Moving On

I should have known. He was on pills. He'd told me he was—that he'd had to do so to get through this last ordeal with the consignment of Luke's ashes. I should have known that in his state he would mistake me for Luke.

* * *

I felt that I had only let Hugh make love to me because he reminded me of Luke so much. In his appearance and his mannerisms, in small ways, like the way he lifted one eyebrow when he was listening to something Luke was saying. The way he twisted his cock inside my ass just like Luke. That had always driven me wild.

On the bed in the cottage I had come myself almost immediately after Hugh had, with Luke's name still ringing in the bedroom, and my cream soaking into the sheet beneath me. And I had been fully connected to Luke. But as I fell back to the bed, exhausted and recovering myself, Luke's cock didn't remain buried up my ass; he didn't rub his chest against my back he way he always did; he didn't bring his mouth to my neck and kiss it.

Instead, I felt him pull away and slip out of me, and I had turned, whimpering for the expected continuation of his fuck. And, and . . . I had realized through the haze I was in that the man leaving the bed and standing on the cottage floor was not Luke. It was a moment before I understood the man who had fucked me so much like my dead lover did was Hugh, Luke's distant cousin. And he was now pale and grim and the facial resemblance to Luke was largely gone.

But then he smiled at me, and I saw Luke again.

"You can be so alike," I gasped in anguish.

And I buried my head in the pillow and cried some more, with Hugh sitting beside me and resting a hand on my shoulder.

"You can stay here for a couple of days," he said, "If you want to. As long as you like," he added, squeezing my shoulder.

"I'm sorry," I replied, "You are, you are just so like him at times."

My long-held bitterness at Hugh was gone. Now I felt thoughtless that I had let what had happened happen. That I had cried out to Luke as Hugh had flooded me with his seed. And I wondered why in his last message to me Luke had insisted that I could only release his ashes if Hugh was there with me. Perhaps he had foreseen this, perhaps he had understood that I might see him in Hugh. Maybe he had thought I would need someone to reawaken my desire. But he had been wrong, instead our lovemaking had left me feeling guilty and more alone.

But Hugh's hand on my body was like a brand, marking me, connecting me to a man I could physically desire but didn't know, and I cried again when he took it away and left me. And I wished that instead of leaving he had tied my wrists to the bed's fancy Victorian bed head with its curving and twining steel and had fucked me hard and made me cry out for him. Cry his name. Make me his.

But this wasn't real. No. I was sure my new desire for Hugh was only me trying to recapture what I had with Luke. That, and the pills I had taken to make the difficult parting from my last physical connection with Luke easy. To me his ashes had become him.

I was confused and desperate to escape and headed back to the Australian desert. Wanting to get the feel of both Luke and Hugh out of my mind. I felt I needed to move on with my life, not wallow in the absence of Luke any longer.

I had been working in the Tanami desert for eighteen months, moving around to different leases, doing initial sampling work, and now was back in the main camp for a few days in the office. After dinner on my first night I went to the back of the canteen to check the mail, and smiled at the postbag waiting for me.

"Have you heard?" Jack said, coming up behind me, "That writer, Hugh Caul, has been in an accident, a car crash in the Alps. He's been badly burnt."

I was too shocked to feel anything, I could only say petulantly, "No. Where did you hear that? I don't believe it."

"Last night, on the BBC news. It's true. I just hope he's OK. I've been enjoying the books you've lent me. Wouldn't want him to have written his last one," he said, before hurrying off.

Back in my demountable I slit open the plastic postbag and pulled out "Dead Lover's Gift," Hugh Caul's latest bestseller. I held it in my hands and looked at it. I wasn't sure why I had started to read his books in particular. I just did. With Luke there had been little time for anything but work and sex.

In ten years together we hadn't gradually had less sex, like most couples do. Luke's appetite had remained large, and I had developed a taste for frequent sex and only had to see him look at me to start getting an erection. And I had never hesitated to indulge any desire I might have for him. I generally took, but there were times I rode him equally hard, and I had come to expect us to share our bodies every night.

But since his death I'd adjusted to celibacy on site and had filled my spare time with reading, and somehow I had started to read Hugh's books. Luke had been quiet and intense, introverted, but intensely sensual. At work he had been methodical and thorough, always serious. But the Hugh I had found lurking in his novels had a wicked sense of humour and a sharp eye for people's hypocrisies. He was a sophisticated urbane observer, a far cry from Luke's almost total preoccupation with his work as a geologist.

