Misbehaving

That was the only time he outlasted me. I came so hard I felt like my whole body passed out through my dick, but somehow I was still there after, still standing, panting. I looked down at the mess I'd made, coating his dick, oozing down over his hand, his wrist, and I'm pretty sure I would've come again if it had been at all possible. And then again, when he spilled all over me thirty seconds later...

And again, once we were out and dried off - I was so outrageously turned on, I would've just kept going and going and going. But he was done. He poured us both a glass of coke and we sat naked on his couch to drink them, and then I put my clammy clothes back on and ran home and had another shower. The next day it was bright and clear and sunny and we were back to blowjobs.

End-of-year came up hard and fast in that way it does, but we stuck to our schedule through deadlines and study week and even exams, right up until the day before he had to leave for Seoul. I had my last exam two days later and then headed home myself for a summer of Not Getting Any and sleeping in a bed that was too short for me.

I didn't know what date Brian was coming back, we hadn't discussed it, but you'd better believe I went for my first run of the academic year all of two hours after I arrived in Palmy. Nothing. And for the whole next week, nothing. After ten days of hanging around that court like a lost puppy, I broke, and ran instead to the hostel. Once I'd convinced somebody to let me in the front entrance, I jogged up the stairs and knocked on his door.

A guy who wasn't Brian pulled it open and stared at me. "I help you?"

"Uhh...no," I said, backing up, "um...sorry, wrong room."

It wasn't the wrong room. I walked home slowly, considering the possibilities. There were a lot of them. Maybe he'd gone out of his way to ghost me. Maybe. Or maybe he failed. Or maybe he decided to study somewhere else. Or his mum found out he wasn't going to church on Sundays and decided a few things on his behalf. He could be working. He could be sick. He could be dead. I didn't know, and I wasn't gonna find out. I didn't have a contact. I didn't even know his real name. What we'd had - it was an arrangement, not a relationship, and whatever the reason, the arrangement was over.

Brian's non-appearance meant I was staring down a way leaner year than I'd anticipated, and I was already champing at the bit after almost three months of living with my parents and valeting cars forty hours a week. I thought about heading down to Wellington to see what I could find. I mean, the way people talked about it, you'd think it was the San Fransisco of the southern hemisphere. But it was a long way to go for a hook-up, and equally, if I found something more than a hook-up...still a long haul. You can't get off six days a week with somebody who lives a hundred and fifty kilometres away. After simmering for a month or so, I downloaded an app, and quickly discovered two things; one, that there were some deeply weird people in my town, and two; that I didn't perform particularly well when I was nervous. And two-point-one, that worrying about not performing very well only compounded the problem. By mid-year, I gave it away altogether and went back to headphones and a computer screen and the fellowship of the hand.

In the final term of my degree, one of my lecturers started working fairly hard to persuade me into postgraduate study. I was dubious. Although I had the grades to probably score a scholarship and I still found chemistry plenty interesting, I had concerns around fitting in if I tried to make a career out of academia. In the same way as I don't look like anyone's immediate idea of gay, I also don't look like the poster boy for clever. You can put me in a lab coat, nitrile gloves and safety glasses, even give me a test tube to hold and stand me under a fume hood, but I still look like I ought to be out concreting a driveway somewhere. That sort of thing shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it does. In the end, I gave it a go anyhow. What else was I gonna do? A bog-standard BSc isn't much of a drawcard for an employer. I mean, practically everybody's got one.

Four months into my two-year Masters, there was yet another department morning tea. This one was on a Thursday, which threw me a little. Usually they held them on Mondays, but I was coming to understand that morning teas were a big thing here. At the beginning, I'd think, group morning tea? Where am I, the Country Womens' Institute or something? By now, I understood that the lure of free food - even a platter of cheap shitty prefrozen Coupland's savouries and a few nasty rectangles of mummified ginger slice - guaranteed a near-perfect attendance rate for whenever a Somebody Had Something To Say and wanted to only say it once. Plus I suppose it made us all look collegial for an hour or so a week.

