Chapter Text
He’s born wrong.
That much he knows, and no more. But he can imagine well enough, from the feeling of it: the way his mother sometimes cannot look him in the eyes, the way she stops dressing him as soon as he is able, the way she will not look at him unless he is clothed, even when he small enough he can barely walk.
He knows she must have known straight away, when he came out and the doctors could not tell her what he was. When she reached for him, grasping, only for them to pull him away. She must have known, in the way mothers do—that something terrible had happened. So many children do not survive those first few minutes when fluid gives way to oxygen, and the world screams suddenly into being in flashes of violent sensation.
He knows, too, that there must have been no fixing what he was. That when they at last placed him in her arms, she sobbed, the sob of a woman who had lost her child. He knows, even then, there must have been love there. Must, because she took him home, took him in her arms and held him and nursed him and allowed him to live there, cradled in her warmth.
He knows, too, that if it weren’t for Mary, Jim would not have taken Paul home at all. That the first moment Jim laid eyes on his child, squirming and purple and wrong, he had lurched to the wastebin and hurled, then cried.
Paul reads, years later, when he’s in his late twenties, trying, after all those years, to know himself, that most children born like him, for hundreds of years, are killed. That most, now, are corrected. That it’s an emergency, to be born the way he is, and after the surgeries and the needles and the thread, most don’t even know that they were born wrong. That they were saved.
But he wasn’t. Isn’t. Mary isn’t around anymore to ask why. And they never talk about it: him and Jim, as a rule. Enforced.
They don’t talk much, these days.
—
He doesn’t like to take his clothes off to shower. He doesn’t like to see it, or think about. He doesn’t have to pull his pants down to pee, so he doesn’t, and when he changes he does it quickly, with his eyes open only a sliver—enough to step into his trousers without falling over. Nothing more.
He’s the way God made him, Mary says. Jim tells her not to fill his head with that rubbish. That sometimes there are mistakes of nature, and that’s the way God intended it. That he can’t be everywhere all at once, and sometimes things like Paul happen, that cannot be unhappened.
So he showers with his y-fronts on, and they don’t talk about, and it’s fine. He’s a boy, and nobody has to know, and it’s good, it’s fine, and one day Mary talks to him about his menses and he says horrible things to her. That it’s her fault his body is like this. That there’s something wrong with her the same way there’s something wrong with him. That there must be. That there has to be.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit, their priest says at mass, and it gets stuck in him. Lodges there—slithers down through his ear canals, drips down his throat until it buries itself, thick and tarry in his lungs. So that he feels it with every inhale, each bit of oxygen that gives him life.
He doesn’t ever really believe his menses will come, the same way he doesn’t believe he’s anything but a boy. Eleven comes and goes. Twelve, thirteen. And all good things, he’ll learn that next year, must end.
When his menses do come, Mary isn’t there anymore to help him. He lies in his narrow wool mattress with a rag stuffed between his legs, clutching his stomach. Feels sick, every time he hears his Father’s footsteps, the creak of his green armchair. Every time the place he does not think about pulses and aches, sick and sticky.
—
He spends his childhood not thinking about it—not touching it. That place between his legs, where all that is bad seems to come from. And he tries not to think about girls, and he tries not to think about sex, and he tries not to think about the pathetic three inches that jut like a fat, dead slug—sometimes random, sometimes not—from the ugly coarse hair that began growing the previous year
He gets used to failing. He fools around with the babysitter, over clothes, and it makes him feel six feet tall, and twenty years old, and it’s a good thing, he decides, being with women. It’s a good thing, if he touches just his cock and nothing else, if he ignores the wet that seeps, insistent, from the place he never thinks about.
He’s a boy, and he chases birds the way a boy does, and thinks about them, and touches that one part that is okay to touch when he does. Not the place a good catholic is meant to touch, but the one all good catholic boys do anyway.
It doesn’t seem so hard, to live like the other place doesn’t exist. To be good.
And then he meets John, and everything is suddenly, irrevocably broken again. He spends days with him. Watches him play guitar, and follows him everywhere, and spends long hours with him, shoulder to shoulder, trading cords and roughhousing, rolling around on John’s narrow, twin bed.
His stomach hurts often, when he walks home after. Aches, from hours spent laughing. And he can almost pretend it’s only that, that there’s no sick roll of nausea underneath, worse than any flu or cold his mother had nursed him through. That there’s no deeper ache, lower down, that has been building for hours, like he gets when he’s sat too long on a bicycle, or wears drainpipes that are too tight.
