Better Than Easy (16 page)

I shrug. “I don't know. He's having a wobble I think.”

“A wobble?” he repeats.

I nod and sip the whisky. “He's being strange.”

Ricardo nods. “All human beings are mad. It's just whether you can find one whose madness you can live with,” he says.

I laugh. “Yeah
…
sounds about right. But I do worry. He had a sort of breakdown about a year ago. He was on anti-depressants – Prozac. Still, I suppose lots of people are.”

“Oh yes,” Ricardo says. “Lots. In France, many, many.”

“We had this really weird conversation,” I say. “He phoned and said he didn't feel like he was in a couple, that he was missing doing the things he did when he was single.”

“Sexual things?”

I shrug.

“Not so good,” Ricardo says, swilling the whisky around the glass.

“No,” I agree.

“He should not make you worry like this. He should just do quietly his needs.”

I turn to him, a confused expression forming. “Well, it's not really how
loud
he is about them,” I say. “It's the needs themselves that worry me.”

Ricardo shrugs. “People do what people must do,” he says. “If it's the end then it's good to tell, if it's important. But otherwise, it's better to be quiet. Better not to worry everyone. Life is too short.”

I combine a small laugh and a little outrage into a short gasp. “So
you
think he should just lie to me?”

Ricardo nods seriously. “The end is the same,” he says. “Only you are worried. You don't agree?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I think he should be faithful. I don't need to shag around, I don't see why Tom would
…
should, whatever.”

Ricardo wobbles his head from side to side and then looks back out over the port. “You are special maybe. I think it is better. I think faithful is better, but most men – they have needs. But if they are,
comment dire …
”

“Speak French if you want,” I say.

Ricardo shakes his head. “It's good for me to use English. No, if they are little needs – I don't see why to hurt your partner by telling everything.”

I sigh. “I see your point,” I say. “But
…
” I shrug and sigh again.

“You never?” Ricardo says.

“What, cheat?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “With other people.”

I shake my head.

“Never!”
he says again.

I shake my head and laugh. “No, never,” I say.

Ricardo nods. “You very serious boy.”

I shrug. “You seem very surprised.”

Ricardo tilts his head wistfully. “Even normal men
…
” he says.

I wince.
“Hetero
is better,” I say. “Or straight.”

Ricardo frowns in incomprehension.

“I'm
normal
too,” I say. “Or I like to think so.”

He nods. “Yes,” he says. “Sorry, of course. So most,
hetero
men, even Catholic, they do things they shouldn't. Sometimes – often maybe – I think it saves a marriage. Lets people do what they must without ending everything. I suppose I think that gay men will be more –
flexible.”

I laugh. The whisky and my tiredness are hitting home and the lights on the jetty are blurring. I blink hard, then, normal vision restored, I say, laughing, “Most of them are. More
flexible
, that is.”

“But not you,” Ricardo says. He sounds impressed. “Not Mark.”

I feel a bit prudish, so I answer, “Not yet,” and then wonder if that sounded flirtatious and rephrase, “never up until now,” and wonder if that didn't sound even worse.

“Pas encore …”
Ricardo translates. “OK.”

“And you?” I ask, trying to move the conversation away from how up-tight I apparently am. “You don't cheat on Jenny, do you?”

Ricardo stares back out at the sea.
“Pas encore,”
he says, laughter in his voice.

I nod and grin. “But if you did you wouldn't tell her anyway. Or me either.”

He sighs and shuffles his feet. “It depends,” he says.

“On?” A first uneasy pang about where this is going hits me. I notice that I'm feeling slightly flushed, and vaguely aroused. I wonder if the two are connected.

Ricardo sighs. “Oh I don't know,” he says. “If it is a little thing, of no importance, then no.”

I nod. “And where do you draw the line?”

“The line?” he asks.

“How do you decide if something is important?”

Ricardo blows through his lips. “Maybe a kiss. Maybe a kiss is not so important. And maybe feelings. Maybe if I'm drunk and something happen, but it is not important – maybe then I don't tell.”