There was someone, that Thursday, who had Something To Say, but I don't remember who, or what it was about. Remember to turn the lights off in the lab if you're the last one out. Just because you ran out of liquid nitrogen it doesn't give you the right to nick some from the lab next door or something like that. But there were a couple of new faces present - two guys standing side by side against the far wall, hunkering in and sort of scanning the room for threats - a gigantic floppy-haired blonde and a more diminutive, dark-haired one who probably wasn't actually that small, just dwarfed by his companion. Once the talking was out of the way, Allie made a beeline for them and started hauling them around the room introducing them to everybody.

There's an Allie in every department, I figure, and in every school and workplace and for sure on every committee in the world. A sort of combination cheerleader/drill sergeant/mother hen - an endlessly cheerful get-things-done-er whose current self-assigned task was Making These Guys Feel Welcome.

She dragged them over to the group I was standing with and gestured to the blonde. "Hey guys, this is Peter." Then, indicating the other, "And this is Vincent."

"Nice to meet you all, yah," the big guy said with a flat nasal Afrikaans intonation, nodding neutrally around.

Vincent didn't get a chance to say anything, because his phone started tinkling in his jeans pocket. He pulled it out, stabbed the screen, and launched into speech, angling slightly away from the rest of us. Although I had no clue what it was about, I was a hundred percent certain that the verbiage pouring forth from his mouth was French. The sound, the shape, the cadence were all familiar to me from a childhood of Mum's movies playing in the background. So obviously I assumed he was French.

Just as obviously, when he finished talking and Allie introduced him to 'Michel', he assumed the same thing about me. Delighted recognition flared in his face as he exclaimed, "Ah! Michel!" and fired off into another screed of syllables, excitedly telling me...something.

Well, we were both wrong in the end. He was Belgian. He was also, in that instant when his face lit up, startlingly beautiful. But I knew I wasn't going to be interacting with him all that often. He was a plastics researcher, so not in my lab, not even on my side of the building. Suddenly all those bloody morning teas seemed a little more appealing...

Maybe a month later, I was sitting at a large round table in the lunchroom with Vincent a couple of seats to my right, trying not to stare. The table had been full half an hour ago, along with most of the others in the room, but it had gotten to the arse end of what you could possibly call lunchtime and the place was mostly empty. Vincent was peeling a mandarin. I was done eating and just plain slacking, because my afternoon's work was going to basically consist of counting dots on a screen, and I didn't want to do it. I glanced over at Vincent just as he was breaking his mandarin up into segments and discovered he was watching me.

As he caught my eye, he tipped his head a little to one side and murmured, "So...Michel. I am thinking you are maybe gay, no?"

I went still as a statue. Couldn't even breathe. I desperately wanted to look around and see whether any of the other stragglers in the room were looking at us, had heard, but I willed myself not to, because that'd make me seem guilty.

"What...what makes you think that?" I eventually croaked.

He smiled. No, he smirked. "Perhaps it is how you reply with 'what makes you think that?' instead, of, 'nooo, not me'?" he breathed. "Or that, mmn, one gets to have a feeling for these things after a while?" He smirked again and gave a very gallic one-shouldered shrug. "But perhaps I am wrong this time? Or maybe you have not quite made up your mind yet, mmn?"

In the midst of my scramblings for something to say that would allow me to exit the conversation without incriminating myself any further, a voice in my head suddenly shouted, Earth to Michel! Earth to Michel! He's good-looking, he's interesting, and he's flirting with you! Why are you being so fucking coy...?

Vincent turned out to be a boatload of fun. Playful, persuasive, cocky. Dirty. He had waaay more experience than me in bed, coupled with absolutely zero shame, both of which were Very Good Things. Staying over with him meant that I effectively came out to everyone in the lab because he was flatting with two other guys from there. The whole thing was refreshingly non-eventful, and the following month I just as undramatically came out to my own group by towing him through the lounge and down the hall of my flat on a Friday evening when all my flatmates had elected to stay in for some reason.

I slunk out in the morning to hopefully quickly make some coffee and take it back to my room. The girls seemed to still be asleep but Jake was up, sitting on a stool by the bench in the kitchen-dining, drinking coffee and reading his phone. He looked over at me slyly as I pulled two mugs down and reached for a spoon.

"So," he murmured, "much becomes clear..."

I quirked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged.