The first time, he ignores his father’s hello when he gets home. Runs up the stairs to the bathroom and locks the door. His briefs make a wet sound, like peeling a dishcloth from the edge of the sink as he eases them, nauseous, down his legs.
They gleam, shiny and slick and wet, and he nearly does throw up then, and several times after, as he washes them hurriedly in the sink the way he imagines a murderer washes blood from their clothes after dumping a body.
He doesn’t realize why it’s happened, at first. It takes four times, for him to put together that it’s only with John, and every time he’s with John, around him, in his orbit. That one look from John, eyes meeting across Pete’s cellar, or one brush of fingers as they pass instruments back and forth is enough to make him hard, and so much more.
He feels it—the wet pulse that dampens his underwear, when they roughhouse in the narrow bed at Mendips. When John pins him down. When John leans over him, grinning, victorious, and all Paul can feel is the hot, sick pulse, the blood rushing to his face, his ears, the way his eyes can’t seem to pull away from the shape of John’s mouth, the way his brain can’t stop thinking of how nice it would be to kiss him, to feel him, to run his hands down the naked plains of skin that he knows must exist, have to, hidden beneath John’s shirt.
Paul’s always thought birds were nice. Their tits, and their legs, and their pretty faces. But he’s never wanted to bite one. He’s never wanted to touch every part of one, memorize every freckle and every mole. Never wanted to climb inside of one and live there, caged within their bones. Never gotten wet for one, quite the way he is then. Never wanted to spread his legs for one.
He understands why Jim doesn’t want John around. Feels ashamed, even when they’re not doing much of anything. Playing guitar, and writing lyrics, and existing in the same space. It coils in him—thick and wrong and sick like milk gone off, sour and curdled. It drips from him, like pus from a wound—rots him from the inside.
Jim doesn’t like it when Paul spends time with much of anyone.
He remembers a time with George Harrison, when Mary was still alive. When Jim came home to George on Paul’s bed, Paul on the floor, guitars in both their laps. Picking their way through something they’d heard on the radio, trying to learn it from nothing, and Jim had stopped in the doorway, said he hadn’t realized Paul had company. Said they looked cozy, but not in the way George’s mother would have said it. Not in a way that meant it was something good.
Paul felt uncomfortable, like they’d been caught doing something wrong. Hadn’t know what the wrong was, but that it was there all the same, curled inside him, fermenting, bubbling beside the parts that were always wrong. George plucked away at a single string, twanging and twanging over and over, the same note, as he glanced between Paul and his father.
“We’re just writing,” Paul said, and Jim hummed, eyes flicking to the sheet music, then to Paul’s face, then away again.
“Just thought—well. Best leave the door open, son. When you’ve got company.”
And they had—and Jim glanced in at them every so often, and every time Paul felt small and strange and dirty and wrong.
He would like to say that's when the other wrongness started. Because there were different kinds. The biological wrongness, the wrongness of his skin, of how he was formed and deposited on the earth, but another one too. Mary had told him bodies were just bodies, and souls were just souls, and one day you would leave your body and be just your soul, and you would leave those imperfections behind. Only Paul’s soul was imperfect to. Marred, and spotted, and black on the inside.
Because Paul wants things he shouldn’t want. Thinks about things he shouldn’t want.
He wants to say the wrongness started with Jim. That he planted it in Paul, left it growing there, a sprout that wrapped around everything, choking, until it grew into something too big to be cut away. A vine that held together a fence that was half-rotten, a wall crumbling to pieces. He wants to say that he had been innocent, had been good, hadn’t even thought to think of things like that.
Small, innocent things were so easily corrupted, and it was Jim who taught him they could be like that, and once Paul knew the knowledge could not be returned, the apple unbitten, the body re-covered.
But he thinks, maybe, you can’t have one wrongness without the other. He knows that’s what the priest would say. That all people are born wicked, and some are born extra wicked, and no amount of the Lord’s word can save their wicked souls. That a corruption inside someone festers the way he festers, the way he bubbles and rots and ferments, the way that one biological wrongness morphs into other wrongness, twining, things wrong with who he is, not only what he is.
