They flew, separately, to Portugal. Tom had been abroad half a dozen times before, either with the England Unders or with his family to Spain, as well as one long wet trip to Rotterdam, when he and his sister had been at each other’s throats the whole holiday. But now he sat looking out of the window as if on a plane for the first time. He felt a jittery excitement at the hills and forests and endless yellowed fields appearing beneath drifts of vapor, the outlines of towns and villages, traffic streaming in and out like ant trails. Halfway through the flight there was a short but intense spell of turbulence. The flight staff took to their seats near the toilets. The quiet old couple beside Tom joined hands on top of their shared armrest. Tom gripped tightly to both of his own, fixing his sight on the flaming ocean below, the flesh of his body already tearing open, defenseless.
Liam was waiting for him in the arrivals hall. He appeared out of the milling crowd in shorts and a T-shirt, his shins somehow already a deep pink. They greeted each other with a firm hand clasp that lasted a few seconds, a midair arm wrestle.
“Decent flight?” Liam asked.
“Mostly. Yours?”
“Good, yes. Easy. On time.”
“It was hot as soon as I got out of the plane,” Tom said.
“I know. Early heatwave, apparently.”
They smiled at each other, recognizing, despite everything, the reassuring pull of the conventional.
“I’ve picked up the car,” Liam said.
It was on the far side of the car park, outside the baking concrete hutch of the hire company.
“I didn’t bring the paper bit of my license,” Tom said when they reached the car. “Didn’t even think, sorry.”
“Don’t worry, I’m all right doing it. Probably won’t do much driving anyway. Depends what the resort’s like.”
Liam maneuvered out onto the road. Palm trees. Car horns. Peeling, sun-bleached advertisement billboards. The vents injected a gush of hot air into the car. He would not let himself be led through the holiday, Tom resolved. He would pay for drinks and meals, speak to foreign waiters, not shy away from tipping. The thought of Liam doing it all, expecting to, revolted him.
Their apartment was one of twenty arranged around a small pool and a rock garden. Under the cool relief of a ceiling fan they looked the rooms over, constantly watchful of each other. They took off their shoes and socks, and the white-tiled floor was deliciously cold underfoot. There was one main room with a bed, table and chairs and tiny kitchenette, a wet room with a shower and toilet, and a narrow low-walled veranda set at the back of the apartment to screen it from the others. They got glasses of water and moved out onto it. Orchards and scrub sloped gently down in front of them. A mile or so away were the brightly colored rooftops and apartment towers of the town. Beyond, steep wooded hills sheltered a lagoon, the hills speckled with whitewashed houses and the concrete and steel frameworks of half-built or abandoned buildings. In the distance, further out past the lagoon, was the hot sea, shining in the afternoon sun like the skin of a fish.
“What did you tell your family?” Liam asked when they had sat down on the scalding plastic chairs.
“That I’m in Portugal with a few of the squad.”
Liam nodded.
Tom waited a moment, then said, “You?”
“Same, pretty much. Except Mum and Dad know most of my friends. I told them I’m with some of the people I met on my groundskeeping course. I’m not actually much in contact with them these days, Facebook a bit, but they can be useful for something to tell Mum and Dad.”
They were both sweating. Liam rolled his glass across his forehead, and Tom studied his face for any sign that the hint at his sexual past was deliberate. Tom got up and went inside to refill his glass. Moments later Liam came into the kitchenette and stood behind him. He passed Tom his own glass to fill and their arms brushed against each other, but Liam took his drink and moved away to begin unpacking his bag. Tom went to do the same. For the next few minutes they arranged their things: toiletries, sun creams, insect repellents, unnecessary phone chargers, shorts, T-shirts and swimming shorts, their combined belongings tidily stacked and shelved independently as if they were roommates. Liam finished and went to the toilet. While he was in there Tom changed out of his jeans into a pair of shorts, unaccountably self-conscious.
They went for a stroll around the apartment complex. Birds sang from the bushes. A man was watering a bed of scorched flowers. Around the pool three English girls lay out on sunloungers pulled close to the edge, their feet dangling in the water. The afternoon was still hot. They walked for a quarter of an hour along a shadeless road into the town. When they got there it was pleasantly bustling. Cafes and bars fringed a narrow cobbled street, and there was a row of stalls displaying wooden trinkets and jewelry and decorative paper fans. A fish market at the beginning of a wide promenade of restaurants that smoked the air with grilling sardines and shellfish, leading to a long curving beach.
