Roger Northing sees Aubrey coming from a long way off.

At first he’s just a figure in the distance, a tall boy with crazy hair, silhouetted against the lawns of the Partington-Hale estate. A mirage, a figment of Roger’s desire. In the dying sunlight Aubrey casts a long shadow that runs along the neatly paved garden paths with an urgency Aubrey himself would never admit to. Roger picks up his rake and stumbles into the stables, tries to look busy, tries to prepare mentally for the tug-o’-war that he knows is coming, the one where he fights his cock for control of his brain.

A few minutes later Aubrey appears outside. He’s wearing an argyle vest that’s too snug around the middle, and makes him look podgy. Underneath, his shirt’s untucked and its triangular tails frame his crotch in a way that’s hopelessly unsubtle. His tie is striped black and blue and hangs loosely over his shoulder, an afterthought, a concession to propriety. He’s got an ice-cream in one hand, chocolate chip, which is dribbling down his hand to the silver band of his watch (Rolex? Probably).

Roger wants to run up and hug him. He wants to say dumb Hollywood shit, like I’ve missed you, and I was so lonely, and Everything’s okay now you’re here. He wants to push his face into Aubrey’s vest and breathe him in, but instead he keeps on with the rake, digging harder into the recesses of the stable where the straw is thick with horseshit and mud.

“Hey, Northing,” says Aubrey, leaning against the railing that bounds the stables, separating them from the field beyond. “How’re you, how’s your mother, how’s the job, how’s the weather, what’re the chances of a quick screw before dinner?”

He’s not handsome but he is striking, because his skin is golden — really golden, that kind of unbelievable perfect tan you see on tanning salon advertisements — and he has this mass of chocolate-brown hair that curls wildly all over the place and smells (Roger remembers) like butterscotch and vanilla. He’s got freckles and a turned up nose and a mouth that’s far too wide for his face but just the right size for kissing and cocksucking and all those other things the mouths of rich, titled libertines are meant to do to their poor grubby stablehands.

Roger looks at him quickly, looks away. “You’ve put on weight,” he says. “College food, I bet.”

“Gracious no. The dorm food was rubbish. Watery vegetables and lukewarm roasts. Happily our college was in the middle of a town. Quaint little pizza place down the road, chippie on the corner, and oh, boy, a ton of pubs. But as pizza and fish and chips and beer are the staples of the college diet... I suppose you could technically call it college food.”

“Mm. I don’t know if I fancy fatties.”

Which is a lie, clearly, because his cock is already twisting in his pants like a snake coiling to strike. God, what is it that makes him so bloody hot for degenerate bastards like Aubrey Partington-Hale, those boys who’ll fuck him and leave him and then come back to fuck him again, without apology, without even a hint of tenderness...? Roger rakes harder, scratching up the stones with the sharp metal prongs, and tries to concentrate on all the things he hates about Aubrey. He makes a list in his head: capricious, bitchy, fickle, occasionally cruel, careless, self-centred, sex-crazed, oblivious and, worst: out-of-his-league.

“I don’t know if I fancy your mouth,” says Aubrey, one hand on his belly, a sort of smug half-grin on his face that says all too plainly, I always get what I want. He licks his ice-cream. “Are we going to do it or are you going to be contrary?”

Roger remembers losing his virginity to Aubrey on a hot September night two years ago. Two kids on the cusp of eighteen, fooling about in the hayloft. He’d cried when it happened, not because it hurt but because he knew it wouldn’t last. Not the sex and not Aubrey, either, who’d trade him in for a better-looking model the moment Roger dared to utter a mood-killer: No or Not tonight or — worse still — Please. But somehow the transient nature of it all made it better, made it more urgent; it was end-of-the-world-sex, one-night-only-sex, desperate and weirdly honest sex, and every time Roger thinks back on that night he gets this funny quake in his stomach like an aftershock.

He puts down the rake and peels off his gloves. He goes to Aubrey’s side and runs his bitten-down fingernails along the argyle vest, following the patterns in a zigzag that begins at Aubrey’s chest and finishes at his stomach. He pokes him a few times, pulls a face like he’s not into it, not into Aubrey, which takes a hell of a lot of restraint. Up close Aubrey smells like butter and aftershave and (shamefully) sex. Maybe he nutted one out in the bathroom before he wandered outside, or maybe he had it off with one of the maids. Roger doesn’t care, and wishes he did.

“Fuck you,” says Aubrey cheerfully, his mouth full of ice-cream wafer. “Give us a kiss at least, for old time’s sake.”