He doesn’t know when he started fantasizing about that—those horrible, terrible, wrong things. He doesn’t know when it started, that small innocent thoughts that sat, furled in his belly, unraveling in small realizations that made his blood hot and his thoughts fizz. He knows it came slowly—he knows standing at the sink one morning, hands aching with the heat of the water as he scrubbed at the egg pan, that he’d glanced out the window and saw the neighbor man there with his dog, that it grew a little more.
The dog jumped up, balanced on its hind legs as it tried to rest its front on the man, who'd kicked it away with a shoe, hardly a glance. Kept walking, tugging the dog down the sidewalk by its neck, and it had whimpered and whined and yelped but had to go on—dragged behind his owner, and something tickled, buzzing near the front of his brain. Something wiggled in his belly.
It wasn’t anything remarkable. Not even anything he should have remembered. But he’d scrubbed at the pan, then the spatula, then a plate, and he looked at that patch of grass and his mind wandered.
He’d been at a party last night. A party with John. And he’d wanted to pick up a girl but failed, because John kept telling him jokes, filthy ones, hot in his ear, and Paul kept getting distracted. And he hadn’t wanted to part from John anyway, because it never happened that they were at a party with anyone more interesting than each other, and after awhile even talking to anyone else agitated him—rubbed like a blister on the edge of a shoe, an unfortunate annoyance he couldn’t really do anything about, unless he wanted to tell Pete to fuck off when he poured himself another drink.
Him and John had a way with each other, at parties like that. Slunk off to corners and watched everyone make fools of themselves, laughed at everyone and told mean jokes to each other like they were the coolest and the most intelligent and the hottest people in the room, because there, with John, Paul knew they were.
And then Pete had joined them, and he always was immune to the twin glares of Lennon and McCartney, as oblivious as he was stupid, and he’d asked why they were always hanging off each other, why John didn’t let Paul off to meet some people other than himself, and John had made a joke. A joke about Paul.
Oh, don’t worry. He likes that, see? Followin’ me around. Like a puppy he is. Should get him a collar, let him sleep at the foot of me bed.
And he doesn’t know why is happened, only that he’d felt his cock thickening in his pants, and John’s hand on his back had been suddenly searing, hot, heavy, and his heart felt like it was crawling up out of his throat when John winked at him, a moment away from flopping wetly and pathetically onto the floor at John’s feet.
He really had followed John around like a puppy then—hung on his every word, smoked the same cigarettes, drank the same drink.
Followed him home.
Now, he stares at the patch of grass and imagines it. Himself, naked, on his hands and knees. Bruised, and cold, and scraped skin as John tugs him along, harsh, until Paul has to follow, has no choice but to follow. Imagines John’s foot, the sweep of his ankle, as he lazily kicks Paul away.
He’s hard again, embarrassingly so, and behind him Mike trips down the stairs, falls into his seat at the kitchen table and says something about school, about breakfast, and Paul can only hum, scrub at another dish and tense his thighs, willing his erection to go back down.
—
He thinks, maybe, it started after Mary, when Jim lost all his patience and Paul became ‘an adult now’. He thinks it started when Jim got more liberal with the belt. When Paul could be standing at the stove cooking dinner and Jim would have a go at him—whip him with one or two errant strikes for nothing, no reason, because why are you looking so sour?
He knows it got worse when Jim made him get on the floor. Crawl on his hands and knees to pick the little pieces of glass out of the spaces between the tiles. When Jim took him by the back of the neck and dragged him through the house—shoved his face in every little failure Paul had made that week as a homemaker—dirt on the floor and wrinkles Jim’s shirts and stains on the tablecloths.
It hadn’t started in those moments, per se. No, not in those moments when rage lodged so deeply in his throat it had felt like tears. When he’d had to clench his fists closed tight, nails in palms, for want of opening them wide, spinning around to hit something, someone.
I could kick the shite out of him, Paul raged to Mike, the same thing John had said to him earlier, while Paul dourly picked grains of glass out from under his nails and tossed them, clinking, into the wastebin beside John’s desk. I’m bigger than him, he can’t even stand up straight his bones have gone so crooked!
But the rage hadn’t lasted. No, it never did. He wished it did, sometimes, when he lay in bed, knees folded up to his chest, feeling smaller and more inconsequential than anything. Knowing he would never get out of here, this bedroom, this house, this street. That he would work in some dead-end factory for the rest of his life, never marry, freakish, deformed. That he’d live the rest of his life in his room in his father's house, and every paycheck would go to Jim, and he’d try the rest of his life to make Jim happy and he never would be, and his friends would grow up and get lives of their own, and eventually, one day…he would be all alone. And his life would be over, and there would be nothing to show for it.