They had not brought towels, so they settled down on the hot sand next to a roped-off sunlounger concession. Tired from the heat, they sat quietly, looking out at the lagoon, absorbing the hum of the people around them. There was the lulling tock-tock sound of a bat and ball game at the water’s edge. Liam was watching. Tom felt weak with a need to touch him. He did not understand why Liam had not yet come close to him. Tom stood up and told him he was going to get some drinks from a stand a short way down the beach.
He bought them each a bottle of Coke, pleased with how he handled the exchange with the vendor. On the way back he noticed two men sitting on the same towel. One was whispering into the other’s ear, stroking his back. Tom hurried past. He returned to Liam and passed him a Coke, wondering if he too had seen the men, if he would have been perturbed by them if he had.
The sun descended towards a hill on one side of the lagoon, and the afternoon began to cool. They walked to a beachside bar and sat at a table on the sand for a beer. They talked about close-season transfer dealings, first Town’s, then more generally, and had a second beer as the conversation turned to the upcoming European Championship, until the sun disappeared completely behind the hill and the temperature fell sharply.
On the walk back, Liam took Tom’s hand. Tom squeezed it in response. At the approach of a shambling dirty truck they let go and moved onto the verge, and when it had passed Tom turned to kiss Liam, his body closing against him and neither of them pulling away at the loud, foreign honking of another passing vehicle.
Once inside the apartment they did not hesitate much further than the door. Their clothes fell to the tiles with little showers of sand, and Tom was fired with an awareness that nobody was on the other side of the door. Nobody even knew that they were there. Liam’s hands were on his back, the pressure by degrees easing, drawing down his vertebrae, his tailbone. A few weeks ago, in the medical room, he had thought that he wanted this but at the last moment had not been ready, turning over and pulling Liam down onto the mattress. Now, though, he closed his eyes against the cool new sheets and heard Liam’s breathing quicken, his lips touching the back of Tom’s neck, whispering something imperceptible beneath the wild ringing of the crickets outside the apartment walls.
Tom gave a small cry of pain. Liam kept his hands around Tom’s waist, slowing but not stopping, and gradually Tom let himself go, the unnatural sensation, heightened by the new sounds from Liam, convulsing through his body with an acute terrible pleasure that was almost unbearable.
The long bright days that followed belonged to a different life. The car remained under the palm trees by the entrance to the complex, untouched. They moved back and forth between the apartment and the beach, staying at one or the other for long, untroubled spells, not caring or noticing that dusk had fallen and they had slept through an afternoon. They would emerge from the apartment ravenous and devour a tableful of dishes at one of the colorful cheap restaurants along the beach or in the cobbled main street. They got drunk—Liam, to Tom’s surprise, became drunk almost as quickly as he did—and stumbled, laughing, onto the sand to walk beside the lapping water.
In these moments, at night, on the beach, when few people were about, Tom was not uncomfortable with them touching or kissing. In the apartment he was becoming unreservedly intimate with Liam, but he was still uneasy at the idea of other people, even strangers, seeing them like that together. Liam teased him about it, sometimes pretending to attempt a kiss while they sunbathed on the beach. One evening while they were walking through the town he playfully called Tom a queer, and Tom fell into a silence that was only broken an hour later by Liam apologizing on the veranda and promising not to say it again. It did not help that they were made conspicuous by their, and especially Liam’s, fierce red patches of sunburn. Or that there were several blatantly gay couples around the resort. Quite often they passed the two men that Tom had seen that first day on the beach. He made sure each time to move a small distance apart from Liam, wary of the possibility that the pair might acknowledge them in some way. He noticed two other couples, as well as a group of five Germans whom he presumed to be gay from the way they play-fought and posed endlessly for photos on the beach, although he wondered if that might just be what Germans were like, and he did not discount either the fact that they could be footballers.
One night near the end of the week, drinking cocktails in celebration of Tom’s birthday on a low hammock seat outside a beach bar, Tom asked Liam why he had chosen this resort.
Liam shrugged. “Don’t know. Just what it said on TripAdvisor. Cheap, good weather, chilled out.”
“You researched it then?”
“Course I did. You didn’t bloody do anything, did you?”
“Were there other places you looked at?”
Liam gave him a skeptical look. “Mate, this isn’t a gay resort, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one.”
“You think I have?”
Tom sipped his cocktail. “I don’t know.”
