A re-hearing of the boy’s loud spasms, long and vicious, shrill as slashed guitar chords.

A silent aftermath rich with reverb and soul regret.

The nameless boy’s slim shadow long and lengthening as he headed home to posters of Kylie and Britney.

The, never to be deleted, song of him. Never. Never.

She’d die if she knew. The wife and mother.
Lindsay. A Gemini.
She’d lie. She’d fucking squawk like she was a total stranger to the raw mechanics of it all. She’d spit fire and brimstone, claim asylum, prejudice the whole wide faggot loathing world against him. She’d wear a tortured heart on her sleeve and model re-born motherhood like a veil. She might even become a Catholic and aspire to some form of saintliness or martyrdom. Worst of all, and without fail, she’d never miss an opportunity to cry on cue. Madonna the diva.

He’ll buy her something major, that’s what.
That’s what he’ll do.
He’ll bite deep into his plastic, get her the wonder stuff. Stylish presents from the one life posted to the cluttered other.
The duplicity of them both is long consummate.

Stephen.
He’d met Stephen in a café bar in St James Street, Brighton. It was the second summer. The one where he’d settled superficial differences with Lindsay. They were almost bound then.
Poised now- just.
Balancing things but only perilously reconciled. The decorating of their shit so slap dash that it was plain as day the cracks would, sooner rather than later, split the lining paper with it’s Laura Ashley wash of non-committal grey and pink. Smart. Over brushed. Distressed. Hung out with Victorian reproductions.

Framed sentiment.
Ugly. Bound to break.

She’d been tearless in her praise of his enormous efforts, buoyed up with a fiancée delusion, convinced by the packaged magic of her sad, crotchless knickers.
But Frank knew. Frank felt he’d been outflanked by female guile.
Then he’d driven with the roof down, out to find sea air, determined to find someone, anyone, in fact Stephen- the other love of his life.

On the way, there were distractions. There were half-naked line painters dividing the road, their red backs glistening with sweat, their waistbands soggy, slipped to their hips.
Taut butts.
Fronts with stomach muscles criss-crossed with moist hair.
Tattooed biceps.
The napes of their necks like river estuaries.
Through violet eyes, the psychic headlights of a pornographic mind, Frank saw. And Frank rode the wave of it, his skiffy stiffening.
This, something raw.
This, something mutual.
He imagined the man’s ejaculate, immaculate, off-white against a work stained thigh. His leer a fulcrum- fight or flee. The tense fist a hint of what may come. The eyes moist from a sudden realisation. This is sex, pure lusting, gloriously loveless, nothing more.
The stop/go lollypop spinning from red to green, it’s borstal boy a grin of dead teeth hissing ‘Wanker!’
                    Wanker.
Here and now, drying on the marriage bed, Frank’s bathed fingers closing round himself and going for it slowly. Fucking his own fist.

Stephen had led him to a garden flat in Hove. French doors and stone steps to an Eden without grass, the Welsh slate dusty in the heat, the Tree Ferns casting delicate shadows. Not his. No. He would be moving on. Thinking about a return to re-born Cardiff Bay.
Soon.
ASAP. [As soon as possible.]
SWGM [Single white gay male.] Again.

Frank swanned indoors determined to own a necklace of moments. He slotted porn into this stranger’s video and relaxed.