I nod. “I guess,” I say, vaguely.

“But if, you know, you see someone many times – well, then, maybe you have to decide who you want to be with.”

I nod. “I can see the logic,” I say. “But it just
…
”

“And it depends who,” he continues. “Say it's a friend of Jenny – say I kiss you, or Tom, or a girlfriend of her – she would be hurt. So I would not tell.”

I try to swallow but my mouth is suddenly dry. I swig the last of my whisky. My dick is hardening – I'm hyper aware of his physical presence beside me – and I'm not sure if it's just the whisky or my tiredness, but the situation seems increasingly unreal. “And is that something you're likely to do?” I say. “Kiss Tom?”

Ricardo laughs lightly. “Tom? No!” he says. “But with you, it might be good.”

I clear my throat and summon my final reserves – my final reserves
of reserve
. I place the glass carefully on the wooden sideboard and turn to Ricardo. I touch his arm gently and nod and smile wryly. I wrinkle my nose and nod. “This is where I should leave,” I say calmly, with certainty.

He smiles at me broadly and tilts his head to one side. “I like you,” he says simply, a glint in his eye.

We stare at each other for a few moments. His eyes are deep seductive wells, and it's a struggle not to let go of the rope, a struggle not to relinquish myself to the freefall into ecstasy or oblivion or whatever is calling to me from those depths. But my mind is a cacophony of screaming alarm bells. In the stupidity stakes of life, sleeping with Jenny's
boyfriend would clearly be hard to beat. “I know,” I say. “And I'm flattered, but
…
”

Ricardo raises an eyebrow. “Just a kiss then,” he says, leaning towards me.

“I don't
…
” I say, but it's all I can manage.

Ricardo licks his lips and shrugs one shoulder. “Just a quick kiss – for Christmas. Oh, yes! I have this!” He produces a sprig of mistletoe from the sideboard and lifts it above his head. “Now you
can't
refuse.”

I smile and he leans in a little further, but at the last minute I turn sideways to avoid the impact. His stubble grazes my cheek. I brazen it out and move and kiss him on the other cheek turning the whole sorry episode into a goodbye peck.

He sighs, straightens and looks at me with an amused, circumspect expression. “So here,” he says, theatrically, almost
camply
, pointing at his cheek, “is OK. And here,” he points at his lips, “is not?”

I nod and laugh. “Something like that,” I say.

He measures the distance between his cheek and his lips with finger and thumb and then shows me the result. “So, what,
six
centimetres between good and evil? I must read my Bible again.”

I snort, part out of amusement, part out of embarrassment. “You're right,” I say. “It's absurd, but
…
”

He shrugs and looks at me quizzically. “So don't be,” he says with a mini-shake of the head. “Don't be absurd.”

I stand before him and freeze as his face comes closer; I can feel his breath on my lips, the heat of his nose beside mine. And like a dam weakened first by a tiny leak and then crumbling into a gush and finally rupturing into a torrent, I sense my defences collapsing. When his lips touch mine, lightly at first, I think,
“Oh God, no,”
and then simply,
“Oh God.”

He kisses me on the lips and I don't hinder or abet; I just stand there in that thought,
“Oh God,”
and
let him. And then he slides a hand behind my neck, pulls away and says, “I really
like
you, you know. Since the day in the mountains.” And then he moves in for a second kiss, and this time, as he pulls me towards him, I turn my head so that we make a better fit and it seems that at that instant, because of that simple act of acquiescence, I am as steeped in the sin of the moment as he is. Curiously, I think of something my auntie used to say:
“You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
I think of Tom, pissing me around and think,
“Fuck him!”
And perversely,
“Huh! Two can play at that game.”

I wonder if there is a
scale
of infidelity, or is that
it;
is it simply now,
done?
And if so, if I
am
to be hung for my crimes, why
not
just go the whole hog? It's at this point that I open my jaw and let Ricardo's tongue enter my mouth; it's at this point that I pull my stomach in so that his hand can work it's way past the waistband towards my dick.

