I’d had a shower then was glad that I hadn’t: that both of us were warmly and truthfully here. He thrust at me, one long penetrative push.

  He was big, and I was out of practice. The cry he shook from me rattled the walls. “God,” he gasped against my ear, holding me. “That wasn’t very...”

  I just about had one word left in me. “What?”

  “Professional. Sorry, George.”

  Burying my face in the crook of his elbow, I shook my head. I hoped he’d understand from the mute gesture that I didn’t care. That I liked him just where he was, that my insides were sorting themselves out around that initial balls-deep shove and I felt fine. That even if this—the lapse of control, like his blushes and his readiness to kiss—was all part of his package, I would take it
. I pushed back against him, raising my rump. Shaped my throat and breath for one more word. “Please.”

  He began to move. Gently at first, as if to make up for the bumpy start, and then when I grabbed the pillow, reading my urgency and settling down to a hard beat. He tucked a hand under me, found my rigid cock and took hold. His grip was firm enough to restrain my first surging impulse to come, and after that I found my long-married man’s self-control, breathed deep and set to work to make it last for both of us. Silver wasn’t a guy to keep banging away in there after his lover was done. I spread for him, letting him in deeper still. His rhythm quickened. I shoved the pillows aside, lay flat and dug my fingers under the headboard. A glance across my shoulder showed him up on rigid arms, flushed and serenely wild, so bloody lovely I wanted to die of it. “Come on,” he gasped. “You don’t have to hang on for me. I’m there.”

  I dropped my head with a gutted little moan. Just for a second the handbrake was hard to release: I’d have held on for him till dawn if he’d asked. Then, thank God, forces of joy and release came thundering up the beach for me, out of the dusty, dull day-to-day prisons I’d made for them, and I scrambled halfway onto my hands and knees to meet his climax.

  Came so fucking hard myself that shadows grazed my vision, and whatever thing within myself I thought of as me, as George, tried to tear loose of its roots and escape. I roared like a bloody bull—one, twice, again, the third sound breaking up into rags. I tasted blood, thumped back down onto the mattress, still spilling into Silver’s tight-clenched hand.

  For a long time I lay there, flat out. My breath came and went in noisy efforts that would turn into sobs if let them. I couldn’t: couldn’t bear for him to think I hadn’t enjoyed it, or had enjoyed it so impossibly way too much that I’d fallen in love with my birthday present and couldn’t imagine for the life of me when or how I’d ever feel like this again. “George?” he said uncertainly, and when I didn’t answer, pulled out of me, making me grunt in discomfort. “Haven’t killed you, have I?”