The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [16]
"Time's getting on," he said. "I can't be late getting back."
Nick looked down and mumbled, "Do you have to get back?" He tried to smile but he knew his face was stiff with sudden anxiety. He moved his wet glass in circles on the rough-sawn table top. When he glanced up again he found Leo was gazing at him sceptically, one eyebrow arched.
"I meant back to your place, of course," he said.
Nick grinned and reddened at the beautiful reversal, like a teased child abruptly reprieved, rewarded. But then he had to say, "I don't think we can . . ."
Leo looked at him levelly. "Not enough room?"
Nick winced and waited—the truth was he didn't dare, he just couldn't do that to Rachel and Gerald, it was vulgar and unsafe, the consequences unspooled ahead of him, their happy routines of chortling agreement would wither for ever. "I don't think we can. I don't mind going up to your place."
Leo shrugged. "It's not practical," he said.
"I can jump on the bus," said Nick, who had studied the London A-Z in absorbed conjecture about Leo's street, neighbourhood, historic churches, and access to public transport.
"Nah—" Leo looked away with a reluctant smile and Nick saw that he was embarrassed. "My old lady's at home." This first hint of shyness and shame, and the irony that tried to cover it, cockneyfied and West Indian too, made Nick want to jump on him and kiss him. "She's dead religious," Leo said, with a short defeated chuckle.
"I know what you mean," said Nick. So there they were, two men on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own. There was a kind of romance to that. "I've got an idea," he said tentatively. "If you don't mind, um, being outside."
"I don't care," said Leo, and looked lazily over his shoulder. "I'm not dropping my pants in the street."
"No, no . . ."
"I'm not that sort of slut."
Nick laughed anxiously. He wasn't sure what people meant when they said they'd had sex "in the street"—even "on Oxford Street," he'd once heard. In six months' time perhaps he would know, he'd have sorted out the facts from the figures of speech. He watched Leo twist and lift a knee to clamber free of the bench—he looked keen to get on with it, and he acted of course as if Nick knew the procedure. Nick followed him with a baked smile and a teeming inward sense of occasion. He was consenting and powerless in the thrust of the event, the rich foregone conclusion of the half-hour that opened ahead of them: it made his heart race with its daring and originality, though it also seemed, as Leo squatted to unlock his bike, something everyday and inevitable. He ought to tell Leo it was his first time; then he thought it might bore him or put him off. He gazed down at his strictly shaved nape, the back of a stranger's,head, which any minute now he would be allowed to touch. The label of Leo's skimpy blue shirt was turned up at the collar and showed the temp's signature of Miss Selfridge. It was a little secret given away, a vanity exposed—Nick was light-headed, it was so funny and touching and sexy. He saw the long muscles of his back shifting in its sleek grip, and then, as Leo hunkered on his heels and his loose jeans stood away from his waist, the street lamp shining in on the brown divide of his buttocks and the taut low line of his briefs.
He unlocked the gate and let Leo go in ahead of him. "Cycling isn't permitted in the gardens, but I dare say you can walk your bike."
Leo hadn't learnt his mock-pompous tone yet. "I dare say bumshoving isn't permitted either," he said. The gate closed behind them, an oiled click, and they were together in the near-darkness of the shrubbery. Nick