Aubrey’s mouth is so fucking cold it makes Roger so fucking hard and he can feel his heart rate charge up to about a million beats per second as Aubrey’s ice-creamy tongue slides between his lips and says oh hai to his tonsils. And Roger forgets for a second to be cool, and he squeezes Aubrey close, wonderfully close, only the wooden railing separating their bodies. It’s so right to have Aubrey in his hands.

“I can’t believe you’d rather cum in your pants than admit you dig me,” says Aubrey, breaking away. “That’s sort of sexy in a weird masochistic way. You are all kinds of fun, Northing.”

Roger breathes heavily.

“I dropped my ice cream. Sorry. I guess it won’t matter if you’ll be hosing this place out later anyway.”

“Shit, Aubrey. Shit, why do you do this?”

“Do what?” Aubrey blinks, innocent as hell. “I just came down for a screw. I’m okay if you aren’t interested in that. If you’ve got someone else. If you’re busy with, I don’t know, whatever it is stablehands do besides hanging around looking sullen. I just arrived ten minutes ago, I dropped my bags in the kitchen, and then I came straight here because I can’t face my family right now. If you won’t fuck me at least talk to me.”

“What am I going to say to you?”

“Anything,” says Aubrey, climbing over the railing. “Anything you like. You’ve got beer hidden down here, don’t you?”

*

Roger knows about Aubrey and sex. Aubrey likes sex the way his grandfather likes brandy and his mother likes soap operas and chocolate — it’s a way out of the world. Aubrey’s life can be falling down around him, he can be losing his mind, tumbling into depression, bored out of his wits, and all it takes to cure him, to make the bad stuff fade away into the background, is to bury his dick the way an ostrich buries its head. Boys, girls, he’s not fussed, although he’s told Roger he prefers the former because boys fight back, boys seem to have this weird WTF reaction to getting fucked in the arse, even the queer ones. Boys buck and yell and carry on and it’s a great distraction, so Aubrey says, much more fun than the pretty, posh, finishing-school girls who just lie back and think of, well, maybe not England these days, but about sales at Harrods and their latest Spanish vacation and how they can squirm their way into a Good Marriage without having to piss about with a pre-nup.

Sex makes Aubrey happy while it makes Roger miserable. Aubrey lives in the moment, while Roger dreams of futures that can never happen. Which is why this — the whole Aubrey obsession — is never going to work out the way Roger wants it to.

He takes Aubrey out the back to the stable storehouse, which is mainly filled with huge bags of horse feed and straw bales, but down the back there’s a metal crate that’s home to all the beer Roger can afford on his shitty salary. Proper beer, black beer, more hops than a barrel of rabbits, not the lager shit that the posh kids drink at university. He opens the bottles with a twist of his fore-arm, placing one wordlessly in Aubrey’s soft golden hand.

“I like college,” says Aubrey. “I’m doing okay there. I met a guy, sort of. Some foreign jock. I like fucking him. I’ve got a girl too, who I don’t fuck; she’s got a brain a bit like mine. She’s into quantum physics. That’s how she says it, that she’s into quantum physics. Like I’d say I’m into, I don’t know, getting stoned on the weekends and going to parties.”

“That’s great for you,” says Roger hollowly. “I hope you three are very happy together.”

Aubrey puts his hand between Roger’s legs and Roger smacks him away like you’d smack away a fly or a mosquito or some fat rich college prick looking for a grope, figuring his trust fund can buy him love. Unhurt, unruffled, Aubrey grins and sprawls back on a hay bale, a crooked arm pillowing his head. He holds his beer bottle upright between his legs and runs his thumb slowly around the rim. His eyes are on Roger’s crotch, where the hard-on Roger’s been trying hopelessly to quell is trying to break its way out of its denim prison.

There’s something just basically fuckable about Aubrey. There’s something about his face that says I’m doable, take me now, please, seriously, I’m totally up for it, I swear to fuck I’ll do whatever you want, just let me give you a long hard dicking, I’ll be your slave for life, honest, you’ll like it, and if you don’t I’ll do it again until you do… Right now he’s practically fucking fellating his beer bottle and Roger has nothing to say.

“Are you over me?” Aubrey asks. “Or are you punishing me?”

“Mm,” says Roger, noncommittally, necking his bottle and fixing his gaze on a point that’s just over Aubrey’s head, a bag of feed that looks like it’s got the word HORE plastered across it, the S lost in a rumple of hessian. How fitting.

“Oh,” says Aubrey, sitting up. “You’re punishing yourself.”

“Shut up.”