Liam laughed. “Well, you’ll be glad to know that I haven’t. I did find out that this place was ‘tolerant,’ or ‘gay friendly,’ or whatever bollocks it said on the Internet. And I thought that would be about right because I knew you wouldn’t have wanted a more full-on place. Me neither. They look proper dodgy.”
“You looked into it?”
“Not for long.”
They drank another cocktail. The group of English girls from the apartment complex passed on the beach and waved hello. Tom, tipsy now, pushed at the sand with his foot to swing the hammock. “So, you’ve not been anywhere like this before?” he said.
“Like what—here?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been to Portugal before. We came when I was about thirteen. With my sister, I think. Andrew had moved out.”
“No, I mean, with anyone else.”
Liam smirked at him. “A man, you mean?”
Tom did not say anything.
“No, I haven’t.”
They were quiet for a long while, watching the dark shapes of the fishing boats moored in the lagoon.
“You gone out with anyone before?” Tom said.
“Yes. Not many.” He checked to see if that was as much as Tom wanted but gathered from his attention that he needed to hear more. “My first relationship was with a girl I went out with when I was eighteen. Lisa. I thought I was in love. I thought I was going to marry her. But then there was this thing—didn’t go anywhere—with a boy after a youth tournament. That was a bit before I split up with Lisa. Why I split up with Lisa.”
He looked across. Tom’s face, although his heart was beating hard, showed nothing.
“Then it was all just confusing for a long time. I didn’t know what was going on with me. If I’m honest, that’s probably why I didn’t try getting a trial anywhere else when Town released me. It’s hard enough anyway. You’re on the scrap heap. And then you think, right, if I’m…if that’s what I am, then why am I going to put myself through a load of shit just to get a trial at some Isthmian League back-end-of-nowhere place?” He gave Tom a look that suggested he thought Tom might say something, but Tom kept quiet. “Anyway, about a year and a half after I left the club, I met this guy, Dan.”
He stopped to drink the last of his cocktail and did not pick up the story, staring off instead through the palm trees to the looming mass of cliffs at one side of the lagoon. A band the color of rare meat covered his neck, although the white edge of his still strangely unburned chest was just visible above his shirt.
“Who was he?”
“Dan? Went out with him, on and off, about six months. He was in the year above me at school, but we didn’t know each other then. We met at a party. Facebooked for a while afterwards, and then he said we should meet up. I didn’t even know he was gay at first. It was difficult when we did start seeing each other. He was at university up in Lancaster, so we only saw each other when it wasn’t term time. All his friends up there knew he was gay but nobody at home knew, and nobody knew I was either, so we’d meet up in secret. I think in the end the choice between having to hide or being somewhere he could be himself, plus the long-distance thing…Well, not much of a choice, to be fair.”
He gave a short laugh and then he turned to Tom, his eyes clear and bright in his red face. “So, there you are, my life history. That enough of an answer for you?”
Tom tried not to let the thought of Dan bother him. The story, however, kept playing on his mind. A contrived image of Dan grew quickly into a presence that left the bar with them, walked alongside them on the road back to the apartment. Tom hungered for more details. Dates. Whether it had ended definitively or if there had been later, more occasional, meetings. If they were still in contact now. He knew that he could not seek any of this from Liam, though. While they returned, Liam asked him about his own past relationships. There wasn’t much to tell, Tom said. A girlfriend, Jenni, a long time ago, who had moved away after school and married a military policeman. Nothing since. Part of him longed to tell Liam about Craig, but another, more careful part of him would not allow it. A vague guilt came over him at concealing Craig after Liam had shared his own past with him, but he was not prepared to let Liam compare some ancient episode with a boy and what was happening now.
Later, drunk, standing on the veranda looking out at the enormous black sky, Tom let Liam undress him then lead him through the doorway and guide him onto the bed. He waited for the sound of Liam’s shorts buttons but Liam continued working his hands down the grooves of his back, over his buttocks, kneading, circling delicately with his fingertips, then with the increased sliding pressure of one unrelenting finger until an abrupt thick tide radiated deep inside him.
Liam sat next to him on the bed, still dressed.
“You didn’t know about that, did you?”
Tom could only shake his head. “Do you wan—?”
“No, it’s OK,” Liam cut him off. “I need to sleep. I’m wasted.”
In the morning Tom woke to find the other side of the bed empty. The door of the apartment was open, a square of sunlight on the floor. There was loud birdsong, as if the birds were inside. And then they were—two small hopping creatures pecking at the tiles of the kitchenette for a few seconds before spotting Tom and flying out. He lay on the bed for a while, waiting for them to return, then put on his shorts and went outside.
