WE CYCLED AWAY FOR THE Oosterdok into the chill breeze coming off the IJsselmeer. Slightly ahead of me on his bicycle, Mauritz’s dark hair streamed. The harbour lay before us, shimmering with the lights of ships and traffic across the bay in Amsterdam Noord.
At Singel 500 Mauritz went up the stairs while I stowed my bicycle in the entrance hall. When I caught up with him he was already standing in my room looking up at the ceiling, mesmerised by the Renaissance angels gazing down at him from their circle of gold. Something caught in my throat. He seemed at once angelic, too, as he stood there, looking up, in the half light of the room, but also detached. For a moment I felt uncertain. My own body was alive with desire for him but suddenly I was cowed by the prospect of my coming submission.
Then he saw me hesitating and smiled. In one smooth action he shucked off his jacket and pulled his T-shirt over his head. Practised. He knew his way out of his clothes. There was a metallic snap as his belt buckle slid out of his jeans. His eyes on mine, he allowed the belt to fall to the floor. He dropped his jeans. He was not wearing any underwear and I saw that he was keenly erect. Outlined in the soft light Mauritz was a satyr, a mythical creature.
Rooted to the spot, caught up in a paralysis of desire, I waited for his next move. Mauritz was the one who had initiated this. It was in his control. He stepped over to me and took me in his arms. Then his hands were in my hair, rough and urgent. He tipped my head back and began kissing me with force. I groaned. He pressed into me.
“Mannetje.” His lips travelled down the side of my neck and into its nape. The only way I can think to describe how I felt at that moment was to say I swooned – a marvellously old-fashioned but accurate word for surrender. The sinew in my muscle dissolved. There was no stasis to my body. It had become liquid.
Mauritz’s body, however, was taut, contained. He was hairless, his skin ivory in that light. I felt the imprint of him, his ribs a corrugation against mine, pressing through my clothes. He pushed his knee up between my legs and an odour rose from him – a sweet sawdust smokiness, not only his scent but more the infusions of Het Breekijzer and, beneath it, a more personal smell, a hint of soap, perhaps deodorant. It was a distinctly male muskiness. He roused me from my exploration of his scent – my face in his neck, behind his ears – and stood me before him, as if he was a puppeteer.
He unbuttoned my shirt and ran his fingers down the expanse of my chest and abdomen as the folds of material came away from my torso.
I was captive to the diction of his fingers. He slipped the belt from my jeans and I stepped out of them. Then we fell onto my mattress and locked into each other. I folded my legs into his, pressed my lips to his. He drew me in with his tongue. The tenor of the sex changed. He gripped me by the hair and forced my head back, his tongue invading me. I succumbed, allowing sensation to take over.
There was something about Mauritz that I couldn’t account for, a heat that rose from his body, defying the cold evening, and as I had him under me I felt a tremor pass through him, beneath his skin. It was in his fingers too – a trembling tentativeness to his tracery of my body, as if he had a fever.
I was reaching the point where I crave more force, but he was caught up in our kissing, moaning gently, pulling me to him, running his fine long-fingered hands over my back and sides. Then suddenly “Fuck me,” he implored.
I had not anticipated this, assuming that in his ironic seduction of me in Het Breekijzer, it was he who would claim me. Attuned to that, I had given up authority to him, to his leading me through it to the moment of ecstatic submission.
But now he turned under me and pulled me to him. It was an easy transition. I slid into him and as I did so he rose up to me. I was careful and tender, taking it slowly, but he dictated the tenor and soon I was fucking him rhythmically. He groaned and locked into the swell of it.
And I lost him. He rode away from me on a wave of sensation. He bucked and rocked and moaned and cried out. His fingers closed tightly around my thighs and he pulled me into him. I stared down at him. He was elated. But we had lost the connection, the communion. He was buried deep in a pleasure which seemed disconnected from my thrusting.
He was beautiful to watch, though, with the light sliding over his torso, his eyes closed, dark brows stark against the pale ivory of his face and his lips opening slightly over his glistening teeth. Sweat formed on his brow and his black hair was a halo against the pillow. And he came with force. His semen sprayed across the sheets, his body seized by the spasm of the orgasm’s aftermath, and he whimpered, turning his head into the pillow.
I was almost there. I exploded into him and consciousness briefly refracted into a pattern of unaccustomed light, as if I was looking into a kaleidoscope. I was staggered by the force of my own orgasm. I was spent. A delicious tiredness invaded me and I fell back against the pillows. Mauritz turned to me and locked me in an embrace, his legs through mine, my body pulled against his. We fell into a trance of wordless, tender kissing. We carried on like this for who knows how long and then, at some stage, we fell asleep.
I was woken by the fractious dawn cooing of the pigeons. The light in the room was pale and tentative. It illuminated the bed, but the further reaches of the room were in darkness. Mauritz was on his back beside me, still deep in slumber. During the night the sheet had fallen away from him and his pale chest was revealed in all its ivory exquisiteness. I lay on my side taking him in, stark black nipples and a fine line of black hair running from his navel to the base of his penis. To me he was the epitome of masculine beauty. I had found my two previous lovers beautiful, not initially in the physical sense, but in their combinations of physicality and vulnerability. Mauritz’s beauty was immediate, archetypal, complete. It invited awe, an almost religious apprehension of its perfection.
I folded my body back into him and slept some more.
Much later Mauritz woke me. “Schat,” he said, “the demonstration – we need to go.”
There was no time to shower and we got dressed quickly, with the odours of our exertions still on our bodies. As we drank hasty coffees at the windowsill, the pigeons regarded us balefully from across the well. Mauritz pulled me to him, nuzzled his nose in my neck and said, “I can smell me on you – it’s beautiful – very sexy.”
As we went down the stairs he rested his hand on my shoulder and at the door before we stepped outside into the day, he kissed me again. I leapt onto the saddle of his bicycle and closed my arms around his body, my head against his shoulder blades, taking in the scent of him, the lingering sweet smell of Drum.