Free Life After Joe by Harper Fox

die of it. “Pretty reasonable,” Aaron had said. My throat filled with hot salt. “Poor bastard,” Aaron whispered. “You’re in bits, aren’t you? Poor sod. You’ll be all right; you’ll be all right.”
    ***
    We had lunch when I was capable of raising my head again, of speaking and making sense. He was nice about the casserole, which somehow hadn’t burned, and we sat for a long time, talking about some of the stuff we hadn’t had a chance to cover so far, what with all the street fights and fucking. He told me he’d gone out to the rigs straight from university, attracted by the money, the chance to leave behind a childhood in deprived western Cumbria that was as unpromising as my own had been. He’d enjoyed the cash and the experience and slowly come to realise the damage the oil industry was doing, its ultimate destructiveness in a world running dry of fossil fuels. He admitted without shame he was biting the hand that fed him, but hoped to do better in future—was using his off shifts to work towards his degree in engineering, studying the structures needed to make alternative energy sources more than a nice idea.
    It was good to hear him talk. We washed up together afterwards, looking out across the wintry roof garden I’d tried to keep alive for Joe. We were keeping to safe subjects—for my sake, I knew, to let me find my equilibrium. I’d cried until my sinuses were raw, and my chest was still aching, shuddering on deep in-breaths, a side effect I hadn’t experienced since childhood. To make it easier on him and show him I could be calm, I volunteered the circumstances of Joe’s leaving, told him I was selling the flat. He listened quietly, and I heard myself eventually say, “And…you? Anyone in your life at the moment?”
    He took his gaze from the cold grey afternoon beyond the window, where it had just started to snow. “No,” he said, folding a tea towel onto its rack. “Not at the moment.”
    And that was the problem with information legitimately gained. You had to trust the source. I didn’t see how those clear eyes could lie to me, and I nodded, smiling uncertainly. “Good.”
    “Is that good?”
    “Mm.” I put my hands on his waist, pulled him towards me and kissed him. “Yes. That’s good.”
    The bedroom was too much for me. Only as we stumbled through the door, kissing frantically, did I finally work out that the last time I had seen it was when Lou had turfed me out of it the night before, and the night before that, if I hadn’t lain down in the rumpled bed to die, I certainly hadn’t gone there to try and stay alive. And for Christ’s sake, it was Joe’s. I’d never brought anyone home. If two men could be said to have a marital bed, that had been ours, and I wasn’t bloody ready. I stiffened in unwanted resistance. Aaron said, “Okay. Okay,” clearly putting two and two together, and turned me around.
    He steered me back into the kitchen. If he was seeking to distract me, he did it well—pulled out a chair for me and sat me down, then lithely straddled my lap. He picked up the kiss where he had left off, bracing his weight on his thighs and moving sinuously over me until my cock heaved up as if I hadn’t been screwed six ways to sunset barely four hours previously, as if I’d never had it before in my life. He took a moment to dismount and strip off his briefs and jeans, and stood before me, hot as hell in his unbuttoned shirt, stomach muscles rippling in the fabric’s shadows, shaft blooming up dark with blood. “Lift up for me,” he said, and together we pulled my trousers and underwear down my thighs far enough.
    It took me a second to work out far enough for what. Events were moving too fast. And I’d stupidly thought, because he had taken the driver’s seat for our first couple of rides—because he was refinement of the stereotype—that was his preference: that he would not like to be fucked. Now he took hold of the top bar of the chair and sat back