He found Liam at the pool, talking to the English girls. He was standing in front of their sunloungers. They were laughing as though at something he had said.
“Tom.” Liam smiled over.
Tom hung back, staying by the corner of the pool. “Hi.”
“Apparently this lot got hit on last night by some middle-aged American golfers.”
“Canadian,” one of the girls said, and the other two giggled.
They were all looking at him.
“Bloody hell,” he said.
“You guys should come out with us tonight,” one of them said from beneath her wide straw hat. The others chimed their agreement.
“You could protect us,” another said, and they all laughed.
Tom could not tell whether they knew that he and Liam were together. But then Liam came round the pool and put his arm about his waist. They did not look surprised.
“What do you think?” Liam said. “Sounds fun.”
“Yeah, it does.” They were all watching him again, half-smiling. “We’ll maybe see you out and about then.” He turned to Liam. “Come on, let’s get breakfast. We’ll leave you to it. Enjoy the pool.”
Liam was quiet as they walked up the path back to the apartment. They nodded hello to the gardener, the expecting Dutch couple, the ageless friendly owner, who waved back at them, crouched behind her huge panting dog. They all knew, Tom was convinced. Had heard them, probably.
“Don’t you want to do that tonight?” Liam asked when they were inside, packing a bag for the beach.
“Yes, if you do.”
“That was a bit rude, back there.”
“Wasn’t meant to be. I’m up for it if you are.”
He was not in the least bit up for it. He had been instantly hurt, standing by the pool, that Liam was so keen to spend their final night with these girls. He fell into a brooding detachment while they went to the beach and lay out in the heat, indulging the feeling, finding a wounded pleasure in it. Doubtful thoughts took hold of him: that Liam had grown bored with his constant company; that he was staring at a man with a tattooed neck near the beach showers.
These notions were intensified by Liam’s own silence, and Tom could not relax. He went for a long dip in the sea, becoming aware, as he swam against the powerful tugging water, that he had lost condition since the end of the season. He vowed to get started on building his fitness as soon as he returned home, and at once the inevitability of leaving this place pulled him down like a weight. He swam forcefully out into the lagoon, quickly becoming out of breath, sucking for air on each stroke but making his body continue to work, sensing the buried cords of muscle in his legs and buttocks, and the thought of playing football again, as if rising from the darkness below, impelled him onwards, out into the ocean. When eventually he stopped, treading water to catch his breath, the anticipation of playing, the determination to prove himself, was still there. And, when he started back for the beach, a spontaneous resentment too, towards Liam, for the disordering of how that part of his life could be.
He neared the shore, his knees brushing against the seabed. He climbed out of the water, wanting Liam to notice him, to watch him walking back over the sand. Liam, though, was reading his book. Tom sat down beside him. He rested his dripping body against Liam’s side and got his own book out. He did not want to bring up the subject of that evening. He could imagine, if they did go out, how it would be. The girls assigning them the role of their gay companions, flirting, expecting them to be funny, wanting to dance. They would want to know all about them, and they would have to lie. A cover story would have to be prepared in advance. He pictured again the scene by the pool that morning and felt a reflex of anger at Liam for playing up to the stereotype.
They left the beach to go for what ended up being a long, tiring walk around the lagoon to the top of a hill, where they sat exhausted in a bar to share a bowl of little fried fish. While they ate, Liam, out of nowhere, said, “Have you told anybody about us?”
Tom was startled. “No. What, have you?”
“Yes.”
Tom stared at him, instantly petrified.
“The friend I told you about. Leah.”
“You’ve told her my name?”
“No. And don’t worry. She’s an old friend.”
“She’s Easter’s wife.”
“That doesn’t mean she’d tell him.”
They carried on eating. A crowd of dead fish eyes ogled him from inside their crunchy caskets.
“I wondered if you might have told your sister,” Liam said.
“No.”
“Leah’s the only person I’ve told, you know. She couldn’t believe it. I’ve never told anybody before.” When Tom did not respond, he continued: “I’ve thought about it, but then every time I’ve known I just can’t. Never seemed worth the risk of other people finding out. Not like I work in a hairdresser’s, is it? There’s my dad, for one thing. His position at the club. Not to mention my position. And don’t even think about what would happen if the club found out I’m shagging one of their players. Can you imagine?”