And now that I was no longer young and my career had reached a plateau I wasn't as content as I had been. I was alone on the lonely isolated sites where the work I knew best was, and I was starting to wonder if the world Luke and I had shared so contentedly was really mine now, without him.

I lay on the bed and clutched Hugh's book to myself and my mind ran in a hundred directions trying to get away for the news but always coming back to Hugh burned and perhaps dying. And I cried for him, for not being able to be with him at such a terrible time. And I cried too at the thought of losing him. But he'd let me go so easily that afternoon I had mistaken him for Luke. I was struggling with myself. I had tried moving on with my life; I had tried to bury the memory of Luke—and that short encounter with his cousin as well. But, whereas I could think of Luke with bittersweet appreciation mellowing memory now, I still could only think of Hugh with almost a visceral sexual heat that radiated through my body and had me seeking privacy and the relief of my stroking hand.

I tried to dispel the rising of arousal at the remembrance of that brief love making with Hugh by lying back on the bed and opening his latest book, "Dead Lover's Gift."

As I read, the voice of the book's narrator became that of Hugh, and the farther into the book I read, the more I realized that he had written the book to and about Hugh and me. The situation of Luke's last few months and his death were slightly changed in the book, but I, who had lived them, clearly discerned the underlying tragedies and truths in what he wrote. And what began to rise out of these written truths as I read on was Hugh's voice crying out to me. What I had seen as him so easily letting me go that day after we had made confused love after consigning Luke's ashes to the lake waters, was strongly belied here in his writings. His book described in deeply painful terms how hard it was for him to let go of the character who so obviously was me.

In a climatic sequence in the book, he wrote of coming upon my character, exhausted from the caring for and suicide of his lover and sleeping deeply on a chaise lounge in a pavilion on the edge of the lake in the book's English country house setting. I stripped off my sleeping pants, and I was lightly stroking my cock as I read of Hugh's character in his book sitting there and looking down at the sleeping man who was my character. Not being able to help himself, Hugh's character was lightly running his hands over the bare torso of my character. As I read, I started to glide my hand over my belly and nipples just as was happening in the book. And the half-waking moaning of the character in the book came very much alive to me as my own arousing attention to my body brought out audible moans of my own. Hugh's character lowered his mouth to the tumescent manhood of his cousin's lover and started to gently work him to trembling arousal. In concert with that, I was stroking myself with increasingly rapid strokes. When Hugh entered a fully awake and accepting character of me in the book, I was entering myself with my own fingers, surfacing and mimicking images not only of the writing in the book but also of how Hugh had, in reality, so masterfully entered and worked my passage that fateful day in the cottage bedroom at Oakton Park. The man in the pavilion was crying for the fucking of Hugh's character just as I was writhing in my bed, my attention prisoner to Hugh's fucking of me with the words in his book. The Hugh of the book ejaculated and the man in the pavilion cried his acceptance; I dropped the book, using both hands on myself now. Stroking hard with one hand, digging deep with the other. Thrashing about on the bed, working my hips wildly off and then back against the sheeting. And this time when I at last found heavily fountained relief, it was Hugh's name I was crying out, not Luke's.

I read on through the night. I had to know how Hugh's book ended. I had to know if he saw any possible future for us in what had become such a complex, bittersweet saga. I was in tears when I reached the end, where some coincidence had brought the characters back together after a long parting, and the character who represented me was declaring how he had felt he just had to move on after Luke's death, that he couldn't let the character representing Hugh become a Luke substitute who was willing to accept him only to honour the memory of the dead lover.

"I am not the lover you came into my life with," Hugh's character said. "I am me. And I never was only willing, as you say, to accept you into my life and my bed because of what you and I once were to him. I wanted you because I fell in love with you. With you. I wanted you because my body aches to encase you and make love to you. And I agree that we both must move on from that shared tragedy in our lives. But that in no way means we need move away from each other; there's no reason why we need deny ourselves the pleasure of moving on together. Come to me. Come away with me."

The next day, the now-treasured copy of "Dead Lover's Gift" under my arm, I was at the travel agent's office making arrangements for a flight to Switzerland.