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"Sex with Dakin," Posner said with a worldly air, "was like my Bar Mitzvah."
In his head, Scripps turned to the audience and raised an eyebrow. He wasn't sure if that was the best sales pitch for Judaism he'd ever heard, or the worst. Out loud, of course, he said nothing, merely inclining his head in encouragement Posner didn't need.
"I wasn't ready for my Bar Mitzvah, when it happened. I'd prepared, yes, but I wasn't a man. And no one was there, no one important. If it had been later, you would have been there." Posner paused, considering. "You'd all have laughed, but you'd have been there."
It was true. "Wait. You wanted us there when Dakin fucked-- sorry, when you fucked Dakin?"
"When Dakin fucked me."
They were sitting in a poky pub in central Cambridge. Posner liked it because everywhere you looked there was a corner to sit in; Scripps liked it because in every corner there was someone to look at. Timms -- too busy with a cuppers dinner to come and hear the juicy details of Posner and Dakin's brief encounter -- liked it because of the cider.
"You wanted us there?" Scripps pushed. "I have to say, that's a little disturbing."
"No." Posner nodded to himself. "But it's another thing that would have meant more when I was seventeen. It was okay, yes, but just as I wasn't ready for my Bar Mitzvah, so I was well past ready for this. Right idea, wrong bloody year."
At that, Scripps had to snort into his pint. "Oh, Posner," he said. "Isn't it always the way?"
Scripps, still too wrapped up in God to have a few fucks of his own, pieced together Posner and Dakin's night of passion from two long drinking sessions and some minor sins of omission. He was well versed in those.
They'd met for a drink, Posner and Dakin, at the Eagle and Child. ("Where your C.S. Lewis went," Dakin reminded Scripps later, prompting the now familiar cry of "He's not my bloody C.S. Lewis.")
Dakin had launched straight into his thesis of the day. "It's the fucking that's the fucking taboo," he greeted Posner.
Posner had nodded, barely rolling his eyes at all.
"The literary tradition doesn't contain enough explicit representations of homosexuality," Dakin said, punctuating his thoughts with a fierce scowl he thought made him look more intellectual, "so even people who want to write it find themselves hopelessly adrift in a sea of innuendo and self-hating elision of anything approaching actual fucking sex."
"'A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct?'" Posner shrugged. "Hector hated that one."
"Yeah, and Lawrence goes one further there, doesn't he? He's not just using tortoises --" Dakin at this point, Scripps liked to imagine, had Irwin's faint whine in his voice. Dakin probably thought that made him seem more intellectual, too. "-- he's using bloody heterosexual tortoises to talk about gay sex."
"And other things," Posner added. "He's talking about more than just sex."
Dakin gave him an assessing look. "Buy us a drink, then."
Posner said that was when he knew he was in. Dakin's blithe -- and irritatingly accurate -- assumption that anyone would jump at the chance to seduce him amounted in Posner's mind to a proposal.
Dakin had sworn blind he didn't decide until later, when he blinked and realised there was an open mouthed and fuckable man sitting opposite him wearing Posner's face.
Personally, Scripps thought the entire discourse on why there should be more gay sex in Western literary canon was the first big hint, but then what would he know about it?
"Lawrence wasn't just covering his homosexuality with a tortoise metaphor," Posner had said as he put the drinks down in front of Dakin. "He hated all of sex."
"Well, forget Lawrence, then. Take As You fucking Like It. Shakespeare's full of men loving men, and yet the only men who get action with men are secretly women."
Posner raised his head. "'Virtue is no horn-maker; and my Rosalind is virtuous.'"
Here Posner and Dakin's stories differed again. In Dakin's there was another pint between Shakespeare and the bedroom. In Posner's, there was barely enough time to finish the first lot.
"When we got back to his room, he had me sit down on his chair," Posner said. Dakin hadn't mentioned this. "'Sit down,' he said, 'and I'll suck you.'"
"Ever the romantic, our Dakin," said Scripps, trying not to think too hard about it. The thought escaped before he could stop it. "That didn't strike you as a little--"
"And?" Posner's voice was tart but amused. "He was going to suck me off. What did I care who he was thinking of?"
There was a silence. A moment too late, Scripps tried to fill it with "I wouldn't know."
"You know how he acts like he's doing you a favour just being in the same room as you?"
Scripps did.
"Well imagine that, only then he actually was doing me a favour for once."
"Insufferable?"
"Oh, I suffered for my art." Posner had a face made for wry but sincere agony, Scripps felt. It was surprising how good smugness looked on him.
Posner went to get another round in, leaving his past self sitting at Dakin's desk, his trousers round his ankles and his cock up in the air.
When Dakin had told it, the pause for new drinks left Posner lying face down on the bed with his arse round and ready.
"He laughed," Dakin had said when Scripps came back with a pint in each hand. "He was lying there, naked as Hector's wet dreams, and he laughed."
"Why?"
From Dakin, all this had got was a disgusted "I don't bloody know."
Now the question drew another laugh from Posner. "I was lying there, and all I could think was I may be a Jew, I may be small, I may be homosexual, and no one from my supervisor to my bedder will let me forget I'm from Sheffield. But at least I'm about to get fucked."
The blow job beforehand, Posner continued, was fast and inelegant in a way only Dakin could make look good. His mouth was sloppy over Posner, less suction and more wet heat, but at least he swallowed, one hand still pumping Posner's cock.
"It was just like him," Posner said. "Expecting his mere presence to be enough to get me off."
"But it was." It wasn't a question.
Posner thought about this for a moment, looking over Scripps' shoulder at the beer mats papering the pub wall. "He had his eyes closed," he said conversationally, as if passing the time of day. "I didn't like to make a noise, in case he remembered who I was."
Scripps winced.
"I didn't mind. It just seemed--" He paused again, looking for the right word. "'No wonder then so many die of grief, So many are so lonely as they die.'"
Scripps dredged back through his memory for the right bit of Auden. "'No one has yet believed or liked a lie'?"
Posner nodded. "'Another time has other lives to live.' Do you remember when Hector--?"
Even out of Hector's lessons, it was hard to forget that one. They'd each been given a copy of the poem and made to stand on the tables, shouting the ills of history one word at a time as Hector pointed at each of them in turn.
"They're just words, m'boys," he'd said. "They don't have to mean anything."
"Like nancy, sir?"
Timms had nearly fallen off the table laughing.
"Poor Dakin." Scripps hadn't realised he'd said it out loud until Posner snorted with disgust.
"Poor Dakin? Poor bloody me, more like." He took a long swallow of his pint. "No, poor Dakin. Two years too late, but at least I got what I wanted."
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