“Eh, oui,”
he murmurs, pulling me towards the sofa, then sitting and unbuckling my belt. As he pulls my jeans down, I catch sight of myself in the mirror. For an instant, I see myself exactly as I am: a sad, weak, human being, with no willpower, no principles – someone who would cheat on his partner with his best friend's boyfriend. And in that instant, I almost summon the willpower to stop it all – my muscles even begin to move in the right direction. But then he lies back on the sofa and wriggles his own jeans off, and I stop looking in the mirror, and look instead at his tight body, at the swirls of fur around his belly button, at his expectant, naive grin, and he's as tempting as a fireplace on a rainy day, and I simply forget about walking away. I remember instead, the thought I had the first time I saw him: that there are people who are
so
pretty,
so
seductive,
so
charming, that there's just no point
trying
to resist.

He pulls me to the sofa beside him and we press our bodies together – delicious. I unbutton my shirt
and help him shuck his polo, and then we pull each other tight, desperate to maximise the skin-to-skin contact. He reaches and pushes his stiff dick down so that it sits between my thighs, and then, amazingly, nothing else happens.

We lie there together, kissing occasionally, looking into each other's eyes, smiling. I stroke his back, he strokes my hair, and each twitch of his dick solicits an identical twitch from my own and that makes us snigger, and the simple fact of that laughter on a rainy Christmas Eve feels like a gift from some open-minded, benign God.

After maybe twenty minutes, I start to doze, and my arousal fades, and I wonder confusedly why this act should count for anything at all; I wonder how our societies became so fucked-up that a cuddle became a crime?

And then the moment is broken and I'm awake and my mobile is vibrating across the coffee table and Ricardo is jumping up and saying,
“Merde, la dinde,”
and there's smoke in the room, and I'm blinking at my nudity and pressing a button and listening to Tom sing,
“We wish you a merry Christmas. We wish you a merry Christmas …”

When he has finished, I say, as one might to a child, “Thanks Tom, that was lovely.”

“You OK?” he says. “You sound weird.”

“Sorry, yeah, I dozed off.”

“You're at Rick's aren't you?” he says.

I clear my throat guiltily. “Yeah,” I say. “He's in the kitchen. Burning the turkey. But I'm knackered. I hardly slept.”

“Turkey?” Tom says.

“Don't ask.”

“Anyway, I know it's only the twenty-fourth, but I wanted to say happy Christmas, and, well, sorry. For everything.”

“I tried to phone you,” I say, realising as I say it that Tom has actually apologised – a first!

“Yeah, I was out,” he says.

“But I phoned you this morning too,” I say, re-buttoning my jeans, and thinking that I'm not in the best position to be expressing outrage no matter where he was, but that this probably won't stop me.

“Yeah,”
he says vaguely. “Anyway, give Ricky boy a big kiss from me, and you two have a lovely evening, OK?”

“And you, Tom? What are you doing?”

“I'll call you tomorrow, OK?” he says. “Byeeee.”
Click
.

“Yeah,” I say, frowning and putting the already silent phone back on the table. “Bye.”

I refasten my belt and button my shirt, and think that Tom is hiding something, and think that there are problems closer to home, and then wonder briefly which problem I need to think about first.

I head through to the kitchen where Ricardo, still bare-chested, is using his polo shirt to fan a smoking, turkey-shaped lump of charcoal on the windowsill.

“I burn the bird,” he says despondently.

I bite my lip and smirk despite myself.

“What?” he asks. “It's not so funny.”

I crack into a broad grin. “Actually, it
is,”
I say. “Vegetarians don't eat turkey.”

Ricardo shakes his head. “No?” he says. “And you? You
don't?”

I shake my head slowly.

Ricardo feigns outrage. “So you do this on purpose,” he says. “You seduce me and drug me to sleep and burn my dinner?”

I mimic his outrage.
“I seduced you?”

Ricardo opens his arms and walks towards me. “OK,” he says. “We seduce each other.”