

# The Other Side of the Pool

Benjamin Ashton

The Other Side of the Pool

Benjamin Ashton

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Benjamin Ashton

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Raleigh, North Carolina, Summer 2014

Luxor, Spring 1995

Chapter 1 - Sunday

Chapter 2 - Monday

Chapter 3 - Tuesday, Adam

Chapter 4 - Wednesday

Chapter 5 - Thursday, Siobhan

Chapter 6 - Friday, Richard

Chapter 7 - Saturday

Adams Morgan, DC, Fall, 2014

About the author

## To A.

Who may or may not read this book. Who made me a better person.

My sincere thanks to G and J, who made me a better writer, which may or may not be the same thing.

### Raleigh, North Carolina, Summer 2014

"Tell me a good story," Jeremy said, pulling two rustic chaises next to each other, settling down on one and staring ahead at the dark trees surrounding the wild garden and the unlit pool.

Jeremy had spent most of the evening telling stories about himself, filling the blanks between Gaza, Ukraine, the upcoming midterm elections, and the revival of the Philip Marlowe novels. Vibrant and magnetic, he had narrated tales and anecdotes, with the socially graceful amount of wit, erudition and self-deprecation. The nine other guests had generally responded well and some had interjected sporadically with tales and anecdotes of their own. It had been a warm, starry evening, the plentiful outdoor dinner embellished by handpicked wine and the summery sound of cicadas.

Our host, patrician and warm, was a retired university professor and a partner at the consulting firm where my boyfriend and Jeremy's partner work. His wife, daughter and two teenage grand-daughters, all Southernly vivacious and mischievous, had seemed delighted by welcoming four gay men in their colonial, if slightly browbeaten, second residence.

My boyfriend and I were on our way down from DC to Savannah, in a road trip designed a few weeks earlier to visit a few friends and relatives along the way and to extricate us from our more intuitive routes up New England and along the West Coast. Jeremy and his partner had decided to accept our hosts' long standing and annual invitation to spend a few days in North Carolina, apparently reassured by the presence of like-minded East Coast liberals in their first foray into what New Yorker Jeremy had named during desserts the "Bible belt". The two teenage girls had giggled, the old man had not.

Jeremy had directed much of his attention towards me throughout the evening, drawing me into his stories, into his political musings, into his age bracket: we were about the same age and both our respective partners were a few years younger, something unprecedented in my own dating history but an age gap with which Jeremy seemed rather more comfortable. "Benjamin will know what I'm referring to here" or "That must have been around the time when Benjamin and I would have still been in college," he had said, among other winks and nods and smiling glances at me.

He wasn't flirtatious, not exactly, not in a sexual sense. I didn't think so, at least. He seemed happily partnered and my own domestic harmony must have been obvious enough to fend off tentative and daring advances - or inappropriate bouts of donjuanism. But I liked Jeremy and I knew he liked me. I felt we had been drawn towards each other, as if by a fleeting promise of a bonding comradery, by the elusive possibility of a form of intimacy parallel to love, lust and matrimony.

"What kind of story?" I asked, setting between our chaises two glasses and the opened bottle of wine that had been left on the table a few minutes ago, when everyone had decided to go to bed, save for Jeremy and I - left alone in an initially apprehensive, then comfortably expectant silence.

"I feel like I don't know much about you, Ben. Where you come from, your family. All that."

"My family?"

"Whenever I ask, you keep pretty silent and your husband flusters and changes the conversation."

"I have two brothers, one I love, one I barely speak with."

"Okay."

"My father died two years ago, my mother runs some sort of vegan bed & breakfast in Oregon."

"I'm sorry."

"About which part?"

"Both, I guess."

"You really want a story about my family?"

"Nah," he said, after theatrically pondering the question. "It probably wouldn't have much sex in it."

"You want a story with sex."

"I want to hear about slutty, smutty Benjamin. Tell me a story your boyfriend doesn't know." He wasn't teasing any longer, not really. There was a pleading in a voice, faint and slightly playful. There was a hand reached, an opening, a welcoming.

"He knows everything about me, I think. He knows my family, he knows much of my past, he knows I had my heart broken once. He knows I love him." I wanted to play along. I wanted to share, since that was apparently what was needed to make the warm breeze envelop us both and shield us. I knew my tone and my words might convey guardedness, however. I kicked off my shoes, looking up at the stars, letting him give me one more chance.

I felt him look at my sneakers dropping with a light thud on the grass. I watched him try to kick off his, unsuccessfully, until he had to raise himself and lean over and carefully unlace them, almost ruining the casual spontaneity of the moment.

"You must have broken someone's heart too, right?" he resumed, making himself comfortable again.

I turned towards him, amused by the cheesy and clumsy phrase, and raised a "really?" eyebrow. He smiled and sighed: "You know what I mean."

"Yes. And yes, I have broken some people's hearts. We all do. It's part of the whole growing up thing, isn't it?"

"I'm not sure about that. I know assholes who repeatedly break people's hearts and never seem to grow up. I was one of them until I met my boyfriend."

"I'm sure you were. But you met your boyfriend and now you're all mature."

"Yup. Evidently."

"That's my point, I guess." I turned and looked at him smile. "There is no real story in there. It's all so banal. I could tell you stories about how I was a complete dick to some nice man, but I'm not sure I would be saying much about me. Much that is interesting, I mean, or telling. But I'd probably make you say 'I know what you mean, I've been there, we're similar you and me'. And all that."

"Which would be nice," he said softly, but pointedly, looking away.

I held my stare towards him, beckoning him to turn back and look at me. He did and the silence that followed, the sweet, breezy, flustering silence, made me miss being 25. Or 20. Or 17.

"What does it mean, anyway, to grow up, to learn?" I asked rhetorically, with a hint of boredom, to deflate both the moment and the increasing triteness of the conversation.

"Making amends. To yourself. To your younger self, I guess. Or absolving your younger self of his sins," Jeremy said, surprisingly serious again.

"They're not quite the same thing."

"No, I know."

"And what sins are we talking about, anyway? Isn't it a bigger sin to think, especially years later, that you were so special that you actually hurt someone? Like, lastingly hurt someone?"

"Pride, yes. The most serious of the seven deadly sins, the source of all others."

"Exactly."

Jeremy became silent again. He picked up the bottle of the wine on the ground and, with a gesture and a nod, asked if I wanted some more. Our eyes locked for a second before I said, in a clear and congenial voice, "Yes, thanks".

The noise of the wine pouring and filling our glasses felt comforting. I took a sip and, grabbing the glass with both my hands, made it rest on my stomach. I looked at the lit pool in front of us, winced and stared at it some more, then started to speak, looking back up at the stars.

"I think I was really awful once to this guy, a married man. I was very young. He was, like, my first guy, and –"

"Straight married men are bad news," he interrupted me, displaying some glee at the jump start of our conversation. "I mean, they never, by definition, really have their shit together. If you yourself are still trying to figure things out too, it just gets messy." Jeremy was warm and inviting, leading me to say more. I couldn't. He had stopped me and I found myself unable to start again. He gave me time, aware of having broken the flow, and left open an apologetic and inviting silence.

I couldn't tell him the story I really wanted to, the story that had appeared, Rorschach-like, in the wavelets of the pool. Not because the memories hurt or shamed me – they did, but that was supposed to be the point of telling that story, that was the symbolic undressing that was expected, the "mine" I showed expecting to see the "yours" in return. But I realized I didn't know what the story was about, what I needed to say to make the story compelling, what I still needed to know to have the story carry some minimal weight and meaning.

This is a story you write, not a story you tell, I thought. This is a story you edit, you proofread, you augment, you morph, you knead. This is a story you embellish and you darken. This is a story that needs more than my truth and my youth, it needs other characters' lies and their pasts. This is a story that might not be told, anyway, because who cares, apart from Jeremy maybe - interested for the wrong reasons and the right motives? This is a story that, indeed, my boyfriend doesn't know about - and doesn't that say something?

When a story needs other voices, other pasts, other fictions to make sense, are you even telling a true story anymore? When the contrition you seek requires the omniscience and omnipotence of the storyteller, to whom are you really making amends?

"Well," I told Jeremy, "let me tell you about this one time when I sublet the apartment of this guy I knew from work. It was in Boston, a while ago..."

I had changed the subject, luring him away and postponing the moment when I'd reconstruct the story to myself. I had changed decades and continents.

### Luxor, Spring 1995

### Chapter 1

Sunday

I noticed him before he noticed me. He couldn't have seen me when my eyes first landed on him; he would have if he had slightly turned around, if he had felt my gaze upon him that first time, and if my gaze had stirred him into glancing shyly, intensely, blushingly back at me, like he would on so many occasions in the few days that followed.

He was tentatively applying some sun cream on the very pink back of his wife, displaying his own slightly pink one for me to see, despite the blinding, slowly setting sun of a late afternoon, at the poolside of a small resort on the Nile, where I had just arrived.

My father was taking care of the formalities required to finally check us in, after a long and exhausting trip from Philadelphia. I had headed straight to the pool, calmly disguising my eagerness to discover for myself what my father had excitedly raved about: a U-shaped building around a beautiful swimming pool, right on the bank of the Nile, overlooking what could be the Valley of the Kings - or what you could imagine was the Valley of the Kings, if you were so inclined when relaxing on a chaise turned toward the view, with the post-colonial architecture of an upscale hotel left behind you.

The place was astonishingly beautiful and quiet. I relished my dad's preference for this smaller, British-oriented hotel rather than the large, bloated international resorts at which our van had made stops on our way from the local airport. There was a subdued elegance to this place and the fact that it seemed to have known better, more glamourous days when the prices of flights to Egypt had been more of a deterrent to the masses, gave it an added layer of faded charm. There were a few people lounging by the pool, most of them dozing, reading or silently sunbathing. The only noises, faintly shrilling, were coming from this woman with a very pink back, who seemed irritated at her husband's clumsiness with the lathering of sun cream – his gestures made all the more irrelevant by the fact that his wife was already well burnt and by the somewhat late time in the day. They were both in the late twenties, much younger than most of the guests I could see; she sounded British and they both seemed unhappy.

I heard my father's voice calling me from the lobby behind me. Our rooms were ready. They were next to each other, on the third floor, the top floor of the south wing. Each had a balcony overlooking the pool, facing the other leg of the U. But when you sat down on one of the two small wicker chairs, turned it sideways, rested your feet on the other chair, and relaxed, you were facing the Nile and the setting sun.

I was seventeen, about a month away from my eighteenth birthday, half a term away from high school graduation. My father had taken my brother Andrew to this very same hotel ten years before, to the day. With each of us, he wanted to properly celebrate the "end of an era", as he called it. He was already planning my younger brother Dustin's graduation trip ("Though I can't quite come back a third time in Luxor, can I? I mean, these beautiful ruins don't change that much, do they?"). His trip with Andrew had been an intense bonding experience for both of them; it was the first time they had found themselves alone together, at least since my father had remarried, many years before, after the early death of Andrew's mother.

My father was never one to hide his excitement or elation. He had been planning this trip for months, drawing me in as much as he could in all the logistics and planning. There hadn't been much to do, however, as once the flights and the hotel were booked, the week planned itself quite obviously: the hotel offered morning excursions to all the sites of the areas, all you had to do was to tell them which ones you were interested in joining. My father wanted to do them all and many Sunday nights of that winter had involved the browsing of the photo albums he had lovingly and assiduously put together when he had come back from his trip with Andrew. My father's planning was thus mostly desultory: he voiced his firm intention for us not to miss this or that king's tomb while in the Valley for instance, and I kept silent my conviction that our guide was bound to have included them on the planned tour anyway.

My father's gleeful anticipation was touching. Yet I found myself resisting his efforts to drag me close and found it difficult to express a similarly joyful anticipation when looking at maps and at pictures of Andrew as a broadly smiling youth. I was not a demonstrative teenager, but I knew that my reluctance was mostly due to the ardent yet implicit wish of my father to replicate with his second son the emotional connection his first trip had cemented with his oldest. The pressure was a little daunting, however much I loved my father – and I did, tremendously and wholeheartedly, ever since my mother, his second wife, had taken off when I was five, left us behind, and started her geographical and personal meanderings.

But my preoccupations were elsewhere: I was soon to graduate high school, enter college in the fall and, just a couple of weeks before we left for Egypt, I was dealing with the repercussions of my callous behavior. My girlfriend of six months had found out I had repeatedly cheated on her with a cool, unruly, magnetic young woman who attended the community college across the street from our school. The drama and her long monologues that ensued were draining, even if legitimately inflicted. In retrospect, they may very well also have been a slightly welcome distraction from the nagging unease and confusion ignited by recurrent evenings of masturbation with Jason, my friend from soccer practice.

I heard the shower running in my father's bathroom next door. I lit a cigarette and leaned on the rails of the balcony, taking in the view and the scene around the pool. People were starting to pack their things, as the early April sun sets somewhat early and as the hotel, to accommodate its mostly British clientele, had set dinner time at 6:30. I watched the previously bickering couple. She was putting her light summer shirt back on, cringing with the obvious pain caused by the contact with her sunburned skin. She shoved him with little affection, signaling him her intention to leave. He moved slowly and reluctantly, rubbed his eyes, looked around him, yawned, rubbed his eyes some more and, looking up distractedly, saw me. I looked away, back to the greenish color of the river and the golden sand of the hills across. When I looked back in their direction, they had gone.

We got to the restaurant later than most of the other guests; we were shown to our table, one that seemed to be assigned to us for the whole of our stay. The atmosphere was quiet, a hint of sophistication given by the uniforms of the waiters that reminded me of those I imagined were worn on cruise ships in the thirties. I was wearing an oxford shirt and felt suitably fitting in the surroundings, even if I sensed a slight of unease at the very bourgeois conventionality I had so quickly conform to.

I quickly noticed the young couple occupied a table close to ours, but my father had taken the seat facing them. I occasionally tried to concentrate on catching the kind of conversation they might be engaging in, but despite the relative quiet of the room, I concluded I was either too far from them to hear anything distinctly or they were immersed in a version of silence that would be left to interpretation. I was at the appetizers' buffet when they were perusing the dessert table and I got my first good look of them both.

She looked rather wholesome, with long, permed, dark ginger hair. She had a light dress, flowery but rather bland, with thin straps that displayed her burned shoulders. She wore little make-up and her face betrayed nothing but her irresolution at choosing a dessert, a frowning yearn for some kind of satisfaction. Her face, patchily reddened by the sun, seemed to promise sparkling blue eyes and a delightful smile, but was too tensed to deliver on either. She was rather petite, but exuded strength, even some harshness when she waved off the tentative efforts of her husband (I presumed they were married) to help her choose among the tantalizing display.

He was rather thin, just below average height (or was it his demurred demeanor when dealing with his wife that shrunk him slightly?). He had light brown hair, carefully and neatly slicked back. Strong cheekbones, a face both masculine and delicate, thin lips and thin eyebrows. His dark polo-shirt and light khakis made him look like many men I'd pass by in a mall in the Philly suburbs, but the little I caught from their curt conversation confirmed that they were both definitely British. His whole demeanor seemed caring and warm, but clumsy and gauche, as if apologizing for a slight he hadn't yet committed.

I thought briefly how they were both potentially beautiful individually, but how, together, they mutually quash any shy surge of sexiness.

"What are you staring at?" my father interrupted.

"Nothing. The dessert table."

"Cornucopia, he?"

"Yes, Dad," I replied, touched by his persistent appreciation of somewhat obscure words and by his obvious delight and pride brought by my understanding them.

On my way back to our table, I nearly bumped into the husband, who was concentrated on his small plate overflowing with an assortment of desserts. Our eyes locked. He blushed. I smiled. He blushed some more.

Dinner was lovely. My father and I easily found a nice groove to our conversation. He insisted I have a glass of red wine with him, as had been the custom of our Sunday night dinners for the past few months. "This week, every day will be like Sunday." I told him this was pretty much the name of a not-so-happy song by The Smiths, but he stared at me blankly. We reminisced a few trips we had taken together, he and "his three boys", over the previous years. He shared his joy to be "on another continent again" and to be with me here. "This means a lot to me. You know that, Benjamin, right?" He called me Benjamin only when the matter was important ("Benjamin, we need to talk about your mother, I think", "Benjamin, there is a letter from Princeton on the dinner table", "Benjamin, do you think your younger brother is happy?"). "It means a lot to me too, Dad," I managed to mumble, genuinely. I raised my glass, with a tiny drop of red wine left, a gesture that seemed to bring him close to joyful tears.

We had an early rise the next day and didn't linger much longer in the restaurant. Back in my room, I went straight to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The lighter flickered a tiny light in the otherwise dark setting. The pool was dimly lit and, except for a couple of bedrooms which had the lights on behind the curtains, most of the guests seemed to have decided on an early night as well. But I saw a figure slightly moving by the pool. The British man was alone, sitting on a chaise, sipping a beer, and looking pensively straight ahead, towards the Nile bank. He briefly glanced up in my direction, as he must have heard the sound of the lighter, or seen its glow. I briefly felt like going back inside, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy. But he looked away again and didn't seem intent on shortening his introspective break.

There was something sad and moving about the sight of him; yet I felt the pangs of something altogether quite different. I wanted him to look at me again. I found myself inhaling and exhaling smoke a little louder than would be natural, moving the wicker chair to create the noise necessary to remind him of my nearby presence. I stared at him the whole time, but, despite some flickers of movement, some aborted tilts of his head towards me, our eyes didn't meet again. He stood up and left just as I was finishing my cigarette.

I went back inside, undressed and brushed my teeth. Facing the mirror with just my boxers on, I felt the urge to jerk off. This was more than a daily occurrence, common enough that I never stopped to think about its motivations or origins. It was usually dealt with swiftly and efficiently. Indeed, that night too, a few tugs were enough to bring me to climax, angling my body to neatly release myself in the sink. I rinsed it all, splashed some cold water on my face and headed to bed.

As I was about to shut the curtains, I saw across the pool, on the same floor as mine, but slightly to the left, a bedroom that wasn't lit earlier. The British man was standing on his balcony, the backlight making his face inscrutable but his posture suggesting he was looking at my window. I froze briefly, then, almost hypnotically, I lowered my boxers slowly, took them off and stood naked, facing him, the faint throbbing of my still semi-hardon as my only movement. I stared at him, for ten, maybe twenty long seconds. I went to turn out the lights and, with him still immobile, I shut the curtains, putting a quite theatrical end to my brief performance. Despite my heart pounding, despite the jetlag, I fell asleep quickly.

### Chapter 2

Monday

We boarded our mini-bus by 6 the next morning. My father and I had skipped breakfast, but I had made a quick detour to the restaurant to grab a cup of coffee. The rest of what would obviously be our group was leaving the room and I caught sight of the British couple gulping down their tea before following the small horde. The husband caught my eye, but betrayed no acknowledgement of the fleeting, strange moment we had shared the previous night.

The drive to Karnak Temple was short. The sky was crisp blue and the temperature had already reached at least 75. It would rise to the nineties quickly, as it would every day of the week. The low humidity made it somewhat bearable, but as soon as we got off the bus, I rushed to a shaded area while the guide was getting us organized, a quick dash for coolness I would replicate frequently and quite obsessively throughout our stay.

The site was astounding – sober and majestic. The guide, a wonderful young Egyptian woman who spoke a flawless English, walked us through courts and vestibules, alluringly oppressive clusters of massive columns and wide sun-flooded open areas. My father was basking in the beauty of it all with the glee of a child. At 57, he was still a handsome man and took good care of himself, despite having apparently foregone any active interest in rebuilding a romantic life. A serious and successful lawyer, a dedicated and protective father, he was able to periodically let go of any inhibitions and give a free rein to his natural and spontaneous keenness for the small beauties of life. That morning, he was shifty and impatient, walking ahead or running behind, chatting with everyone in the group (regardless of people's actual willingness to be engaged so briskly), all the while managing not to miss a word of our guide's explanations (even if those were frequently followed by him whispering additional trivia for my benefit).

The only wall he metaphorically hit was in his attempt to chat with the British couple. I had been watching them closely and my surveillance had confirmed my initial impression of seething marital discord. They did exchange brief gestures of tenderness, but they seemed quick to become irritated by each other. She sighed when he was walking too slowly, he shushed her when he was trying to listen to the guide, she chided him for failing to bring his sunglasses, he snapped the camera off her hands when she struggled with adjusting the lens. My observing them didn't go completely unnoticed. While I was careful to be discreet when watching her, I took an odd pleasure at being quite obvious in my staring at him, a pleasure reinforced and fed by his blushing attempts to stare me down, to feebly quiz me on my intentions. Nothing in his attitude was hostile or reprehensive; he was puzzled, weakened, expectant, furtive. He looked shaken when my father started to address him and his wife (their marital status now confirmed by my noticing of their wedding bands). I don't remember what he told them but I think my father flinched when he was met by a taut and cold answer from her. Undeterred, he tried another approach, by introducing himself and, pointing at me as I was pretending, a few feet away, to be absorbed by some hieroglyphs, "my son Benjamin".

I heard a trite "I'm Siobhan, this is my husband Adam" and my father had barely the time to utter, in the most British way he could achieve, "pleased to meet you" before the stiff young woman moved on to catch up with the rest of the group.

When our guide had completed her two-hour tour, she gave us thirty minutes to wander at our own pace, before the bus was set to leave. My father wanted to rest a bit and sit in the shade; I told him I would walk around some more and take additional pictures. The whole site was quite tantalizing and it was possible to find some dispersed quiet and empty spots, as most of the tourists present were clustered in synchronized groups. Sometimes, the silence was so complete I could hear my feet scratch the sand with every step I made. It was splendid.

I spotted Siobhan, sitting alone on a big rock, protected from the sun by a big column against which she rested her back. She was studiously applying sun cream on her face. I watched her closely, intently searching for something attractive about her. Her breasts were eye-catching enough and what her Capri pants revealed of her legs was equally pleasing. Yet her hat, shirt and pants were so ill-fitting and tawdry that it was hard to find her arousing, save from engaging in the mental visualization of her completely naked body. Her whole demeanor, however, seemed to preemptively strike against any such exercise. The way she was furiously rubbing the thick white sunblock all over her face made her look like she was angrily battling the sun itself and fending off any intruder who would similarly attempt to launch an assault on her body. I walked on, snapping pictures in the opposite direction, hoping that my stroll would take me along to where Siobhan's husband was taking a respite from her.

I walked around for fifteen minutes, playing hide-and-seek with the scorching sun and with the knots of tourists. As I stepped out distractedly from the Great Hypostyle Hall, I was suddenly blinded by a ray of sunshine slicing its way through two large columns. I instinctively and briskly raised my arm in front of my eyes and turned around, only to find, as my eyes reopened and readjusted to the light, Adam staring at me, a few feet away, standing straight and frozen, framed and dwarfed by two pillars on either side of him. He shuddered, then moved swiftly away, disappearing among the columns, the statues, the tourists.

I stopped in my tracks and couldn't move for a few seconds. I felt, slowly surging within me, a clear sense of elation and arousal, and a murkier feeling of vindication, of power. I couldn't help thinking he had been following me, or at the very least, had been resolutely watching me when his path crossed mine. I went after him, trying to locate him, but couldn't find him anywhere before it was time to rejoin the rest of the group in the bus.

Adam and Siobhan were already seated inside, as was my father. We drove to a museum, full of artifacts, statues, mummies. I wasn't fully able at first to concentrate on our guide's explanations, distracted as I was by my attempts to read and understand Adam's complete oblivion. He never looked at me, but he actually never seemed to be looking at anything or anyone, not really, not with the attention and involvement one would normally notice. He was vacant, even if faintly struggling to concentrate on our guide, on the objects, on the panels with printed accompanying texts. At some point, I saw him leaning towards one such panel and studiously reading about the adjacent chariot; it was only after a few long seconds that he shuddered, blushed and looked away: he had been facing the French translation.