"I thought it was crippling shyness holding you back all this time, mate."

"Nope," I told him, "crippling gayness."

Both of us laughed, but only Jake spat coffee all over his phone.

Vincent and I never actually moved in together, but it was less than a month before we had spare toothbrushes at each other's places. It was only a short-term thing, obviously. That's all it was ever going to be. He wasn't going to want to stay in New Zealand after his fellowship was finished - he had a position open for him back in Liege. And I couldn't realistically follow him, not least because the only French I knew was the filth he'd taught me in bed. So when his year wound up, Vincent was going to fly back home, rejoin his lab group and continue his research on novel polymers, and I was going to stay here, finish my experiments, write my thesis, and hope like hell it'd make me employable. That's how it was going to be. And because I knew all this from the word go, I thought I understood it, I thought that it'd be okay. I thought that I'd be okay.

I wasn't okay.

We took a holiday together for ten days before he left, so Vincent could see the postcard things you're supposed to see and get all the regulation selfies - Mitre Peak, Queenstown, glaciers, Punakaiki, blah, blah - before he headed home. I waved him goodbye as he walked down the tunnel at Christchurch airport bound for Brussels via Sydney and Dubai. I was already antsy an hour and a half later when I got on my own flight back to Palmy. I had a window seat, but I didn't want to soak up the view. I had a three quarters finished Lee Child book in my carry-on but I didn't want to read. I took out my phone to play a game then set it down on my lap after a couple of minutes, chewed on my thumbnail, and ever-so-quietly spun the fuck out.

In the weeks that followed, I tried to be nice to myself. Firm, but nice. I didn't beat myself up over my lack of progress with my write-up preparations, my continuous zoning-out in meetings. I went for positive self-talk, rather than negative. You've got this, Michel. You're going to push through. You're not pathetic, you're sad. So, okay. You're not gonna be sad forever. Give yourself time. You'll get over this. You will. Being my own therapist worked alright during the daytime. Less so in the evenings, even less at night. A pattern began to develop where I'd be juuuust dropping off to sleep, in that floating borderland state, and suddenly I'd jerk awake with a feeling of falling, heart pounding, roaring in my ears, sweating up a storm.

After a few weeks of that shit, I was craving and fearing sleep in roughly equal measure, and averaging maybe four hours a night. I hung back from the idea of drinking myself into oblivion because I had a strong suspicion that ugly snotty crying would result, but I felt like I was nearing the end of my rope.

The only thing I could think to do about it was run - run until I was so utterly fucking exhausted I couldn't even think in a straight line - until I was guaranteed to pass out immediately my poor battered carcass hit a mattress. Now, Palmerston North isn't very big; it's not Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide. Or even Darwin for that matter. But running from one end of it to the other and back isn't nothing, turns out. I was living fairly near the southern limits, close by the university, and thought I'd give it a shot. I was looking to ruin myself after all. Over an hour later and only a third of the way into the circuit I'd planned out in my head, I admitted to myself that I wasn't up to it - that I needed to start heading back home now, right now, if I wanted to make it in one piece.

I turned down a side street that I knew ended in a park, not thinking about anything beyond cutting this ordeal short, but a couple of hundred metres on I ran straight into another memory. The wall, the hoop, the little stub of a half-court that 'Brian' had practiced on, every day except Sunday...

I stopped. I sat down on the warped and wizened seal, dropped my forehead to my knees and panted and drooled and bled internally. After a while I lifted my head and stared blearily around, wrung out and run out, and acknowledged the truth; that yes, one day all of this would be painless and distant - but also that I might need to leave this place for that to be able to happen.

———

Not completing my Masters wasn't a tough decision. That'd been somebody else's idea of what I should do right from the start. What to do instead was a bit tougher. Concreting driveways is still an option, I told myself, scrolling through the job ads on the seek website. You know you've got the looks, Michel. Thankfully a listing jumped out at me before I felt like there was an urgent need to investigate concrete from a hands-on perspective. Hazards and containment manager for a composite wood panels manufacturer, and the only prerequisites were three HAZMAT certificates that I already had from my lab work.