“Geez, Northing.” Aubrey puts an arm around Roger’s shoulders and Roger doesn’t have the heart to shake him off. “It’s just a fuck. Everyone fucks. Why the hang-up all of a sudden? Why so moody? It’s not like you haven’t been getting some while I wasn’t here.”

It’s true, Roger’s tried to find other people to fuck. To love, maybe, if that’s what it takes. There was this sweet boy he met online, a blond, with a nice smile and a gentle, placid nature. Good looking, if you liked them clean-cut. They went on dates, they kissed, they even made love one terrible time. And all through it, all through the kisses and the questions (‘does this hurt?’ ‘do you like this?’ ‘where do you want me?’) and the cuddles afterwards, all Roger could think of was how nice it was to be held down and seriously dicked by a rich bastard who didn’t give a shit about you. How liberating, how cathartic, to be Aubrey Partington-Hale’s back-up butt-fuck.

He presses his mouth over Aubrey’s just to shut the prick up, sucks Aubrey’s tongue against his, inhales. He puts his hand on Aubrey’s stomach — softer than he remembers, as pliable as the bastard’s morals — and pushes him down into the hay, pushes hard, until Aubrey yelps and knocks him off, one sharp warning punch to the back of Roger’s neck. Roger leans away, rubbing the spot, the word arsehole on his lips, but he doesn’t get to say it because Aubrey’s on him a second later, squatting on his chest, crushing his lungs. Roger looks up at the storehouse’s ceiling, the wooden beams arching below a canopy of corrugated plastic, and wheezes.

“Feisty,” says Aubrey, taking a swig of his beer — in all this he hasn’t spilled a drop. He reaches behind him to unbuckle Roger’s jeans.

“Aubrey…”

“What?” Aubrey’s pulling off his argyle sweater, unbuttoning his shirt.

Is this going anywhere, is the question Roger wants to ask. Does this — this fucking — mean anything to you? Am I just a casual screw, a bit on the side, the boy you run to when you’ve no one else within groping-reach, or is there a part of you that thinks about me when I’m gone? Except Roger Northing can see the future, clear as Aubrey’s lascivious grin, and knows the answers Aubrey gives won’t change anything. Not to Aubrey and not to Roger, either.

Anyway it’s only hot, Roger remembers, when it means nothing. Without the distractions of love and nerves and caring-what-the-other-person-wants, all that remains is the fucking, the raw red sex, the hard shit that makes Roger — strong, stoic Roger-the-stablehand — whimper like a kid. When he gets right down to it, Roger doesn’t want Aubrey like a lover, not really. He just wants the idea of it, the idea of a Mills & Boon-romance future dangling ahead of him like a carrot before some dumb donkey. Something that’ll make it easier for him to forget that deep inside him there’s some torn-up fucked-up thing that just likes being used.

He’s so fucking hard right now. He’s still so fucking hard right now.

“I’m confused,” is all he says. Croaks, really, partly because the words are difficult, coming out with clumsy, jagged edges, and partly because there’s some flabby twat sitting on his chest, squishing his lungs into pâté. “Sometimes I think I want more.”

“I have seriously missed fucking you,” says Aubrey, half-naked now, golden as sunlight. “You always know the best way to say welcome home.”

*

On his knees, over a hay bale, Aubrey’s teeth in the back of his neck. Getting fucked. Getting seriously dicked. Roger’s cock is pressed against a prickly wall of straw and every time Aubrey thrusts it hurts, it’s like needles ripping at his sensitive skin. Aubrey holds his hands over his head, wrists together, pinioning him there; Roger couldn’t move an inch even if he wanted to. Air comes out of his mouth in little puffs and pants, he can hardly breathe, Aubrey’s so deep in him he swears to fuck the head of the guy’s cock is banging against his lungs.

It’s been so long since he’s been fucked like this, fucked rough like this, and the pain is intense, almost euphoric. It’s kind of like that time he got beat up, down in the village, by a bunch of drunken teenagers who smelled the queer on him from a mile off. It’s that kind of pain that makes you think you’re going to die right here right now, the pain that fills up every cavity in the body, every fold of skin, and throbs to a beat that’s louder than a pulse. Roger is like the god of adrenaline, he’s totally high on pain, he’s practically delusional. Aubrey’s bare skin slaps against his and Roger imagines he smells butter, melting.

Aubrey’s teeth get tighter on his skin, a new pain to echo the one in his arse. Roger’s stomach gets hard and his balls pinch up, fat with cum. In a few seconds he knows his cock’s going to explode with the stuff, it’s going to stream out all the holes the straw’s been poking in him like water out of a sieve. He breathes, hyperventilates, and Aubrey gets his dick up somewhere fucking awesome, somewhere that makes all Roger’s nerves skitz out, and suddenly his knees are just gone, his forehead is banging off the hay, and everything feels red.