* * *

When we got back to the hotel in the early afternoon, I hurried through lunch, impatient to get to the pool. I quickly changed into my swimming trunks and headed back down. The British couple had evidently skipped lunch and were lounging in the exact same chairs as the ones in which I had first seen them the day before. Siobhan was lying on her stomach, her t-shirt covering her back, as a likely protection from the sun. Adam was resting on his elbows, glimmering with sweat or sun oil, wearing black speedos. I noticed him noticing me.

The pool wasn't crowded and plenty of chaises were available. I purposefully, yet in an apparent casual way, chose two directly opposite from theirs. I turned them slightly, so that they faced the sun and the Nile, and laid the towels, books and bags I had brought. I found myself moving slowly, almost languorously, lifting my t-shirt and dropping my cargo shorts as might have done a cheap stripper. I felt Adam's eyes on me throughout and I relished capturing his attention.

I dove into the pool, just as much for cooling off as for parading my athletic skills – I had become quite a good swimmer and diver in the last few years, and I knew, from pictures taken by my proud brother, that I could dive all muscles tensed and stretched and cut in the water with some forceful grace and without much of a splash. I swam underwater all the way to Adam's side of the pool, made a swift turn and swam the way back, coming up for air when I reached my starting point. I shook my head briskly, sending circles of water drops all around me. I slowly turned around and looked at Adam: he had been watching me the whole time. I lifted myself swiftly out of the water and grabbed a towel to dry my face. I looked again, he was still watching.

He was, however, briskly snapped out of his staring by a movement of Siobhan's, and by some words she mumbled without my being able to understand them. Adam answered, in a similarly inaudible way. She appeared satisfied, though, as she resumed her dozing position. Adam sat up straight, turned around slightly and began to stare at the view. My eyes were fixed on him and I could detect, and rejoice from, his sideways glances towards me.

I manipulated my chaise so that I could sit up a little, my legs straightened in front of me. I spread them slightly and made an obvious gesture of readjusting my cock. My body was soaked from my dive in the pool, but quickly drying with the sun. I reached for the sun cream in my bag and started to lather myself up. I did so as slowly and as suggestively as I had just recently undressed. Adam was now clearly staring at me, his sideways glances now intended for checking whether his wife was stirring from her nap.

Even with the distance that separated us, I could feel the intensity of Adam's transfixed gawking. I then noticed some movement, someone walking towards the pool from the lobby. It was my father, who was finally joining me.

I panicked briefly, suddenly awake to the fact that I was sporting half an erection in the middle of this pool area which, even if it wasn't crowded, was still populated by at least a dozen people. I pulled my knees towards my chest and gently waved at my father. He sternly reprimanded me for being in the sun in the middle of day, reminded me (as he is prone to do) of the number of people who died of cancer on his side of the family, and asked a member of the staff, with verbose politeness, if an umbrella could be brought to us. When he caught Adam's watching us, he mistook his fascination for a wish for a similar favor. "Do you want an umbrella too, Adam?" he called, waking Siobhan in the process. Adam shook his head, without giving the gesture any clear meaning. My father decided for him and, turning back towards the middle-aged Egyptian pool attendant, asked "Would it be a terrible bother for you to bring one for this nice couple over there as well? They don't seem too comfortable under this scorching sun."

My father started to read his book but quickly dozed off. His arrival and the following animation caused by three staff members ineptly trying to correctly install the umbrellas on both sides of the pool had disrupted the general peace of the atmosphere, stirred Siobhan back into grumpy wakefulness, and dislodged Adam from our enthralling bubble.

I was fighting off sleep myself, as the jetlag seemed to pull me down on my chaise and numb my movements. I was still glancing at Adam and hoping to catch his eyes, but my assiduity had to be tempered by a wariness of becoming too obvious, both to Adam who, I instinctively felt, needed to be teased rather than convinced, and to Siobhan, who was scanning the guests, hiding behind her sunglasses what was probably a disapproving, bored or malicious gaze.

I rearranged my body again, trying in different ways to assume what I thought might be the sexiest pose, the most subtly suggestive attitude. I'd often caress my chest, my crotch or my legs, with candid yet lascivious detachment. I'd spread my legs or cross them. I'd turn around on my stomach, lifting my ass just so slightly. I constantly readjusted my cock. I was most likely being ridiculous, but the obvious longing I had seen and felt radiating from Adam in the last twenty-four hours was both a bolster to my cockiness and a mild antidote against self-consciousness.

And if and when I'd ever doubt that I'd become too pathetically recognizable in my seduction game, I'd only have to look at Adam: more often than not, he was watching me.

The whole atmosphere became heavy. The heat was now weighing down on my body. The near complete silence around the pool was disturbed only by occasional shouts coming from feluccas on the Nile, Arabic harangues that sounded full of anger or hilarity and that felt like projectiles launched over a metaphorical fence, behind which brimmed real life, dirt, small transactions, things to see and things to do, danger, History, poverty, and the Nile.

I decided to get some iced tea from the pool bar: I was parched and the short walk would take me right past Adam. I moved carefully as not to wake my father, stood up and lowered my trunks by an inch or two, displaying the upper patch of my pubic hair. I walked slowly, having taken notice of both Siobhan's dozing and Adam's apparent alertness to all my movements. As I approached him, I averted his eyes and looked at the rest of him, using this first opportunity I had to study from up close his mostly naked body. I couldn't help but first notice he was reading (albeit distractedly) a John Grisham novel. It registered briefly that I had wished him to be edgier and more selective in his tastes. John Irving would have been fine, Zweig, Mann, Pynchon or Kerouac would have been perfect.

He tanned better than his wife. His skin had moved from the light pink I had observed from afar the previous day to a golden light brown. His color and the pearls of sweat that covered his torso made his chest glisten attractively and the little hair he had looked soft and silky. He did not have an ounce of fat on him, he was even too thin here and there. His clavicles were protruding, but his biceps had a nice bulge. Both his hands rested on the hips of his speedos, as if framing his penis, distinctly bunched sideways between the fabric and his shrunken balls. He obviously didn't wear speedos whenever outside, as a tan line separated his very white upper thighs from healthier and sexier-looking thin and hairy legs. I had already passed him, despite my slow pace, before I could get a look at his feet. I had seen enough. He was beautiful.

Waiting for the barman to fix my drink and to bring me a glass of water, I did wonder whether I could have actually found him anything but attractive. Hadn't our flirtation taken me past any reservation, turn-offs, even indifference? Would I have noticed him and been attracted to him if he hadn't given all these intense, blushing signals? Would I be looking at this stranger's crotch if the clientele in the hotel had had more than three people under the age of fifty? Would I be caressing myself out in the open for his benefit if a young, hot waitress had had her shift this afternoon? If one of the two young, hot women I was currently involved with back in Philly had joined me on this trip?

I gulped down the glass of water at once, before heading back. Adam looked up from his book, his eyes squinting a little. I looked straight back at him and gave him a serious, warm stare, which he reciprocated, his mouth opening slightly, his breathing seemingly halted. I had only a few steps left before I'd pass him again, he'd become a figure behind me, he'd go back to his book, and I'd only have a distant view, missing the details and nuances and expressions he might decide to exhibit.

I had to hold his stare, which was suddenly so intense that I felt weakened and flushed. I had to hold his stare, because I had had the upper hand, I had strong-armed him into infatuation. I had to hold his stare, because he had to see, understand and fully absorb the brutality of my resolve, the reckless doggedness of my youth. I was coming after him. I knew that, I absolutely knew that, and he had to know it too.

He didn't stare down. He didn't blush. His eyes were fixated on me, displaying something I didn't recognize at first, an expression I hadn't really seen before on his face. I felt my body quivering a bit as I walked around the pool and reached my chair, eager to lie down. I closed my eyes. For the first time since our little game of cat-and-mouse had started, his gaze had been devoid of embarrassment, puzzlement, curiosity or eagerness; it was now a magnetic, sustained stare of pure, animal lust.

I had never been the conscious (and willing) recipient of such a torrent of raw sexual hunger coming from a man. I usually avoided the heavy flirting of strangers, something that occurs frequently when you're a young man living in a city. And Jason's heavy breathing or husky arousal had always felt directed at my cock, at the movement of our hands jerking each other off, or at our ejaculations; but it never really felt directed at me, as a person, as a living body.

I also realized that Adam's attention made me feel actually beautiful and sexy. I had never been very self-conscious, either way, about my body. It had changed a lot in the previous years, as I had been forewarned tediously and repeatedly in awkward sex-ed classes. But they had never told us when your new body would be ready, done, completed. I had noticed my feet had stopped growing; they were now wide, a little hairy, and looked manly enough. My legs had firmed up, thanks to hours of soccer practice. I wasn't sure about my arms, but my pectorals were coming along nicely, mostly due to the push-ups I had disciplined myself into performing every morning. My nose had a weird shape, but my blue eyes seemed to be appreciated. I had started to shave, but had little hair on my chest. I was taller and had broader shoulders than my dad and my two brothers, but I still had the occasional pimples. And Jason had voiced the reassurance I needed when it came to my dick.

But each of these body parts had seemed to have a life on their own; that is, I had let them grow and morph at their own pace and separately, with the vague idea that, one day, the sum of these parts will be complete and the whole, bigger or not, will reveal itself. In the meantime, I had no problems attracting girls and I was apparently athletic and attractive enough to compensate for my general guardedness.

But Adam's increasingly hungry eyes were tending a mirror in which I had never looked at myself. Like these rumored glasses that undress people, I saw myself naked and heavily sexualized. My arms, my legs, my dick felt bigger and stronger than I remembered or presumed them to be. My age had become irrelevant; I saw myself clearly and lucidly as a young man who was actually taller and stronger than this British guy in his late twenties, someone who would actually overpower him if it came to that, someone with whom he badly wanted to fuck. The sexual tension that I now felt dripping between us the way the Egyptian sun was soaking my forehead with sweat, did project intentions and possibilities that were wholly and grippingly adult. He didn't want me the way Jason and I had fooled around together, the way my girlfriend and I had after-school sex in my bedroom, not even the way the young woman from the community college and I were fucking like rabbits in her small room while her roommate was out.

Adam's eyes were full of a lust I hadn't quite encountered yet and were igniting within my groin and within my blurring brain sparks I wasn't quite able to tame. But I knew then, I really knew then, that our moment, his stare, my sudden appropriation of my completed body, had jostled me briskly into a stage of adulthood I had only glimpsed from a distance. Incidentally, dimly, I also felt myself sliding open a heavy door behind which two men could want each other so brazenly, without a trace of obfuscating ambiguity or orderly restraint.

I felt an erection growing in my trunks. I rubbed it slowly, shaping its bulge through the fabric. I opened my eyes and was disappointed to find Adam asleep.

I stared for a while at what then looked like a rather desolate view: Adam and Siobhan, two lumps of flesh slumbering in the shade. I stood up and briskly walked to my room, hampered by my erection. I lay on the floor, quickly released myself and, when done and drenched and panting, stared at the ceiling for what seemed like a very long time.

* * *

I had convinced my father to have dinner early, pretexting great appetite and a wish to have an early night and vanquish jetlag once and for all. My hunger lay somewhere else, however, as I longed to see Adam again and have him see me. I also wished for a longer opportunity to sit just a few feet away from him and for more run-ins at the various buffets. We were indeed better synchronized that night; Adam and Siobhan seemed to have just seated at their table when we arrived and I beat my father to the chair he had previously occupied. I was now facing Adam and experienced what an alcoholic felt when watching a sommelier uncork one of his best bottles.

Adam's reaction was immediate. He blushed nervously, with a hint of disapproval, as if my blunt attitude was an affront not only to propriety, but to his own intended caution as to how to handle the forthcoming evening. I was however relentless in my flirting assaults, mixing detachment and conspicuousness, oblivion and recklessness, with an instinctive sharpness that surprised me. I timed my trips to the buffet, my glances, the light touches of our arms as I'd walk past him; I was circling a prey, scaring it, taming it, softening it, and readying it for a yet amorphous outcome.

My father did notice my distraction (as Siobhan may have registered Adam's own), but his worry seemed limited to my enjoyment of the evening and, perhaps, by the kind of proxy some people are wont to establish, of the trip as a whole. I reassured him profusely on both accounts; my sincerity soothed him enough to let the evening run its course cordially – though he did twice turn around to ascertain the object of my twitching glances.

Adam and Siobhan ate rather quickly, coasting through dinner with a stilted conversation, leaving long silences between each of their questions and answers, rather like one of those language tapes where two people speak slowly, stretching blanks between them and overacting slightly their tediously asinine lines. Adam seemed to seize any opportunity given by his wife's meticulous attention to her plate and its content and by her own sporadic, bored scanning of the room to glance, stare, blink, and glower much throughout the evening. I let him win some of our stare-downs, to give him a sense of control, to draw him in the comfort of reciprocity. He became gradually less fidgety, managed to suppress his blushing, and seemed to conjure up again the proper and operational tools of flirting, as if using them for the first time after a long period of neglect. By the end of the evening, he seemed pleased with himself, basking in the immodest attention with which I bombarded him. He also seemed more attractive, his poise and grasp finally showcasing without obstruction his masculinity and his hunger.

When they got up to leave, Adam's hand tenderly grazed the small of her back, nudging her away from the restaurant, from me, from the uncertainty and danger we had kneaded all evening, from his own returning discomfort. He didn't look at me, but his avoidance was so resolute and his awareness of my watching so obvious that he seemed to breathe out capitulation and retreat.

I swiftly finished my glass of wine, a gesture my yawning father seemed to welcome and seized to call it a night. Our walk back to our rooms was brisk. I was stirred by anticipation, drunk with red wine and narcissism. Yet I felt a certain dread too: within a few minutes, I could very well be alone in my room and find across the way an empty balcony, drawn curtains, and foreclosing darkness in Adam's room. I briefly questioned my cockiness, my assertive claim on Adam's attention and mind activity, my sequestration of his lust, and my vanquishing of his qualms, uncertainties, or fears. As I climbed the stairs behind my uncharacteristically slow father, I realized that the sexual tension was overpowering me, my horniness making everything possible, urgent, yearning. I gave a distracted hug goodnight to my dad and closed the door of my room slowly, trying to catch my breath, to cool my head and to prepare myself for an anti-climactic disappointment. I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. But I couldn't help notice the quickening of my pace as I made my way to the balcony.

I glimpsed quickly at Adam's room. It was dark and the balcony was empty. But as I opened the sliding door, I saw Adam by the pool, assuming the same vacant, lonely position and seated on the exact same chaise as he had the previous night. My movement caught his attention and his head tilted upwards towards me, slowly, as if he had been waiting for this moment, with patience or resignation. It was too dark to decipher anything more than the direction of his stare. I wouldn't have been able to tell anger from lust, dismissal from begging. But he didn't move and kept his eyes fixed on me, which told me enough.

I was stunned for a few seconds, for I realized that whatever the next step was, it was mine to make. I had fantasized something happening with him and it had to do with sex. Clutching his flesh, touching his face, squeezing his chest and his ass. It had a lot to do with him feasting on my body somehow too, him taking the initiative and showing me what he had in mind, showing me what two men do when they're both hardened by a raw and crude shared attraction. When Alicia, the woman from the community college, had stripped me naked in her room for the first time, she had dived on my cock and given me the kind of blowjob I didn't know existed; she had relentlessly maneuvered me to fuck her in more positions than I had once imagined. I knew I wanted something similar from Adam, even though I couldn't quite conceive what it would be, look and feel like and even though, more importantly at that stage, I didn't know how we would journey to that point, separated as we were by stairs, doors, silence, nightfall.

I stepped back inside, while making sure he could still see me. I slowly stripped down to my boxers and t-shirt, staring at him. I went to fetch a beer from the mini-bar and came back out. I turned the wicker chair in his direction and sat down. I took a couple of sips from the can and I spread my legs wider, sluggishly. My naked feet felt nice on the warm tiles and a slight breeze was caressing the hair on my legs. I looked up and around, the whole hotel seemed quiet, all the rooms but a distant one on the ground floor were dark. I switched my beer to my left hand and used the right one to grab my cock and fondled it out of the opening of my boxers. I started to stroke it slowly, my watching him only interrupted every few seconds to check for any light or movement in the rooms facing me. I put my left foot against the railing. I spat on my hand and resumed my indolent jerking.

Your move, I thought. This is fine for me, this feels great: reckless, dangerous, subversive, daring, violently erotic. This is my last missile blasted on you; now you watch, you leave or you join.

He stood up. Looked around him, nervously. Glanced up at me. I couldn't tell whether he was seeking a further sign of consent on my part, or a final clearance from his own conscience. He looked towards the lobby and the stairs leading to the floors, took a last glimpse of my ongoing jacking, and made a start, not looking back.

I went to my door and opened it ajar. I went to sit on the edge of the bed, ready for him. I was oddly calm. I had done my part: I had reached into my own limits of boldness, I had set things in motion. All I had to do was to wait and accept whatever I had made him ready to offer. I heard footsteps approaching, slowing down, my cock throbbing expectantly. The backlit shade of Adam appeared in the slight door frame. He pushed it open slowly, stepped carefully into my room, then shut it briskly behind. My eyes and his adjusted to the dim light; he was gradually taking shape just as I was materializing to him. The silence was so overpowering I could hear his breathing and feel the beating of my heart.

"I can't stay," he muttered, without making clear whether this was a warning, an admonishment, a sorrow, or an urging for self-discipline on his own part. "It's okay," I said, answering at once all his potential meanings. I resumed my stroking, he gaped a little and moved towards me. He pushed me on my back and started to kiss me on my neck, grabbing my biceps. He lifted up my t-shirt and regaining his immobilizing grasp, his mouth licked, sucked, kissed me all over my chest, stomach, armpits. His eyes kept darting up towards me, but he wasn't seeking permission. The hunger and intensity in his look were like an inhalation of me, of the moment, of our lust. He ravenously took my cock in his mouth, using one hand to grip at its shaft, the other to seize my balls. He hurt me a little and the discomfort I felt from his sucking came as a disappointment in comparison to men's alleged skills at blowjobs. But as he eased his clutch and slowed down his rhythm, the sensation slowly morphed into something more familiar, more blissful. I grabbed his head with both hands, enjoying the feel of his short hair around my fingers, and sending him the reactions and signals needed to adjust the pace and movement of his bobbing face.

It then felt amazing. He released my hands from his head, to gain better access to my body for his own. He rubbed my stomach, my nipples, my arms, my hips. I couldn't keep my eyes off him and every time he looked up towards me, his mouth full of my cock or his lips slurping noisily on my foreskin, a jolt of sexual electricity flushed me.

He undid his buckle, pushed his khakis and underwear down, just enough to release his own cock. I couldn't quite see it, his position, the darkness and the rapid strokes of his arm dimming the view. He was on his knees, facing me, between my dangling legs. He started to lick and kiss my balls. With his free hand, he grasped and massaged one of my legs, then the other, licking the muscles of my thighs, the sweaty part behind the knee, the hair on my calves, the bones of my ankles.

He came back up towards my groin and resumed his blowing, stroking me with one hand while furiously jerking himself off with the other. I was reaching orgasm pretty fast and breathed "Watch out...". He seemed to take a couple of seconds to understand my meaning and he lifted his mouth just as I was spurting the first jet of an expectedly copious orgasm. A couple of drops hit his upper lip and nose, before I corrected my aim towards my chest. He buried his face on my balls and scrotum, muffling his grunting and smearing my semen. I felt him cum, though I didn't see it. He exhaled loudly between my legs.

He looked up at me. Within a couple of seconds, his face expressed amusement, terror, relief, pleasure, unease, in a sequence I can't quite recall today. I thought about smiling, about caressing his flushed cheeks, about saying something coarse and sexy, but I stayed silent and rather expressionless. He stood up, lifted and readjusted his pants, tucking his shirt back in. I sat up straight and took his hand in mine. I squeezed it, looking up towards him. The widest, most luminous smile I had ever seen him with accompanied his own squeezing back my hand. He lifted it and kissed it. He blushed, suddenly aware of the oddness of the gesture. He dropped it and made his quick way towards the door.

"Good night, Adam," I said softly.

"Yes, good night."

"See you tomorrow," I added, just in time before the door was delicately shut.

I stood up and headed towards the bathroom. But I felt dizzy, lightheaded. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, against the deck. I took a deep breath and looked at my room, at my balcony, at my bed. It happened. It just happened. I glanced at the spot where Adam had kneeled down, just a few minutes ago. He had cum on the front side of the bed, splattering the bedcover. His cum was dripping slowly to the carpeted floor, forming a small white puddle. I watched this intently and, just for a fleeting moment, it was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen.

### Chapter 3

Tuesday, Adam

So this makes three. Philip, Devon, and now young Benjamin. Or four, if Adam counts Nigel. But wanking off just the once, at night under a tent in a campground on the Isle of Wight, doesn't count, does it? "Brilliant" was the only word uttered. By Nigel, at the end, when it was obvious both of them had just made a mess of their sleeping bags. And Nigel is his cousin, his deranged, unstable, troublemaker of a cousin. That can't count. He had decided the next morning that it didn't. Ten years later, he doesn't see why it now would. So three men. For eleven women. Twelve, if he counts Siobhan twice, as their first fling was a one-time thing, two full years before they actually started to date. But if he counts Siobhan twice, he'd have to count Devon like, what, six or seven times?

The bus is finally speeding up a bit. They left the Valley of the Queens about thirty minutes ago and the drive back to the hotel seems to take twice as long as the trip to the site. It was dawn, granted. Or at least very early. But people in this country seem to wake up with the sun. He doesn't notice much difference in traffic. He thinks the bus is just so much slower. He feels distracted and he is sure it has to be obvious to anyone. It has to be. He can't seem to be able to focus on anything. "This is your trip," Siobhan had said curtly three months ago, when they were at the bookstore and he had asked her if she wanted to buy something on Egypt. It felt like a betrayal. It was indeed his dream to go to Luxor, it had been since he was a kid. But the favor she had done him with the necessary amount of grace when they had made all the bookings had suddenly become, within two seconds inside a bookstore, a begrudged compromise with a capricious bore. So this is his trip, he had decided. This is his trip, he had been reminding himself whenever he hears or sees her cross, sunburned, impatient, or bored. It's okay, they're in bloody Egypt, this is fantastic. She's aloof all the time, but the sun will make her beautiful within days; she forgot his biography of Howard Carter, but he's bought a John Grisham at the airport. She finds the people at the hotel boring and snotty, but he thinks their tour guide is just terrific. She says she can't believe Americans really are everywhere. He can't believe he sucked Benjamin's cock last night. And he can't believe he just said this to himself. But "this is your trip", she had said.

"What am I feeling?" he has been constantly thinking since last night, the way a hypochondriac might constantly check his pulse. Like his dad. He wishes he could say he doesn't feel anything. Or much. He wishes he could be that guy. But he's flustered and distracted, quivered and cracked by feelings. He's just not sure what they are. Guilt and lust are obvious, but they're not really feelings, aren't they? Cause and effect, his English teacher used to say. Cause and effect.

He should concentrate. Compare and contrast. Rationalize. Shake himself into clarity. The heat is so brutal, though. His polo shirt has been sloppily stuck to his back for the last three hours. The inside of his armpits and groin feel unpleasantly damp, his whole face feels sickly moist. Siobhan is dozing next to him and her sunburned body seems to radiate out all the heat accumulated during their tour of the Valley. Benjamin is sitting a couple of seats ahead, on the aisle like him, but the other side. He can only see about, what, a third of his face? He can see Benjamin's left ear. His brown hair, a little curly. He can see him fidgeting, crossing and uncrossing his legs, raising his left foot against the seat in front of him. The old Welsh lady sitting ahead turns around and scorns the young American with a darting look. He can see Benjamin's hand, occasionally rubbing his thigh, slightly pulling up his green cargo shorts, or his fingers, slowly going through the hair on his calf. Adam knows he knows he's watching. That's their thing, apparently.