Tom dipped a fish in mayonnaise.
“You should meet her,” Liam said, animated. “You’d like her, I know you would.”
Tom looked out at the lagoon. In the distance a huge white ship proceeded through the ocean. He had suspected this ever since he saw them together at the furniture store, but nonetheless hearing Liam say it had turned him cold with dread. Swelling beneath that too was the feeling that he had been betrayed, that Liam had put them at risk.
He tried to hide it from Liam, but he was unable to stop his foreboding and, as well, the sense that something vital had been lost. That it was no longer just the two of them; that whatever was going to happen between them when they left this place, somebody else would know. “I’m going for a lie-down,” Liam said when they returned to the apartment. “I’m done in.”
Tom went out onto the veranda. He sat, weary with the heat, watching a lizard—perfectly still on top of the wall—monitor a fly. He tried to keep his mind from Leah but could not. Even though he knew it was natural that Liam would eventually tell a friend, the fact that he had done so was shocking, disorienting. He told himself repeatedly that it was fair enough, it was normal, wanting to brace himself against the possibility that anything could come between them or mar the time they had spent together here, pissed off with himself for his earlier petulance, which had wasted most of their final day.
A slow wheezing was coming from the bedroom. He got up, causing the fly to drone away, though the lizard remained steadfast on the wall as Tom came past, through the doorway, to lie down next to Liam on the bed. Liam’s neck, his sideburns, were damp. As they lay there, faces close together, Liam began to snore. Tom moved his body up against Liam’s, letting his eyes close.
When he woke, Liam’s arm was around him, although he seemed still to be asleep. Tom placed a hand on Liam’s head. He stroked the hair above the ear with his thumb, revealing the ghostly white skin beneath. Liam came to, grunted, shut his eyes again.
“I do want to go out tonight,” Tom said.
“Huh?”
“With those girls. I think we should meet up with them.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
They walked together through the complex. The evening was still hot. Children’s voices, the sound of splashing, came from the pool. A barbecue had been lit on the Dutch couple’s veranda, and the smell of cooking meat carried on the air. Liam apparently knew which was the girls’ apartment. He walked up the path towards their door while Tom hung back, surprised at his assuredness, wondering whether maybe there had been some other interaction between Liam and the girls that he had not known about. The door opened, and a girl with short dark hair was saying hello to Liam. She had a towel wrapped around her. As she spoke to him in the doorway another one approached, smiling, in only a skirt and a bra—confirmation, Tom thought, that they did know he and Liam were a couple. Liam was turning to come back down the path.
“We’re going to meet them in a bar,” he said, putting his hands on Tom’s shoulders and leaning in to kiss him on the mouth in full view of the Dutch couple on their veranda.
They sat at a table outside the bar, on the cobbles. Across the street, vendors were packing up their stalls. An African man knelt before a suitcase, carefully placing into downy slots the artifacts that a woman passed down to him.
“Last night, then,” Liam said. “Cheers.”
They knocked their beer bottles together. Tom waited for him to say more about the holiday, about their return home, but nothing came. They watched the stalls coming down. Holidaymakers were going up the street and into the bars and restaurants, some of them still in swimwear, only now leaving the beach.
They were on their second beer when they saw the girls walking down the street towards them. Tom watched their approach, ready to take his cue from Liam, but upon their arrival Liam did not get up to greet them and Tom was happy to stay in his seat. The girls went inside to get drinks, and came back out a few minutes later with a tray of beers and dark red shots.
“To holidays,” one of the girls said. They held up their shot glasses, then downed the contents.
“I’m Laura, by the way,” the same girl said to Tom. “This is Eve, and Jo.”
“Tom.”
Laura and Eve had similar short black hair, sun-bloated freckles. Tom had presumed that they were sisters, but early in the conversation, Jo—small, blond, who had already attracted the attention of a group of shirtless boys walking up from the beach—informed them that the three had met at university. They had been in the same hall of residence during their first year and were about to move into a house together.
“What about you guys,” Laura asked. “What do you do?”
It struck Tom only then that they had neglected to discuss a cover story. He hesitated, waiting for Liam to answer.
“Tom’s an underwear model.”
Tom let out a breath of surprise, embarrassment. The nasty sweet belch of the liquor filled his nose.
“Cool,” Laura said. She smiled at Liam. “Lucky for you, eh?” She turned to Tom. “And what about this one?”
Tom wiped his mouth. Composed himself. “He’s a butcher.”
