The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [85]
When they were getting dried and dressed in the compound Wani nodded and said, "There's our friend Ricky again." Nick looked over his shoulder and saw the sexy man emerging round the fence of the nudist yard and pulling carelessly at the draw-string of his trunks.
"Oh, yes. I didn't know he was called Pdcky," Nick said.
"Well, he looks like a Ricky," said Wani, while getting out of his trunks sitting down and wrapped in a towel.
"Have you got an erection or something?" said Nick.
"Don't be puerile," Wani said. He gave Nick a look that was part challenge and part broody supplication. "Why don't you ask him if he'd like to come home with us?"
"What, 'Ricky'?"
"Isn't that what goes on at this sort of place? I didn't imagine we'd come here for the exercise."
Nick sniggered. "You don't have to go mad," he said, "the first time I take you out."
Wani coloured a little but he held his gaze. "It could be a lot of fun," he said. "I should have thought. He's very common."
Nick glanced round again at Ricky, who was loitering amiably by the path to the toilets, and loitered too of course in his memory, as unexplored potential. At the same time he felt a little clutch of warning. Wani didn't know what he might be getting them into, and nor did Nick. When he looked back Wani was standing up in his underpants and tugging on his jeans. "I'm sure it could be," Nick said drily. At which Wani, with a twitch of his eyebrows and a sour compression of his lips, seemed to shrug the thing off. He took his watch from his pocket and put it on.
"If you don't ask him soon," he said, "we won't have time. I'm sorry, I thought you liked him."
"Yes, he's hot," said Nick, and found he was describing himself, in his unexpected anxiety. He hated to see Wani's beautiful mouth curl like that, and to feel his disdain, so amusing and exciting when applied to others, fall on him. He wanted only love, and today perhaps a kind of obedience, from Wani, who knew that the local tactics of argument and persuasion confused and upset him. "All right, I'll go and get him," he said, pretending that for him as well to ask was naturally to get, and knowing that he could never allow Wani to ask him himself.
"I mean I know he's not one of your nig-nogs."
"Oh, fuck off," Nick said, and marched away, in his jeans, but still shirtless, towards the toilet. He felt the disadvantage of the clothed among the naked; and the floor of the lavatory, when he entered it, was unpleasantly wet under his bare feet.
The door of one of the two cubicles was shut, and at the raised tin trough of the urinal the man was standing, his big sleek back and arse to the room, but turning his head, in his odd expressionless way, to see who had come in. And that look, and the smell of the place, piss and disinfectant, the atmosphere of permission, the rules all changed by keen but furtive consent, gripped Nick and melted him. He went over and stood beside the man and a few seconds later the spray from the excited fizz of the flush was coldly tickling the tips of their two erections. Nick slid his foreskin slowly backwards and forwards and gazed at the other man's blunt-headed shaft. Then he looked into his eyes, and it was like when they had chatted on the raft, totally expected, the reason they were here, as commonplace as it was deep. He seemed to swim in that dark gaze, with little flickers of conjecture. The man tilted his head towards the open cubicle, so that Nick wondered if he could do that, quickly or partially, before "getting" him, or trying to get him, to come home with them, but there was the snap of the bolt, the other door opened halfway and little Andy, the Malaysian handful, slipped out, and crossed the room to wash his hands. In the mirror Nick saw the mischief in his eyes fade into blankness. Then as if by magic the flush sounded, the door opened wide, and a grey-haired man, who was not his friend Leslie and not his rough-voiced admirer either, emerged and made off with a preoccupied look.
Now they were alone, and Nick felt there was something almost romantic in their patience,