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It felt like the set-up to some porn movie. Maybe that’s what he would take it as.Fuck it.I couldn’t sit here on the side of the road for the rest of the night for want of someone less awkward to contact. I was going to call him. Get it over with.
I dialed his number and a moment later he picked up the phone, as though he had been waiting to hear from me.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Joseph?” I greeted him, and I took a deep breath. There was still time for me to back all the way out of this conversation if I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure that I did. I could have just hung up and pretended that I hadn’t meant to call him up. But I did. I needed to hear his voice. I needed to hear those words, honeyed, dripping into my ear. I didn’t care how I got them or where they came from, but I needed them, something ferocious, something fierce.
"I’m stuck in the layby at the side of the Loch," I explained. "You know, the one down from Arpafeelie?”
"What’s wrong?" He asked, sounding worried at once. "Why are you stuck there?"
"My car broke down," I replied. "I don’t know how to fix it. I was hoping..."
"I’ll be there in twenty," he told me at once, and with that, he hung up the phone, and left me sitting there in the car with a slight smile on my face, pleased that he was already in such a hurry to see me once more.
It didn’t even take him the full twenty minutes he had told me to have him arrive right there to help me; he pulled over his car, something sleek and classic that he had told me he’d worked on to pull it back up to scratch, and gestured for me to roll the window down.
"Hey," he greeted me, with a broad smile. "You mind getting out? Let me take a look at this thing for you..."
"Of course," I replied, and I slipped out of the car and gestured for him to go right ahead and take a look. I leaned on the side of the car and watched him and wondered how this made him feel. Was he feeling a little off-put by the fact that I had just hit him up out of nowhere to ask for his help? If he was, he was certainly doing a good job hiding it. He hardly seemed bothered at all. It didn’t take long until he had popped the hood of the car and stuck his head underneath, and he emerged a moment or two later, looking grim.
"It doesn’t look great," he remarked. "I have a friend I can call if you’d like me to-"
"No, it’s fine," I replied, waving my hand. "I just want to get back. I have insurance on this thing, I just need to call them up and I know they’ll fix it for me."
He paused for a moment, eyeing me. I knew exactly what was going through his mind. I looked him in the eye, daring him to say it.
"Can I give you a lift back to your place?" He offered, and I smiled.
"Sure," I agreed, and he led me to his car, opening the door for me, helping me inside. What the fuck was I doing? I should have told him no, shot him down, got on with my life. But I couldn’t shake him. Couldn’t shake the want for him. Couldn’t shake my need to come for him, no matter what it took, no matter how much of a mess we knew that it would land us in.
"You know, I didn’t expect to hear from you," he remarked, as he pulled out of the layby and back onto the road.
"I didn’t expect to be calling you," I admitted. And it was the truth, at least some of it; he had been the last person I’d expected to get in touch with today. Though I had woken up thinking of him. Though I had dreamed of him the night before, lain in bed and imagined what it would have been like to have him next to me once more. Remembered, with a such vividness, the passion that he had brought to my bed, even if it was just for one night. I needed him. I craved him. Something deep down in my guts made it impossible for me to resist or forget about him, no matter how much I wanted to.
But my brain, that logical part, told me that we could never be anything more than friends. Because if someone found out about us, then there would be trouble. One time, well, I could put that down to a bad decision, nothing more than that, but more than once, when I was knowing about everything that he was to me, that would have just been in bad taste.
He pulled up outside my block of flats, and I took a deep breath. I wanted to tell him to go, but that seemed a little mean, given that he had come in and played my hero when I had needed him to.
"Do you want a drink?" I asked him. "A cup of tea, I mean?"
"I would love that," he agreed.
"But no funny business, alright?” I warned him. I knew that it was a cliché, but he needed to know that nothing was going to happen between us; he needed to know that this was where it ended.
"I’ll see what I can do," he replied, and he helped me out of the car and we headed up the steps together once again.
It was hard not to think of the first time that he had come up to my flat when we had slept together for the first time. When I had kissed him in the street, and everything else had fallen away. And I could convince myself that this man, this perfect man, was the one that I was meant to be with.
I turned on the kettle when I got in, and he sank into the living room couch and looked around.
"You’ve been here before," I reminded him.
"Yeah, but I didn’t get much of a chance to see anything outside the bedroom," He reminded me. I couldn’t help but smile. I was doing my best not to think about what had happened between us then. But then the kettle pinged and I made us a couple of cups of tea, and I went to the living room to give it to him.
"Thanks for coming out and helping me tonight," I murmured.
"Well, it wouldn’t be very gentlemanly to leave you out there alone," he replied.
