‘I’m a little nervous about tonight,’ I blurted out, after a protracted silence.
‘Me too, to be honest. I’m dreading going.’
‘Why are you going then?’
‘You know those friends you’ve had since early school days that you’ve totally grown apart from but still feel obliged to see because of your shared history, even though your lives are completely different and if you had to meet them today, you probably wouldn’t be friends?’
‘No,’ I said straight away.
‘Well, you’re lucky then. They live in England now, but come to South Africa once a year, so I do dinner with them. They’re high-school sweethearts who got married right out of school and have produced a set of blonde twins. They seem to think I should be doing the same. Always telling me I don’t want to be a sixty-year-old at my future children’s graduations.’
‘How old are you?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to ask him.
‘Thirty-two. You?’
‘Twenty-nine. My parents want to throw me a massive thirtieth-birthday party. My mom says if she can’t plan a wedding, I should at least let her plan a party.’
‘Maybe she can plan a wine-tasting evening,’ he joked.
‘No. Never again. I’ve decided that I’m never going to taste wines again. It seems like such an innocent thing to do – take little sips – but it’s not! Before you know what you’ve done, you’ve consumed two bottles of wine and are sitting on a rock on the side of the road. I consider that a very low point in my life, dignity-wise.’
‘If that was a low point for you, then you’ve managed to get through life pretty unscathed,’ Andrew said.
‘What was your low point?’
‘There were many. But one that sticks out is when my friends and I graduated as pilots. Picture the scene: we all got very drunk, stripped down to our underpants and stood behind the engine of a jet and let it fling us into the fence.’
‘I see.’
‘Imagine grown men in their underwear pinned to a fence.’
‘That is incredibly undignified!’ I said, but couldn’t help my smile, and then couldn’t help imagining what Andrew might look like in his underwear.
‘What underwear?’ I quickly asked, in order to add detail to the mental images I was currently building.
‘What?’ He tilted his head to look at me.
‘Briefs? Boxers? G-string?’
‘Um . . . definitely not a G-string! Why?’
‘I’m trying to picture the scene accurately.’
Andrew laughed. ‘Would you like me to tell you what color they were?’
‘That would be useful.’
‘I was joking. I couldn’t tell you what color my underwear was that day if you paid me.’
‘Unfortunate,’ I said. ‘What about the gym? Were you going to the gym as much as you do now?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, your body. Did it look like it does now?’
‘What does it look like now?’ He turned in his seat and raised his brows at me.
‘Well, you obviously work out regularly. And judging by your physique, I would say with an emphasis on strength training.’ He definitely went to the gym; that much was obvious. But other things weren’t that obvious, like, did he have a six-pack? I loved six-packs. The ones where you were able to see the outlines of all the muscles perfectly. Like a study that Da Vinci might have done of the human body. I loved it when you could see the veins that ran into the groin area, the sinews between the ribs as they turned their torsos. I liked bodies like that. Bodies that revealed the intriguing structures below the surface. That revealed the inner, fascinating workings of the musculoskeletal system. Not that I’d been with many men who looked like that; in fact, I’d started considering bodies like those to be somewhat of a fantasy. Most of the men I’d been with were a little squishier around the middle; not that I minded squishy, but my fantasy had always beenDavid(preferably with a larger penis though).
