A Spot Of Bother

96

It was all a bit wearing.

For a third of his waking hours Jamie managed not to think about Tony at all. For another third he imagined Tony getting back in time and the two of them being reunited in various melodramatic scenes. The final third was given over to maudlin thoughts of going to Peterborough alone and getting way too much sympathy or none at all and having to remain cheerful for Katie’s sake.

He was planning to head up early on Friday afternoon to miss the traffic. Thursday evening he ate a Tesco pasta bake and a fruit salad in front of a video of The Blair Witch Project, which was rather scarier than he’d anticipated, so that he had to pause the tape halfway through and close all the downstairs curtains and lock the front door.

He expected to have nightmares. So it came as something of a surprise to find himself having a sex dream about Tony. He wasn’t complaining. It was boots-on, fresh-out-of-prison stuff. But what was slightly disturbing was that the whole thing was taking place in his parents’ living room during some kind of cocktail party. Tony pushing him facedown on the sofa, shoving three fingers into his mouth and fucking him with no preliminaries whatsoever. All the details far more vivid than they were meant to be in dreams. The bend in Tony’s cock, the paint stains on his fingers, the knotted vine pattern on the cushion covers pressed up against Jamie’s face in extreme close-up, the chatter, the clink of wineglasses. So vivid in fact that on several occasions during the following morning he remembered what had happened and broke into a cold sweat for a fraction of a second before remembering that it wasn’t real.