He’s crying, when he closes his eyes. When he tries to imagine the woman that could love him. Some girl with long blonde hair and shapely, elfin legs. He gets hard, when she insults him. When she pushes him away with one heeled foot to lie, child's posed between her feet. But the image shifts, blurs, falls apart.
Her shoes change, her voice. Not light and airy but something deeper, something he could feel sink down into his chest, something that didn’t ask but told. And maybe it’s not a heel anymore. Maybe it’s not the pale, shapely stretch of a woman’s leg. Maybe there’s hair there. Maybe there’s hair, long, unshaved, reddish, curling up from her calf. And maybe she’s not wearing a heel, but an oxford. A pointy winklepicker.
Maybe they cross their ankles over one another, lift up their feet, rest them on Paul’s back. And maybe he stays there. Maybe he stays there and lets them.
He opens his eyes, heart hammering. He doesn’t want to imagine this anymore.
—
They lay on the grass at Strawberry Fields. It’s a hot day—too hot to do much of anything. Too hot to sit inside. Their bikes lay discarded, handlebars damp with sweat, on the other side of the brick wall.
John rolls onto his side, propped on one elbow, and his head shadows Paul’s own, a respite from the sweltering heat.
“What is it?” Paul asks, when John doesn’t say anything. John has a bad habit of staring at him—looking at Paul like he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. A symptom, Paul knows, of being as close as they are, the way twins can sometimes read each other’s minds.
“You don’t have a girlfriend,” John says, and the shade doesn’t matter then—the heat returns, just a little, dusting over his cheekbones. John smiles, pleased, always, when Paul is embarrassed. When Paul does much of anything in response to John—laughs, or smiles, or even just looks at him.
“So what?” Paul asks, heart thudding against the inside of his ribs. He’s gone wobbly all over—feels it, even though he’s lying down, in every one of his joints. Soft like gelatin. Is it so strange to not have a girlfriend? Is it something he should do, needs to do, so people don’t know he’s—
“Don’t you think it’s time you got one?” John asks. “You don’t want people thinking you’re strange, do you? Hanging out only with blokes all the time.”
John spins out every thought in Paul’s head the way carnival men spin sugar thread for candy floss. So John’s noticed then, too—how strange Paul is—the same way Jim does. The same way people seem to sometimes—a thing they get a sense of without knowing why. An instinctive distrust, looking at Paul through the corner of their eye when he was in the shops, or weeding an elderly woman’s garden.
Mary had told Paul he’d just have to be nicer, for every uncharitable word or glance. It had always felt like turning one cruel word to two—digging out an extra fistful of dirt for a bloke who was digging Paul’s grave.
Fifteen now, with nice manners, and nothing to show for it.
“You hang around with blokes all the time,” Paul says, weakly.
“That’s different,” John says. “I’ve had girls. The others have had girls. You—haven’t.”
John doesn’t mean much by it, probably, but the words land heavy. You haven’t—flops into the grass between them like a carcass. Is that true? He’s the only one who hasn’t….
Paul squirms a bit, uncomfortable. Turns half on his side, so John can’t see his face as he reaches, plucks up a piece of clover like it’s the most interesting thing. Like this, his back is to John, and he can feel the slight breeze licking cool on the sweat that’s gathered on the small of his back—the sliver of exposed skin.
John watches, Paul knows he is, even if he can’t see him.
“You don’t want people talking,” John says, behind him, and Paul can hear the smile in his voice, knows he’s enjoying it—riling Paul up, making him uncomfortable.
“People aren’t talking,” Paul protests.
“Not yet,” John says, and there’s something horrible and familiar banging away in the back of Paul’s mind in the way John says it—something Paul needs to hide, desperately, from everyone—including John.
Especially John.
Paul keeps his voice steady with effort. “I’m not strange,” He says, pushing a bit of grass between his fingers, shredding it to hide his hands shaking.
“Didn’t say you were, did I?” And John must have slid across the grass, towards Paul’s back, because he’s close—close enough to nudge Paul’s knee with his own, casual, and Paul’s joints go soft again, and shaky. “Just saying—maybe get ahead of it. Prove you’re not…you know. Odd.”