Benjamin's been watching him the whole morning, though. Just as he has since he arrived, since this thing started. He's a bit different today, however, Adam thinks. He's less menacing, less pressing, less abrasive somehow. There was a lot of walking again today, sites to go through, tombs to sneak in. The Valley of the Nobles and the Valley of the Queens. The Kings are for tomorrow, as if they have to climb the social ladder themselves. Benjamin smiled a couple of times, looking at him, when the tour guide or his chatty father made some kind of joke. That was nice.

Clarity. Compare and contrast. With what? Nigel doesn't count. So, Philip. And Devon. Easy, it's nothing like Devon. He didn't really like Devon, one of his flatmates at Uni. Buff rugby player, posh but a bit rogue. A blond rich young man with some kind of inherited title, but who liked to play the lad. Heavy drinker, fixed up with Lara Double Surname, average student, party boy. Didn't go home much during weekends, as opposed to Eric, Liam and Adam, who all lived somewhere in South London, barely an hour away from Brighton.

Adam once came back to the flat a few hours after he had left it, having decided that the weekend alone in Brighton would be more pleasant than enduring his Aunt's surprise visit ("Have my room, please, really, I insist"). He heard loud sex noises as soon as he stepped in. Two men, obviously. Then panicky shuffling. He went straight to his room and heard someone leave. It wasn't before dinner time that Devon acknowledged what Adam had stumbled into. Detached, blasé, almost disdainful, Devon stated as a matter of fact that buggery (his word) was cool sometimes. He claimed not to care what Adam thought (Adam didn't think anything) but still, not quite casually, suggested his flatmate doesn't tell anyone. "These twats wouldn't get it," he claimed, but he didn't say who these twats precisely were. Adam assumed he meant the world-at-large, as everyone was a twat to Devon until otherwise proven.

The whole thing was never brought up by either of them for a few weeks until one night, when they were alone in the flat and had ordered pizza. A rather attractive young Italian had delivered it and as soon as he had left, Devon winked and said "This was almost like a gay porn set-up, wasn't it?" Adam had never seen gay porn and his face must have been blank. Devon blushed, very much alone in his attempt at coarseness. Which made Adam feel inadequate, for some reason. After eating, and lounging on the couch, he asked if Devon still engaged in the "buggery thing". Devon's face closed off, but nodded yes. "Who are these guys? Where do you find them?"

"They're strangers. Real men," Devon said, with a hint of aggression. He seemed to imply that these men were nothing like Adam, at least on these two counts. That's how Adam took it.

"I've fooled around with guys too, you know. Well, one guy in particular."

"Okay," Devon said, feigning indifference, while his body was slowly shuffling.

"Yes."

Devon turned off the telly, which they had been distractedly watching, and Adam couldn't read into the silence that followed.

"Well, you want to play?" Devon finally said, with puzzled impatience.

And they did. They engaged in what Adam had come to assume was the typical stuff that went on between two young guys. He was never fully and wholly in the action, however, being constantly distracted by how different sex with Devon was from what he had experienced many times over with Philip. The new body especially seemed completely foreign to him. Devon was blond and tanned, short and beefy, whereas Philip had been, much like Adam himself, brown, pale, lean. Devon was a bull, whereas Philip had been a horse. Or something like that.

He came to his senses when he realized Devon was trying to penetrate him. He had not foreseen that, as actual intercourse had not been part of his experience with Philip, except for that one fateful time. He tensed. Devon couldn't get in and he became limp. And irritated.

"Do me," he simply said and led Adam to his bed, positioning himself on all fours with an ease and swiftness Adam recalled, weeks later, when he told him being fucked (in that position) is all he does with all these strangers, these real men. Adam had never "done" a man before, but he "did" Devon. It felt dirty, debauched, but terribly exciting. He didn't last long, which seemed to renew his flatmate's irritation, who wanked himself off, still on all fours, isolating his thoughts, attention and orgasm from Adam, who was left panting on the edge of the bed.

It happened again, a few times over the course of the following two years. Seven or six times is still Adam's estimate. Nothing transpired to anyone, not to their flatmates, not to Lara, not to his own occasional girlfriends, not to any twats Devon had warned him against. Nothing actually changed between them either, as Devon's attitude towards him stayed absolutely constant. But they would fuck every once in a while, always at Devon's suggestion, always in his room, always in the same position. They didn't bother with foreplay, an omission Adam was fine with, as cuddling, kissing or hugging Devon was never something he had craved. Devon never said much before, during (except "harder", repeatedly and commandingly) or after. Except that one time, when he was still drunk after they had both climaxed, and he started to confide, without prompting, about his experiences, his lust and his needs. He spoke fast. A torrent of filth, really; a flood of smut. Adam didn't say anything, listened and kept wishing he could take a cleansing shower.

Benjamin turns back briefly and flashes him a faint, yet cheerful, smile. Gosh, he is beautiful. Why did he smile? Maybe because they're approaching the hotel. Adam recognizes the row of resorts on this avenue. They're only a few minutes away. He feels so happy right now. And he doesn't have an erection. That must mean something. "What am I feeling?", he ponders - again.

* * *

He and Siobhan are skipping lunch again. They only paid for half-board, she pointedly reminds him. She just got out of the cold shower she had rushed to as soon as they had stepped out of the bus. She is never as beautiful as when she dries herself, naked with damp hair. Her sun-blotched body is a little disgraceful right now, but she seems calm, fresh to the touch, soap-smelling, unadorned with make-up or clothes that don't always suit her or fit who she really is.

He knows he has an hour or so of respite. Benjamin and his father will probably take a shower too, will surely have lunch (they look like full-board guests, like people who can afford it). It's a time he wants to use not to think. He's ready to step in the shower himself and Siobhan is still standing naked in front of the mirror. He lightly grabs her shoulders with both his hands, his eyes meeting hers in their reflection. He lifts her long wet hair sideways and plants a small kiss on her neck. She looks at him, intrigued.

He hates it when she meets his gestures of physical affection with puzzlement. It chides him a little. She had that same look, he thinks, two nights ago, when he initiated sex. It was very dark in the room and he had just turned off the light, but he's pretty sure he caught it. It was the first night he had seen, and watched, Benjamin from their balcony. The young man (the old boy?) had just essentially stripped for him and stood brazenly naked by his own window. By the time Adam fully took in the suffocating appeal of these actions, Benjamin had abruptly shut his curtains. As Adam lay in bed seconds later, he put his hand on Siobhan's shoulder blade. The touch of skin felt like a sparkle and despite indications that she might be sleeping, he pulled her gently towards him, caressed her and, in their usual somewhat rapid sequence, entered her.

His mind was buzzing with the fresh image of a naked, peering Benjamin and he imagined him watching them, watching him fucking his wife. This intensified the pleasure and, he could feel it, his own hardness. The fantasy slowly morphed into Benjamin fucking his wife, Adam somehow floating above them. Then, and he's not sure how to aptly remember this, he became Benjamin (Benjamin became him?), that is, he was Benjamin fucking Siobhan. Or rather, and this is accurate he thinks, he was Benjamin fucking a woman. And he was good. He was really good. He was powerful, and gentle, and skillful. It felt incredible and intense. So did the orgasm that followed, sooner than usual, but not too soon as not to give time to Siobhan to reach her own. He thinks.

They didn't talk about it. Nor should they have. He doesn't think it usual for a married couple to actually discuss and dissect their sex life, is it? Part of him wished she had acknowledged the wonderful moment he believed they had shared; he can use the validation, occasionally. But another part was probably uneasy with what had ignited and amplified it. Some things are better left unsaid.

He steps into the shower, caressing on his way the small of her back, and turns on the water. He doesn't have an erection. That doesn't have to mean anything.

* * *

He wishes it were winter. A sunny, briskly cold winter. Benjamin would have to wear layers of clothing. A scarf, rubbing the very light stubble he sports on his chin. A hat, maybe, pulled down just above his dark blue eyes. They could sneak somewhere. Meet in a secluded, quiet, private place. And Adam could remove all these layers, one by one. Gloves would reveal Benjamin's strong hands. Coat, sweater, shirt, undershirt would slowly draw the sharp features of his chest and arms. It would take time. He could ease his way into lust.

The young American's constant near-nakedness is unsettling and aggressive. It's only in the evenings that a long-sleeved shirt, actual pants, as well as socks and shoes cloak him with some endurable decency. All day long, however, his tanning bare body parts are free and authorized to unleash their constant assault on Adam's self-control.

"I can't control myself," his friend Liam had tried to explain to him, about six months ago, after Liam's wife had left. He had made no secret to Adam of his infidelities; he had bragged a bit about his shags with women from work or from pubs in cities he had to travel to. A disgruntled secretary had eventually bitterly spilled the beans to his wife and his marriage was shattered. So was his life, according to him. "I just can't control myself."

Liam opening up was a rare occurrence and when he did finally gut himself apart, after just two Guinnesses at the pub, what he displayed seemed lame and trite. An easy cop out. Control is something Adam had become excellent at practicing. Control was the one obvious thing you have to learn to master when you become an adult, when you commit, when you move forward in life. If he can do it (and endure the pain and tugging and pulling), why couldn't Liam? If he has to do it, why shouldn't anyone else?

Control is discipline and structure. It's a compromise, with yourself, with your spouse, with the potentialities that life throws at your face. It's exercising choice, implementing your decisions, managing their practicalities. He has sex about once a month. With his wife. It works for them. He masturbates once a week. It works for him. He gets along with people, with his parents, with his sister, with his in-laws. He tries to have everyone getting along too (his mother doesn't like Siobhan, though, but there's only so much one can do).

"Are you and Siobhan really happy?" Liam had asked, either looking for advice or commiseration. "Yes, of course," Adam had replied tersely, striving intensely hard not to throw a punch at his pathetic puffed-up face. Fuck you, Liam. Fuck you then, and fuck you now. Adam's self-control is dissolving, yes. He is dissolving. But this is nothing like Liam's shagging bimbo sluts. They wiggle their tits to tug at his prick; Benjamin, this beautiful man, is stabbing Adam's brains, his heart, his guts. But he is fine. He really is. He can handle this, he has before. Though not quite like this, not when he's married, not when a man is clawing at him.

A loud splashing sound shakes him out of his dozing. He opens his eyes, covers them with his hand from the blinding sun. The surface of the pool seems empty but chopped. He can now see a figure swimming underwater, moving gracefully and blurrily towards his direction. Then Benjamin suddenly emerges, gasping for air, reaching the concrete edge. He rests both his arms on it, shakes his head forcefully, spreading drops of water all around. He spits some water, breathes in and out, and opens his eyes. He stares at Adam, briefly, then smiles, then pushes himself backwards, then inhales fully, then slides back into the water, swimming back towards his starting point.

He is sitting on the pool steps, eyes closed, facing up towards the sun, drying up his dripping body, his legs spread wide. On a whim, Adam stands up and dives in the pool. It's only when he's moving under water, briskly cooled by the sudden drop in temperature that he needs to figure out what he'll do next. He settles for swimming laps, a natural and common enough activity for him. He starts going back and forth. From one side of the pool to another, from Benjamin to Siobhan and back. He notices his wife briefly looking up from her magazine, he registers Benjamin watching him discreetly, while chatting casually with his father, seated behind him under an umbrella. The swim is actually invigorating. Just as Benjamin's room had felt like a secure haven for them to pretend the rest of the world didn't exist, this pool too feels like a safe vacuum, isolating them somehow from the crowd sunbathing and lounging all around them. The pool is theirs, Benjamin stretches out, Adam swims. And he swims some more. He doesn't want to get out of the water, he wants to stay and to keep floating in this suspended time.

* * *

Clarity. Compare and contrast. Philip. Adam liked Philip; he really, really, bloody liked him. Philip was not beautiful: bespectacled, pasty, rather shapeless. "How come I have a girlfriend and you don't? I mean, look at you, look at me", Philip once quipped. He got himself a girlfriend shortly afterwards.

Philip was not dangerous, not at first. He was reserved and bookish, yet opened up with him. "Only with me," Adam liked to think. Philip became vibrant, energetic and luminous. They were both sixteen when they met, eighteen when Adam last heard from him. For two years, they were inseparable. They didn't go to the same school but belonged to the same chess club at their local library. They spent afternoons cycling, they played board games obsessively, they went to the movies all the time (they once saw "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" three times in a row), they went camping often, they slept at each other's places on a weekly basis. They talked about everything: computers, sports, Adam's stiff parents and Philip's separating ones, TV shows, school and the prospects of Uni, the loss of Philip's virginity, their shared inability to keep their girlfriends interested. They did a tour of Europe by train one summer. There was a lot of rain, he remembers.

And they kissed. All the time. They held hands, whenever alone. It seems like they never spent a night together without falling asleep spooning. All of this came naturally and quickly. Adam doesn't even remember the first times of any of these mileposts. But he still remembers the feeling of squeezing into a single sleeping bag together. He remembers the clutch of Philip's hand on his when they ran through a storm. He doesn't cringe at the banality of these beautiful moments. They're his and, yes, he cherishes them.

It did become more sexual, of course it did. It was tentative at first. They gave each other blow jobs in the woods once, about eight months after they had become fast friends. Philip displayed amusement and pleasure, the right attitude to make Adam feel comfortable and to make them at ease to do it again a month later. It then became a regular occurrence. So did mutual masturbation. The whole thing was lovely, really.

Adam became visibly anxious early in the summer before university. He was headed to Brighton, Philip had chosen Hull. Adam probably became a little needy, enough at least to disrupt the smooth balance of their relationship (a word they never used), to scratch at the bundle of unsaid feelings and unacknowledged implications of their bonding. Adam noticed Philip started to talk about girls and heterosexual sex much more, with a gauche bravado.

One night, towards the end of that summer, he let it all out, vomiting his feelings all over Philip, using as only precaution the systematic substitution of "like" for "love". Philip was uneasy, but took him in his arms. Adam used everything he knew about Philip and his body (and he knew plenty) to work him into an erection. The sex they had seemed perfunctory and half-hearted until Adam motioned him into a position that clearly indicated his wanting for Philip to penetrate him. Philip blushed and frowned. But he then spat on his fingers and translated the meagre inserting skills he had acquired with this one girl to enter Adam.

Adam's body exploded, its smithereens circling around, crashing and pounding ceaselessly for the twenty minutes that Philip lasted inside him. He had never felt anything like it, he had never felt such a need to possess Philip so wholly, he had never felt such little control over his own self. He had never loved Philip more.

Philip was obviously uneasy when they had finished. Very obviously. A little angry too? He never picked up the phone the next day when Adam called; his mother kept taking messages throughout the week. Adam has never heard from him ever since.

Here too control and discipline and structure have helped. Adam once tried to picture Philip when he was fucking Devon. It didn't work, he felt like sullying the image of teenage candidness he was struggling to maintain, the image of Philip he used to suppress the memories of that last, fateful night: Philip smiling, removing his spectacles to kiss him, taking his hand, carrying him somewhere new, nice and lovely.

If Adam's gay, he reckons, he'd be a terrible gay man. A gay man for whom topping is dirty, and bottoming inevitably leads to rejection, humiliation and collapsing pain.

* * *

His arms and shoulders are sore. How long has he been swimming? Siobhan seems to have dozed off again. Why is she always so tired? Benjamin is standing up, telling his father (loudly enough for Adam to hear) that he's going to the bathroom.

So that's his cue. Does he have a say in this? Can he lead this dance for once? Of course, he can. He just doesn't. He just lies there, he eats, lounges, watches, swims, just waiting for his cue. Wait, Adam, for Devon to tell you to fuck him. This is the time of the month, Adam, to make love to your wife. You better enjoy this trip, Adam, because "this is your trip"; just don't have lunch, because you're only half-board guest. Gosh, he could just cry, sometimes. Or scream.

He wants to scream. Where can he go and scream? Where can anyone scream, just the once, really loud, really long, shattering one's whole body?

He lifts himself out of the pool and wraps himself with the towel. He closes his eyes and breathes. And he heads to the bathroom, leaving a gently snoring Siobhan behind. She could follow him, she could follow the wet imprints of his feet as he marches towards where he's expected to go. Except these traces dry and disappear almost instantly, and he realizes his fast pace might just be due to the scorching heat of the concrete burning his soles.

The bathroom is plastered with Arabic orange-brown tiles, with two cubicles, two urinals and two sinks. Benjamin is washing his hands. Or pretending to. His back, tan and strong, is what greets Adam, then his look in the mirror, showing relief and a bit of excitement.

"I wasn't sure you heard my signal," he smiles, not turning around, looking at Adam intently in the mirror.

"I didn't, actually," Adam lies. "But I noticed you were gone and I chose to look for you. I decided to check in here first, though you might have just gone up to your room."

Benjamin finally turns around and steps towards him. "You're a good swimmer," he says, looking for something to say.

Adam reaches for his hands, grabs them gently and pulls him. He turns him so Benjamin's back rests against the door, blocking any potential intruder. The young man looks at him searchingly, a gaze that mellows and softens him instantly. Adam leans slowly and kisses him softly, his lips grazing the soft duvet just above his mouth. He cups Benjamin's head between his two hands and kisses his ear, his cheekbone, his chin, his neck, then moves back up towards the lips. Benjamin kisses him back, with a skill and a tenderness that he doesn't expect. Their tongues roll around and it feels like the best kiss he's ever had. It surely isn't true, but that is what it feels like in his hollowing head. That's what all perfect kisses feel like.

The only sound is the fall of water drops from their soaked swim trunks onto the tiles. Adam becomes a bit distracted by his erection. He becomes more distracted by Benjamin's. But he thinks it doesn't have to lead to anything, it is actually quite fantastic to feel these two little monsters wiggle around, rubbing each other, having their own conversation down there while Benjamin's and his mouths are busying themselves at sealing a tenderness that had been absent so far from their encounters. Adam grabs Benjamin's hands and squeezes them forcefully, completing a sort of holy trinity: horniness, tenderness, strength.

* * *

He has about fifteen minutes to himself. Twenty, maybe? He doesn't know. The sun is setting, but he can't figure out how much time he has left until it disappears behind the hills across the Nile. He used to be pretty good at that. He is pretty good at that. He'd say fifteen minutes, by the look of it.

Benjamin's left, along with his father. A quick parting glance from him, blushing bliss for Adam. Siobhan's just left too. He's actually alone around the pool right now, except for the pool attendant who's started to tidy things up. He may be in the way. But he actually doesn't care, it can't be appalling manners to enjoy the pool until the sun is actually set.

He can't seem to concentrate on anything, on any thought. Which is fine, except that he feels he should use these fifteen minutes to take stock, somehow, to make sense of it all. He tries to think about Philip, feeling that he could actually think about him without the usual piercing pain. But he sees his feet and wiggles his toes. He tries to think about being Benjamin's age and whether he'd have been so brazenly forward with a man in his late twenties, when he was himself eighteen. He starts to compare times, eras really, and what it means - what it feels - to be attracted to a man in the mid-eighties and ten years later, today. But then he looks at his hands, closes one into a fist, then opens that fist, then remembers it wrapped around Benjamin's cock. He think about Benjamin's cock now, of course he does. He tries to think about next week, about next month. He dares himself to, as if he ought to face the anguish. But he can't, not really. He looks at the small gardens around him and he remembers a sunflower.

A couple of years ago, Siobhan had decided to plant some sunflowers in the back corner of their small garden. The seeds had grown rather nicely, thanks to a warm and sunny summer. By the fall, however, she had decided she didn't like them any longer and had quite ferociously slashed and pulled them. Adam witnessed the following summer that one had apparently survived his wife's wrath. It was a single sunflower, standing rather proud and valiant, even if looking a bit desolate and alone among untended weeds. That summer, however, proved to be one of the worsts, even by British standards. The sun rarely shone and the temperatures were well below the season averages. In this grey and damp environment, the enduring sunflower seemed to be stunted in its development. Its flower was never more than a bulging, unopened round burgeon. Whenever he saw it, which was rarely, he did hope that for its sake alone, summer would finally deliver on its promise of light and warmth, feeding the flower with its essential nutrients, giving it the strength to bloom and realize its own potential. It never did. He kept expecting Siobhan to tear it out, either to end its suffering or to dispense of a useless failure of an organism ("uselessness" was one of her most common, and visceral, aversion). She didn't. She and he both very much ignored the sun-deprived flower and let it rot slowly, still standing.

* * *

Dinners are usually when his wife and he manage to relax and be more comfortable around each other. It has been so for a while now. It may have something to do with leaving work troubles and everyday stress behind, transitioning to a silently cozy evening in front of the television. Or it is the wine. Siobhan and Adam have come to drink a lot of red wine in the evenings.

The wine here is quite nice. He likes it, at least. And he loves the buffet. Siobhan thinks it "not very classy", but he loves the variety, the possibilities, and the fact that you're the one who chooses when to stop. His habit with buffets is to stuff his plate with as much food as he can. "It's not like you've been through the war, Adam. You can pace yourself, there's no rationing," she usually chides. He plays it differently now, though. He helps himself with less and goes back often. Because each trip to the buffet has come to mean an encounter with Benjamin. Adam passes by his table and smiles, they walk past each other and discreetly bump, they stand by each other pretending to scan all the dishes but whisper cute things like "you're so hot tonight" or "I really want to kiss you again". Adam feeds off these stolen moments just as voraciously as he does on the more than decent international food that half-fills his plates. Forty-five minutes ago, at the soup buffet, Benjamin even made him feel beautiful.

Adam has to control his giddiness, but the wine doesn't help. He has tiny, split-second-long panic attacks about Siobhan potentially launching into a conversation more grave or important than he can possibly handle. Like them having a baby. Although she hasn't brought this up for a long while now.

So he makes her talk. And she does, gradually more open and engaged. He makes her talk about her dad (one of her favorite subjects), he makes her talk about her job, he makes her talk about her childhood (also something she loves dwelling on). And he finds her lovely and beautiful. And it breaks his heart, also for a split-second. He feels inadequate and undeserving. Then he excuses himself to go quickly to the buffet ("Hold that thought, my darling, I'll be right back") and he gets a fix of his drug, of Benjamin's carefree and luminous flirtation. He comes back, recharged and ready.

Tonight is the first night that Benjamin and his father leave the dining room before Adam and Siobhan do. Adam decides he is not scared. He's curious and excited about what will happen. Soon. As soon as Siobhan empties her glass and wraps up this story about her uncle. She does and they both make their way out, she obviously a little tipsy. He doesn't even have to tell her he wants to relax a bit out there; she knows well enough that this is part of his ritual, every night, his own transitioning exercise, the buffer between the day and the night. Fifteen minutes (sometimes more, sometimes less) that belong just to him. She's always asleep by the time he's brushed my teeth, slipped on his pajamas and joined her in bed.

She cursorily waves her goodnight, yawning. He heads slowly to the pool, by now a rendezvous point with Benjamin. He shudders. He remembers last night, blurrily. He remembers losing himself in the moment, surrendering to an unmanageable lust. "I can't control myself," Liam had said. The floodgates opened last night. He sees himself with Benjamin's cock in his mouth; he sees his tongue darting into Benjamin's bellybutton; he sees his hand clutching the muscles of Benjamin's arms; he sees his fingers kneading into Benjamin's thighs. He can still feel drops of Benjamin's semen on the tip of his own nose.

Clarity. Compare and contrast. Well, no. He's heading out. He's meeting him. Benjamin is right there, by the pool, in the dark, standing up, waiting. Adam stops. Are they going up? The teenager starts moving, but not in Adam's direction, not in the direction of the stairs. He's walking slowly, making sure that Adam follows him. So Adam does.

There are a few steps after the pool area and the bushes of laurel. There is a patch of grass and flowers, then a wall. But Adam knows there's a door in that wall, which you can open with your room key. Behind that door, behind that wall, is a whole other world. The real world. A dusty large path, forming some sort of bank for the Nile. There is a small wooden dock there too, where a bunch of feluccas are stationed. He's glanced at it in his short exploration on the first day here.

