“Ça va sans dire.” Which was okay by me.
It all went like clockwork, and I was sitting in his flat with the cafetière bubbling away and a specially purchased cake just aching to be consumed. I didn’t have long to wait, and I heard the car, a BMW iPerformance hybrid, draw up outside, then steps running upstairs, and I had the door open before he reached the top. He looked a bit jaded, but that all added to his charm.
“God, I stink” were his first words. “Keep away from me.”
“I love it,” I said, and held him close. He did smell a bit ripe, but that was almost a turn-on.
“Let me get in the shower. That coffee smells marvelous. I guess you wouldn’t mind bringing a cup in with me?”
I didn’t mind of course but decided that a cup wasn’t the only thing he needed, so I stripped and took the coffee, and myself, in to him. He turned and enveloped me in a shower of desire and a cock so hard that I could barely squeeze past it. So what I did was turn and let it find its own welcoming and compliant place. He didn’t need to touch me, but as the rush of liquid sex entered me, I spouted up the shower wall, once, twice, three times. And then he was clasping me, and I came again. I was saying his name over and over.
Then he gasped and re
peated, “I love you. I love you. If you ever leave me, I will follow you to the ends of the earth.”
It was such an easy thing to say in the heat of passion or just after. I wondered afterwards if he would repeat it as we ate cake and drank coffee and then went out into the sunshine.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Devon.”
It was one hour forty-four minutes via the M5 (roughly a hundred and ten miles), and we made it in one hour thirty. The evening sun was shining in our eyes and a stall holder was just shutting up but opened again to give us some sandwiches and buns that, he said, he wouldn’t be able to sell the following day. The tea samovar had been emptied, but there were plenty of bottles of water, both flat and sparkling, to quench our thirst.
We wandered into the edge of Dartmoor. Obviously it was too late to make a real expedition, so we roamed across the level but strangely beautiful landscapes. There was a bridge across the stream just made of smooth stones, which might have stood there for aeons. More of the same or similar flat rocks were piled up in higgledy-piggledy mounds. They were surely too heavy to be lifted there by passing tourists, and Lex wondered if they’d been left there after the ice sheets and glaciers melted at the end of the Paleolithic period, when man first was able to roam north and not starve to death from lack of game.
“Which included woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.”
“Possibly, but doubtful,” said Lex, who probably knew a great deal more about these things than I did. “I expect groups of guys manhandled them on top of each other.”
“But some must weigh over a tonne.”
“The heaviest weight, according to the Guinness Book of Records, lifted by a single guy is 2.85 metric tonnes.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Sh!” In the distance we heard the haunting, screaming cry of the peewit, or lapwing, and I suddenly shivered.
“Come on,” said Lex. “We’ve got to make tracks for home—and bed.”
“Yes, please.”
I had forgotten, what with the events of the day, that I had promised to get in touch with Jacob, but it had carried the proviso that I might be working, so it wasn’t until about half past two of the following day—I had a job to do in the morning; it wasn’t exciting but it was time-consuming—that I rang him.
He sounded depressed but cheered up a bit when I called.
“Anything on the jobs front?”
“I think I’ve been blacklisted. And it wasn’t me at all. The little shit had it in for me ever since I told him off for being late. And they always believe the so-called victim and never the accused.”
“No, that’s not fair. But it didn’t come to court.”
“Of course not. They didn’t have a case, but my name would be published and his hidden.”
“Will they give you a reference?”
The only answer was a hollow laugh.
“Look, Jacob, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I look after the job advertisements. If I see one that would suit you, I’ll hold it up for a day and tell you. Obviously I can’t hold it for longer than a day or the firm will start raising Cain, but it will give you a day’s start on everyone else.”