The sweat is dripping off him. He cums — this great burst of pleasure that seems to bypass his dick and leap right out of his gut — and then he cries, reflexively (how lame is that?), and Aubrey keeps on going, like Roger’s enjoyment of the whole thing is incidental and, let’s face it, in Aubrey’s book it probably is. Roger forgets about getting off and concentrates on surviving. He aches. Aubrey fucks his way right into the centre of that ache, expands it, shows Roger brand new pain horizons that Roger’s never imagined existed. Roger can’t breathe at all. There’s no more air. Aubrey’s going to kill him. Aubrey’s going to bite his fucking head off like a preying mantis. And Roger doesn’t care, and that makes this liberating, in a twisted, fucked-up way. His life pronged on the end of Aubrey’s dick. He wants to die like this, fucked out, every part of him exhausted and abused, with nothing left inside but the memory of pain.

Then Aubrey says, “Shit, I’m cumming,” and does.

Just like that, and it’s over.

Roger doesn’t move, just lies there, feeling sticky inside and out. Aubrey backs off and pulls up his trousers and slaps Roger’s left buttock in an affectionate way.

“That was neat,” he says. “I’m going to be here all summer, you know. We should catch up. Catch up a lot, I mean. I don’t relish the idea of having to spend more than a few hours a day talking to my bloody family.”

“Okay,” says Roger, his voice hitching on the second syllable, making the word sound like a sigh. Tilting his head to the side, he can just make out Aubrey’s form, a golden blur in his watery eyes. It’s only hot when it means nothing, he reminds himself, and peels himself away from the straw.

*

Aubrey dresses quickly, efficiently, buttoning his shirt faster than Clark Kent — his libertine lifestyle has given him a lot of practice when it comes to quick costume changes, maybe even more than Superman himself.

Once he’s clothed, he stays a while longer to finish his beer and to watch Roger grunt and mutter in the hay bale. Aubrey likes Roger heaps. He likes Roger’s wiry body and his scruffy black hair, his blue eyes and his sullen mouth that always dips down at the corners, even when he’s meant to be happy. Roger loves misery, and Aubrey is okay with that — whatever floats your boat, right? And fucking Roger is, Aubrey has to admit, a teeny bit more fun because he knows that Roger is fighting him mentally all the way. Oh, Roger Northing will allow himself to be fucked, sure, but he’ll make Aubrey work for the privilege, and even when he’s getting fucked, it’s all superficial, physical shit. Roger isn’t opening up to Aubrey, isn’t showing him any secret part of himself, isn’t making love. He’s just using Aubrey for sex, plain and simple, and Aubrey reckons he could probably be anyone and it wouldn’t make much difference.

After a time Roger picks himself up, pulls up his jeans (slowly, tentatively), and gropes around for his own beer bottle, which has half-spilled beside an open feed bag.

“I like the beer,” says Aubrey brightly, making conversation. “I’m sick of lager. That’s all they drink in college.”

“Mm.”

The silence widens between them. It makes Aubrey fidget. He casts about him for inspiration, for ice-breakers — well, if you can call any conversation that follows an arsefucking an ice-breaker.

“You know about parallel universes, right?” he says. “Quantum mechanics and all. They’re what my girlfriend — the one from college — is really into. The idea is that with every choice you make, all the possible options you could choose branch off into different universes. So there’s a universe out there where you’re King, I guess. Or a universe where I’m a chick.”

“Or somewhere we’re together?” Roger asks.

It’s a funny question, especially coming from Roger. “I suppose,” says Aubrey, knitting his fingers over his stomach. “That could be kind of cool. We’d fall in love, and have a clandestine affair until we got found out, at which point I’d get promptly disinherited and your mum would kick you out of home. And then we’d have to live on the streets or something equally tragic. Doomed lovers. How does that sound?”

He’s not surprised when the corners of Roger’s mouth twitch a bit, like he wants to smile. But he is surprised when Roger, never an affectionate guy, never soft, staggers over to his side and kisses his forehead lightly with lips still wet with sweat.

“Sounds rubbish,” says Roger, a funny sort of finality in his voice. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

---

RJ Astruc is an erotic fiction author whose stories have appeared in Yaoi Magazine, The Fat Man at the End of the World anthology, and Changeling Press. Her alter-ego is a science fiction author who has appeared in Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, Midnight Echo, Andromeda Spaceways and Aurealis, amongst others. Her new novel, A Festival of Skeletons, is being serialised by Crossed Genres.

Author contact