Paul forces a laugh, face still pressed down into the grass. “Dunno why it matters so much to you.”
“Doesn’t matter to me. Just looking out for you, aren’t I?” John drawls, slow. His knee is still touching the back of Paul’s knee, and after a moment he shifts his ankle, hooks it through Paul’s, which does nothing to slow Paul’s heart rate. He’s always wanting to touch—John. Always casual and bold like it’s no big thing. Paul wishes he could touch like that—like it didn’t mean anything. Like it was alright to.
“Have you ever kissed anyone?” John asks, and Paul starts enough their feet knock together, and John is laughing, hand on Paul’s upper arm, forcibly turning Paul around, back toward him.
“John!” Paul protests, squirming. Reaches to shove John off before he realizes John is right there, face inches from his own and he stops, eyes wide, dumb, mouth open. Their noses are nearly touching, and Paul’s chest is doing something funny, and for John it doesn’t even seem to register—how close they are, how much they breathe the other’s air.
John is still laughing, a loud, unrestrained thing—a beautiful thing—tips his head back and opens his mouth and barks. “Christ, I knew it,” he says. “How are you gonna get a girl if ye don’t know how to kiss?”
“I don’t—I don’t think—” Paul stammers, red, and John grins wider.
“I know ye don’t,” John says, gloating. It’s not possible for John to lean further in, but he siddles his chest closer to Paul’s, so close they’re pressed together, so close Paul can feel the swell and the dip of John’s chest with each breath, and when John talks his voice goes lower, smooth and thick like honey, like the way he talks to birds in bars, the way he talks when he’s trying to pick somebody up.
“I could teach ya, y’know?” John whispers, eyes flicking down to Paul’s mouth, and Paul can’t breathe, can’t speak. He feels like a fish yanked out of the water, plopped down in a place so antithetical to everything else his brain can’t even interpret it, make sense of it. “Give you a bit of practice. Just so you can get girls, yeah?”
And it doesn’t make sense that John would be using that voice with him, with Paul, so he must be taking the piss, and Paul is going to embarrass himself like this, lying practically in John’s arm in the grass, no space between them, like something out of a wet dream.
“Sound, that,” Paul says, tries for sarcastic, comes out wobbly instead, and he tries to push John away, but John’s hand it still on Paul’s upper arm and the fingers wrap tighter, so tight Paul can’t, and Paul doesn’t understand, and then John’s other hand is on Paul’s chin, tilting his head up, and back, so that he has to look up into John’s eyes then and—oh.
“I’m not joking,” John says, honey-colored eyes staring down into his own, and yeah, he looks pretty fucking serious.
The bottom has dropped out of him, he’s sure, and all the pieces are spilling out into a gross a pile on the grass. He’s sure John can hear him swallow. They’re so bloody close he can probably hear the blood sliding through Paul’s veins. Paul doesn’t know what to do, what to say, and his own hand it clutching weakly at John’s wrist, the one holding his chin, and he should tug away but doesn’t, because he can’t look away from John’s eyes.
He remembers reading in The Boy’s Own Paper as a lad—All About Vacuum Tubes!—how the anode and the cathode, with nothing between them, would exchange electrons uncontrollably, without end. Two things, properly aligned, that could not stop the endless flow between them as long as they were connected.
He feels like that now—looking into John’s eyes. Every time he looks into John’s eyes. An anode and a cathode, no grid between them, and the endless, unstoppable flood of everything pouring out of them, everything about John, and everything about Paul, from the moment they both were born.
No way to stop it, unless one of them looks away, and Paul doesn’t want to, and John was never one to lose at a game, and Paul realizes, again, and again, and again, how beautiful John’s eyes are, what a precious shade of brown they seem in the light, tan like a pot of caramel, or the leather on his old school bag, or the plumage of a baby duckling.
It only makes sense to practice kissing, he realizes, because the real blokes know how to kiss girls, and they wouldn’t want to look like a couple of queers who don’t know how to get girls, would they? And he knows John’s only helping him, because he can see it in John’s eyes, in that flow between them, the glassy surface of his eyes like a mirror. John is only offering to help him, and Paul should let him, Paul should let him because Paul wants him too, because John wants Paul to want him to.
