shiver a beauty
by GRSTALT Comm
It’s raining and I’m waiting for the text. The drains on Cemetery Road are clogged and overflowing. His sister is visiting unexpectedly, so I’ve been put back – I don’t know what would’ve happened if she’d turned up while I was there. She does something with real estate. She’s concerned about him – she thinks he might be neurodivergent.
I don’t have any money to go anywhere and wait, so I walk around the supermarket and pretend to shop while my clothes dry off. I’ve got some regular work now – I click on pictures of puffins that I see – so I get out my phone and do that while I put things that I’m not going to buy into my cart. I’ll pretend I’ve got an emergency message and make a shocked face before dumping my cart. It’s a fun game, stocking up for a life I don’t have. I can signal whatever I want to the other shoppers – I do my bit to help farmers in the developing world and protect the bee population, but I also like to have fun with plenty of treats.
He won’t go anywhere with me because he’s scared someone will see us together and tell his family – his dad has a lot of sway in the community, he’s a bigwig at the Grand Mosque, I don’t know what his exact role is there, but everyone seems terrified of him. I’m out of my depth with all this, these are cultural pressures I don’t really understand, so I agree to go through the ritual of arriving and leaving covertly. The flat is seriously under-furnished, to the point where if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was a shooting gallery – just a chair, a desk where his laptop is, cardboard boxes with his clothes stuffed in them, and a mattress on the floor. There’s nothing in the cramped kitchen except empty takeaway cartons.
The buzzer hasn’t been working the last couple of times, so the smooth process of entering has been disrupted – I’ve got to send him a text when I’m turning onto his street, and he’ll be waiting at the entrance to let me in, hurrying me up the stairs before anyone can see me. He always seems like he’s just got up, wearing slippers and a dressing gown.
He tells me he’s going for a shower. His voice is slow and sleepy, as usual. The room is dark and cold, as usual. But there’s an unfamiliar smell that I track to a box on the desk. I lift the flaps to see sachets of protein powder. He has gained quite a bit of weight since we started meeting up – in his profile photo he’s slim and smiling and his hair is sleek and straightened. He tells me he’s going to start running, there’s a guy on his course who’s started a club – I get the feeling he’s into this guy and he’s telling me this as a warning that what we have is temporary, and once he’s back in presentable shape I’ll be jettisoned.
I’m not worried because I know he’s not going to do anything. This is another of his sister’s attempts to get him ‘out there’ or ‘back in the game’ or whatever euphemism she uses for dealing with what’s going on with him. I’m confident that box will be sitting there untouched the next time I visit. When he comes back in with a towel wrapped around his waist, I ask him how his sister is, he shrugs and says: ‘She wanted an update on my von Mises presentation.’ He told me he never wanted to study finance, he finds it dull and confusing, but he had to stay close to home and be the STEMlord the family demands him to be as the firstborn male. I get the impression he’s flunking hard. Extensions are mentioned a lot.
He takes off the towel, drops onto the mattress, pulls the duvet up to his chin and watches me undress. He lifts the duvet to let me in and we tangle together in each other’s warmth. His hole is freshly shaved, he’s rubbed some lotion into it that smells of coconut. It’s bitter and acidic and addictive. He never lets me fuck him – he always tells me ‘Next time’ – and that’s what keeps me coming back, the promise. It ends the same way every time: me straddling his chest so he can crane his neck and take the head of my dick in his mouth until I slide out and bust over his clamped lips and quivering chin, then tonguing his balls until he finishes himself off. As soon as he busts, he rolls off the mattress and leaves the room.
I’m sitting on the edge of the mattress when something comes into my mind from a region where all the inconsequential stuff that somehow sticks is stored – me and a bunch of schoolmates are talking to this kid who asks us if we like to ‘shiver a beauty.’ We haven’t got a clue what this kid’s on about until he makes a wanking gesture. After that, we crack up and follow this kid around shouting ‘shiver a beauty!’ in increasingly obnoxious tones. From that day on, everyone called this kid ‘Beauty.’ We never bothered to find out if he made it up, or where he heard it from, or what it even means, because it was too much fun to chase this scrawny kid up and down the corridors screaming ‘Beauty!’
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