Benjamin is holding the door open for him. Adam passes him and steps out, apprehensive and dumbfounded.

"What are we doing here?" Adam whispers. There is nobody around and it's almost pitch black, until his eyes slowly adjust.

"This is a bit more private. We can talk here. We could just sit down and talk. We're in Egypt, we are steps away from the fucking Nile. It's amazing." Benjamin, perplexed or irritated, knows Adam's not convinced.

"Yes, indeed", Adam says, looking around, hesitant and uneasy. Instead of sitting next to Benjamin, he takes a few steps towards the Nile. It's so dark. It's bloody scary. He doesn't know why his breathing starts to be arduous. He is sweating. It's maddeningly silent, but he keeps expecting people, locals, to emerge from the darkness and start shouting at them in their incomprehensible language. They could be mugged here, lynched or mobbed. They're two men, alone in the night. Adam wears a double scarlet letter on my forehead: he's an adulterer and a faggot.

This is all wrong.

Let me go back inside, Adam screams silently. They could have gone by the pool if it wasn't so exposed. The pool is nice, it works well for them. Let them go back to their bathroom, because, yes, it's their bathroom now. Let them go back to Benjamin's room, to his dimmed, safe, tantalizing room. Let Adam bury his face in his groin again, in his armpit and in his neck, blinding himself and suffocating with the sweet, musky smell of Benjamin's youth. Let them leave and hide, lock themselves in and shut the world out, hold each other tight.

He's violently startled by Benjamin lightly grabbing his arm. He hadn't heard him get up and close in on him. "Shit! Sorry. You bloody scared me. Sorry. Damn, this is so creepy."

"Creepy?"

"Yes. I mean, you know, it's weird. It's so silent and dark."

"Are you okay?"

"Of course. Yes. I don't know, I don't feel well. Let's... Is it all right if we go?"

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Inside. On the other side of the wall."

"We can't really talk in my room. My father's just next door."

"I understand, of course." Was Benjamin testing him? Was he setting a trap to scold him about being only interested in shagging? Adam does want to talk. He's fine with talking. Just not here.

He fumbles in his pocket to find his key and shakily opens the door. Once he's safe within the gardens again, he waves the beautiful, shadowy figure to follow him.

"Why don't we go have drink at the bar?" Adam says. Then, it suddenly dawns on him, with a surge of terror. "Oh my god, how old are you? You drink, right? I saw you drink wine with your father, right?"

"I'm eighteen," Benjamin says, nonchalantly, perhaps even defiantly. "So, yes, let's have a drink".

* * *

It's time to go. To leave naked Benjamin behind, to close the door of his room with cautious quiet, to tiptoe in the hallway, go down a couple of flights of stairs, walk through the lobby, go back up other stairs, creak open the door of their bedroom, forego brushing his teeth, undress carefully, and noiselessly slip under the sheets. Then try to fall asleep. How can he? He is so wired. He really is. Everything that happened today is jolting his brains alive; everything that could happen tomorrow is stirring his body awake.

They had a nice drink, a nice talk. It was endearing to realize that, for all his swagger, Benjamin actually needed to tell him that he hadn't "really done anything like this before". Has Adam? He told Benjamin a little bit about himself, improvising along, sharpening the features of the man he wanted to be for him. Uncertain, maybe, but not wounded. Cautious, but not scared. Intrigued, but not desperate. Benjamin's quiet warmth made it deceptively easy to lie. I am that man, Adam even thought for a moment.

He left Devon out, or at least downsized him to a "bloke with whom I fooled around occasionally". "Nothing major", Devon was. And he really wasn't. But Adam talked about Philip, thinking the adolescent sweetness, innocence and organic sensuality of that story could appeal to an eighteen year-old, could ease his way into what Adam hoped the rest of the evening could offer, the way you arrange nicely a guest's bedroom to help him feel welcome and settled. He didn't mention that last fateful night with Philip, and got away with vagueness about the outcome of their teenage dalliance: "Oh, you know. Life." Benjamin didn't. He wouldn't.

Benjamin is surprisingly reserved. Not shy, but guarded, a little intense. A little blunt, too, when it comes to sex. "I like knowing your cock gets hard when you see me". Or "I have this friend, we often jerk off together", which made Adam bring up Nigel and the Isle of Wight, thinking this is a sort of connection they have. Adam thinks he saw a slight cringe when he added Nigel was his cousin. Benjamin is graceful, however: he never brought up Adam's wife, marriage, or plans for the future.

Benjamin kept shaking his legs throughout their conversation. Was he nervous? Impatient? Adam was time-conscious. His little private breaks before heading to bed never lasted that long. But he waved these concerns away. He'll put the bill on his room, he will tell Siobhan he ran into "the young American" and had a beer with him at the bar. They talked about things the Adam she knows and expects would talk about with a young man: computers, sports, Star Wars.

"You're so beautiful", he blurted out, without thinking. Benjamin stopped and threw him a piercing gaze. Adam waved the old Egyptian bartender to pay for their drinks. This is the same guy who works at the pool. What kind of shifts are these people on? Benjamin stood up first, and started to walk towards his room, knowing that he would follow him, that there wasn't ever any doubt about where they were going next, never any discussion about what they would do.

The sex was splendid. More of the same as last night, yes. But completely different at the same time. They rolled around for what seemed like hours, touching and caressing and grabbing every part of each other's bodies. The kisses were tender and passionate and hungry and sweet. They smiled, they laughed. Benjamin tickled him once. He tickled him!

Adam was so delirious with joy at some point that he wanted to stop. He wanted to bring him back downstairs, to get another round, to start over and talk some more. Really talk. He wanted to hear the sound of Benjamin's voice, beyond "this is so good" and other similar utterances he was getting drunk on. He wanted Benjamin to tell him about himself, his hopes and fears. He wanted to impress his lover, to make him laugh. He wanted to hear Benjamin say "Really?" or "I can't believe this" or "Oh no, you didn't".

But they rolled around some more. "I'm gonna cum," Benjamin said, which sounded crude, and alarming. He did. Adam did. And Adam got scared. And Benjamin kissed him. And Adam felt happy. He felt so happy he could cry. He thinks he actually did. Or something close to it. But Benjamin didn't see him, because Adam had turned him over, tucked him in, hugged him and spooned him, until the teenager fell asleep. Until now. And now, it's time to go.

### Chapter 4

Wednesday

I woke up horny, early that morning. I had woken up in the middle of night, finding Adam gone and my bed awkwardly lacking his presence and his body heat. I had gone up to open wide the curtains and the French doors of the balcony, and peeked outside, naked. The light breeze had sent shivers on my body, which the moonlight made look very pale. Everything was dark, everything was quiet. I could feel the dried cum on my belly and chest, and a little bit on my neck too. I rubbed it slowly, scratched it and looked at the white crusty flecks on my nails. I watched Adam's window and wished him silently goodnight.

I was surprised to wake up horny. It was indeed very early, a good thirty minutes before 6 am, when I would receive the wake-up call from the reception. But I was mostly surprised because I had fallen back asleep mellowed by images of Adam's light touch and caresses on my shoulders and cheeks, yet I woke up stirred by a painfully rigid erection and a longing for tightly grabbing his cock, his ass cheeks, or the back of his head. There will be plenty of time today, I thought, plenty of time this week.

I took a long shower and got ready for that morning's excursion. As I was about to step out of my room, I turned around, undressed quickly to remove my underwear and put my shorts back on, feeling the fabric and zipper rub not entirely pleasantly against my crotch. It felt absurdly daring, somehow; I also knew that the only point of my impulsive attempt at self-pleasure or self-amusement was really for the thrill of letting Adam know, at some carefully planned moment, that my cock, the cock he had so lovely venerated a few hours ago, was just one layer closer to his reach.

I had planned to skip breakfast again, but had intended to grab a fruit or two for the bus trip. As I walked down the stairs to the restaurant, however, I realized that what had gone on between Adam and me the previous night had changed more than the outcome of my future interactions with him. I looked forward to other stolen moments with him alone but suddenly recognized that much of our discreet, questioning and tentative flirting was over. If I entered the restaurant and both Adam and Siobhan were having their breakfast, I'd also have to face an actual, tangible reality: this is a woman whose husband I had sex with last night, unbeknownst to her; this is a man who crassly, even if tenderly, cheated on his wife with me. Oddly, I felt ready to face them both on the bus, or among Egyptian ruins, or by the swimming pool. But I couldn't quite bring myself to enter an empty, bleak, whitely lit dining hall and come face to face with them. I didn't know what, if anything, he had told her to justify his late coming back to their room; I didn't know whether she had noticed at all; I wasn't even sure what time Adam had actually left my room. I had fallen asleep before him (in his arms, I remembered in a brief, warming, flash) and hadn't felt him or heard him leave. I climbed back the stairs up to my floor, hurriedly, and went to knock at my father's door. I'll be with him, I thought, everything will be all right.

And everything was. Adam and his wife were among the last people to get on the bus. It was hard to gauge her mood, as she was hidden behind large dark sunglasses. They briskly walked past us towards the seats in the back. "Hi, Benjamin," he said, with an effort to be casual that may have been obvious only to me. They were both seated by the time I uttered a brief "Hey Adam, what's up?", half covered by the growling sound of the bus engine revving up.

We spent that morning in the Valley of the Kings and it was a lovely morning: breathtaking landscapes flooded by a blinding sun, stingingly hot strolls from one tomb entrance to another, the endearingly energetic erudition of our guide, the contagious sheer pleasure of my dad. And those tombs. Those astounding, mesmerizing, gilded and colorful caves, lavish follies deeply buried under sandy desolation - even I was waxing lyrical by the time we drove back to the hotel.

There was enough to wonder and gawk at that whole morning to help me keep in check the magnetic pull I felt towards Adam. Our playful flirtation punctuated our walks, our guide's lectures, and our careful examination of the tombs' walls. Gone was the eagerness or the uncertainty. There was something organic, almost telepathic, and definitely joyful about our silent connections. He and I both used every opportunity given to lightly touch each other, casually and furtively. We were obviously thirsty for each other, parched even at times, yet the shared certainty of forthcoming, more adequate settings for jumping each other kept us from doing anything rash, obvious or foolish. We did come close, however, on a few occasions.

A couple of tombs were only accessible through long, narrow, steep, and somewhat dark flights of wooden stairs, heading straight down the belly of the hills. People prone to claustrophobia (as, apparently, Siobhan was) and people of weaker physical condition (as, unexpectedly, my father considered himself to be) were discouraged from visiting them. Twice, thus, Adam and I walked down, wandered around and walked back up, like two unsupervised children. We systematically opted to close ranks whenever on these stairs; hence the rest of the group would be ahead of us, safely oblivious. When we first walked down, Adam was right behind me; he grazed my head and my neck with his fingers, caressed my shoulders and my biceps. When the tour of that tomb was over, we stayed slightly behind and he suddenly grabbed me, pushed me against a wall, behind a corner, making us invisible to the group. We kissed deeply and hurriedly, I held his face, his warm, sweaty face, between my hands. He hugged me and held me tight, then buried his face in my neck. "Oh, Benjamin," he said.

As we walked back up, I took care to be the one at the end of the line. I grabbed his ass cheeks and felt them move and squeeze with each of his climbing steps. I inserted my hand underneath his t-shirt, caressing his damp lower back. I inserted a hand inside the leg of his shorts, feeling the moist curly hair of his thigh. Just before we were about to exit, half blinded by the narrow torrent of light coming through the narrow passageway, I got close to his ear and whispered "I'm not wearing underwear and you're making me fucking hard." I couldn't see his reaction and cursed myself for having impulsively ruined the timing. I felt suddenly cheap, a little crass, and very stupid. But I heard him say "Nice", though I couldn't be sure whether it was directed at me or at my father, who was welcoming us back out with an expectant and questioning look.

As we entered the other trickily accessible tomb, I purposefully walked behind Adam. I grabbed his ass again and was surprised at my growing obsession with it. I tried to insert a hand inside his shorts and underwear, hoping to feel the pale, soft flesh of his cheeks, but our position and the tightness of his belt made it impossible to go further than an inch or two. I tried to reach for the front of his body and grope his crotch, but here too the acrobatics needed almost made us trip and fall. He turned around and flashed me a wide smile.

My growing erection was clearly visible by the time we reached our deeply buried destination. I tried to cover it by readjusting my cock upward and by standing behind Adam while listening to our guide. Like most of the other, older, men in our little group, Adam put his hands behind his back. But unlike all the other, better focused, men of our group, these hands reached for another man's dick. He fondled mine, played with it, and rubbed it through the fabric of my shorts. Once again we found a brief moment, in a dark corner, to be alone. He unzipped my shorts and took my half hard cock in his mouth. It only lasted a couple of seconds, as we both felt rushed, scared and a little humbled by our surroundings.

This is fucking amazing, I thought as we walked back up, this is absolutely fucking amazing: I got a blow job in an Egyptian tomb. I didn't, of course, not really, but this was a story I couldn't wait to tell someone – until I realized there was no one I could actually tell this story. I'd have to lie, or I'd have to wait.

And this is when it hit me. This is the moment when some vague facts about my future became just a little crisper. Maybe I'm gay. Or bisexual. But I'm something-sexual, because I knew I wanted to have a life where these things happen and I knew I wanted to have friends to whom I could tell these stories. Because this moment which had just happened with Adam, this two-second long slurping on my half-hard penis, was so fucking amazing and fun and thrilling and exhilarating that I couldn't imagine having to make anything like that either shamefully forbidden or frustratingly secret.

* * *

I was somewhat dazed during the rest of our visit, which also included a walk through the ruins of a small temple ("Ptolemaic", my father tried to explain, puzzled at my lack of focus). I wasn't aloof or distant and nothing in my behavior alarmed Adam in any significant way. In fact, I think we were both a bit stunned by how far our mutual attraction could take us, when only loosely kept in check by propriety, surveillance, or reason.

I actually slept in the bus on the drive back. I tried to dream about Adam when I started to feel myself dozing off, but my mind took me somewhere else. It was something about my forthcoming first day in college, about starting a new life there, about the possibilities seemingly offered by the brochure pictures of Princeton I had stared at for long hours in the days following my acceptance letter. My father nudged me gently when we got to the hotel and told me he was going to call my brothers and try to catch them before they went off to work and school.

I faintly heard his voice talking to them, through the wall separating our rooms. Both when I stepped in and out of my bathroom to take a shower, I could make out the elation and enthusiasm in his voice.

"They're both fine", he told me as soon as we sat down for lunch. "Andrew was excited we saw the tombs this morning. That's what he remembers best about our trip, apparently. Well, you saw the tombs, I should say. Andrew chided me for not walking down the stairs with you. I'm not that old, he said!"

"You're not." However ridiculous, I felt a pang of light offense that these tombs meant something to other people, whereas I had already started to feel like Adam and I had claimed them as our own.

"I know, but, well, I had seen them, and these stairs are quite treacherous. Anyway, they both said hi."

"Dustin did too?" I raised one wary eyebrow. My younger brother and I had never been close and the day when we had dropped him off at Angela's, an old family friend, on our way to the airport, had been one of particular animosity between us.

"Yes, Ben, he did. I think he's doing really well. Angela may be spoiling him a bit, but they seem to be having a great time."

"Being spoiled is something he easily deals with." I smiled a bit, to alleviate some of the pettiness that had come out unexpectedly. My father seemed to ignore the comment.

"Andrew and Corinna are spending the weekend up in the Finger Lakes. They're going with Ethan, to his parents' cabin there, which should be nice."

"They're taking the baby with them?"

"Yes. Well, I assume so. A baby is not something you leave behind."

He froze for a second. I recognized that halted look, the one he displayed when he realized he may have been insensitive or clumsy. Dustin was very much a baby when our mother took off. I felt sorry for my father, the way I always did when I saw or felt him tense up when he thought he may have hurt my or Dustin's feelings in an off-hand remark either about my mother or about any analogy that could be construed as being about her. I tried to help him by changing the topic slightly.

"How is Ethan?"

"He's well, I think. Finishing his dissertation, I'm sure. Andrew mentioned a new boyfriend, so that's good."

Ethan was my brother's best friend, and had been so since they met early in high school. I vaguely remember my father and Andrew telling me about Ethan coming out, which left the seven-year old that I was fairly unfazed. Ever since then, the close bond between Andrew and him had given Ethan an important presence in my life. They both moved to New York for college and came back to Philly together frequently, Ethan very often staying at our place. I'm not sure why, but Ethan evidently preferred to spend time with us rather than with his own family, with whom we effectively shared him. We had him for Thanksgiving, they kept him for Christmas.

As my father went to replenish his plate at the buffet, I stared for a while at Adam's empty chair (why do these people never have lunch?), but my mind drifted back to Ethan. He came out when he was seventeen, which I then realized was an astoundingly young age to do so. It dawned on me too that Adam and Ethan (and Andrew) were about the same age. So, at the time Adam was secretly fooling around with the friend he mentioned, or jerking off with his cousin, Ethan was rounding up the courage to tell his parents and his straight best friend that he knew he was gay and wanted to be recognized as such. Ten years later, Ethan is a thriving, serene, steady NYU grad student and yoga instructor; Adam is a blushing, fearful man, easily seduced by a random semi-naked young American and married to (and thwarted by) an angry bitch.

I knew I was being callously unfair. I knew I couldn't fathom what it meant to come of age in the eighties wherever it is in Britain that Adam was from, and I knew Ethan came from a well-off family of progressive intellectuals (his father had once been friends for a while with Gore Vidal, I still remember that). But my brief acrimony must have stemmed from knowing that I myself was at the exact age when Adam and Ethan made radically different choices, or, at least, took radically different paths. And it scared me. I was nowhere near the lucidity and self-awareness that Ethan seemed to have achieved. Whatever I was aware of wasn't crisp enough, nor properly grasped and processed; it was easily shelved, readily added to the clutter of my sexual experiences and my longings for various shades of intimacy.

My father interrupted my thoughts when he came back with a full plate for himself. I wasn't very hungry, but watched him eat with the kind of pleasure a parent displays at the appetite of an ailing child. I had been troubled by his declining to walk down the tombs, even as distracted and eager as I had been by the prospects of some time alone with Adam. I did not like to see my father ageing and he usually didn't give me many occasions to do so.

* * *

It wasn't until I lay by the pool that I realized how happy I felt to be reunited with Adam, albeit at our usual inconspicuous distance. We exchanged glances and smiles before I dove into the refreshing water. I swam a few laps, basking in his gaze, lifted myself out in one swift movement, shook water out of my hair and face, lay down and let the sun dry me off.

I thought about Ethan again. I thought about calling him when I got back, about having him talk to me about coming out and about knowing for sure that you're gay. I quickly waved these thoughts away, however. Bringing up the subject, manufacturing such a conversation, implied a degree of clarity and resolution that I was lacking. It would also mean discussing frankly and openly sexual matters with him, something with which I wasn't comfortable. My puzzlement wasn't really about what I felt I was missing, but rather at the lack of apparent consistency or overall logic of my sexual connections and tastes. I liked jerking off with Jason, but never felt a craving to kiss him; I loved kissing my girlfriend, but I was pretty sure I preferred sex with the more audacious woman with I was seeing clandestinely. I loved the adoring embraces of Adam's eager hands, but right then, at that moment, all I really wanted to see and touch was his cock.

There was, and had been for a while, something astonishing and literally awesome about seeing another man's dick. Not quite in pornographic pictures, which transported sex in general (and hard cocks in particular) in a different dimension: staged, distorted and overlit. But the incongruous reality, the actual physicality of a guy's penis was violently arousing to me. I saw Jason at soccer practice twice a week and showered with him and the rest of the team on each occasion. While there had been some fascination with the mildly homoerotic mood inherent to the setting, I never felt more aroused than when I was with him, at his place, in his room, and he would take his hardening cock out of his pants. We never really jerked off together fully naked and I never felt a need for that. Jason was never hotter than when fully dressed the way I normally knew him (baseball hat, t-shirt, jeans and Converses), while displaying and furiously stroking his dick, his pants down just the necessary length for easy movements.

It was uncomfortable, yet inescapable, for me to assign to Ethan the first instance I could recall when the sight of a naked male made me quiver in an unfamiliar way. I vividly remembered a time when he was staying at our house for a couple of days. I was young, maybe fourteen. I went to the bathroom one morning to brush my teeth and, as I opened the door without knocking, I found him in the bathroom, naked and shaving in front of the mirror. I was briefly stunned, mumbled some apologies, retreated quickly, and slammed the door. I vaguely heard him say "no worries" very casually. I walked back to my room, slightly dizzy and very much shaken by the joltingly erotic sight of his penis. I had only seen it for a split second, but I had found it thick, silky and, somehow, beautiful. That image stayed with me for years. I knew it wasn't the sign of an attraction to Ethan himself (even though my relationship with him would take, seven years later, a brief, yet intense, sexual turn), but the recurring flashes of that moment did become both a nagging reminder of the incompleteness of my developing sexuality and some of sort of beacon I knew I needed to follow through the fog of my scattered attractions.

I heard a splash and opened my eyes to find Adam and Siobhan in the pool. It was the first time I'd seen her in the water. Our eyes met and he gave me a quick and uneasy look, as if apologizing for his wife intruding in yet another territory we had claimed as our own. I felt very horny, dangerously and recklessly so. I knew I had the start of an erection which might begin to show, even in my loose trunks. I stood up and, in one swift movement, dove into the pool. Adam and Siobhan were both in the shallow end when I surfaced; his glistening, lightly tanned chest was beautiful. They started to do laps, side by side, and I went underwater, taking in as much air as I could, going deep to the floor of the pool and feeling like a male mermaid. I opened my eyes and watched from below their legs move, bending and straightening, slowly propelling them forward. It was a lovely, blurry sight and for a moment I wished I could watch them have sex, right there in the pool, see their bodies touching, these four legs like the tentacles of a sexy beast. I went up for air, gasped, inhaled and came back down. I watched Adam's thighs, which looked strong and graceful; I watched his crotch and ass wrapped in and sharpened by tight speedos. I thought about his cock, barely visible, probably shriveled by the cool water and bunched up by his swimwear. It had been so incredibly hard last night, a stick of concrete solidly affixed to his lithe body. I could barely bend it and if I did, it would slam back against his stomach when I released my grip; I had never seen or felt anything quite like that with Jason's lubed-up small penis, which I had held and stroked a few times.

I was out of breath and resurfaced a little light-headed. I adjusted my eyes to the blinding sun and heard Siobhan say, as she stepped out of the pool, "Well, see you later, then." "Yes, darling. Enjoy," Adam replied. We both watched her dry herself off, gather some of her belongings, and walk away toward the lobby. I looked at Adam questioningly. He smiled, darted a look towards my father, whom he found sleeping, and swam towards me. "She's going to the spa. She's having a massage too." Then, as if that information wasn't enough for me to understand what his pleading and hungry eyes were conveying, he whispered "I reckon we have almost two hours to ourselves."

I instantly felt my erection revived. "Meet me in fifteen minutes in my room, okay?" I told him before exiting the pool. My father woke as I was toweling myself. "It's too hot for me here," I told him. "I'm gonna head back up and try to take an actual nap with the a/c on or something."

"Sure," he said, not completely awake.

"I'll be back in a couple of hours or so, I'm sure."

"Of course, no worries. Get some rest."

I walked to my room briskly and went straight to the balcony. Adam was lounging, letting the sun dry him. He made regular quick checks of his watch. I did too: in ten minutes, he would be there, right next to me. I used that time to watch his body, from afar and unhindered. In a few minutes, I could grab his cock if I wanted to. In a few minutes, I could touch that chest, its light hair, its faintly defined muscles. In a few minutes, I could grab his legs, knead his thighs. I had right in front of me a beautiful, masculine, older body, the kind it never felt fitting to desire or to pursue. In a few minutes, this body, this man, would be mine and I could do with him and to him whatever my lust would savagely drive me to.

