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We’re getting on well, don’t you think?
Phil said nothing. He and Tim had hooked up a few weeks before, the sex had been instantly easy, fun and uncomplicated, and their lives had meshed without fuss. So what was this about?
The slightly over-heated room slowed in a fading daylight, they lay on a rumpled bed, Tim held Phil in a loose clasp.
There was the kind of hush that heralds another remark, or perhaps declaration.
To forestall this Phil slowly rose and walked away from the bed. He was a short, maybe slightly plump young man, with a friendly energy that appealed to people. From the window of Tim’s South Yarra flat he looked out into Domain Road. Cars rushed by, their tyres faintly audible in the wet streets, then the creak of an occasional tram, and a good number of pedestrians ambling along, in the late Sunday afternoon. Over the road were the expanses of the Botanical Gardens where, during the week, St. Kilda Road workers enjoyed a rushed lunch, and the trees lost more of their leaves each day.
Phil liked this view. The flat and its surrounds contrasted markedly with his parents’ place in suburban Macleod, which was ordinary, if pleasant. To him this area was simply more sophisticated, and of course, more affluent. He and Tim, who was ten years older, now met only here, in South Yarra, it seemed tacitly agreed this was best.
Actually, now that Phil thought of it, he saw Tim never asked questions about his family, home, work or other people in his life. Their times together seemed sealed-off, a separate, unworldly space. Perhaps this came from the sex, which both enjoyed with vigour, and which seemed to dictate the pace, style and shape of any meeting. You could almost script the moment of their meeting again, then the lead up, the touch, the action itself, the sweat and the later diminuendo. For the moment, all this was exhilarating, and enough.