I emailed off an application before looking the place up, which was stupid. Not that there was anything shonky about their set-up, but holy shit it was in the middle of nowhere. About halfway between Whangarei and Kaikohe on the back road. When I got an email the next day asking me to come for an interview I wondered if they were having trouble filling the position, due to their...position. Five in the fucking morning was when I had to leave to make the trip in time for my 3pm appointment, and even that only gave me time to grab the odd coffee to go while I pissed the previous one out.

I arrived jee-ust in time for my interview with the site manager, who looked like he was the hands-on type - he was wearing safety boots and had divot in his hair which suggested he'd recently taken off a hard hat. After twenty minutes of unthreatening interrogation, the guy glanced down at my CV, sitting on the desk in front of him, and then back up at me, frowning.

"Michel Stoddart..." he mused. "I thought that sounded familiar when this came through, and now you're sitting there, you look familiar too, but I can't place you. Where you from originally?"

"Te Puke," I told him.

"That figures," he said. "I used to manage HT Panels over at The Mount." He fell into contemplation again for a few seconds, nodding vaguely to himself, before hissing, "I've got it! You played junior rep rugby with my son! Cordell Wagner - remember him?"

Cordell, yeah. I remembered. A super speedy fullback. And a top shelf single barrel triple distilled export grade cunt.

I made myself look thrilled. "Sure do!" I said. "How's he getting on these days?"

He raved about Cordell's many successes for a few minutes, then straight-up offered me a job.

I said - because you do, right? - I said I'd think on it for a couple of days. He seemed fine with that, grabbed me a hard hat and showed me around the site. It was a pretty tidy set-up in general, except...ooooh, boy...except for the room where the chemicals were stored.

He saw my wince and grimaced in return. "Yeah, I know, I know. I need someone in this role yesterday, as you can see."

I nodded. "Let me head back to Whangarei, and eat and sleep on it. I'll get back to you tomorrow."

"No need for that," he told me. "There's a hotel just up the road."

"There's a what?" I didn't believe it. We were deep into nowhere.

"A hotel," he repeated patiently. "About a kilometre further up the road. It's not a...I mean, it's mostly a bar, y'know. An old-style country hotel from back in the day, but they do have rooms. Give it a look-in, you may as well scope out the area while you're here. In fact, give me fifteen minutes and I'll come along with."

I gave him his fifteen minutes and then I trailed him up the road, and sure enough, there it was. A fucking hotel. A dilapidated, lichen-encrusted once-was-white-painted honest-to-god concrete stucco hotel. All the way out here.

A bell tingled as we pushed through the door, and the two old codgers propping up the bar glanced momentarily away from the trackside channel.

One of them nodded at the site manager. "Steve."

He nodded back. "Trev."

Steve. Trev. I had another of those panicky moments I'd been having my whole life long, thanks to Mum. Wayne, Shane, Dan, Stan, Sam, Cam, John, Tom, Michel. Pick the weirdo. And hey, after that, we can play pick the homo! This won't work, I thought. It won't work. Not here. I should drink my beer and make my excuses and get the hell away from here and let this be a lesson to me not to apply for jobs I haven't thoroughly researched. But then a jug was placed before me, a jug that was clearly my own personal jug - the other three guys all had their own too - and I realised I wasn't feasibly getting out of here anytime soon. Oh well. I was pretty bloody thirsty.

"Are you after a feed?" Steve asked a minute or so later, sliding a sticky laminated A4 sheet across in front of me.

I considered it. On the one hand, whatever I got from here might be fairly dodgy. On the other, I had over a litre of beer to get through and had put nothing but coffee into myself so far today. I probably wasn't going to be able to drive back to Whangarei for a couple of hours either way, and I was only gonna get hungrier.

"It's just bar food today," Steve continued, "they have the kitchen properly staffed on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Rest of the time, you're stuck choosing something Jack here can tip into a fryer."

Well, at least it's hard to fuck that sort of thing up too bad, I thought. "I'll have a plate of wedges, thanks."

"Reckon I will too," Steve agreed.

The ole boy who hadn't said anything yet suddenly roused. "Oh look, while you're chucking stuff in the fryer, do some for me as well, eh Jacky? But don't be putting any of that sour cream shit on mine, willya? Or any of those green circley things either."