Adam checked his watch again and stood up. He dressed, obviously trying to put his t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops on at a pace that would be considered normal to any onlooker, instead of with the frenzy of a horny man hurrying to sex. He looked up towards my balcony, saw me, and walked on leisurely towards the lobby. I went to open my door ajar, just as I had two nights before. We had come a long way.

As soon as he was inside, I grabbed him and slammed his body against the closing door. We kissed fiercely, releasing with our hungry mouths and tongues some of the tension accumulated throughout the day. His hands were all over me, frantically seizing and grabbing me, hopping vigorously from my neck to my arms, to my waist, to my back, to my head. I was fondling his cock, amazed again at its throbbing hardness. We both came up for air and he stared at me, his eyes piercing, moist, and lustful. We kissed again, instantly back into our frenzy. I undid a couple of buttons of his shorts and slid my hand inside them. His cock felt scorching hot and sweaty. I couldn't stop holding it tight, stroking it a bit, grabbing it like a joystick.

Adam pushed me back and opened all the buttons of my short-sleeved shirt. He kissed my chest and my nipples, then licked a trail all the way from my throat down to the top of my shorts. He kneeled and positioned himself comfortably to open my zipper, pull down my trunks to my ankles and engulf my cock. The blowjob he gave me was extraordinary; I rested my head against the door, closed my eyes and put lightly my two hands on his head. I let him slurp, suck, lick, kiss, slurp again on my dick, woozy with the blissful sensation. I bucked a couple of times, when my cock became too sensitive; he mistook these jolts for signs that I was about to cum. "Shoot in my mouth", he mumbled, without releasing my dick. I really wanted to cum and I quickly convinced myself that I had easily a second orgasm in me, that we could still make full use of the time we had been unexpectedly given.

I came quite violently inside his mouth, which made him gag. I could see, as I was panting and trying to keep my balance, that he hadn't swallowed my load, his eyes and his locked jaw betraying his indecision or sudden reluctance to ingest sperm. He opened his lips and some of my semen started to dribble out, running along his chin and dropping on his toes and on the v-shaped band of his flip-flops. Then he shut his mouth resolutely, closed his mouth and swallowed all the cum left in one big and loud gulp.

My dick was wet and reddened, it was shaking and throbbing, shrinking gradually almost against its own will. He was staring at it, took it in his hand and began to kiss it gently. It hurt when he reached its oversensitive head and I pulled Adam up, bringing him to my level so I could kiss him. His mouth tasted foul with semen, a taste indeed it took a long time for me to acquire. But I hugged him, he hugged me back and whispered to my ear "Oooh, Benjamin."

I nudged him gently toward the bed, slipping out of my trunks, still bunched at my ankles. I sat him down on the edge of the bed after pulling his shorts and speedos slightly down. I liked that he still had his clothes on, I wasn't surprised to find it arousing. I tried to reciprocate the fantastic blowjob he had just given me. I may have been skilled, for he pulled his cock out my mouth after just a few minutes. "I don't want to cum just yet."

He grabbed me and pulled me towards him, had me lie on my back and climbed on top of me to kiss me some more. Again, his hands were darting all over my body, while mine had settled on a firm grip of both his ass cheeks. It was lovely and bracing. He gently pulled up one of my legs, then another. I tried to wrap them around his waist, but the position felt odd and I settled for letting him hold them somewhat mid-air. I felt him getting lost in his own trance, as he was grinding his body against mine in an increasingly animalistic fashion and dry-humping me with grunts and moans. My uneasiness increased when I felt his disturbingly hard dick pressing insistently at my asshole. I was aggressively clenched, hoping that the resistance would be evidence enough of my unwillingness to engage in something that was still frighteningly and disturbingly alien to me. But as I took a deep breath, my sphincter unwittingly opened up just a bit, just enough for his cock to enter me, dryly and painfully, less than an inch in.

My reaction was immediate, uncontrolled, violent. My knees, which had been pressed against his chest in a tight embrace, pushed him away, then my right foot jerkily kicked him off me. He fell backwards on the floor. Startled and shocked, he lay there for a long second, his legs dangling in the air like an upturned beetle, one flip-flop still on, the other discarded in the commotion.

"I'm so sorry," he cried out.

"It's okay," I muttered, panting and confused.

"My god, Benjamin, I am so sorry. I just... I don't know, it felt..."

"Adam, it's fine," I said, though my voice probably didn't quite match yet my efforts to forget about the whole thing and to start over, somehow.

"No, it's not. I don't know what came over me. I thought maybe you wanted it too. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..."

"Stop apologizing, for fuck's sake!" I suddenly shouted. I felt deeply humiliated. Not for feeling abused or manhandled, but rather because my inability or unwillingness to let him penetrate me, to let him perform a sexual act which was common, appreciated and indulged in by sexually mature adults, had suddenly relegated me back to my condition of a seventeen year-old, a kid really, unable to walk the talk. My outburst had been childish too, to make things worse. I felt small, stupid, unmasked.

Adam looked lost. He started to pull his pants up, then stopped, doubting himself. He looked at me expectantly. I hated him so much. I loathed him intensely. I wanted him to do something, to take some initiative to pull us out of that downward spiral that was engulfing us. I didn't want him to touch me, which he seemed to feel. I didn't want him to leave, which he also seemed to instinctively assess, probably fuelling his own confusion.

He took a deep breath and sat cross-legged, facing me, trying to be calm and soothing. "I don't have a lot of practice, Benjamin."

"Please stop calling me Benjamin. It's weird and creepy. I'm Ben."

"Okay," he said evenly. "This is fairly new to me, this whole thing."

"You've never fucked someone before?"

"I have, actually. But not like that. I mean, not someone I cared about. It was... different. It was just sex, I guess."

"We barely know each other, Adam. We don't have much more than sex going for us either."

"Yes. Yes, of course. I just meant... I don't know, you make me feel things differently. This, what we have, is nothing like I've had before. And I need to control myself a bit more, to respect your boundaries."

This deference and sweetness felt unpleasant, bland and emasculating. I couldn't quite join in and discuss some prudish resistance to being fucked, some virginal boundaries I'd have which needed the respect of this gentlemanly stiff young man, courting me like a debutante.

"Tell me something sexy, Adam," I blurted out suddenly, ending an awkward silence.

"What?"

"Tell me something dirty, something really fucking nasty, which you'd want to do to me or with me."

He smiled, showing some relief that my mood seemed to change, but still apprehensive about where I was then leading him.

"I don't want to do anything dirty to you, Ben," he said, as a child tentatively trying to answer a trick question.

"Come on, Adam, please, just let go a little. Let go. You swallowed my spunk a few minutes ago, your mouth is still reeking of sperm, for fuck's sake. What else do you want to do?"

"I don't know, Ben. I just... I want to do it again? Maybe I want to lick your ass?" His own mention of my ass suddenly made him obviously scared that he had, yet again, broached a forbidden and antagonizing subject. I tried to reassure him and to move us on by leaving the bed and sitting down behind him, on the floor, my mouth pressed against his ear.

"I'd like that," I whispered huskily. "I'd like to do the same to you." My voice and my breath in his ear sent shivers and goose bumps all over his body. I could feel them under my hands holding his arms. "And I'd like you to suck me off some more," I continued, "in a bunch of different places in this hotel, without getting caught. And I'd like to watch you jack off on your balcony, in the middle of the night, and see you cum over the rail, hear the drops on the ground, two floors down. Oh, and I'd love to see your whole body covered with my cum and yours, completely drenched. And you'd rub it and smear it and lick your fingers."

Adam was panting. I had lowered one hand down to his cock, which had quickly hardened again. I was stroking him, finding a rhythm aligned with my speech. He closed his eyes. I jerked him faster, repeating much of what I had just told him. I asked him a couple of times what he'd want to do with me, but he never answered, just moaned. I felt him tense and buck his hips, I knew he was about to cum. I asked him again, blowing softly into his ear, as his climax was just seconds away: "What do you want, Adam? What do you want?"

"I want you to fuck me!" he gasped, in between groans and heavy breathing, as he sprayed the carpeted floor with volleys of thick white cum. I kissed him gently all around his neck, holding him, almost carrying him, keeping him from dropping on the floor. He had never felt lighter.

* * *

Adam had kissed me before I closed the door of my room behind us, cupping my face in his two hands and whispering sweetly "I have to see you tonight." It's only when we started walking down the stairs that I realized we probably should have come back separately; we hadn't used up the whole two hours given to us by his wife's alone time at the hands of the masseur, however, so we were most likely safe. As we arrived in the lobby, Adam walked confidently straight ahead, towards the stairs leading to his own wing, and quickly disappeared. I veered left, toward the pool. I was briefly blinded by the sun which, even if not as bright as it had been earlier, forced me to stop and adjust. The pool area was almost empty, which felt odd and a bit creepy, as I longed for noise and movements to welcome me back to reality. I couldn't see my father, though his bag and books and glasses were right where we had been sitting together earlier. I undressed and dove straight into the pool, to shake off a nagging anxiety that he had gone up to his room and had heard us.

I swam idly for fifteen minutes, before seeing him stroll towards me. He'd been in the gift shop of the hotel, he said, but didn't buy anything: "Nothing there that Dustin would like, I'm sure." I smiled, distracted and relieved. I looked up towards Adam's balcony, which had remained disappointingly empty since I'd been in the water. Siobhan stood there now, surprisingly, staring ahead, smoking a cigarette – something I had never seen her do before.

* * *

"Have you called your mother?" my father asked, while eyeing his full plate with both eagerness and curiosity. He had decided to forego that night any dish that wasn't typically Egyptian and had come back from the buffet with an assortment of food recommended by me or by one of the waiters with the least broken English.

"No, not yet. She's still in Colorado, isn't she?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. She went to the house last week with your aunt, but I'm pretty sure she'd be back home by now."

"I think she was visiting Rick and Estelle in Denver, before heading back."

"Oh, okay."

"Anyway, I'll just call her from Philly when we get home. There's nothing that can't wait, is there?"

"She'd just be glad to hear that everything's well."

"She'd hear if things weren't. No news is good news. She can relate to that."

My dad threw me a weary smile.

"When was the last time you talked to her?" he persisted.

"I don't know. After I got the Princeton letter?"

"Right. You told me she was pretty happy, right?"

"Well, yes." I chuckled at his efforts to put a positive spin to anything my mother did or said these days. "She didn't cry and hug me, like you did."

"That would be a hard thing to do on the phone, wouldn't it?"

"Cry?"

"Hug, silly you. Her mother went to Princeton, one of the very few women in those days. So the place means something special to her."

"I know. She said it'll have a 'very positive energy' for me. And she'll send me a picture of her mother, so I can put it somewhere in my room."

"I think it's sweet."

"It is, actually." I paused for a while, realizing it was pleasant to have something nice about my mother we could agree on. "You know she broke it off with the real estate guy?" I continued.

"Yes, Ben," my father said. "Dustin told me, he sounded a little upset about it."

"Why?" The guy had been a pretentious dick, completely in love with my mother, yet so conservative, in every sense of the word, that I had never figured out what my supposedly free-spirited mother found appealing in this man (whose face I had first seen on a bus bench in an Orange County strip mall). Yet to this day, she insists on claiming that he had been one of the Seven Loves that she, along with every fellow human, is granted during our short life on this planet.

"I think Dustin saw some kind of stabilizing aspect to this man. He thought Barbara had been happier, more serene."

"She's always happy. Or always claims to be."

"Well, that's not the same thing."

"It is for her, kind of. Anyway, do we have to talk about her?"

"No, not really. Let's talk about you, then." He smiled, knowing that it wasn't a subject I was more prone to dwell on.

"There isn't much to say, really." It thought for a while, frowning. "I feel like a lot of things are now changed by the reality of my leaving for college soon."

"Changed how?"

"I don't know. It just feels like there's this whole period ahead of me where nothing really matters, since I'll be leaving everything behind soon."

"And that's scary?"

"No, not all. It's just... I don't know, odd. Nothing is suddenly of much consequence, everything is pretty much dwindling down. Like friendship and all. I mean, I like the fact that there is a strong urge or need to enjoy everything and everyone while you still have a chance to. But you're not building anything anymore."

"Amy hasn't come for dinner at home in a while now..."

"Has Andrew talked to you?"

"No, no, your secrets are safe with your brother. But I'm not blind, Ben, your girlfriend had been a frequent guest until, well, she wasn't anymore. Is there another girl? Is everything all right with Amy?"

"Well, not really." I was tempted, for a second, to delve into details about Amy, about my cheating on her, as if disserting on everything that was still resolutely heterosexual about me would help push down Adam below a few layers of reality and bury Jason completely. But as the nature of my relationship with "the other girl" was fairly one-dimensionally sexual, I didn't feel comfortable expanding on her or on Amy.

"But, that's my point too," I continued. "I can't quite summon the energy to make things work with Amy when, in a few weeks, I'll be at Princeton and she'll be at Smith."

"Well, they're not that far away."

"Come on, Dad. It nauseates me to see and hear some of my friends swear allegiance and fidelity to each other. Like high-school sweethearts in the fifties. I know it doesn't work that way."

"I know. But just try not to hurt her. She might not share your cold rationality."

"Cold?"

"I don't mean it in a bad way."

"I don't feel cold. And I don't like when people say that. I feel hotly rational, if that makes any sense. Like I'm excited for the changes ahead, even a bit overwhelmed. I'm very ready to start the next phase, to try and see new things, new people. It's terrific and daunting."

My father looked a bit uneasy, or tentative. "It's wonderful, Ben. Just, you know, be careful."

"Says the father who pours wine red wine to his teenage son."

"Please. You know what I mean." He fumbled with his napkin. I thought for a moment, probably mistakenly, that his eyes were welling up as he went on: "It's just... You've got so much potential, so much going for you. And I'm so proud and excited to see how you'll turn out. It's always been my dearest wish to provide for you, I don't know, an environment within which you can blossom to your full potential. You know?"

"Yes, Dad, I do."

"It's just... Be careful. And especially, and I guess there are no other words to say this: be kind to others. Always be kind to others, Benjamin."

* * *

I was sitting in bed, in t-shirt and boxers, when Adam cautiously came through my door, which I had, again, left ajar. He and Siobhan had had a brief and quiet dinner. I had been more absorbed by my conversation with my father than the previous evenings, but Adam and I had found a few opportunities to exchange glances and some fleeting words. "Wait up for me", he had said lovingly, insistent and blushing, when he walked back from the dessert buffet and I walked to the entrees.

He hadn't been sitting alone by the pool when I first entered my room and checked from my balcony. But the lights that were on by my bed may have beckoned him. "It's late, I'm sorry," I told him when he softly closed the door behind him.

"Don't worry. I'll claim insomnia and the need to walk."

"How long can you stay?"

"I don't know. I know I had to see you".

He climbed on the bed and sat in front of me, gripping my calves with his hands.

"It's funny, you're like a drug to me," he said, looking more melancholic than amused.

"It's a little messed up, though."

"Yes, I guess," he said grudgingly. "But this is my problem. Don't let it come between us."

"We're both lying to people who are important to us."

"Yes, I know," he said, reluctant to see my point or to give it some importance. "But we can deal with that later, can't we? Right now, I really can't think of anything else than you. And believe me, for me, it's quite a rare treat to be able to just enjoy the moment." He moved one of his hands up my leg, reaching and passing the opening of my boxers.

I wasn't comfortable with the oblivious sweetness with which he seemed intent on enveloping us. Any explicit sign of a burgeoning romance felt gawkily at odds with our reality: his marriage, our age difference, the short time we had together until both of us would go back to our respective countries. There was, rationally, absolutely no prospect for us to see each other again, at least not for a long time. Delving into hypothetical tender feelings, whose finality was fundamentally at odds with our situation, made those very feelings glaringly faker, inflated and hollow. A strong sexual bond, or at least an overwhelming urge to act on an intense sexual attraction, made more sense and felt like a more genuine drive to steal moments together, and make the most of them until reality took us back to our homes and to our futures. The memory of an early girlfriend telling me dryly that I was "in love with love" flashed briefly. I was just fourteen when that happened, whereas Adam was now in his late twenties. The weight of his feelings, the apparently shattering impact of our mating didn't feel quite obfuscating, but rather increasingly cumbersome, as if distracting us from the kind of sexual heights to which I was still hoping it would take us both.

His hand had now reached my cock, which he was gently fondling while looking at me intensely. I was growing hard.

"Stop," I said, trying to be as gentle as I could. "Not here."

"What?" He chuckled, with a hint of incredulity in his eyes.

"Show me how much you want me. I want to see it. I want to see it burning in your eyes. But not here. It's too safe here, too predictable."

"Where?"

"Meet me in the bathroom downstairs in two minutes."

"What bathroom?"

"Our bathroom."

I darted out of bed and quickly slipped in some shorts and flip flops, pushing my erection down. I grabbed my keycard and headed downstairs, soundlessly. The bathroom lights had already been switched off and when I turned them on, the orange tiles on the walls assaulted me. I took a deep breath and went to stand against the sink, facing the door, which was soon opened by Adam. I didn't know exactly what I'd do next; I knew I had put us, willingly if thoughtlessly, in this weird situation, in this small room which reeked of cleaning product.

Adam tentatively opened the door and tried to lock it behind him, but there was no key or mechanism to do so. He frowned.

"Stand against the door," I told him. "We should be okay. Everybody's sleeping and I haven't seen any of the staff using this bathroom."

He stood somewhat awkwardly, rested his back against the door, a little too forcefully. He raised a hand, gesturing me toward him.

I went to him, kissed him softly on his half-opened lips, then stepped back to my previous position. "Take your clothes off. I want to see you naked," I said, resolutely.

He complied, silently and slowly. He kicked his sandals off. Pulled down his navy blue sweatpants, lifted his grey t-shirt. He threw all his clothing on a pile, in the corner of the room. Without further nudging on my part, he slowly pulled his white y-fronts down and stepped out of them. His half-hard dick jumped out.

He had never looked more beautiful. The glaring light still made his body appear healthy and strong. I watched the pile of his clothes and felt fiercely turned on by the sight of his white, bunched up underwear which lay on top of his discarded sweatpants. It was intensely erotic: the physical reality of a man, of both his most intimate and most casual accessory. I flashed to a porn picture I had once seen, that of a guy sniffing a pair of undies while jerking off; it had left me cold, puzzled, and mildly grossed out. I got it now, I almost reached for them.

The sight in front of me was intoxicating. Adam standing naked against the door, his clothes and underwear on the floor. I was glad we hadn't stayed in my room. This was exciting, this was incredible. We were in a fucking bathroom, a man was naked with a powerful erection, white briefs were a few steps away. Everything was completely out of place, was mind-bogglingly distorted. Sex had taken over a random, public room; sex was suddenly dripping from the walls. It felt like a Dali picture.

"Jerk yourself off", I instructed Adam.

He was clearly enthralled and gave me what was obviously, but eagerly, a show. He was relaxed, he was beautiful. I had him as I had wanted him: a man, a real man, moved by a strong sexual drive, but measured and touching and sexy, and drifting away from an unhappy life.

His eyes were begging me to come closer, to touch him, to kiss him. I stepped towards him and slowly ran my hands over his whole body, rediscovering every inch of flesh, every patch of hair, every muscle. I kneeled and stood up and kneeled down again. I kissed his neck and his ear. I licked his inner thighs and kneaded his calves. I ran my tongue around his nipples and buried my face in his armpits. All the while, he was jerking off, keeping a slow but steady rhythm.

I turned him around and pressed myself against his body. I dropped my shorts to my ankles and rubbed my erection against his ass crack. I couldn't stop, I had completely lost control and restraint. I had never had anal sex before and the very idea had actually always seemed a bit uncanny. But right then, in that bathroom, standing so sweatingly close to Adam's body, my dick really felt like a magnet to his asshole, led irrepressibly and mechanically towards its opening. It was dry, though, so I spit on my fingers to lube the head of my cock. I pressed against him, mouthing huskily to his ear "I want you, Adam, I want you so bad right now."

There was a clenched resistance, which started to hurt a bit but didn't make my erection subside nor my intent wither. "You're so beautiful, you're so incredibly sexy," I whispered, sending shivers through his neck.

"Oh Ben, oooh Ben," was all he could mumble.

Another push didn't yield to easier entry and my inexperience left me clueless at what to do next to achieve what I so overpoweringly craved for. Adam muttered something inaudible.

"What?"

"Tell me you love me," he gasped in one breath. "Tell me you love me, Ben".

I froze very briefly, but an intense throbbing of my cock seemed to jolt the words out of me: "I love you."

And his sphincter opened. And I was in. Not completely in yet, not fully, moistly, warmly, slickly in, as I would be, a few seconds later, after I had repeated (once? twice?) the magic words that had loosened him and welcomed me.

But soon enough, we were having sex, we were fucking, we were actually fucking. It wasn't wholly comfortable; our standing position limited my movements and his, and the inch or two that separated the anus from my more usual point of entry were just a bit awkward. But the heat emanating from our bodies, the pulsating tension I could feel in all of Adam's body, the sheathing tightness of his ass around my cock, the tears rolling down his face to meet his smiling lips, were astonishing. I pulled back at times, just a bit, to take in the full sight of my hard cock sliding in and out of his ass, his stunning ass drawn by stark tan lines and the imprint of his speedos on his very white cheeks.

I was making love to Adam. I was fucking a man. The sensation was of an intensity I had rarely encountered; at that time, I actually believed it was the best sex I had ever had. I was flushed, my brain felt swelling, and every thrust sent shivering jolts of pleasure in my shaft, my scrotum, my whole pelvis. I couldn't stop looking at his sweaty back, his white ass, his quivering arms, the back of his head. I was fucking him harder and harder, panting uncontrollably. I was fucking a man. A man is an object of desire I could actually fuck, sex with a man unleashes a raw and overpowering energy: everything I had, at one point or another, vaguely envisioned but carefully suppressed, was exploding to clarity in my mind, was becoming actually and violently real.

I don't know when Adam came. He had come before me because, when I slowly disengaged from him, I noticed cum dripping down against the door. For most of our fucking, he had held my hand in his mouth, using his bite both to ride the pain and muffle his cries. He had only let it out a few times to say out loud "This is it, this is it." Something he had said one last time when he felt me ejaculating inside him. "This is it," he had repeated, apparently to himself, while I noticed that my hand bore the red marks of his teeth.

### Chapter 5

Thursday, Siobhan

"These two very big statues, these 'Colossi', are all that remain of the funerary temple of Amenhotep III," the guide warns them, shouting for the whole bus to hear. Siobhan winces and glances at Adam, looking sternly through the window. "It's really beautiful: you basically have two giant figures, proud and strong, guarding ferociously a whole vast stretch of nothing."

Siobhan is pretty sure the guide doesn't like her. She reckons she likes her husband but hates her. Earlier, when the guide talked about the temple of Hatshepsut, she gestured at the whole grandiose site and glowed: "Hatshepsut means the 'foremost of Noble Ladies', so you see how a lady is treated in Ancient Egypt!" She chuckled, finding her own humor charming, then glared briefly at Siobhan. She seemed to say "How much of a lady are you? What kind of bloody temple do you get in fucking Watford?" Siobhan wonders what this Egyptian woman sounds like when she curses in Arabic, when she gets really mad, or really sad, or really frustrated.

The bus is stifling hot, almost like outside, minus the little breeze. They stop; the horde gets out; the horde snaps pictures of the two giant statues; the horde snaps pictures of the whole vast stretch of nothing; the horde gets back in the bus and starts babbling again. Siobhan wants to be back at the hotel. She wants to be alone, she wants to think.

It'll be nice, and new, to think about her life. She hasn't often done that; there hasn't been much to ponder in the last few years, has it? But misery brings change and change could be exciting. It has to be. Thinking about being back home, about what comes next, is all she really wants to do today. The prospect of being able to think is actually exciting, even if daunting. Yet, it is one way to get her through this day. And the next. And the next. And the trip back to England. Thinking about her way out is her way out. For now.