And Paul can barely string together two coherent thoughts when he nods, and John smiles, rolls more onto his front, pushing Paul back, and Paul follows, mirrors, John is over him in the grass, looking down at him, and they stare at each other. He’s shaking, just a little, as John starts to lean down. He’s shaking, as John’s breath ghosts over his lips, and his mouth opens just a little as his eyes close, and he knows it’s wrong—that boys aren't supposed to kiss, and his fingers are still curled around John’s wrist but he doesn’t stop him.
Their mouths connect. A moment of plush pressure before John pushes down. Their noses rub, and John’s hand on Paul’s chin tilts him, and Paul moves so easily, like putty, and John kisses him, and John kisses him, and every other thought he’s ever had stops. He’s dizzy, the ground beneath him roiling like the ocean. John’s other hand is on his cheek now, and Paul can feel the callouses bloomed from guitar strings, can feel the grass tickling the back of his neck, can smell the soap Mimi buys, and, more than anything—the feel of John’s lips. The slick damp of him, the way he moves against Paul’s own.
John makes a sound, far back in his throat, and Paul feels, against his own skin, the moment John’s mouth opens, the moment his tongue darts forward—and Paul’s mouth is already open, of course it is, and he can’t stop the shuddering moan that darts out of him—suprised and pleased and mortifying, the moment John’s tongue forces it’s way inside his small mouth.
And then John is pushing harder, and it’s not just their lips now but their whole bodies—pushing against each other from head to toe, and John isn’t just kissing him but rubbing on him, rutting on him, and Paul knows he should be horrified but he can’t remember anything—any of the fear, or the shame or the disgust. He knows only pleasure, rolling through him from his core like something swaddling him, thick and warm and cozy.
He’s drunk, he thinks, for the fourth or fifth time in his life. Heady and insensate on the sounds John makes, and the way he moves, and the way his skin feels against Paul’s own. He never wants to stop kissing him. He never wants to stop lying beneath him, here, in this sun-drenched field. Think, perhaps, he understands what bliss is, in a way he never has before.
Paul is panting when, finally, John pulls back. His fingers still clutch John’s shoulder, lips red and wet and slick from John’s saliva.
“Was that okay?” He asks, looks up into John’s eyes, and they’re dark, and deep, and Paul could fall into them, could live and die in them. Wants, suddenly, to be minuscule, infinitesimal. To live in the forest of John’s eyelashes and soak his feet in the black pool of his pupils.
“You need more practice,” John says—and they do.
They practice much, much more.
—
It doesn’t stay just kissing. John wants more, always, all the time, and Paul doesn’t mind it—kissing on the couch when Jim is out and they’ve given Mikey a few shilling to go to the movies, or in John’s room at Mendips, Mimi downstairs with her radio programs, and once even on the floor of George’s bedroom, when George wanders downstairs for a midnight snack.
Now John sits on the edge of Paul’s bed, Paul in his lap, and their mouths meet lazily, and open, and when John’s hand smooths down Paul’s back to squeeze his ass Paul moans, surprised and sudden, into John’s mouth.
He pulls back, panting, lips red and wet and obscene, and John squeezes again—doesn’t just squeeze, but holds on, massaging the plump globe, and Paul whines.
It’s not just kissing, it’s not. And they’ve rubbed on each other, touched faces and necks and hands the way lads do with their girlfriends, and it’s all practice, it’s all good practice, but this—
“You said—” Paul starts, but John interrupts him, desperate, needy. There are two blotches of color high on his cheeks, and his pupils are blown, like they often are when Paul is around, these days, and his hair is messed—tangled and standing on end from when Paul tugged it moments ago, and he looks wonderful.
“Please Paulie,” John says, mouth wet. “Just let me—” and his hand moves, pets over the curve of Paul arse through his trousers, the tight, obscene ones that Jim nearly had a conniption over. The ones John convinced him to have taken in.
“It’s not—” Paul starts, face flaming. It’s difficult, stringing words together. Following a thought. “How does it help us?”
“What?” John asks, not slowing. Pawing, and—
“Get girls,” Paul manages.
“What are you talking about?”
“The kissing,” Paul pants. “You said it was to help us get girls.”
And John, finally, stops. The hand working at Paul’s ass stills, and his face goes completely blank for one second, two, three.
“It feels better, when someone else does it,” John says, abruptly, and it’s Paul’s turn to stare blankly. “Y’know, jerks you off.”
