disciple (ch. 11)

by Tom Stuckey

11

Back in my hotel room, Olivia lay on the bed as if she knew both of us intimately; she wore white panties and a shirt that was open with no bra underneath. I looked at her in waves and then back at Thomas.

“Do you remember your childhood?” Thomas asked.

“It's not very clear, no.”

“I remember it. You had a dog called Figaro, a small terrier, and one day whilst you were in the woods, you lost him, and instead of having to tell your father that you had, you burned down the barn that was full of the winter hay, and made up a story that Figaro was in there catching rats and had died.”

“I remember the fire and my father’s eyes.”

“Do you know why you went to such lengths to cover up your mistake?”

“Not really. Maybe fear.”

“So that you could remain free and so could I.”

“I don’t understand.” I looked at Olivia who seemed to be aroused.

“I thank you, I could not of done this without you. You are truly the strong one.”

Olivia took my hand and put it between her legs as Thomas started to kiss her and then me; it was the first time I had kissed a man, but Thomas wasn’t a man, and I felt like I was kissing a warm feeling. “Take out your cock,” Olivia said, and I did. I felt an energy flow all the way from my lips down to my cock and then into her pussy. We were an electric circuit and every time one of us moved, we all felt the pulses.

After, we all lay on the bed, interwoven, and Thomas began to speak,

 “Mark, you don’t have to be anyone other than yourself anymore…”

“OK.” I replied.

“…and I know you will inevitably leave me again.” I wasn’t sure what to say because deep down I knew that to be true.

   The thing about acceptance is it leaves you feeling pretty fucking good. Yet, it is something so indescribably elusive. Some say that it is at the very core of life, and that if you magnify far enough down, you can see it in the space between atoms. There was a time in the 80’s when I remember feeling something similar; me and a girl Hazel were drinking in a graveyard, and she was naked from the waist up, and the sun was hot, and we started to dig our own graves. We lay there with the feeling of disappearance, but we couldn't fully, and we always had one hand out of the graves. After, we had to separate, and I got sick and then felt the full force of the illness of life. Life, as a bargain, gives little moments of acceptance and clarity in which reasoning can be reformulated—in other words, you just keep on going. 

“Let’s go and eat in Rome. You can meet Fiorenzo. He’s been dying to meet you.”

“I have to go now, but you three should go.” Thomas replied.

“Come on, let’s leave Thomas. He has work to do. We'll go and meet your friend.”

I put on a dark green woollen suit with faint coal stripes woven in; he really was the best tailor in Rome. Olivia had on a classic black dress that was high on her legs and made her bum swing like the bells of a church tower. With each leg that moved, her entire body followed in a way that can only be described as musical. Getting glimpses of this other world, where you can hear the music, makes a stark contrast to the silence, but you no longer care about the other world and foolishly believe that you could never possibly return there, but the silence is always waiting for the music to stop. Looking at her hips as she walked the streets of Rome, I contemplated being inside of her as she turned to smile at me and then carried on talking with F. Later, we would fuck again, and that made perfect sense. Whilst we ate, I looked at her and could see her breasts clearly in my mind; they were not large and curved to a point, and were a pink-brown colour. It wasn’t until it was nearly time to order the bill that I resailed I had been in a state of distant stupor since we left the hotel. “I’m just going to get some fresh air.”

The Ristoro Della Salute faced The Coliseum with only a road in between where locals passed by frequently on scooters. The sun was almost gone, but its final farewells were enough to illuminate the structure in a fiery warmth. When you are with a woman, such as Olivia, The Coliseum makes sense. You can also look into the eyes of other men, and whatever they may be thinking of you is drowned out by the music of the love battle. They can also hear it; it is that loud, but only men can hear it, and not all men—some having stopped listening a long time ago (or they never learnt how). It could be considered sexist, another reason some men stopped listening, but under all the new wave trends there is a beat and most men are listening out for it, and it has a BPM of unregistrable magnitude, a bit like with dogs and high frequencies. These days don’t come too often, which is strange because they are the simplest of them all, basic even, unlike the sun which goes down every evening, give or take a few hours apart.

I called a taxi and went in to let them know we had to go. When I thought about Olivia, my mind gave me the taste of her via lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, and there was nothing I could do to stop it now. It was Force Majeure.

*Read the next instqallment of Tom Stuckey’s new novella Disciple coming on April 7, 2026, at 6PM CST.

Photo of Tom Stuckey

BIO: Tom is a writer from Devon in England.  His work can be found at A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bristol Noir, Nut House Press, and Pulp Magazine. He is the author of The Canary in the Dream is Dead and The Sun Marches upon Us All. Learn more about Tom Stuckey at www.tomstuckey.com.