The guide just made a joke on her microphone, but Siobhan didn't catch it. The horde is having a big laugh. Adam is still looking at the dreary landscape through the window; he is smiling, but she's not sure he heard the joke either. She didn't sign up for this. For any of this. She wants to be alone and she wants to think.

She is ready to do some thinking about Callum, something that she hasn't done in years now, not consciously or willingly. She is strangely keen to face him, to confront his memory, like a hand drawn to the burning tip of a melting candle. Or is she like these girls who need to cut themselves, to suffer a pain that makes them feel alive? She read about them in a magazine.

She buried Callum, buried him alive and left him behind. But she hasn't, has she? Not really. So she might as well talk. She might as well tell him. Her shame, her anger, her failure are now so complete, so final, that she is ready to bow to him and admit capitulation. There really isn't much that can add to or worsen the resounding fiasco of her choices and delusion. You win, Callum, you win.

She remembers when she first met him. It was in one of those clubs, nestled underneath the arches on the beachfront of Brighton. She was with a group of girls, who probably all looked like her. He was alone, aloof and bored. He wouldn't dance, he was too cool for that, but he kept looking at her, who was jostling around awkwardly on the dance floor, trying so hard to appear poised, sexual and confident – everything she wasn't, not before she met him. Oh, he was such a cliché, the bad boy her mother (all mothers, really) would warn her against. But he was such a sexy, enticing, dangerous cliché.

She sees the both of them later, underneath the pier, standing against one of its dirty, mossy, wet wooden pillars. That was the first time she touched his cock. Yes, his dark eyes were beautiful, his unruly mop of hair was appealing, and his sweet-talking voice was husky. But it was his cock that shattered the old Siobhan at that moment. It was a throbbing, tumescent beast staring her down. He didn't exist for a brief moment, he evaporated. It was just her and It. She knew, she really knew, with the kind of clarity that shakes one inside and chills one's bones, that whatever she did next was a pivotal choice. She could run away, back to her pink room in a pink flat, and lock herself shut in choking, crushing, pink boredom. Or she could be the girl he had picked, the girl he chose, the girl he selected in the club; she could be what he saw and whom he fancied. She could be that person, not just for him and not just for tonight. His cock, his long and veiny little monster, was staring her down and waiting for an answer. She took It in her mouth and something was sealed.

He fucked her in his car that night. It wasn't very pleasant. He laughed at her, asking if it had been her first time. She didn't lie, not really, when she said no. She did lie when she claimed experience (a half-failed, bleeding, and rushed one-time thing isn't really experience) and when she did make up, on the spot, a new and different Siobhan: one who sneered at the number of cars she had shagged in, one who was casual about the soiling of her most expensive dress with all the dried cum, one who uttered a blasé "maybe" when he asked if she'd like to meet up again.

She would have died if she hadn't seen him again. She was young and stupid, she knew. She wanted to grow into that person she had invented while his middle finger was expertly invading her vagina, right under the pier, with the sounds of the waves and of his whispered cursing of the foulest sex-talk she had ever heard. Because he liked that person, he obviously did. "Jesus, fuck," he exclaimed, surprised, when she repeated later in his car some of his own trash talk (she lacked the imagination and vocabulary she gained in the following months).

He was an apprentice electrician, nicked a few trinkets from old ladies, dealt a bit of weed on the side, had both his arms covered in tattoos and shared a flat with an old, deaf, incontinent uncle. She was a bored, two a penny psych student at Uni and went back most weekends to her parents' middle-class semi-detached in Tunbridge Wells, imploding inside at the dullness of her female flatmates (and only friends), suffocating with the dreary landscape of her likely future. But still he said, barely two months after they met, "You and I, babe, oh, you and I. We're so alike. We're nothing like all these twats, right? You and me, babe."

They were never "together". Callum was always very insistent about that. "That'd be so fucking boring, Shiv. Imagine that." No, they fucked and talked. She listened to his rants about the world being unfair, the London girls not putting out, his boss being on his ass, the police being fascist pigs, the London girls being so snotty. He really had something for these London girls, she wasn't sure why. Fucking a London girl, the object of so much vile and scorn, was apparently the height of sexual achievement, and fucking a London girl up the ass was the Holy Grail. "Imagine that," he said, repeatedly.

She talked too. He liked hearing about the blokes she had seduced (some of them, she could tell him now, were entirely made up). He liked hearing about what she did to them and with them, but nothing pleased him more than when her stories, recollections and gossip amounted essentially to a spiteful emasculation of these guys. He relished premature ejaculations, small dicks, limp dicks, clumsy inexperience, or inability to stir up at least one orgasm on her side. The smarter, the posher, the nicer, the richer these guys were when she met them, the more inadequate, laughable, prudish, and humiliated she had to make them. For him. For him to fuck her, for him to say "Oh, you and me, babe, we're nothing like these twats, right?"

She sucked and fucked all these other guys to be better with him, to become the skilled and voracious lover that she pretended to be. "I like that you are in charge of your cunt," Callum once told her. "What does that even mean?" she asked, feigning lack of interest. "You're like a man, you fuck just when you want. No bullshit about it. You take it and enjoy it." Then he slid his hand under her skirt and went straight for her pussy, knowing she wasn't wearing any underwear because she had told him she wasn't. She had told him she very often wasn't - whereas she would only do such things when she knew she'd see him, when she knew she'd have the chance to tell him something dirty about herself. She wouldn't wear panties because she knew it'd increase the chances of him fucking her, it'd further build the image of Siobhan the wild little thing. It'd make him think, apparently, that she was "in charge of her cunt".

Siobhan thought he might change his mind about "being together". Well, she actually lived for that, restively attentive to any sign he might give away that the "soul mates" he claimed they were could become the "lovebirds" he usually sniggered at on the pier. So she waited. And masked the pain whenever he started a story with "Let me tell you about the bird I fucked last night". And rejoiced silently whenever he held her hand or took her to the movies or held her in his arms on the beach or said something sweet like "I love that I can cum on your tits".

She wasn't a victim. She did actually own her sexuality. And she took plenty from him. Callum made her feel alive, so incredibly, bloody alive. She shed her friends, she didn't lose them. She became confident, she became beautiful. There was some gossip about her, sure, but she existed. A whole new breed of people became intrigued by who Siobhan was - cool and interesting people. Some of these new friends she never much talked to Callum about, because he would have found them pretentious or "too normal", or he would have fucked them (Sarah, her new flatmate, was a London girl). She had a good life, based only partly on lies. She wasn't the girl she used to be and wasn't becoming the woman she was expected to turn into. And Siobhan knew she was special to him and that was incredible. "You and me, babe," he did keep saying.

Some guys were actually nice and sweet and caring; they found her beautiful and engaging. Adam was like that. He seemed flattered and surprised when she first came on to him or when she took his clothes off or when she sucked him off or when she rode him. Always flattered, always surprised. He was sweet and he told her the nicest things, things she rarely heard from one-night stands whom she had just fucked commandingly. Adam was moving and stealthily attractive. She tried to tell Callum about him, probably to make him jealous. "He looks like a bloody poofter," Callum had sneered, which didn't make her think much, since every guy not working-class or not in prison looked like a poofter to him. So, of course, she dropped Adam ("Who'd want such a boring stiff?"), told Callum how small Adam's cock looked compared to his (another lie), and ignored the stern, respectable, solid young man for the following two years.

Two years. Two years of waiting for Callum, two years of increasing disorientation and yearning. Two years of hearing him say "I'll never get fixed up. No way. No woman is ever going to chain me, you know. I'm just like you with your men. Oh, you and I, babe, we're the same."

Two years until he stopped calling her, until he told her with an inept mixture of bravado and coyness that he'd met someone and that she was pretty possessive when it came to him seeing other people ("Even my friends!"). A London girl, of course. Of course. Then he disappeared. He fucking got married. He moved. He sent her a postcard from Benidorm ("I envy your freedom, babe! Keep shagging!"). He worked for his father-in-law on construction sites. Siobhan thought the joke would be on Callum: his bloody London girl was from lame Croydon. But apparently, he liked it there.

She ran into Adam in the Lanes and they talked. And again, he was nice and sweet, he was flattered and surprised. They had tea together a few times (tea!), he took her to the cinema. They kissed at the door of her flat. He was handsome, he smelled good, he smelled clean. She never talked much and that seemed to be fine with him. He wasn't very sexual and it was definitely fine and soothing and cleansing to bury that side of her (a side which belonged to Callum). The first time they found themselves naked in a bed, she hadn't seen a cock in five months (and the last wasn't Callum's, it was the cock of that bouncer he had asked her to suck off so he'd stop being such an arse with them).

She was numb, but not unhappy. Adam asked if he could introduce her to his parents and she said yes, knowing that this was the beginning of something which would then unfold in an unbroken, predictable, dreary sequence. His parents were civil but glacially distant; she had to step out into their manicured, tiny garden to get some air. When they left, driving back in his little Vauxhall, he shyly said that his parents were nice but he didn't want to lead the life they had. Siobhan looked away, through the window, and said "Good, and if you promise we won't become like mine either, we have a deal."

And that was that. She signed up. It was either that or drinking herself to oblivion or blowing her brains out.

While Callum were fixing electric doorbells in stupid Croydon, they settled in real London. Watford, granted, but still: north of the Thames. They have real jobs, they travel to interesting places, and they have a real garden. And Adam didn't "chain" her, didn't make her into a tame neutered poodle like Croydon girl probably did with Callum.

"You married the poofter!!!!!!" was the last thing he had scribbled to her, with actual spelling mistakes in both the insult and her wedded status. She tore that card in so many pieces, the joints of her fingers hurt. She watched all the tiny pieces snow down in the bin but felt only pain and anguish. He wasn't even jealous, or piqued, or bitter: it was all a big joke to him.

Then came the anger.

A slowly burning, quietly gnawing anger. At Callum, of course, though it is easily quashed down, ignored or diverted. At Adam sometimes and, granted, for no particular or decent reason. At the world, stupidly yet decidedly, for its unforgiven nature, for its relentless insistence on making her pay for her mistakes and on reminding her about her failures past and present.

It never subsides, or not for long, this anger. It is intent on tarring and spoiling any little bright spot. Whenever she starts to feel calmer or, God forbid, happy, something nasty comes up to fuel its fire. When Adam and she started really planning for this trip, buying books and reading about the highlights, she has to learn from Seanna that Callum just had twins. Callum, who loved the pose of despising children. When she starts packing a few days before they leave (Adam's insistence, not hers), she goes out with the girls at the pub and she has to run into Liam. Liam, Adam's roommate at Uni, a bloke so pathetic even his dumb wife left him. And Liam makes a pass at her. He is drunk, smelly, sweaty, and stupid and he makes a pass at her. "Come on, Shiv, I remember, you were quite the cock-loving fun girl at uni. Come on."

But she now knows the anger is not the worst. Callum's too idiotic to have crafted some fucking master plan, but the anger is nothing compared to his worst parting gift: the curse of missing his touch. Yes, she still misses being touched the way he touched her. She doesn't miss him, that little shit, but she misses his big hands, his huge hands on her body. She doesn't know what he did and how he did it, but she hasn't been touched like this in years now. And it is killing her.

Adam is nice, he is attentive. He is meticulous, even. But he grabs her or holds her or positions her, it always feels perfunctory, proper, courteous and polite. Yet he doesn't touch her, not the way Callum did. Even when he tries. A couple of nights ago, he uncharacteristically forced himself on her, late at night. That could have been nice. It was different, at any rate. But it ended up being ridiculous: he was fucking her with the gestures and groans and posturing of some kind of moustachioed porn star. She thought briefly he was fucking like she imagines Don Johnson would have fucked in 'Miami Vice'. And her second thought was that she wished she could tell Callum that, she wished they could still talk about their conquests and make snotty fun of them. And she hated herself for letting her mind go to these dark corners. And she was angry.

And here comes Callum's final stab, his ultimate knifing, with cruel irony as his sharpened blade. Because Siobhan sees that it was the missing of his touch, of being touched at all, that set everything off.

She is this pathetic: she needed to get a massage, to fucking pay for some guy to actually touch her the way a woman like her needs to be touched. So yesterday, when she was naked and ready, when she lay on the massage table barely dried after an hour of steam room and cold water pool, she was happy. She was longing and yearning, but happy. And then the masseuse got in the room. A bloody woman, a bloody fat and middle-aged French woman. Not the beautiful Egyptian body builder she had glimpsed the day before.

She wanted to scream, to scratch that woman's face with her manicured nails, to throw the massage table smashing the hi-fi set and destroying the tape inside, with whale and pan flute music.

But she just left. She got dressed, mumbled some apologies and got out. And when she got to the lobby, she froze. Adam and that young American were coming down the stairs together. The wrong stairs, the stairs that lead to the American's bedroom, not to theirs. They were together. Together.

In retrospect, this is when she could have come up with alternative explanations. Or this is when everything could have started to make sense. Or this is when she could have lashed out at Adam, call him a pervert while slapping that arrogant young kid.

She didn't. She thought about Callum. You win, is exactly what she thought. And she started sobbing, just when they were both out of sight, finally going their own separate ways after a brief, light touch of their hands.

The old American saw her as he exited the gift shop. She doesn't know what else he saw, but he saw her. "Are you okay, dear?" he felt compelled to ask. What do you fucking think. "I'm fine," she managed to say, somewhat neutrally between two hiccups. He nudged her towards a chair, sat her down, disappeared in the bathroom and came back with a tissue. "Do you have a cigarette?" she asked. She doesn't know where that came from. She hasn't smoked in years. He hobbled like a Labrador towards the concierge and came back with a cigarette and a matchbox. She grabbed both, stood up and limped to her room. She did turn around and thank him.

Adam was in the shower. Siobhan knew he'd startle hearing her back sooner than expected. He would be scared and anxious. That was good. She went to the balcony and lit the cigarette. And she started to think. She felt something nice creeping up inside her. She couldn't quite tell what it was. But it was comforting, perhaps even exciting. Something to look forward to. But what? Something will change, her life will be different sometime in the near future. That was nice. She will make Adam pay, too. He will suffer, she was pretty sure about that. That was also nice.

This is what she calls the resounding fiasco of her choices and delusion. You win, Callum, you win.

* * *

Siobhan is in another bus now. It's smaller, but cooler. She is alone and this is fantastic. Part of the horde is with her, but only a small part, all clamped in the front seats. She is sitting alone in the long, undivided row at the very back.

She couldn't quite fathom staying by the pool all afternoon next to Adam. He would be staring at Ben (this is how they call him now apparently, not Benjamin), watching nervously for each of the young American's moves. It's rather ghastly and sad. So she decided to sign up for the jolly afternoon at the Medina, the local market. They're almost there and she's quite set on ditching the horde as soon as they arrive.

It's a different guide, the task of touring them through a souk being probably beneath their usual one. The new guide seems particularly bored and distracted and Siobhan finds herself watching her and anticipating her moves the way she did in school when she tried to ditch her teacher during a school trip. This is actually a lot of fun. And soon enough they reach a y-shaped intersection and, as the horde follows blindly to the right, she takes a left. Within a few steps, she is steeped in a different world: curious eyes are on her, hands are grabbing her arm to pull her toward a store, kids are asking for money and candy (with a look both pleading and aggressive), shouts of Arabic are flying around (and, as always, she can't tell whether they're angry or just animated).

She smiles at first, proud and commanding. Then she slowly starts to panic. She waves off kids and old men with a growing forcefulness, she increases her pace and bumps into more kids and old men. Her voice declining their offers or supplications is growingly curt and abrasive. She doesn't know where she's going and she's having a hard time breathing. As she tries to push away a woman who is pulling her by the waist, she inadvertently slaps her. The woman freezes then curses Siobhan angrily in Arabic, soon joined by more voices, until there are more and more people circling around her, drowning her in suffocating fear, until a hand grabs her by the arm and pulls her away. It is the old American, "Richard," he'd soon remind her as they reach the Y-intersection again and she gasps for air, suddenly feeling safe again.

He doesn't say anything, he just gives her time to catch her breath and find her bearings. She feels stupid and confused. She looks up toward the street they just left and finds none of the assaulting frenzy she thinks she had just caused. Has she imagined this? Overreacted? Richard's caring and protective touch on her shoulder could mean anything.

"I think I need to get back to the hotel," she says decidedly.

"Let's," he says and starts ahead, turning his head briefly to check if she's indeed following him.

They reach the bus pretty fast, but it stands empty, the driver probably enjoying tea somewhere.

"It's all right, I'll just walk. I'll be fine," she tells Richard.

"Nonsense. We're not far from the hotel, but the sun will kill you." He scans their surroundings and sees a line of horse-carts, tackily decorated with fake flowers and waiting for tourists to hop in. Richard slides his arm under hers and drags her gently towards one of them. They climb in and the driver starts yelling at his horse as soon as they give him the name of their hotel.

The ride is longer than she expected. It feels longer, at least. There is no way to hide from the sun and she can feel her cheeks, nose, shoulders boiling. She feels dizzy and has a hard time absorbing Richard's soft-spoken rambling. Whatever he is talking about is soothing, however. There is something in the tone of his voice. She catches something about her needing some rest. Then something about life and adversity and uncertainty. She tries really hard to focus now, because she's taken aback by the turn he seems to have given to the conversation. He tells her about his wives, one who died, the other who left him alone to raise his three kids. Siobhan doesn't want to know, she doesn't want him to impose intimacy between them by force-feeding her revelations and confessions. He is sweet but, my God, he is so American.

But he is persistent. He leaves silences open for her to jump in, to interact, to share. She tries to stay polite, as they're stuck in a horse-cart anyway, but makes a point not to encourage him. She stays mute, but it doesn't deter him. She is sweating profusely and is looking for her sunglasses, rummaging in her purse, while he chatters engagingly about "trust" and "commitment" and "self-realization" and "moving forward" and "love" and "hope" and "finding your way".

She finally has her sunglasses on, which gives her briefly and falsely a sense of victory against the sun. As she breathes out, she hears him say, in a conclusive tone: "So you see, that's why I needed to let her go." She turns towards him and stares at his expectant eyes. He can't see her through her glasses. What would he see? Is she surprised or resentful or offended or upset or shaken? Is she angry?

"You're telling me I need to let my husband go?" she asks accusingly.

"No," he answers, flustered and embarrassed. "No, not at all. I'm sorry, Siobhan, that's not what I meant. What I'm saying is, he has to let you go."

* * *

She is alone in bed and Adam's not here. She's not bothered, not really. This is how it'll be until they get back to England. He wasn't by the pool or in their room when she came back from the market. He mumbled some excuse when he finally joined her outside (something about walking on the banks, she thinks). He had these large red spots on his neck, the ones he sports during and after sex. He wasn't very talkative during dinner, but that's fine. He made a lot of trips to the buffet that evening. Then he was fidgeting in bed, all the while trying to be quiet so she would fall asleep. He stepped out of the bed noiselessly when he thought she was. It was quite delightful to scare him, just as he was going through the door: "What's wrong, Adam, where are you going?" "Nothing, darling, just bloody insomnia again. I'll walk it off. Go back to sleep."

She does want to sleep; sleep is the only way to make time move faster. She wishes she could sleep for hours and days, until Adam would tap her gently on the shoulder and tell her, "Wake up, Siobhan, we're home." And if she can't sleep, this is actually her second best choice: being alone and thinking. Thinking about being back home, about what comes next. Thinking that she's not that old, that she can start again, that she can be yet another new Siobhan, one whom she likes, who has a flat in the city and posh friends and a glamorous job. A real London girl.

She's not quite there yet. And it seems exhausting to get there, somehow. There'll need to be some talking. Maybe she can do that. Maybe Adam and she will talk: he'll cry and hug her, she'll tell him he is and will stay her best friend. She'll wish him the best and he will do the same. They'll stay in touch, he'll come to her new flat in the city and he'll be in awe. She'll pat him on the shoulder goodbye.

Or maybe they won't talk. She'll make him cringe and contort whenever she feels he's about to talk, to bravely start a confession, humbled and pathetic. She'll stop him short and have his agony renewed and renewed again, through a whole series of silent dinners. She'll make him question himself, she'll have him wondering whether she knows and what she knows. She'll make him pay for a few months, pay for the years of longing to be touched, by him if not by anybody else. He left her standing there all these years with her pain and anger. He left them both there, like two giant figures, falsely proud and strong, guarding ferociously a whole vast stretch of nothing.

### Chapter 6

Friday, Richard

Everyone lies. Omissions, fibs, inventions, denials, half-truths, white lies. Richard has always loved both the sound and the very concept of a "white lie". The purity, the innocence, the romanticism even, of its flowing phonetics, a whispering surge and a delicate fall. "White lie". A transgression with a name not unlike that of a flower. His fondness is transparently self-serving, of course. His only lies have always been white. Is there such a thing as a "black lie"? A lie told with the sole purpose of hurting someone?

The whiteness of a lie, its pallor, is hard to gauge; it's a fine line, moving and blurring and reshaping. But it is a good moral compass. A transgression with a name not unlike that of a flower can make a good moral compass, arguably. Discipline is needed, however. A white lie could stay white for as long as needed, yet ultimately, the truth has to slowly emerge, after a careful maturation. A white lie is a protective cocoon for the truth to hibernate in and from which it can slowly emerge: yawning and, sometimes, ugly.

Again, discipline helps. Raising three boys left by their mothers (brutally castoff by illness or dejection) requires structure, planning, design, adjustment. You have to map out the emotional development of three helpless beings, to sculpt their interactions with each other, to choreograph their dealings with the world, with its paradigms, abstractions, expectations and Mother's Days.

Dealing with death, in that sense and in that sense only, is surprisingly organic. The lies are not just white, they are an exquisite snow-like white. They are comforting to hear as they are cleansing to tell. Richard told Andrew repeatedly over the years, with a vocabulary evolving along with his son's heartening emotional intelligence, that his mother had been one of the most beautiful, smart, loving, selfless women he had ever seen, that she had cared for nothing and no one more than she did for her only child. There are some lies in there. But white, so white. Richard invented for Andrew some of her favorite books or music that contrasted nicely with his, to give his son a broader realm within which to fine tune his tastes and sensitivity. Richard invented for Andrew some of her views on religion and fate and life that matched nicely his atheistic humanism, to give his son a firmer hold on complex notions.

Then you adjust. He told Andrew evolving yet loving truths about life, love, women, and his own uniqueness in his father's eyes when he was eight and Richard met Barbara, when he was ten and she came back from the hospital with tiny Benjamin in her arms, when he was twelve and Dustin came along, when he was fifteen and Barbara was gone.

At that point came another set of lies, all white and all loving, more subtle too because you can't lie about a living mother, a mother who writes and sporadically calls, a mother who has decided to start a new life but declines to leave the old one completely behind. Desertion is harder to explain than death, harder to simplify, to shape, to give context to. One thing is obvious and paramount: never say "don't worry, she'll be back." Anything else, you improvise and hope for the best. You stick to your moral compass (white lies have to make the other person feel better, not yourself) and to one structuring narrative: your father is happy, things are good, nothing else bad or hurtful will happen to you three children. Protection is key, and easily done because it is a purpose, it is an active approach to everything in life. Things are good if you make them good, if you rejoice and enjoy and share your elation, if you plan surprises and gifts and trips, if you smile, if you kiss, if you hug. Protection is demonstrative.

Richard's own personal happiness usually follows. And when it doesn't, he tell lies, all white and loving. There's one lie these days, a temporary, fairly inconsequential lie (two, if you count his undisclosed health issues). He is having a relationship with Angela. Warm, exuberant, lively Angela. A "family friend" as Benjamin usually refers to her. She is. Benjamin and Dustin (and Andrew, because Richard can't lie to some and not to all, it's just too complicated) will know about her soon, when their dad in turn knows that they are safe and ready to move in the world, when they will know that he can be everything to them, always and everywhere, while still having some happiness of his own. One step at a time, a yawning truth will emerge from its white lie cocoon.