Oh. Oh. John’s had that before, then, with a bird. It makes sense he has. He’s so much older than Paul, so much cooler. Of course he would know, and Paul wouldn’t.
“It’s practice, still. So you don’t get in a girl and go off straight away,” John says. Paul looks at him carefully—the half of his face Paul can see in the light that spills in from his bedroom window. It’s late—John making a show of leaving after a ‘songwriting’ session, saying his polite goodbyes to Mike, his less polite goodbyes to Jim before circling the block and shimmying his way up the drainpipe.
He doesn’t look like he’s taking the piss, but it’s hard to tell, sometimes, with John—there are layers to it. Truth with lies, and lies with humor, and the real thing mixed in there somewhere between. But John’s hand is still there on Paul’s ass, warm, and—it’s not a bad feeling. It’s not bad at all.
“Is that…is that a problem?” Paul asks, nervously, fingers clenching and releasing rhythmically on John’s shoulders. John nods, solemn. “How do you know?”
“Christ, Macca, you think I’m a bloody virgin?”
Paul squirms in his lap, looks anywhere but John’s face. He’s lucky, that John still wants to be with him, to practice with him, even though Paul’s a lame kid who doesn’t know the first thing about sex or anything. He worries, sometimes—that if he doesn’t give John what he wants then John will lose interest, find someone else.
Practice with someone else.
“You can—you can touch me, if you want,” Paul says, sudden enough he surprises himself, and so quiet John almost doesn’t hear. John’s hand clenches, tightens in the meat of Paul’s ass, and Paul shivers against him, gives an abortive little thrust against nothing.
“Over the clothes,” Paul adds, nervously, and John groans into his neck.
He knows John wants more, and hopes, for now, this will be enough. Knows he can never take his pants off in front of him, knows John would hate him, be disgusted by him, the moment he saw what was really between Paul’s legs.
And so John crushes him to the bed and touches him everywhere—slides his hands up Paul’s thighs and over his ass and his flanks and his chest and his head, and Paul shivers with it—the touch, the connection, how good it feels, to be touched and petted and held.
Paul doesn’t really know what’s happening until they’re in the middle of it—can’t trace backs the steps that led them here. Once moment John is rubbing Paul’s abdomen with a heavy, hard pressure, puffing hot breaths against his neck, and the next John ruts against him—fucks down between his legs as pleasure spikes, overwhelming, in Paul’s belly.
Paul wraps his arms around him, clings to John’s back, desperately, as John shakes them up the mattress, thrusts until Paul’s head thunks against the wall. Fucking. Are they fucking? They’re being too loud—mattress springs groaning, and bouncing, and downstairs Paul knows Jim is sleeping—one too many measures of undiluted alcohol, but there’s a thump from the other side of the wall—Mike, and Paul should stop, Paul needs to stop, but he rolls his hips, thrusts his little clothed cock up into John’s pelvis, and soon they’re both coming, sudden and hot and sticky and unbearable into their trousers.
They collapse, the both of them, overwrought. Unable to catch their breath, so wrung out by this incredible, incomprehensible thing that Paul is sure that will be the end of it, that there can’t possibly be anything beyond it, any further the two of them could ruin themselves.
But John wants more. They do it again, and again, and weeks pass, and then months, and more months, a year, more, and John wants more. Wants to touch him, really touch him, without the clothes. Naked. Skin to skin.
Paul doesn’t let him, but John doesn’t stop niggling at it, and Paul keeps saying no, and how about like before, and Johnny, please, and John works over him, John is every part of him, and Paul is every part of John, and finally one night, after John’s snuck Paul up to his bedroom, after they’ve spent the better part of an hour kissing, Paul can’t say no anymore.
Paul’s breath is shaking, John is sprawled on the bed beside him, flushed, mouth kiss-bitten, eyes glassy with wanting. Beautiful. He feels delirious with wanting, with fear, half like he’s going to shoot off, half like he’s going to throw up. Flagging, by the time John’s fingers drag down the panel of Paul’s trousers. Feels the way he imagines a rabbit does, in the moment a vulture's shadow falls over it—when it knows, beyond a doubt, that it is going to die.
Paul lies back, and John’s fingers reach the buttons, and he can hear the way John’s breathing changes—pitches up. Feels when John gets too excited and fumbles, clumsy, with the clasp.
