Lexington Black (10 page)

Lex was the only person he could really talk
to about his feelings. Over the weeks, their emails had become
longer, more personal, with Rob telling him things he had never
talked about with anyone else apart from Geri. Things like his
guilt over Sandy, and how terrified he was about his new sexual
status. He admitted he had made his fair share of off-colour jokes
about queers, never once thinking he might be one of them. How had
he not known?

Lex's replies were comforting and gave him
strength. Rob was a product of his upbringing. His mother had
suppressed his natural instincts, encouraging his union with Sandy,
using passive-aggressive techniques to ensure he toed the line.
Possibly she already knew what he was and could not face it. Lex's
own parents were similar. His mother had died when he was sixteen,
and he hadn't spoken to his father for five years after Lex stepped
out and told him he was gay.

Then the old man had become ill, and in his
vulnerable state had reached out to his only child. Lex could have
rejected him but he did not, as aware as his father was that they
only had each other. He wouldn't be the first heir to a
multi-million dollar fortune forced to eat a lot of crow in order
to gain approval and love from his parents. He just wished his
father could just accept him as he was, without asking him with
wearisome regularity if he had found a wife yet.

Since that first night, Rob had seesawed
between feeling as hot as hell and plain, cold panic. Each night in
bed he would download erotic novels onto his e-reader and feast on
sexy images. He was hungry for knowledge and gratification. Lex was
3,000 miles away but even if he wasn't, Rob had no idea what to
expect from him. All he knew was what other people did, and get his
kicks from that. He found he was excited by the beautiful male
bodies on his computer screen. The hairy guys didn't do it for him
but the dark haired, suave guys did. The guys who wore suits, were
well-groomed, who knew their way around a wine bottle label.

Guys like Lexington Black.

Lex was a top, all the way. Rob couldn't
imagine him being subservient to anyone, yet the thought of him
submitting was the most exciting thing of all. He didn't need
pornography once he had that scenario in his head. All he had to do
was close his eyes and imagine Lex crouching on the bed, possibly
tied to it so he was totally helpless, and he was sprung.

At the weekends he went up to Camden a few
times with Geri, ostensibly to see her old university friends, but
they would always end up at a gay club, with Geri pointing out
handsome men for Rob to flirt with.

And he did flirt. He even snogged a few.
Once, he allowed someone to suck him off in the bowels of the
nightclub, but it wasn't the same. It just made him feel empty
inside.

Four weeks after Lex's departure, he was
dozing in bed when the phone jarred him awake. He was expecting Lex
to call in response to the email he had sent the day before, saying
he was going to try to get to New York in the summer. The garage
was busy and he was in the middle of upgrading their accounting
system. There never seemed to be a good time to get away, even
though the temptation was to drop everything and get on the first
flight to Manhattan.

He leapt out of bed and dived for the
phone.

'Rob! Sorry to wake you.' It was Paul, the
last person he expected to hear from on Saturday morning. Paul
practically lived in the garage but he didn't expect anyone else
to. 'Could you come in for a while this morning?'

'Sure. Is everything okay?'

'Yes and no.' Paul hesitated. 'Just get here
as soon as you can, will you?'

Rob was about to ask why when the line went
dead. Immediately, he was uneasy. If Paul was about to sack him, he
would do it at the weekend, and save them both the embarrassment of
doing it in front of his other employees.

All kinds of thoughts raced around his head
as he drove to the garage. If Paul had a problem with something he
had done, he would just say it at the time, but if he could no
longer keep him on as an employee, for whatever reason, that was
different. By the time he reached the garage, he had convinced
himself that he was about to become unemployed.

As he walked in, trying not to panic, Paul's
face was strained. He looked to be in a state of shock.

Rob sat on one of the plastic chairs on the
other side of Paul's desk and waited.

'Rob, I have no idea what to say. To be
frank, I haven't a clue how to handle this situation.'

'There's been a complaint?'

