The Lunch Hour

The stairs were the worst part, and Nick had known it would be. Three floors up and nowhere to put his eyes. He'd taken the 11:07 out of Greenwich and walked the long way from Grand Central, past a deli and a church and two banks, telling himself at each corner that he could still turn around and spend the afternoon at the Morgan Library like a man with a respectable interest in manuscripts. He'd spent months on the website first, rereading the same pages, picturing one particular thing he had never once said out loud, and telling himself maybe next week.

He hadn't turned around. He pushed through the door at the top into a hallway that smelled of cedar and something clean, and a man at a small desk looked up and said, "First time?" in a voice that made it sound like good news.

"That obvious?"

"You're holding your bag like it might get away from you." Silver at the temples, dressed in business casual. "Lockers to the left. No names inside, no phones, and nobody's on a clock except the guys who have to be back at their desks by two."

The locker room was small and warm. Two men were changing in silence, the easy, practiced silence of regulars. Nick found his locker and stood there.

He'd thought about this moment more than any other. Not the sex. The undressing. Fifty-three, a waist he'd stopped measuring honestly, a body that had spent three decades in conference rooms and car seats and the good chairs at good restaurants. He'd stood in front of the bathroom mirror at home in the jockstrap, turning, trying to see himself as a stranger would, and couldn't tell.

He took off his jacket. Then his shirt. One of the regulars glanced over, a long, unembarrassed look that traveled down and came back up, and held his eyes for a second before turning away. Not dismissal. Appraisal, and something like approval. Nick felt his face go warm and kept going.

* * *

The main room was lit low and amber from fixtures near the floor, so that everyone moved through it in a permanent late afternoon. Twenty men, maybe. Nobody talking above a murmur. The sounds were the sounds of bodies: breath, the creak of padded platforms, a low groan from somewhere in the shadows that went straight down Nick's spine.

He'd braced for the gym bodies, the young ones, the men who were clearly the point. A few were here. One, tall and carved and thirty at most, stood near the platforms with a small knot of men around him, and Nick felt the old arithmetic start up -- that's where the attention goes, and that's not you -- and then a hand settled on the small of his back.

He turned. The man was about his age, broad through the chest and soft through the middle in a way that looked like contentment. Gray hair cropped close. A wedding ring he hadn't taken off. Nick knew him, distantly: two cars back on the 11:07.

The man didn't say anything. He raised his eyebrows, a question. Nick nodded.

The hand moved, slow and certain, up his spine, across his shoulder, down his chest, his stomach, the part of himself he'd spent a week dreading anyone touching, and the man's palm lingered there, warm and flat and unhurried, as if this were exactly what he'd come for. Then lower, over the cotton pouch of the jock, and Nick, already half hard since the locker room, went the rest of the way under that hand and heard himself make a sound he hadn't made in years.

The man smiled and took his wrist and led him to a platform in the corner, half in shadow.

* * *

The kissing came first, and it went on a long time.

Nick had forgotten this. Not the mechanics, but the patience. The man kissed him like there was no clock, no 2:34, no wife or desk or anything waiting at the bottom of those stairs, his stubble rough along Nick's jaw, one hand cupping the back of his skull. When Nick tried to speed things up, reaching down, the man caught his wrist, pressed it back against the cushion, and shook his head slowly, smiling against his mouth. Not yet.

So Nick lay there and let it happen at someone else's pace, which he realized he had not done in a very long time, possibly ever. In meetings he set the pace. In the writers' room he set the pace. In bed, the last few times, years ago now, he'd set the pace too, mostly to get past the part where someone might look at him too closely.

The man was looking at him closely now. He'd pulled back to do it, propped on one elbow in the amber light, and his free hand was moving over Nick the way you'd move over a car you were thinking of buying: chest, ribs, the slope of his stomach, the soft give at his side. He squeezed there, gently, and Nick flinched before he could stop himself.

The man noticed. Of course he noticed. He stilled his hand, and for one awful second Nick waited for him to move it somewhere safer.

Instead the man bent and pressed his mouth exactly there, to the soft place at Nick's side, and kept it there, warm, open-mouthed, the scrape of his beard. Then another kiss lower, across the curve of his belly. Then another. Unhurried. Deliberate. As if he'd read Nick's mind on the stairs and decided to go straight at the thing he was most afraid of and make him feel it.

Nick put his forearm over his eyes. His throat had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with sex.

The man reached up, took his wrist, and moved his arm away from his face. Held his eyes. Then went back to what he was doing.

