Short story · Couples
Oliver has been reading about the prostate. A lot. He even has a folder. Now he wants to find out what it is he can almost reach – together with Matt.
The stock had been on the hob since half six. Matt had roasted the bones in the oven while it was still dark outside, let them colour until the kitchen smelled like a restaurant just after closing, and then put them in the big pot with onions, carrots, a stick of celery and enough water to come almost to the brim. Now it was simmering so gently that the surface barely trembled. This was his Sunday: eight hours, no rota, no order waiting to go out to table four.
Oliver sat at the kitchen table in his dressing gown with a cup of coffee he had stopped drinking. He had a book open in front of him but hadn’t turned a page in a quarter of an hour. Matt had noticed, the same way he noticed when someone in the kitchen was gripping their knife a little too hard.
‘You’re not reading,’ said Matt.
‘I am reading.’
‘You’ve been on the same page since I first skimmed the pot.’
Oliver shut the book. He was thirty-three, a librarian, and had a face that blushed easily, which he hated and Matt adored. It was blushing now.
‘I have a request,’ said Oliver. ‘It isn’t about food.’
‘Everything’s about food.’
‘Not this time.’
Matt turned the heat down a notch even though it didn’t need it, and came and sat opposite, the tea towel still over his shoulder. They had lived together for three years. He knew Oliver well enough to know this had been prepared; Oliver prepared everything. He put sticky tabs in his cookbooks.
‘OK,’ said Matt. ‘I’m listening.’
Oliver turned his coffee cup round once on the tabletop.
‘You know I’ve never really liked penetration. That it’s always felt more like something I ought to like than something I actually do.’
‘I know. And it’s never mattered.’
‘I know it hasn’t mattered. That’s not it.’ He took a breath. ‘I’ve been reading about the prostate.’
Matt waited.
‘A lot,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ve read an awful lot. I have a folder.’
‘Of course you have a folder.’
‘And I tried. In the shower, a while ago. Just one finger. And it was –’ he searched for the words, and Matt could see what it cost him ‘– it was like when a word’s on the tip of your tongue. As if there was something there I could almost reach, but not quite. And I want to know what it is. With you.’
The kitchen went quiet, apart from the faint simmer of the pot. Matt reached across the table and took his hand.
‘What do you need from me?’ he asked.
‘For you not to laugh.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘You’re smiling.’
‘I’m smiling because you have a folder,’ said Matt. ‘Not at you. Never at you. Show me the folder.’
Oliver fetched the laptop. It really was a folder, with subfolders. They sat close together and read, shoulder to shoulder, while the stock darkened on the hob and the kitchen window steamed up. It turned out Oliver had already chosen: a Rocks-Off O-Boy, the smallest and lightest in its range, slim, with a wide base that couldn’t slip in too far and a little motor in the outer part, the bit that would rest against the perineum.
‘The manufacturer calls it an entry-level model,’ said Oliver. ‘That sounded like a good start.’
‘Starts are good,’ said Matt. ‘Everything I cook starts with not being in a hurry.’
He pressed the button and ordered before Oliver could change his mind, and then got up and skimmed the pot again, though that didn’t need doing either.
The parcel came on a Wednesday, and Oliver waited to open it until Matt got home just after midnight, with the smell of browned butter and the deep-fat fryer in his hair. They opened it at the kitchen table as if it were a delivery they didn’t entirely trust.
The toy was smaller than Matt had imagined. Smooth and velvety-soft, with a rounded tip, a slim neck and a broader outer part with little nubs, and a small cylinder slotted into a channel through the base. He weighed it in his hand. It weighed next to nothing.
‘It’s cute,’ he said.
‘Don’t say cute.’
‘It’s cute in a very respectable way.’
He pressed the button. Nothing happened. He pressed it again.
‘It’s broken.’
‘It has an insulating strip,’ said Oliver, taking it from him. ‘Between the battery and the contacts. So the battery doesn’t drain in the warehouse.’
He unscrewed the cap on the cylinder, pulled out a clear plastic strip and screwed the cap back on, carefully, with three extra little twists. Matt pressed the button again. Nothing.
‘It’s still broken.’
‘Hold it down,’ said Oliver. ‘Three, four seconds. It’s a travel lock.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘The folder.’
Matt held the button down, counting silently, and on four it woke up in his hand with a buzz that made them both jump. It was half past twelve on a Wednesday night and they sat in the kitchen laughing so hard that Oliver had to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his dressing gown. Matt clicked on through the modes. Buzz. Pulse. Faster pulse. Something that sounded like a bumblebee in a matchbox.
‘Back to the last one,’ said Oliver.
‘Can’t. It only goes forwards.’
‘Then you’ll have to go all the way round.’
‘It’s a roundabout,’ said Matt, and clicked his way round until they were back where they started, and then they laughed again.
Then he switched it off and put it on the table between them, and the laughter ebbed away, and something else took its place.
‘Not tonight,’ said Oliver. ‘You’re tired. And I want time.’
‘Sunday,’ said Matt. ‘We’ll have the whole day.’
The battery was a type you couldn’t get at the supermarket or the petrol station. That was in the folder too, that you ought to buy spares. Matt finally found them the next day in a little hardware shop on his way to work, a card of two, and bought three cards to be on the safe side. He carried them in the breast pocket of his chef’s whites all evening, and every time he felt them there he smiled down into the sauce.
On Sunday the stock was on the hob again. By seven in the evening the whole flat smelled of it, dark and sweet and salty, and the windows were steamed up to the top.
