Junction X Read Online Free PDF Page A

you and me.” He went to touch my hair and I hit his hand away, but he persisted.
    I got angry, pushed him away and things got muddled, perhaps I was… No. I was going to blame the wine, but I know now that it wasn’t that at all. I found myself pinning him back against the cool golden stone of the cottage. I was so angry, and I remember being angrier with myself than I was with him. How dare he come along and smile at me and give me something like that? I wanted to punch him, but he was too close, his breath was against my cheek and his groin brushed against my leg, announcing his own hardness. I stared at him, and his face was no longer mocking, his mouth wasn’t smiling. It was wet, and a little open, his tongue just showing behind his teeth. So close. An inch—less—from mine, and there was only one thing I could do. So I did it.

 
    Chapter 3
     
    I was often angry with Phil; but the infuriating thing was that he brushed it aside as if I was joking and his charisma helped him to get away with it. I soon found that our relationship was easy, amazingly easy, to maintain. Not that I would ever call it a relationship. I couldn’t let my mind go beyond my own hemmed-in, hospital-corner boundaries. I was a husband, a father. A man. I wasn’t having a relationship with another man; it was laughable. I looked on it as a series of ‘episodes,’ and I called it that in my head. I refused to call it…what it was.
    We continued our friendship as if nothing had happened that August night. Or rather, Phil continued as if nothing had happened, and I stumbled through the holiday wearing wine-blinded blinkers and feeling hot and sick every time Phil walked in the room. We were not alone together in the same way again that holiday and, as far as I know, neither of us wanted to be; Phil was his normal self, while I was too confused to even allude to it again. I made sure we weren’t alone, making excuses to spend more time with Valerie, going shopping with her, spending hours on the beach just with her. At night, Phil went to bed when Claire did, and I was careful to do the same with Valerie. If anything, the thought of what Phil and I had done made me reach for Valerie’s body with a fierce enthusiasm that surprised us both, and several months later, upon our return to England, she thought she was pregnant again.
    I was greatly relieved when she found that she wasn’t. I felt a rush of guilt whenever she said that the holiday was like a second honeymoon, and it hurt me to see how happy she was when my attention to her was caused by something that she could never understand. I didn’t understand it—so how could she?
    But afterwards, I couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get away with those episodes with Phil, and I suppose it’s because people don’t look for aberration where there is an established routine. Everyone knew that Phil and I were best friends, and no one saw anything but that. If we were five minutes longer getting changed after golf, if we disappeared into the rough to hunt for a lost golf ball, if (and most dangerous of all) we bumped into each other at work, or somewhere in our respective houses, no one saw. No one suspected.
    The first episode after France happened at the golf club early one Sunday morning. We sat on a slatted bench side by side and, as I bent to lace up my shoes, Phil touched me on the back of the neck, his fingers teasing in the short curls. I flinched at first, still unused to gentle touches from a man, and glanced sideways, knowing what he meant before he spoke.
    “There’s no one but us,” he said. “Next pair’s not due to tee off for an hour.”
    I think now, looking back, that it was the public aspect of it that gave it an edge. I suspect for Phil the danger meant more than the act itself. He never arranged for us to get together at a business convention, where we would have been private. For him, it was all about the fear of discovery, and I have to say that this was