“Christ,” he swears, “can’t believe you’re finally lettin’ me—”
The button pops. A tinny, metallic sound that hits like a bullet. The panel falls open, John’s hand at the elastic band of his underwear. Paul allows, just a moment, before he lets out a long, shuddering exhale, and pushes John’s hands aside.
He can’t let him. Can’t risk John reaching too far, to that place where slick wetness has been gathering for nearly an hour. So instead he reaches inside himself, heart hammering against his ribs, as he eases his sad little cock out from the opening.
John starts to make some sound—a soft, victorious thing, before he goes silent. Dead silent.
Paul’s stomach drops, his hands clenching in the sheets, dick hanging half-limp, hardly enough to stand out from the dark hair.
“Oh,” John says, blinking. “Blimey.”
Paul’s face flames. He reaches down—tries to cover himself with his hands, but John’s are there too, grabbing Paul by the wrists, pinning him down to the bed, and it’s a good thing they’re nose to nose like this. A good thing John can’t see the helpless twitch his sad excuse for a cock makes.
“John—” Paul says, embarrassed and turned on and ashamed, but John’s face is there, right over his own, and it’s unmistakable, the way John’s pupils blow wide, the way his breathing changes.
He moves Paul’s arms above his head, grips both Paul’s wrists in one hand. And Paul doesn’t know what he’s doing, what’s happening. Doesn’t know until he feels John’s palm press down into him, until he chokes and bucks his hips. Doesn’t know whether he wants to grind back or forward—to stay or hide.
John strokes again, gentler, and Paul feels himself twitch. The small, inadequate length of him, pinches between John’s thumb and forefinger. Feels himself thickening, helpless, in John’s hand.
“Fits right in me palm,” John says—and his voice has gone all queer. Strangled, pinched. “Dear little thing. No one’d ever suspect you of anything filthy, looking like that. All cute and sweet, like. Reckon the girls wouldn’t even know, if you slipped it in. Wouldn’t even mind if you put it up their arse.”
Paul’s whole body floods hot, mortifying heat crawling up his throat, his ears burning so hard he feels dizzy. He tugs at the hand pinning his wrists to the bed. Can’t get free. He pulses again—inside. Wetly.
“John—don’t. Please,” he begs.
“Why?” John asks like a genuine question, not a tease. His thumb brushes—light, exploratory—and Paul’s whole spine arches before he can stop himself, a small, strangled sound escaping him.
John’s breath catches.
“Oh…” John breathes, and suddenly there’s nothing mocking in him at all, nothing but hungry amazement. His pupils blown wide, his mouth parted. He leans in, lips skimming the shell of Paul’s ear, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like practice anymore. It doesn’t feel like pretend.
“This why you wouldn’t let me see you? There’s not anything to be embarrassed about. Well, hardly anything there at all. Jus’ this precious little thing, could wank it off between me toes.”
“John,” Paul chokes, humiliated, breathless, every nerve burning, exposed. “Please stop talking like that.”
“Why?” John asks, and his hand presses harder—squeezes, and fuck, god—Paul can feel the precum weakly dribbling out of him, can feel the slick bleeding from his cunt.
“I can feel it—you like it when I talk like that,” John says, swipes his thumb over the slit, and then drags it down. Fucks Paul’s cock in the curve of his thumb, the webbing of his hand.
It does feel better when someone else does it. It feels so, so much better, and Paul can’t stand it—can’t stand lying there, cock out, with John looking down at him like he’s something beautiful.
They’ve hardly started and he’s already coming—choking, thrusting up with embarrassing little sounds, and spills into John’s palm while John coos. Knows then John was right about that too, as his cheeks burn, mortified—that he will need more practice to not shoot off with a bird.
John doesn’t seem to mind—keeps jerking him through it—rolling the whole of Paul’s cock through the sticky puddle in his palm, and fuck, it’s so small Paul’s come covers it—coats it generously, and John keeps playing with it—massaging Paul’s come in and around as Paul whines, bucks, overstimulated.
“Shame you hid it from me so long,” John whispers. Reaches down to his own trousers and Paul watches, eyes wide like dinner plates, when John pulls the full, erect length of himself through his fly.
His mouth goes dry, his blood thrumming with arousal and fear.
He’s never really seen anything outside his own cock—a few sideways glances in the loo or at school. Never seen one erect like this. Bobbing.
Bigger than Paul could have imagined.