They showered together first. Matt washed the toy under the tap with lukewarm water and mild soap – not washing-up liquid, Oliver had said, with all the authority of the folder – and checked the cap was tight before rinsing it off. Then he washed Oliver, slowly, his back and shoulder blades and the small of his back, until Oliver leaned his forehead against the tiles and stopped talking.
In the bedroom Oliver had laid a towel over the sheet. On the bedside table stood a bottle of water-based lube, the toy, and a glass of water. The lamp was turned down as low as it would go. He sat on the edge of the bed in just his boxers and looked the way he did before a talk he was giving himself: composed and terrified.
‘I’m nervous,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘What if I don’t feel anything? What if I’ve read three hundred pages about nothing?’
Matt sat down beside him.
‘The stock gets eight hours,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t get any better if I turn the heat up. We’ve got eight hours too. And if you don’t feel anything, we’ll have some stock and you’ll still have the best folder in town.’
Oliver laughed, and his shoulders dropped a centimetre.
‘Lie on your front,’ said Matt.
He started with his back. Just his hands, dry and warm, in long strokes from the neck down along the spine, out over the hips, back up again. He pressed his thumbs into the muscles around the shoulder blades until Oliver groaned into the pillow, and then lower, in the small of his back, in the soft hollow above his buttocks. He took his time. He felt the moment Oliver stopped resisting, when his breaths grew longer and his body heavier against the mattress, like when a dough stops springing back and starts to give.
He pulled down the boxers and Oliver lifted his hips to help.
‘OK so far?’ asked Matt.
‘Mm.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘That’s a yes.’
Matt poured lube into his hand, generously, and warmed it between his fingers. The folder had been clear on that point and he had no intention of being stingy. He let his hand rest against Oliver first, not moving, just warmth and weight, and then began to circle, slowly, on the outside. Oliver breathed out, long.
‘Tell me if you want me to stop.’
‘I’ll tell you.’
He kept circling until Oliver was pressing back against his hand of his own accord. Then he let one finger slide in, just a little way, and stayed there. Oliver tensed and let go again, and Matt waited until he felt it happen from the inside, that soft giving way.
‘How is it?’
‘Strange. Not bad. Strange.’
Matt let his finger slide deeper and curled it carefully towards the navel, the way the folder had described, and felt something: a firmer spot, rounded, like a chestnut under the skin. He pressed, barely.
Oliver made a sound he had never made before.
‘There,’ he said into the pillow. ‘That’s it. That’s the word.’
Matt smiled in the dark and carried on, lightly, rhythmically, and Oliver’s hips began to move against his hand, and it was a long time before either of them said anything else.
‘I want to try it now,’ Oliver said at last. His voice was rough. ‘But I want to do it myself. At first, anyway.’
He lay on his side with his top knee drawn up. Matt coated the toy properly, more lube than he thought it needed and then a bit more, and put it in Oliver’s hand. He laid his own hand on top and went along with it, without steering.
The tip slid in more easily than he had expected. Oliver paused at the neck, breathed, carried on. The broader outer part settled against the skin behind his balls and stayed there on its own, still, and Oliver let go and lay completely quiet.
‘OK?’ whispered Matt.
‘It’s in place,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s pressing right there. Without me having to do anything.’
‘Do you want me to switch it on?’
A moment’s hesitation. Then:
‘Yes. Lowest.’
Matt held the button down and counted silently to four. The buzz was low, almost nothing, but he saw it run through Oliver’s body like current through a wire. Oliver gripped the sheet.
‘Oh,’ he said. And then nothing more for a long while.
Matt lay close behind him, chest to back, and kissed his neck, and let his hand wander forward over his stomach and down. Oliver was hard, harder than Matt could remember him being in a long time, and when Matt closed his hand round him his whole body arched back against Matt’s.
‘Next,’ said Oliver. ‘Next setting.’
Matt clicked. The pulse came, in waves, and Oliver breathed in time with it, and it was good, it was very good, and Matt clicked again when he asked him to – and the new mode was harsh and choppy and Oliver cried out, ‘no, no, wrong one’, and Matt felt laughter bubble up in both of them at once.
‘The roundabout,’ gasped Oliver.
‘The roundabout,’ said Matt, and clicked all the way round, off and on, back to the soft pulsing, and Oliver was still laughing when the laughter turned into something else.
It built slowly. Matt stroked him at the same slow pace as the pulse, pressing lightly against the outer part with his palm now and then, and asking, and Oliver answered with yes and more and there and then not with words at all. It wasn’t how Matt had seen him come before. It was deeper. It started further in and took longer, as if something were rising up through him rather than spilling out, and when it finally arrived Oliver shook so hard the bed shook with him, long waves, one after another, and he held on to Matt’s hand with both of his.
‘Off,’ he said afterwards. ‘Off, off, please.’
Matt switched it off at once. The silence was enormous. He let Oliver, when he was ready, ease it out himself, slowly, and laid it on the towel and pulled the duvet over them both.
Oliver lay with his face against Matt’s neck, breathing. It was several minutes before he said anything.
‘I found the word.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not telling you. It’s mine.’
Matt laughed into his hair.
‘Next time,’ said Oliver after a while, ‘I want to do it for you. If you want.’
Matt thought about it. He thought about the finger, and the chestnut, and the sound Oliver had made.
‘I want to,’ he said.
At midnight Matt strained the stock. They stood in the kitchen in their dressing gowns and drank it from bowls, hot and dark and perfectly clear, while the toy lay on a towel on the draining board, rinsed and dry with the cap screwed on tight, and the three cards of spare batteries lay beside it like a promise.
‘It’s good,’ said Oliver.
‘It was given time,’ said Matt.
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