For a moment there was silence.
“Wow. Butcher and underwear model. That’s different. How did the two of you meet?”
Liam was grinning at him, and Tom understood that he was challenging him to answer, enjoying this.
“The Internet,” Tom said.
Liam’s hand was on his leg. After a pause, during which Jo noticed it there, Tom put his own hand down on top of Liam’s.
“More drinks?” Eve made to stand, but Liam gestured for her to sit down and got up himself to go to the bar. A few tables away, a noisy party of men settled themselves in. Above the heads of the three girls a fat red sun dappled the forested top of the hills beyond the lagoon.
“How long have you two been together?” Eve asked.
“Couple of months, maybe.”
“Oh, not long. Must be going well, then?”
He wondered whether they would have spoken like this to a straight couple, and for an instant he imagined Leah there sitting alongside them. “It is.” He did not, however, feel annoyed by their nosiness. What he felt was drunk and, when Liam returned from the bar with another tray of the red shots, uninhibited. Anonymous. They downed the shots and he stretched over towards Liam to kiss him, enjoying the look of surprise on his face, uncaring of the girls, the other tables, the happy stream of people moving past them from the beach.
They went on to another bar, which was busier, louder. Some people on the other side of the place were dancing. Jo offered to help Tom get more drinks while the others looked for a table. She was more reserved than the other two, and she stayed quietly beside him while he ordered a round of vodka and sodas, a beer for Liam. For a moment, as they stood together, he felt an urge to talk to her, to speak he did not know what about, but the music was booming, and anyway a man had taken her attention, was saying something to her. A few men, he saw now, and he perceived in their regarding of her something expectant, untoward. He stepped up alongside her, facing the men.
“All right, fellas?”
They looked at him indifferently. Four older men in chinos, Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned down moist slack chests.
“Probably time to fuck off, isn’t it?”
They stiffened, unsure how to respond. One of them muttered something into the ear of another and they turned, in sequence, to move off. Tom did not know what to do then. He looked back towards the bar. When he handed a couple of the drinks to Jo, she was smiling at him. “Thank you. Idiots, those lot.”
“Who were they?”
“The Canadian golfers.”
When they found the others standing near the entrance, Jo told them about the encounter at the bar. So odd did it sound to hear about what he had just done, he could not help but laugh, even before he saw Liam’s reaction.
Laura and Eve indicated that they were going to join the dancers. Laura, departing, took Liam’s hand. Liam did not resist and was sucked, still holding her hand, into the bodies. Tom watched the top of his head above the crowd, weaving away.
Jo touched him on the forearm. “Come on.”
They slid through, following the slipstream that had not yet closed behind the others. Up ahead he could see Liam, already dancing. Something sudden rose inside him at the sight of him: the great feet stomping, arms flexed at the elbows into locked right angles, like a forklift. A small force field had opened up around him on the dance floor. Laura and Eve were dancing nearby, enjoying the show, but Liam appeared not to be aware of them or anyone else. Tom pushed towards him until he was at his side, copying his movements, stamping the ground, crooking his arms.
“You dance like a butcher,” Tom shouted.
Liam began stamping even more vigorously, grinning madly. Tom followed suit, clapping—then, as the track changed, jumping, bouncing; Liam, the girls, the dancers around them jumping too, following Tom’s lead. Liam wrapped his arms around Tom’s middle, still bouncing. Tom put his mouth to Liam’s ear. “Not the Hut, is it?”
Liam jumped harder, lifting Tom now with each spring. “Fuck them, mate.” He turned his giant sweating face to Tom’s. “Fuck the lot of them.” Tom loosened his arm from Liam’s grip and thrust it upwards with the beat of the music. Liam put his head back, laughing as they clung to each other amid the latticework of tan lines glowing in the dark, still bouncing, punching the air in unison.
They parted in the airport. Surrounded by the melee of the departures hall, Tom took hold of both Liam’s hands and, in full view of all the gawping children and silently disgusted fathers, kissed him. He had planned this. Built himself up to it.
“Fucking homo,” Liam whispered, and Tom kissed him again. They checked in, dropped off their bags. In the security line Tom watched Liam step forward towards the scanner. On one of his wrists there was a shocking white handcuff. The oddness of it rendered Tom, to the irritation of the man behind him, momentarily still. They would be back home in a few hours, he thought. Their time here was over, the separateness of it so distinct that it was already, not even out of the airport, beginning to take on the unreality of an illusion.