You plan these steps, you never want to be caught off guard - even if that does happen, of course. This trip to Egypt is one of those steps. It's not a big secret, nor a concealed scheme. Benjamin knows Andrew and Richard shared a precious, moving, momentous week here ten years ago. Richard doesn't really care if Benjamin might feel pressured or boxed into filial intimacy: sometimes steps forward need to be prodded a little forcefully.

Richard hasn't done an excellent job so far. It might be because, whereas Andrew was an outgoing, vibrant teenager a decade ago in this very hotel, Benjamin acts and looks much more like a young man - confident, guarded and independent. Richard is not comfortable with adult men, he has always been aware of that. He likes the company of women much better - or children. He likes the challenging interactions with people who are blunt, sensitive, emotional, exuberant if need be. He finds adult men boring, aloof, constrained, and myopically pragmatic.

Richard likes their guide, here in Luxor. She is perky and quirky, passionate and demanding. He likes Siobhan. She's like a wounded cat, all claws out, but with such a burning intensity, such overflowing emotions. He likes Angela. He misses Angela. He just called her, he really needed to hear her voice, her laughter, her affectionate sighs. He talked to her about their day, about the clouds this morning, about their visit to the Ramesseum, about the statue that Shelley mentioned in this poem she likes, about the thunder and the rain which haven't stopped since they got back to the hotel, about lying in his bed in the middle of the afternoon and wanting to call her. "How are things with Ben?" she asked. "Well, I haven't done an excellent job so far," he had to answer.

Richard is now in a bath and the water is getting cold. He took refuge in the bathroom because of its complete silence: no sounds from the rain outside, no sounds coming from Benjamin's room next door. He's making progress: he realizes his frustration at getting his son out of his shell probably stems from his own lack of focus and purpose. Does he want them to talk about Benjamin's mother, to expunge that heavy file from their quarantined records before his son sets off for Act II of his life? Does he want Benjamin to come to peace with Dustin, to ease the brotherly rivalry that has so disrupted and clouded their familial shelter? Does he want to delve into Benjamin's seemingly complicated private life, to convey some sort of message of paternal support or indifference?

He's also aware that Benjamin has never, not in a long time, expressed openly nor silently any need for guidance, resolution, or emotional breakthrough. Angela said earlier "You can lead a horse to water, but you –". "I know, I know," he had gently interrupted her.

His boys are so different. Andrew appeases him. Benjamin makes him proud. Dustin worries him. He had actually told this to Angela, in that lovely café close to Penn's Landing, a month before he left for Egypt. "Mix it up", she had said simply, caringly amused. "Be proud of Andrew. Give some peace to Dustin. And worry about Benjamin. You'll have a whole week with him to do just that."

* * *

"The next time I call Dustin, you should really be with me. It's silly that you haven't talked to him all week." Richard knows it is clumsy on his part to try and force again the subject of his brother in a dinner conversation that is nearing its yawning end. The evening had been very pleasant. They had finally found a wine that was decent enough and he is sipping slowly the second glass he ordered just when Benjamin was finishing his dessert. His son has been puzzled, slightly, as their dinners had never lasted that long. But they can sleep in the next morning, their morning excursions program having reached its conclusion today. Tomorrow is their last day, tomorrow night their last dinner. They need to talk.

"You called Dustin again?" Benjamin asks, looking genuinely surprised, a little annoyed too.

"Well, he was out. So I just talked to Angela."

"Okay. We're leaving on Sunday morning. There is no point making another call, we'll see him soon enough," he says conclusively.

Richard stays silent, stubbornly thinking about another overture. They need to talk.

He notices Benjamin gaze at Siobhan and her husband, over his father's shoulder. Richard turns slightly and sees them leaving the dining room. Neither of them acknowledges the Americans. Their departure seems to change Benjamin's mood slightly, however. He drops to the back of his chair and takes a deep breath before looking up at his father.

"Why are you so intent on me and Dustin getting along? A lot of siblings just don't, not when they're young. That's just the way it is. Why is it so important to you?" There is no aggression in his voice, just weariness and maybe a bit of sulking.

Richard doesn't really care that the brothers don't get along these days. That's not his point, but he doesn't know how to phrase what he really wants to get at. Not yet. "You'll understand when you're a father" is all he can mutter, with surprising assuredness, a tone he immediately regrets for all its implications and presumptions.

"Well, at least, I'll make sure none of my kids is a Republican," Benjamin says defiantly.

"What are you talking about?" Richard asks, a bit irritated by the swift and highhanded change of the subject.

"You do know Dustin volunteered for the Santorum campaign last November? The little idiot was stuffing envelopes and did some door-knocking. It's ridiculous, he's not even fifteen. It's that Van Prague kid and his older sister."

Richard thought briefly about the money he had donated to Harris Wofford, a friend of his from his days as a fellow lawyer. The irony of his youngest kid licking stamps for Wofford's victorious opponent was actually more amusing than anything else. A bittersweet allegory of sort.

"Why do you care?" he asks.

"It's embarrassing."

"How? At school?"

"Yes. In a way. But it's embarrassing for you, Dad, how can you not see that? You're a big shot liberal civil rights lawyer and the little fool has a picture of Newt Gingrich in his wallet. Seriously, Dad, it's moronic and insulting."

His sudden agitation is painful and unnerving. They do need to talk. Richard takes a big gulp of wine and looks at his son, fondly and intently.

"How much do you remember, Ben, you know, from when you were... really young?" he asks.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. How much do you remember?" He feels compelled to add: "From when your mother left."

The fear in his son's eyes makes him want to retract everything, to find a joke to crack, a plan for tomorrow, another round of dessert. But he has to finish what he started.

"I don't know. Not much, I'm sure," Benjamin answers tentatively. He sees his father's hesitation and, gracefully and mercifully, asks "Why?"

"You were maybe seven years old. Dustin was still very young and he was having a tantrum for some reason. I was at my wits' end, really, and you saw it. I could tell you saw it and it scared me. I tried again to calmly quiet Dustin down, but he was screaming his lungs out. Then you looked at me and you asked me point blank: is this why she left?"

Benjamin freezes. He opens his mouth to interrupt his father, then looks down and starts to fidget with his napkin. Richard can see he is hurting and his own pain is jolting.

"The thing is, Ben, it wasn't really a question. Everything in your tone and posture and look on your face was making a statement. You had arrived at this conclusion, however young you were then. I could see it and it scared me, Ben, it really scared me. I had failed at –"

"No, Dad, please, don't say –"

"Hear me out, please, Benjamin. I had failed you, that's how I felt. Whether it was true or not is irrelevant. But yes, that day, it did become important to me that you and your little brother got along, that you accept him for what he is, that you don't resent his presence or his very existence."

"I don't."

"You have. You might still. And I can't have that. I can't have your anger toward your mother redirected at Dustin. It's just not fair."

"I am not angry at my mother, Dad. Honestly. You did a good job with all that. I'm serious. If I don't remember much, it's precisely because it never really was a big deal. I mean, it was, obviously, but you dealt with it the best way you could. None of us are freaks. Well, Dustin is a Republican, so we might have to -"

"Stop, Ben." The exhaustion and sadness in his voice startle his son. He takes another deep breath and catches the attention of the waiter to order another glass of wine. He turns back to Benjamin, who still seems confounded by his father's resolve to dig deeper in the matter. Richard notices that he himself is looking away as he resumes talking, slowly and softly.

"I think you were eleven or twelve, I'm not sure. You weren't a little kid any longer, that's my point. Andrew was back during a break, I think it was spring break. He and Ethan were mugged one evening. Do you remember?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, they were. Nothing serious, but Andrew had his wallet and his keys stolen. So we had to change the lock of our front door. When the locksmith was gone, I could tell you were really upset, but you weren't saying anything. When I pressed you, you looked confused and worried. You finally told me. You were wondering how your mother was going to get in if she decided to come back."

He finally manages to turn toward Benjamin. His son is looking down at his empty plate, still fiddling with his napkin, twisting it with increased vehemence. As Richard thinks he detects the faint start of tears in his son's eyes, he has to look away again. The waiter brings him his glass of wine. Benjamin barely registers his short presence.

"You were eleven, Benjamin, maybe twelve, not five or six. Barbara had never given any signs that she might come back and we had never discussed that possibility together either. The way you talked about your mother to anyone, friends or strangers, was lucid and rational, detached almost. And yet."

Benjamin briskly wipes away a tear from his cheek. Richard's stomach hurts, he feels dizzy. His heart breaks. But he has to march on.

"I promised you I'd send her a copy of the new key by mail. We never mentioned it again."

"Did you?" Benjamin asks, more curious than accusing.

"What?"

"Did you send her a key?"

"No. No, I didn't," he responds meekly, looking away. "How would she have interpreted that?"

"You just could have told her that her son wanted her to have it."

Richard doesn't answer and drinks some wine. Benjamin is right, he supposes. He had wanted to spare his wife guilt, he had wanted to spare himself awkwardness. And he had broken a promise to his son. "The point is," he resumes, "you can't walk around and pretend that none of this has affected you, that none of this is still affecting you. I don't."

"You do. You never show any signs that this has messed you up."

"But I'd never claim it hasn't if someone actually asks me. I'd never say 'it never really was a big deal'. I'm happy and I love you, I love you all, and I love our life together, but this was a big deal, Benjamin."

"Fine," he says then looks around him. They both notice the dining room is now empty; the tables are being cleaned up by the waiters, most of them with celerity and efficient briskness, the ones closer to them with tactful discretion. Benjamin seems to think for a while and Richard lets the silence sort his son's thoughts out.

"How do you do it?" Benjamin asks, earnestly and expectantly.

"How do I do what?"

"Well, deal with it all. Accept it. Move on. Forgive."

Is this a crossroad? Is this when parental protection gives way to fatherly guidance and steering? Is this his final, crucial contribution to his son's coming-of-age, the last parting gift of wisdom to arm him for the coming years of thinking and doubting in college rooms, yearning and hoping on beaches and mountains, holding hands and breaking hearts, packing and unpacking his growing personal belongings?

And why hadn't he seen coming this very question? For all his discipline, structure, planning, design, and adjustment, this was the one query, legitimate and plain, for which he didn't have a ready answer. Not an answer that would round up and cap off years of shaping his son's future, not with the appropriate strength, grace, consistency and finality. Denial? Yes, there has been some of that, albeit in a reasonable amount. Still, not something you want to have emulated. There has also been, he confesses to himself, a sense of smug vindication: his three sons are terrific, his career is thriving, and what a beautiful house he has. Whereas Barbara, poor soul, well, she herself admits that her "journey" isn't over – a journey that is, apparently, "worth more than the destination". Richard thinks he has arrived – given a couple more years to pull Dustin up. He has almost arrived and the destination will be wonderful. He will arrive if he can give a proper answer to Benjamin. He knows his hesitation, even if concealed, is damning, as his long silence is self-defeatingly giving weight to a forthcoming answer he clearly hasn't thought through.

"Empathy," he finally utters, letting the word flow out as if it was elbowing itself out of a cluttered mass of superfluous considerations. The word hangs between them, Richard feels like he's watching it rise and flutter. As Benjamin fails to catch it, his father repeats it softly, blowing more life into it: "Empathy".

* * *

As they walk silently through the dimmed lobby, he sees Benjamin instinctively darting a look towards the stairs leading to the opposite wing. Richard realizes they haven't talked about Siobhan's husband. "I was at the market with Siobhan, the British woman, yesterday afternoon, did I tell you that? We had a lovely time." A white lie.

Benjamin nods, checks his watch discreetly, gives his father a polite smile and veers towards their stairs. "That's nice," he then says, without turning, his long-legged paces decisively leading him to his bedroom. A white lie. One step at a time, a yawning truth will emerge from its white lie cocoon.

### Chapter 7

Saturday

I had often wondered, throughout the week, how early the sun actually rose in Luxor, as it had been light outside every morning when my alarm had wretchedly woken me at impossible hours. It was 4:17am when I startled awake from a fitful dream and it was dark outside.

It was our last full day in Egypt and for the first time since we had gotten there, I was free to get out of bed anytime I wished - before 10:00 if I wanted to catch breakfast. That thought was comforting, as I dreaded letting myself drift back to sleep. There had been a lot of yelling in my dream, loud, angry, vehement shouting directed at my brother Dustin and at other, less crisply identified, figures. In all likelihood, these shapeless recipients of my rage had been allegories or proxies of my mother. I resented feeling so predictable and letting the earlier conversation with my father affect me so. I closed my eyes and tried to wave off the nagging flash images of my dream and the lingering physical sensations of an imaginary throat ache and a less easily explained pang of claustrophobia. A fleeting yet brittle recollection of me lashing out at Adam during my nightmare shook my body awake again. It was 4:23 and it was still dark.

I looked through the window and saw a black starry night. I considered going to the balcony and using the cool air to clear my head, but put on some jeans and a t-shirt instead, and silently stepped out of my bedroom. The contact of the hallway carpet on my bare feet felt nice and somehow added a sense of illicitness to this still aimless stroll. It did feel like sneaking out, not unlike when I tiptoed out of my home to go to a bar or a party or to a girl's house. But I sensed that my cautiousness not to wake or alert anyone was intended to protect the solitary nature of my escapade. I wanted to roam around the hotel alone, not run into a fellow insomniac or a hotel clerk. As I came down the stairs toward the lobby, I noticed the reception desk was empty, yet the door behind it was wide open, leading to what looked like a brightly lit back office. There was a faint sound of Arabic coming from a radio. I quickly made my way outside, where the paved ground felt a little warmer than the cold marble inside.

I lay on the chaise which Adam had made a habit of occupying and took in the view and the silence. All the lights had been turned off, even those of the pool which had always radiated a warm yellow glow when I glanced at it at nights on my balcony. The moonlight was bright enough, however, to intrude on the night safe and comfortably. A little breeze made the plants and shrubs around me bristle sporadically, but the only sounds were those made by the creases of my jeans and the readjustments of my body to snugly fit into what I imagined was Adam's imprint on the chaise.

I thought about him, briefly. I may even have considered the ways to alert him of my presence and to beckon him. I couldn't quite throw pebbles at his window and I quickly realized I wasn't actually seeking his company, or anyone's company. I felt like I was reclaiming a sense of possibility and uncertainty in this hotel, in this foreign land. There was a great thrill, childish and absurd, to being alone in the dark, while everyone around was sleeping. A thrill that quickly became, as it does, forbidden and erotic.

Jason had once claimed, as a way of justifying his very first, albeit tentative, grip of my dick during one of my sleepovers, that he sometime felt overwhelmed by his constant horniness. He professed an amazement at how, since he'd been thirteen years old, there was rarely a moment when he didn't think about sex, rarely a situation where he didn't find himself picturing the girls around him naked, rarely a time where he found himself alone and didn't feel the urge to use that opportunity to jerk off. I had expressed similar feelings and longings, even if I knew they didn't quite play out in such a seemingly permanent and ongoing manner. My horniness came in bursts – unexpected, clouding, and brutal. It was a frequently untamable little monster, but one that reared its head following a pattern and logic which were inscrutable to me. I could usually sense its coming, like a wave slowly taking shape as it moves towards you. And indeed, I usually braced myself to surf it with hankering dedication.

Predictably, I felt my cock grow, pulsating heavily and grating against my jeans. I placed my right hand over my crotch, softly, and concentrated on the feeling of the throbbing of my slowly forming erection. I watched my jeans bulge and felt a selfish anticipation of a truly personal pleasure coming ahead. This erection will be mine to dispose of, I thought, a little bemused. It had only been a few days since I had masturbated, but the last couple of times had already been for Adam or thinking about Adam or joined by Adam. This one would be mine and mine alone to dispose of. It was dark, I was alone, and I could conjure up any images, any man, any woman in my mind.

Sex with Adam had been astounding. We had thus far usually managed to meet up in the afternoon and late at night - in my bedroom usually, in our bathroom by the pool at times. He hadn't come by that night, however, and I was not unhappy with climbing in my bed alone for once. Two days ago, Adam had first said, as I entered him with panting determination, "I'm yours, Ben, I'm yours." Something he had repeated a few times afterwards, with varying tones in his voice. He whispered it when we stood next to each other at the buffet, he mouthed it when we swam past each other in the pool, he breathed it when he kissed me and hugged me tight on my bed – after talking to me at length, and rather incoherently, about his past, about his feelings, about what I seemed to mean to him.

"I'm yours," he had repeatedly said, yet it was my body which really seemed to belong to him. He looked at it, grabbed it, used it with a hungry and possessive eagerness - which actually seemed to turn my body into some kind of towering machine designed and purposed for his pleasure. It was an incredible feeling for a seventeen-year old: my arms, my legs, my cock all felt more adult and formidable than I had ever experienced. My erections were so powerful and my ejaculations so forceful that I often felt I would damage him in some way, bruise him or sully him; but he had instead reacted with increasing abandon and lustful fierceness to my vigorous fucking and thrashing around.

"I'm yours," he had repeatedly said, yet everything about him, his blushing glances by the pool, his clumsy discreet groping by the buffet, his voracious blowing in the bathroom, his raspy commands for me to cum all over him, his frantic speed at delivering scattered titbits of his disquieting affection for me, all seem to impersonate a primal urge to swallow me whole. His intensity was generally invigorating and flattering but, especially after I had come, it was also a bit suffocating and uncomfortable.

But this erection was mine, I thought, and I waved off all images of Adam as I unbuttoned my jeans. I was already regretting the prospect of climaxing fast, as the forbidden and dangerous aspects of jerking off in the open, surrounded by balconies, bedrooms and the Nile, were adding an urgency and intensity that would, I knew, rapidly build an uncontrollable ejaculation. I thought about other, previous forbidden and dangerous situations where I had impulsively masturbated and, as expected, I quickly started to feel an impending orgasm. I stood up and walked a few steps towards the pool. I stood on its edge; it was so dark, it seemed bottomless. Its infinite blackness felt like a hole attempting to vacuum me in. I started to cum and heard the sound of drops hitting the water. I couldn't see them sink, though I kneeled to watch, but I thought of them wandering around the pool, waiting for Adam to jump in tomorrow and splash around, his face warmed by the sun and his body encircled by cloudy little bales of my sperm. I thought of other men, all the other men in the pool whose legs and feet and asses might be similarly and tenderly soiled.

There was some cum left on my fingers. I looked at it and felt an urge, a last whim before my lustful recklessness evaporated, to lovingly smear the walls of the pool bathroom, our bathroom. I stood back up, a little disoriented, and made my way. With each step, however, that urge decreased along with the softening of my dick. When I reached the bathroom, I found its door locked.

* * *

I woke up past eleven; I hadn't drawn the curtains, yet the bright sun had failed to wake me. I scrubbed my eyes, showered, picked up a swim trunk and a tee lying on the floor, got dressed and headed down to the pool. My father seemed relieved to see me and greeted me with the warmest, most engaging smile. He handed me a shiny green apple: "I saved one for you from the breakfast buffet". I managed to smirk gratefully, struggling to fight haziness and crankiness. This was our last day here, I thought as I bit into the apple, glancing at Adam, glancing at the pool, remembering the previous night and my twilight sullying of its waters. I took a few steps away, towards the end of the garden, the gate and its latched door to the Nile. I watched the hills of the Valley across, eating the fruit with forceful bites. This was my last day here and I didn't know how to spend it.

I walked towards the bar to find a trash can and discard the core of the apple, looking at Adam watching me. There was eagerness and uncertainty in his eyes. The connection was brief, however, as Siobhan raised her head from her magazine and ostensibly pointed at one of its pages to her husband. Adam turned, dejected, and Siobhan flashed me an obnoxious smile. I felt really tired again.

"You should go have a swim," my father suggested. "It'll wake you. The water is cooler, because of yesterday's rain. It's quite nice."

I knew I could get away with sulkiness in the morning - my father had raised three teenage boys. "You have exactly one hour to become Mr. Sunshine," I remember him telling Andrew when I was still a kid. "Until then, silence is tolerated, rudeness is frowned upon." Noiselessly and politely, I took off my t-shirt and flip-flops and dove in the cooling water.

I swam grazing the pool floor for the longest time I could hold my breath in, pushing myself around every time I reached one end of the pool. I came up for air, panting and slightly anguished. Adam was towering just above me. "Sorry. I wanted to dive in, but didn't want to hit you or scare you. You stayed an awfully long time down there," he said cheerfully, one tourist to another. He was blocking the sun, darkening his face and body with backlight. As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was staring at his stomach, where pearls of sweat were gliding towards the seam of his speedo.

"Yeah, sorry about that," I said, a little brisk, as I hauled myself out of the pool, brushing his hairy calves. "Go ahead. All yours."

Before he could take the plunge, he was pushed by Siobhan, who had sneaked behind him. He fell in the pool with little grace and an unattractive shriek, which caused his wife to laugh. Her smile disappeared swiftly when she caught mine and she jumped in the pool.

I lay on my chaise and let the scorching sun dry me. I dozed off for a while and woke up with a strong urge to use the bathroom. I resisted it, a little apprehensive about sending Adam the wrong signal. I was still a little cranky and was wary of his likely gushing. He seemed to be sleeping too, however, his book folded over his chest, with one hand clutching it, the other dropped on his side. I hurried towards the bathroom but, as I was washing my hands after using the urinal, he barged in.

"I missed you," he said, darting towards me and taking me in his arms. Within a few seconds, he managed to cup my face, kiss me, squeeze my crotch and place one of my hands on his ass.

"And I missed you last night too," he whispered to my ear.

"You didn't come," I said, pulling back.

"Well, no. I don't know, it seems you and your father were having a pretty serious conversation. And I didn't see any lights in your bedroom for a long time. And, well, I just fell asleep." He put his lips close to my ear again. "I've been pretty knackered after the last few days."

"Yes, it was probably just as well," I said, disentangling myself from him and moving towards the center of the room, closer to its exit. "My dad and I did talk forever. And I was probably not in the mood after all that."

"What did you talk about?" he asked, concerned. My face went blank and his went pale. "I mean, sorry, I don't want to pry."

"No, it's okay. We talked about my mother."

"Oh."

"Yes, oh." I had told him a little bit about my family situation, but hadn't gone into any specifics.

He took my hand in his hands and, suddenly and very briefly, I felt like melting, I felt like burying myself in his neck and rest my head on his shoulder, or on the light patch of hair of his chest.

"He basically wants me to forgive her," I said sternly, trying to hold it together.

"Did you?"

"No, not really."

"I understand."

"Do you?" I said, just a little too defiantly.

"Well, I guess I do. She must have had her reasons, but she still hurt you. She basically abandoned you."

"Then you don't understand, Adam. You don't understand her reasons and you don't understand the hurt."

"Okay, fine, I probably don't. All I'm saying is, somehow, it must have been really hard on her too. It must have been an awful situation for everyone involved."

"But see, that's the thing, everyone is trying to come up with some kind of excuses for her. I don't give a shit about that. Plus, I don't think her leaving is the worst part, but everyone is completely obsessed with that."

"What's the worst part?"

"I don't know."

"You don't?" he said, doubtfully.

"What pisses me off the most is when some friend of hers or her sister comes up with shit like 'You know, it was very brave for a woman in those days to claim her life and her future' or 'Sweetie, you have to understand that people make mistakes, they take the wrong path and it takes a lot of guts to say 'enough' and to do what's right, even if it might hurt people and yourself'. And blah, blah, blah."

Adam was silent, obviously considering what he wanted to say, wary of my outburst. Rather tentatively, he started: "Well, I don't know, maybe when you get a little older, you –"

"Oh, come on. Please. Fucking please. I'm old enough to fuck your brains out, but I'm too young to see what kind of mess she is and always was?"

"I didn't mean it that way. I just -"

"I know. I'm sorry."

It took him a few seconds, and a few strokes on the small of my back, to break the silence. "All I'm saying is, people do things when they're very young because they think they're supposed to do them, they think that's what will make them happy, because, hey, it seems to be working for everybody else. How young was your mum when she left?"