'No. Nothing like that at all.' He pushed a
letter over to Rob. 'I think you've done your job rather too
well.'

******

'Say that again.' Geri was curled up on the
sofa, Simon's head resting against her shoulder. He was fast
asleep.

Rob nursed a large glass of Cabernet
Sauvignon. He had folded himself into the second-hand leather
armchair opposite them. The initial shock had been replaced by hot
anticipation.

'I'm going to New York for a month. Lex has
offered me some time out to write my novel. And he's given Paul a
cheque for $250,000 for the inconvenience.'

'Right. So he's bought you.'

'He hasn't bought me, Geri. I'm not some male
version of Pretty Woman.'

'Sounds like you are.'

'I'm not.'

'Okay, you're not.' Pause. 'But you are,
really.'

'I'm not getting the money, Paul is. He's
still in shock.'

'So he wants you in New York to work on your
novel. What's in it for him?'

'The pleasure of my company in his bed,' Rob
replied lightly.

Geri pursed her lips. 'Am I the only person
seeing how wrong this is? You'd be a ... rent-boy!'

'For a month, to kick-start my writing
career. Where's the harm in that?'

'No, no, this is bullshit! How could you piss
away your self-respect like this? He's using you and you're using
him. It sucks, Rob. Really sucks.'

'I think that's part of the deal,' Simon
murmured, and received a thump in return.

'I thought you were asleep. Don't you think
he's selling himself?'

Simon languidly swung his legs off the couch.
'Why shouldn't he go? It isn't as if he has anything to stay for,
apart from our superlative company, my sweet.'

She dodged away from his kiss. 'This is
insane. I just wish ... I just wish I could convince you not to do
it. I don't want you to get hurt!'

'So I might get hurt. Then I'll get over it
and do something else. I'm doing this, Geri, whether you like it or
not.'

He held out his arms for a hug and she fell
into them, squeezing him tightly.

The next day, he told Paul he was going to
take up Lex's offer.

'Good,' Paul said. 'Go and have a break. The
wife will stand in until you get back. If you want to come back,
that is.'

'Of course I'm coming back.' Rob could not
imagine doing anything different. Paul was smiling sympathetically,
almost as if he knew already.

******

On the night before he was due to fly out, he
tidied the flat and checked his suitcase. At the last minute he
decided to pack his 3 meter wind-ripper. It was an old power kite
with a string system that wasn't too complicated. He left his
paperwork to go and retrieve it from under the bed. He was a big
kid at heart, and the thought of driving to a deserted beach and
testing his stamina with that bad boy gave him a frisson of
pleasure. If Lex was with him, the pleasure would be doubled.

With the kite duly stowed in his suitcase,
replacing his fraying tweed jacket (so not New York, Geri had
warned him,) he went back to his paperwork. He removed the plank of
wood resting over two storage boxes that doubled as his coffee
table in order to get his passport. Having located it, he then
looked at all the old papers he had thrown into the box when he had
first moved in.

Previously, he had sorted out the notes he
needed to work on his novel. With the chapters he had already
written, he was looking forward to collating it all and seeing how
far he had progressed. It was with a sense of excitement that he
put them in his in-flight bag. He didn't want to risk them being
lost, should his suitcase not make it to Manhattan.

Whilst eating sweet and sour pork out of a
cardboard carton, he sorted through his old bank statements,
letters and receipts. He made four piles, for recycling, filing,
shredding, and for taking with him to America.

Soon the pile of recycling was growing and
the one for shredding was even bigger. It felt good to actually get
his papers in order. With the first box sorted, he moved onto the
second one.

