The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [115]
For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible—the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room—two or three heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision, a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits, Wani's lightweight Italian "grey," black really, like one of his father's suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age, the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even . . .
Funny how sound travelled in an old house—through blocked-off chimney spaces, along joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly, kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he never had before) and at it so promptly and so fast. No wasteful foreplay there—it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.
Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen, and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like a manic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured them, Catherine vaguely and anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.
Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it unpleasantly hard. "They're really going at it," he murmured. "The little sluts . . . " Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not at him directly but at the two of them in the mirror; and also (Nick knew) staring through the mirror, and the wardrobe itself, into the room beyond, which he had never seen and which was just as readily the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. "They're really going at it—the little sluts"—Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it, and grunted as Wani's little thrusts against his face fell into the accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share—he tried again, he'd jerked off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and on lithium, and, well . . . a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato wails . . . and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the moment he had him. And then another idea