"I don't know. Young."

"See," he said, relieved to be proven right.

"She is a coward and a selfish mess, Adam, she just is. I have no patience nor tolerance for that."

"I'm not sure I see it that way."

"Fuck, Adam, of course you wouldn't. Of course you wouldn't."

He was startled and immobile. I took his hand and led him out. "Come on, let's just go. It's creepy to be talking about this in a bathroom, with you having a semi-hardon to top it all." I attempted a reconciliatory smile.

"I have to see you, Ben. I miss you. I have to see you tonight."

"Sure."

"It's our last night. And we're leaving before dawn tomorrow. I don't even know your address or anything. I want to talk some more. And I want you. I'm all yours, you know that, right?"

"Yes, Adam, I do."

* * *

My footsteps led me towards the gate, towards the Nile. Lunch had been a rather silent affair, though I had made every effort to be attentive, considerate, and kind. My father had seemed content to watch me eat, to watch his seventeen-year old son take full advantage of the hotel buffet. He had commented on my tan, twice. He had looked happy.

I pushed the gate open, stepped down a few concrete stairs and found myself on the dirty footpath of the bank. A few Egyptians, lounging on the dock, alertly raised their head, and perfunctorily asked "Felucca? Felucca?" I blurted "Non, merci," then wondered why I thought French might be better understood than English.

I hadn't had a real purpose when I had decided to walk out of the hotel compound. I just needed to push that gate open and to be on the other side. Now that I was, I pondered my options. I really wanted to sit down and watch the Nile, but the footpath and its verges were dirty and inhospitable. The puzzled and wary stares I was getting from the Egyptian men, who had conspicuously stopped their conversation to watch me and my next move, made me turn right and start walking. The bank itself wasn't pretty or enticing, and the river seemed muddy and thick. You had to look slightly up and far ahead to unobtrusively take in the beauty of the place, of the hills gilded by an early spring low sun. I reached another small wooden dock, in front of a low wall and an iron gate similar to those of my hotel. I had obviously gotten to the adjacent compound, another resort, the imposing yet tacky entrance of which our bus had passed every time we drove to and from our excursions.

A couple of German tourists were climbing cautiously out of a felucca, repeating "shukran" to an effusive Egyptian, who was then slipped some money discreetly by the man, as if the tipping of a local was something distasteful from which he had to gallantly shield his wife. The Germans darted toward the closed gate, distractedly cutting me off. I decided to follow them, as if my destination had always been their resort. I made a polite gesture to let them pass ahead. The man was briefly puzzled, and suspicious, but when he looked up and down and saw my western clothes (and, probably, my light skin), he smiled courteously and said "Danke schön".

I nodded and followed them, mechanically, after the man had used his key to let us all in. The garden was bigger and lusher than the one I had just left; I quickly realized that the whole resort was probably at least twice as large as ours. It was more recently built, imposing and flashy, mixing awkwardly architectural styles that were thought to appeal to tourists: marble and tiles, stones and sandy concrete, columns and awnings, faux colonial and tawdry post-modernism.

The German couple was faster than my leisurely and uncertain stroll and they quickly disappeared ahead. I reached the pool, busy and swarming, and took a little time to find an empty chaise, in the shade and with a panoramic view of the vacationing crowd.

I made myself comfortable and fairly inconspicuous, and I watched.

Ahead of me, sitting cross-legged and sideways by the pool, was a lifeguard. He was in his early twenties and extremely tan. His bleached and moist hair was pulled behind his ears and grazed the base of his neck; he wore the typical red-white short and tee combination, and had an ankle bracelet, a fat silver ring on a middle finger and a seashell necklace. He was chatting up a young woman in the pool, who had rested her elbows on its edge and looked up towards him, in awe. Within the next few minutes, a number of women, of various ages and physiques, passed by him and giddily greeted him. He greeted them all back with the same flirtatious, raspy cockiness.

To my left lay a greying man, probably in his late forties, early fifties. He was bulky, with a strong frame and a wide waist, the face of businessman with the body of a retired football player. He sat straight on his chaise, next to a much younger woman who was, interestingly, not as attractive as he was. Neither of them was reading or sleeping, they never exchanged a word, but traded affectionate glances, the young woman often placing her hand with cheaply painted nails on his thigh, rubbing it slowly and playing with its salt and pepper hair.

The lifeguard distracted me by rearranging his crotch with one hand, using the other to shield his eyes from the sun, as he looked up to talk in broken English to a young, giggling teenage girl.

I imagined the older guy when he first realized that the young woman besides him might be willing to do things, to say things, to feel things that his wife had lost sight of or interest for. The young woman looks like she could be his secretary. They must have exchanged looks at work, teasing and clumsy, for days, weeks, before he made a move. Or she made the move, because he had a few doubts, questions, reserves. She wasn't as good looking as his wife was, when younger; she was not as good looking as his best friend's mistress (a waitress, a knock-out); she was not as good-looking as the woman with whom he had imagined (he had known) he would one day cheat on his wife. But he caved in one evening, after work, when she had suggested some drinks for happy hour. And he had been kissed, and blown, and fucked, and touched by that woman in ways he hadn't quite thought were possible. And he had felt stronger and sexier than he had been feeling in a long time. And he had left his wife and moved in with his secretary in a new place. And he bought her gifts and took her to Egypt. And still she kissed him and blew him and fucked him and touched him like she was a porn star. Like he was a porn star. He came twice last night.

The lifeguard loudly high-fived the teenage girl who then darted, with exasperation, towards her parents. His attention was quickly diverted to a middle-aged woman, with highlights and a tiny bikini, swimming conscientious laps by him. He offered her encouragements, in a voice both goodhearted and sleazy.

I imagined the lifeguard being led by that woman, later this evening, towards her bedroom. She would be giddily inebriated, she would be sloppily ravenous as soon as they'd get in and she'd push him on the bed. He would fuck her, losing little time with foreplay. He would position himself so that he could watch his own reflection in the mirror. He would wonder, at some point while changing her position, if the drops of cum he had emitted on the carpet of that exact same bedroom, previously occupied by another woman whom he had also fucked, if these drops were still there, encrusted in the cheap fabric, if these traces of his presence would still be around when the season would be over, when he'd have to leave and figure out if a winter resort will have him, somewhere, doing something, until a new season started and new women booked a seat on a charter flight in the hope of being fucked by a young lifeguard with a dumb bracelet on his ankle.

Are we all doomed to the terrible ordinariness of our sex lives?

To my right sat two young German men, who looked and behaved like college friends. The one closer to me was very tall and thin, with a small face, relative to his large frame, deep-seated eyes covered by black-rimmed glasses resting on a big crooked nose. He had a mop of unruly black hair and was browsing distractedly at a sports magazine. He had placed his huge right leg on his bent left one, ankle on knee, creating an imposing and complicated sculpture of limbs, flesh and wiry muscles. His friend next to him was short, pudgy, sunburned, with reddish curly hair. He was sipping a beer and looking at women in the pool. I gazed further away when I saw him casually burp.

I imagined the tall German student taking off his glasses and slipping down his boxers before inserting himself in his girlfriend, a girl he met in class, a girl his pudgy friend crassly teased him about, a wholesome girl who gave herself to him fairly quickly, too quickly perhaps for him not to wonder if she really desired him or just wanted a boyfriend, to wonder if his hours at the gym were not wasted on her (if these hours have a point at all), if his feet were not too big or smelly, if his dick was big enough (it was, and he kind of knew it and he kind of didn't). He was happy to have a girlfriend, he was happy to be able to fuck once a week, he was happy to tell his pudgy friend that eating her out is wunderbar even if he never quite got himself to go down there, he was happy and relieved that he had a sex life and his pudgy friend didn't, even if he felt awful at times about these feelings. He loved fucking his girlfriend because it felt splendid to be doing the things you're supposed to be doing when you're a man. He didn't know if he was good at it, and that feeling, whenever it crept up, always made him cum in premature and slightly panicked knee-jerk reflex. He liked using condoms because he liked buying them, or boorishly telling his pudgy friend to bring him some from the grocery store when it was his pudgy friend's turn to do the shopping. He hoped he gave his girlfriend orgasms and believed her when she told him he did. He could never find the words to aptly describe, to her, to his pudgy friend, to himself, the mind-blowing sensation that his own orgasms jolted violently inside his tall, wiry, muscular body.

Are we all doomed to the terrible ordinariness of our sex lives? Or are we merely getting through our day, being a man, permanently negotiating the present and future contractual relationship with our dicks, our desires, our weaknesses, our humanity?

Then he looked at me. The lifeguard was scanning his surroundings, bored and vapid, and his eyes locked with my vacant gaze. I held his stare, flustered but resolute. He pouted and winked, quickly, subtle and silly. He looked away and yawned, theatrically, showing off his muscles and basking in his own beauty. He was preposterous and narcissistic, I thought, and I knew that a similarly preposterous narcissism must have been apparent to any attentive onlooker when I was myself performing my mating dance around Adam.

I imagined the lifeguard with the middle-age woman with the tiny bikini, panting after his orgasm, looking straight at her ravished face and telling her, winking, "Next time, we'll have your husband join us". I imagined fucking him in a broom closet and getting caught by one of the other women he'd had sex with the previous week.

I felt a hardness growing. I smiled. It wasn't a shift of label or sexual assignation, it was a shift of perspective.

I imagined fucking the German guy and making him feel beautiful, making him want to fuck his girlfriend again, but better, making him want to find better friends, making him want to fuck better women.

Further right was a French family. The wife, with her two little boys behind her, was nodding goodbye to her husband, as she carefully lay on the three empty chaises various items to mark her territory and deter any intruder to steal or occupy the space she was claiming for herself. The husband watched his family walk away and resumed the reading of his newspaper. He looked poised and handsome. He dropped his paper to the floor and placed both his hands on the back of his head. He closed his eyes and basked in the sun with a satisfied smile.

I imagined the French man with a masturbation addiction. He loved his wife and didn't desire any other woman, not really, not any real woman, not any woman he'd actually meet and who would actually be someone better than his wife, someone with a life better than his. He had a masturbation addiction and it was fairly new and rapidly growing. Not an addiction that made him unhappy or anxious or guilt-ridden (not more anyway than the usual amount of feeble guilt he thought a married man carries, a man who made vows but who can't help secret and lonely erections). The addiction got the better of him, sometimes; it made him reckless and he liked it. He jerked off at work in the office bathroom, he jerked off in his car (he once did it while driving, on a freeway at night), he jerked off in the middle of the night at home, locked in the downstairs bathroom; he loved jerking off in hotel rooms when he was out of town paging through porn magazines he bought at the local airport, magazines he never quite knew how to discard when leaving the hotel. He really loved jerking off during his jogs in the morning, when he'd go off the path, into the wooded area and masturbate behind a tree and cum with a just a few tugs because he'd been so aroused just thinking about that prospect when he walked out of his house and started running.

I imagined running into the French man in his woods, making him startle just as he ejaculated. I imagined him so tantalized that he'd come back to the same spot the next morning, hoping I'd be there again, watch him again. I imagined getting into a game of dare with him, pushing him to jerk off in increasingly dangerous places and tell me about it the next morning, behind our tree. I'd make him bring proofs, I'd push him for more details, I'd make him drunk with his own horniness.

I wasn't self-inflated enough to think I could actually achieve all that subversion. But I realized the mesmerizing allure of the fundamental disruptions that adult sex has the potential to bring. Sex is a beguiling little monster, which feasts on breaking in the orderly arrangement of our desires, like barging in and thrashing about the neat and stuffy storage room of our expectations.

I wanted to walk to the other side of the pool, to other pools, to other hotels, to other cities. See the world and listen to the men. Hear their stories and disrupt their narratives, my narrative. I wanted to go home.

* * *

My father filled dinner with slow retellings of familiar personal anecdotes. He steered clear from my childhood, my mother, my brothers. Safe territory. At some point, he quickly retreated from venturing into a comparison between our trip and the one he'd made with Andrew ten years ago. He indulged in his endless fascination with the Clintons ("I greatly admire both of them individually, but I can't tell if I love them or hate them as a couple. Isn't that odd?" It wasn't.) He gave me updates on the marital woes of his childhood friend. He came back to the Clintons ("I wonder if you guys will one day be known as the Clinton generation? We liked to think of ourselves as the Kennedy generation.")

All I offered and contributed was silent attention. I wasn't petulant nor sulking, but all my energy and focus seemed allotted to and depleted by two other concerns. For reasons I couldn't fathom nor escape, I found myself avoiding Adam, dodging his glances and timing my trips to the buffet as to not coincide with his. I felt cruel and callous, and when our eyes did lock for a second, I submitted a merciful smile. But my mind was mostly reeling back to the conversation my father had dragged me into the previous night, back to the misgivings it had exposed and the omissions it had generated. I had disciplined myself into silence the evening before, I had managed all day long to not let myself be engulfed in the loop of self-analysis, chastisement and resentment. Listening to my father during our last dinner in Luxor, I wanted to scream at him, to hug him and to shake him. I wanted him to hold me and to let me go.

I did not resent my mother for leaving us, for leaving me. Not really, not significantly. It happened when I was very young (which some people have used both as a mitigating and an aggravating circumstance), but her presence had never been a stabilizing or appeasing factor to begin with. My father ordered and structured our home life without our mother, he gave it purpose and meaning. Peace, calm and predictability settled in our house after she left, like the dust on the desk in what used to be "her study". Her leaving was a source of puzzlement, of course, for me and for my classmates; it was a source of embarrassed mushiness and protective effusion, often, from my teachers, neighbors and family friends; but it was also a source of tranquility, of routine, of quiet domestic bonding. The concern from strangers and the tender nursing from my family made this very conclusion subversive and untoward, they made it ungrateful, incongruous and insensible to express.

"How is your food?" my father asked.

"Not bad, thanks."

I did not resent my mother for leaving, not really. I resented her deeply, seethingly, for her insistence to stay, virtually but effectively, in our lives, under her terms, her needy and changing and egotistic terms. My mother had decided at some point that my approval, my forgiveness, my drafting into her choices was paramount to her own happiness. She never expressed it in those terms, of course. She was usually anything but subtle, but in her strategy to win me over and pulverize her guilt, she was fairly cunning. She had vocalized, much earlier than was appropriate, reasonable or healthy, her conviction that I was "such an adult already", that I was "wise beyond my years", and that I, "of all people", would understand what she was going through. I was indeed old enough to think her fairly pathetic for thinking of a ten-year old as someone who "gets her". I was too young to grasp the implications and consequences of these hour-long one-sided monthly phone conversations or the semi-annual visits to wherever she was then living ("You understand what I'm trying to build here, don't you? I know you do".)

"And yours?" I asked my father, suddenly aware of the silence.

"Not bad. Though I can't say it's what I'll miss the most from our trip to Egypt."

I did not resent my mother for leaving, not really. I resented her for making me gradually an accomplice to her failures, for sharing with me the responsibilities and endeavors integral to her elusive and delusional quest for self-realization. She relentlessly tried to make me an emissary to her sister, a woman I deeply adored, with the impossible task of explaining her current circumstances and assuaging concerns or disappointments ("She'll listen to you"). If I wasn't at home when the unpredictable and infrequent caprice to call me took her, she would usually attribute to my absence unfortunate consequences ("Well, without your advice, it figures that I made the wrong choice and called him back."). Worst and most aggravating of all, she always ended our phone conversations and our hugs goodbye at the airport with "Take good care of your father". This always jolted me into brief terror, into sadness and into repressed yet simmering anger. I panicked at my ability to provide happiness to my father, I was distressed by the thought that he might be hiding a need for me to do so, I was quietly furious at her for burdening me with this spousal task.

"I think I'll have just another glass of wine. Do you mind?" my father thought out loud.

I didn't remember, at first, the episode of the changing of our locks. It came back to me as my father reflected on it. He thought I was afraid she wouldn't be able to get in if she ever decided to come back to us. I wasn't. I had briefly, childishly, been worried that she might come back and would get angry at the changed locks and would somehow blame me. That irrational fear had passed in a flash. My father, however, still remembered that moment. He still carried the weight of the misreading.

"Oh, hello!" my father said brightly. I looked up from my plate and saw Siobhan and Adam stepping awkwardly towards our table.

"Sorry to interrupt," Siobhan said. "We're leaving tomorrow very early and I just wanted to say goodbye. It's been lovely meeting you, Richard."

My father stood up, flustered, and I followed his lead. Siobhan did not address me and dropped a limp hand in mine.

"It was a pleasure meeting you both, indeed," my father replied, with a faint trace of British accent.

Siobhan, save from one fleeting moment of trembling warmth when shaking my father's hand, was formal and resolute; she seemed intent on making a point, though I wasn't sure what it was. There was assertive bravado, there was a subtle hint of vindictiveness too. She made her goodbye sound the way some people do: definitive, finite, irrevocable. Adam looked beautiful and lost, he uttered his goodbye with a gentle and expectant voice. Then they were gone.

We took our seats back in awkward silence. I stood back up and went to get a fruit. When I walked back to our table, my father looked sweet and concerned.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, of course," I replied. Then, seeing that my answer hadn't fully satisfied him, I added "I'm just sad we're leaving. It was a wonderful trip."

"Yes, it was." He looked searchingly in my eyes. "You know I love you," he said, putting his hand on mine. I felt the infinite goodness of his heart.

I had cried a little, the previous evening during our conversation. I had cried because, just for a moment, I thought he knew me so little, he knew so little about me.

I had cried because, absorbed as he was by my relationship with my mother, he had failed to see that my primary concern, loyalty and empathy was, and always had been, for him.

* * *

I didn't turn the lights on in my bedroom. I didn't move the curtains. I undressed to my t-shirt and boxers in the corner by the desk, away from the window, I brushed my teeth in the dark. I didn't leave the door ajar, I shut it and locked it.

I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to my life and to what lay ahead in the coming weeks and months. I wanted to go back to my books and exams, to my girlfriend troubles, to awkward and potent glances from men on the bus, to the simple of joy of scavenging with Jason our favorite record store in the hope of finding new imports of Oasis and the Happy Mondays. I wanted to go back to planning for the summer and rejoicing for the fall.

I lay still on the bed, above the covers, my legs paled by the moonlight. And I heard a faint rattle at the door. Then the knob shook a bit, then more vigorously.

"Ben? Benjamin?" I heard Adam whisper.

I froze and shut my eyes tight.

I heard a soft thumping on the door. Adam bit his nails to the core, I remembered. Fingers without nails make a distinctive noise when rattling on a door.

"I'm yours," he had repeatedly said these last few days. I forced myself to remember the moments when these words had actually sounded new and exciting, when they had flustered and tingled my ego, when they hadn't screeched neediness, when I hadn't started wondering whether they might be cowardly and selfish.

I heard him retreating, with careful steps. Then, barely a few minutes later, he was back.

"Ben? I know you're there," he said, still whispering. "You must be. You're not by the pool, you're not in our bathroom. What's going on? What are you doing? Ben?"

I feared the loud beating of my heart in the noiseless room was giving me away. Perhaps it was, as Adam's voice didn't betray any doubts about my presence.

"What are you doing?" he repeated, plaintively.

"I'm yours," he had repeatedly said these last few days. I forced myself to remember when the touching and the grabbing of Adam's hands on my body felt like the sharing of his radiant masculinity, the bestowing of potent adulthood, and the mischievous bonding of equals. His clutching had grown stealthily needy, I argued silently with myself, his misery and hunger more demanding. The clarity of my own introspection at dinner contrasted cruelly with his improbable leap towards a symbiotic rescue operation, I concluded self-righteously. I couldn't be an accomplice to his failures too. I couldn't be that boy, I didn't want to become that man.

Then there was silence. Instinctively, I got up slowly from the bed and stepped carefully in the little entry leading to the door, as if getting closer might give me reassuring confirmation of his departure.

"Ben, please open the door," he said, with a slightly louder voice.

I sat on the floor and looked straight ahead, beckoning him to go away, to leave me alone.

"Ben, don't do this to me. Not now, not you. Please, don't do this to me." He was crying.

I could barely breathe, my head felt dizzy. I heard his body limply dropping to the floor and his forehead slowly and softly banging against the door.

"I'm yours," he had repeatedly said these last few days. I forced myself to remember when Adam had looked beautiful and beguiling, when his body had been an electrifying possibility, then a brittle promise.

"Not now, not you," he seemed to be chantingly lamenting. At one point, he also mumbled "I don't even know your name, I don't know where you live." But it was mostly silence and, repetitively, "Not now, not you."

I blinded and deafened myself to my callousness and cruelty. I was chanting on my own, but wordlessly. Go away, Adam, please go away. Go back to doing things you think you're supposed to do, things you think will make you happy because they seems to be working for everybody else. Or go back and save yourself. Save yourself, Adam, I can't save you. It's not for me to save you. You won't understand my reasons, you won't understand the hurt. But don't put this on me. Save yourself.

Adam became silent, but he was still there. I could hear him readjust his body to be more comfortable. I could hear him touch the door, once or twice, as if his palm was caressing the veneered wood. I could hear sniffing, but his tears seemed to have stopped.

I lay on the floor, a few feet away from the door, and curled up. Occasional murmurs and moans were still coming from the other side of the door; I forced myself to remember Adam on the other side of the pool.

I fell asleep, after a while. I didn't hear Adam leave. My eyes opened at some point in the early morning; the sun had risen but its light was still feeble. My body ached and I sleepily stood up and headed for the bed. My father knocked on my door at 9:00am; it was time to pack and leave. I rubbed my eyes, went to the window and saw an Egyptian lady tidying Adam's balcony.

### Adams Morgan, DC, Fall 2014

The recklessness and the arrogance of youth is the conviction you make a difference, that you have an impact. A recklessness you get a little drunk on, floating on or surfing the waves of flirtation. Dear Adam. Did I disrupt you and your life?

I'm walking down Ontario Road, cold and distracted, letting my steps lead me up Kalorama, up to Meridian Hill Park - as my steps do, when I'm cold and distracted. I've left the remnants of a fire in the hearth at home, and the computer dimming the movements of an Egyptian maid. I'm done with this story. I edited it, proofread, augmented, morphed, and kneaded it. I have embellished and darkened my truth and my youth, as well as other characters' lies and their pasts.

Siobhan must have had a Callum; I reconstructed a Philip for Adam. Siobhan and Adam had to be people who were left, alone or behind. Otherwise, why would anyone be angry or scared or expectant? Where is the hope when there is no ache, where is the redemption when there is no wrath? We all have to leave something or someone behind; something or someone that stalled us, stunned us, shunned us; something or someone we must leave behind in order to move forward and on. This is how I started to think of adulthood, this is what makes the difference between where you're found and where you're headed.

I have learned over the years, obviously; lessons barge in or creep in on you. I learned mine when thinking and doubting in college rooms, yearning and hoping on beaches or mountains, holding hands and breaking hearts, disrupting and mellowing, packing and unpacking my growing personal belongings.

You know you've learned some lessons when you place yourself at some healthy and inquisitive distance, when you start writing in the third person. You've learned some lessons when you start, indeed, to show empathy, out of curiosity at first, out of care later, when you start writing in the present tense.

Dear Adam. I imagined and I wrote that you wanted someone to carry you somewhere new, nice and lovely. I hope someone has. You're now twenty years older. So am I. And yet. There are days, such as this one, Adam, when I do want to see you again, when I want to watch you from a safe distance, from where you never looked more beautiful. There are days, such as this one, when, vainly and predictably, I do want to grab your hand and take you somewhere new, nice and lovely.

The recklessness and the arrogance of youth is the conviction you make a difference, that you have an impact. The recklessness and arrogance of ageing is believing people have forgiven you when you think, you hope, you have forgiven yourself.

### About the author

Benjamin Ashton was born in Philadelphia, PA.

He is author of several short stories, published in the forthcoming Drawing by Numbers. The Other Side of the Pool is his first novel.

### Connect with the author

benashtonvilla@yahoo.com