On top of yet more papers was a single
photograph from his childhood. Staring at the slightly faded
picture he saw his mother, tall and grim, with the five children,
including him. There wasn't a lot of joy in them and as far as Rob
knew, nothing much had changed. Roger was the superior eldest,
practically a stranger now he lived in Quebec. Christopher was
standing next to Geri, then boyish and truculent, and himself,
lanky and angular, a carbon copy of his father. At the time the
photograph was taken, Sara was an obstreperous five year old, held
tightly by their comfortable nanny, who had given them all the love
their mother seemed incapable of. Inevitably, his father had
managed to get his long shadow in the frame as he took the picture.
It would have been a family joke, had the family been capable of
laughing about anything.

More sorting elicited no more photographs,
just a lot of old school reports which he did not have the heart to
throw away, and a copy of his dissertation on Ancient Greek Poetry
for his English Literature degree at Durham university. He flipped
through it, hardly believing he had actually written something that
intellectual. He could have gone into teaching with that kind of
knowledge but had chosen accountancy to spite his mother. If he
hadn't, he might have been an author by then. And he wouldn't be
divorced from the woman he had met on his accountancy course, and
sitting in a shitty flat that smelled of kebabs.

And he wouldn't have met Lexington Black.

As Lex said, regrets were useless. What
mattered was going forward.

He put the dissertation back in the filing
box. One day, he might show it to Lex as proof that he wasn't just
a pretty face, if he ever had the opportunity.

The thought that he might not depressed him,
so he shoved it away and continued with his clear out, finding some
old cassettes which he chucked in the bin, grateful that his taste
in music had improved immeasurably.

Then he picked up a photograph album, and
felt sucker-punched when he realised what it was. At the time, he
hadn't thought about it, but he was holding his wedding pictures.
Sandy obviously didn't want to be reminded of their wedding day and
that actually hurt.

She had looked so beautiful, ahead of fashion
in a slim silk column of a dress, her hair caught up and fastened
with white rosebuds. He was reticent and solemn in his top hat and
grey tails.

Looking at his picture now, he could tell he
had been having doubts. He tried to summon some feeling of regret
or love for the blonde woman standing next to him but she had
ceased to mean anything to him. He might as well have been looking
at a stranger's photograph, therefore the album could go.

He slammed it shut and threw it on the
rubbish pile, then after a moment retrieved it again. Whether she
liked it or not, their marriage had been real and was an indelible
part of their lives. If he just threw it away, he was no better
than either his ex-wife or indeed his mother had been, trying to
scrub his father out of existence after his death. It was something
else to show Lex, if the opportunity arose.

At the very bottom of the box was another,
battered and rusted, with a slender metal handle. It was an old gun
box, containing precious mementos of his father. The tin box had
gone with him wherever he went, even up to his digs in Durham
during his university days. He did not want to risk his mother
finding and destroying it.

After Charles Martyn's suicide, his mother
had insisted he be buried in an unmarked grave, as if that would be
enough to absolve the family of his shame. Rob had never forgiven
her for that. He was desperate to have some form of connection with
him. As soon as he could, he had gone into his study and taken a
few precious items, his cigars, clipper and lighter, his pen, a
spare watch and an unopened cardboard tube. From the label, he knew
it contained a coiled photograph of his last year at Melville Hall.
It was the only photograph he had of his father, yet he had never
been able to face looking at it.

For a while he looked at each item, running
it through his hands, sniffing the faded aroma of the cigars, now
crisp with age. He held the cardboard tube in his hands, his thumb
stroking over the unbroken seal. He had to face it at some point
and that evening was as good a time as any.

In the end he finished his meal, washed up
the cutlery and put the recycling out for collection.

Then he put all the confidential documents
for shredding in a plastic bag which he hid under his bed, and
packed the metal gun box back in with the filing. He reassembled
his coffee table and checked his suitcase yet again, making sure he
had everything packed and ready as the taxi was picking him up at
five the following morning. A small rucksack held his hand luggage,
including his plane tickets, passport, wallet, other important
documents, camera, e-reader, laptop and a spare pair of glasses
just in case he sat on the others. He went through it all two or
three times to satisfy himself that he was completely
organised.

And all the while, the cardboard tube sat on
the sofa, waiting.