Something in Nick's chest that had been clenched since the 11:07, since the bathroom mirror, since some year he couldn't name, slowly let go.

When the man finally drew the jock down and took him into his mouth, Nick was so hard it almost hurt, and the first slow, wet slide of it pulled a sound out of him that echoed off the low ceiling. Someone across the room laughed softly, appreciatively. Nick didn't care. He lay back and gave himself over to it: the heat, the rhythm, the broad hand spread flat on his belly holding him down, the gray head moving over him in the low light. He watched, and then he couldn't watch, and then he had to watch again.

The man brought him close, so close, then eased off and looked up at him, eyes bright, mouth wet, enjoying himself enormously. Then did it again. And again, until Nick's hands were fisted in the cushion and his thighs were trembling, and he understood that he was being taken apart on purpose, by someone who wanted to see what he looked like coming undone.

When he couldn't stand any more, he hauled the man up by the shoulders and rolled him over and pinned him, and the man let himself be pinned, grinning, and Nick returned the favor with a hunger that surprised them both. The weight of him on Nick's tongue. The hand tightening in his hair. The low, steady, unguarded noises the man made, which Nick decided he wanted to hear for the rest of the afternoon.

He was so absorbed in those noises that it took him a while to realize someone was watching.

Younger, dark-haired, compact and furred, leaning against a column a few feet away, stroking himself slowly through his jock with his eyes on Nick. Not on the man beneath him. On Nick.

Nick, who had come here certain that nobody would look at him twice, held the stranger's gaze and didn't look away. The dark-haired man raised his eyebrows. Nick glanced down. The gray-haired man grinned and lifted one hand off the cushion: come.

* * *

What followed, Nick would replay for weeks. The younger man's mouth on his while the older one's worked lower. Being turned, being positioned, hands everywhere, three bodies finding a rhythm without a word spoken. The tear of a condom wrapper. The dark-haired man behind him, slick and slow and careful at first, then not careful, his hands gripping Nick's hips, the soft give of Nick's waist under his fingers clearly no obstacle to anything; if anything he held on tighter there. The gray-haired man beneath Nick, his hand wrapped around both of them, watching Nick's face with open delight as Nick began to come apart.

Then, as if he knew, the gray-haired man rose onto his knees and guided his hard cock to Nick's mouth. This was Nick's ultimate fantasy, the reason he had worked up the courage to come here today. After months of staring at the website, months of doing research, months saying maybe next week. Nick let himself have it. A hard younger cock in his ass and a hard, delicious cock in his mouth. He was being filled from both ends and he was on fire.

He came hard, with a sound he'd have been embarrassed by anywhere else, and felt the younger man follow inside him a few strokes later, shuddering, forehead dropped against the back of Nick's neck. The older man finished last, in Nick's mouth, with a volume that Nick could only have dreamed about, his head thrown back against the cushions, laughing a little, breathless, as if he'd been let in on a joke.

They lay tangled for a long time. Nobody spoke. Somebody's thumb moved idly along Nick's ribs. Across the room the tall young man's knot of admirers had thinned to two, and Nick, catching sight of them, felt nothing at all except a vague, generous wish that they were having as good a time as he was.

* * *

He saw them both again on the sidewalk, which he hadn't expected.

The older man was already outside when Nick came down, leaning against a lamppost with his collar open, and the younger one came out a minute later with his hair still wet. The three of them stood there in the October light, dressed, suddenly a little shy, three men who might have been coming out of any midtown office building.

"Daniel," the older man said finally, and offered his hand, as if they'd just met at a fundraiser.

Nick shook it and couldn't help laughing. "Nick."

"Mario." The younger one grinned. "I was hoping you'd notice me."

"I noticed."

Daniel did something in municipal bonds and hated it cheerfully. Mario was an architect, thirty-eight, and had been coming here for a year. When Nick admitted it was his first time, they both looked at him with a frank surprise that was its own kind of compliment.

"Next week?" Mario said, before he peeled off toward the subway.

"Maybe," Nick said, and meant yes.

Daniel walked with him as far as Lexington. "I'm on the 2:34," he said. "But I'll look for you on the platform next time." He smiled. "Either one."

* * *

On the 3:07, Nick took the script out of his bag and didn't read it. His body felt used and sore and warm and entirely his own. He was getting hard again, much to his surprise. Somewhere past Pelham he caught his reflection in the window as the light changed: a middle-aged man in a good jacket, a little rumpled, a little flushed. For once he didn't look away.