Page 29 of After the Siren

Chapter Fifteen

Theo was aware that he was making it weird.

He couldn’t seem to stop making it weird.

It should have been easy to be normal, because Jake was acting like nothing had happened.

That was making it worse. Jake totally unfazed, when all Theo could think about was the fact they’d had sex.

He laid eyes on Jake and sex klaxons went off in his brain.

At least he was playing okay. It had taken him a couple of games to get used to being on the wing, but he felt settled there now.

Being able to accelerate away from an opponent down the boundary line was a particular kind of satisfying.

For the first time in his career, there had been positive articles about his performance.

He’d even gotten an email from a Falcons fan podcast asking if he’d come on and have a chat.

(He’d filed that one in the ‘maybe’ basket.) He’d also dropped back to one Law subject for the trimester, which was keeping the study side of things manageable.

He couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse that Priya was in Melbourne for a trial. On the one hand, she was his best friend and he wanted to talk to her very badly. On the other hand, she was very thorough in her cross-examination.

He didn’t think he was going to hold up in the witness box.

Priya had requested they go somewhere ‘as Melbourne as possible’, so he’d gotten some advice from Paddy and now they were in a second-floor bar just off Sydney Road that didn’t have a name, just a give-way sticker on a purple door.

The furniture was mismatched, the lighting was soft and there was a neon sign over the bar that said fuck transphobes.

Priya was delighted. She made the bar look like it had been decorated specifically to provide contrast to her patent-leather loafers and pussybow blouse.

They ordered strawberry daiquiris, to the visible distress of the ambiguously gendered and extremely attractive bartender.

The bartender looked even more upset when Theo asked for his to be virgin.

‘Debrief daiquiris,’ Priya explained, leaning on the bar and smiling at the bartender. ‘They’re traditional.’

The bartender smiled back. ‘Can’t mess with tradition.’

‘Shameless flirt,’ Theo told her as they made their way from the bar to find a table.

‘Always,’ she said.

It was the sort of place where you were basically sitting with the people on either side of you unless you managed to snag one of the two booths, both of which had reserved signs on them. Priya doubled back to chat to the bartender and returned to shepherd Theo towards one of the booths.

‘Do I want to know?’ he asked.

She grinned. ‘I’m just charming. Besides, we have things to talk about, and we can’t talk about them if Karen and Jan over there are sitting on your lap.’ She inclined her head towards two middle-aged women who looked like they weren’t sure how they’d ended up in a bar like this.

They sat down and she pushed the complimentary bowl of wasabi peas across the table towards him. At least, he assumed they were wasabi peas. They were the right colour, but something was off about the shape.

‘So, what’s up?’ Priya asked.

‘Who says something’s up?’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s what you’re going with?’

No. He wasn’t. He waited until the straw was in her mouth, then said, ‘I had sex with Jake.’

Priya froze, her lips still wrapped around the straw. Theo watched the level of the daiquiri drop. Then drop more. Then more.

It took her less than ten seconds to finish the whole thing.

She raised her head once she was done and pushed the glass away.

Theo recognised her expression, because he’d seen it many times before.

Not usually directed at him. With a couple of notable exceptions, he wasn’t the one in their group of friends who made terrible choices.

Priya retrieved the bowl of alleged wasabi peas. ‘Right, first thing’s first, are you okay?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be okay?’

‘I don’t know, because you slept with someone you couldn’t stand a few weeks ago?’ She popped a pea into her mouth, crunched it, then winced. ‘What is this?’

Theo tried one. It definitely wasn’t a wasabi pea, but it wasn’t unpleasant. ‘I have no idea.’ He took a handful. He needed to fuel. ‘And I don’t hate him. We’ve been hanging out. You know that.’

‘You definitely hated him three months ago.’ She leaned forward across the table. ‘I say this with love, but have you lost your entire mind?’

‘Probably.’ Theo prodded at one of the maraschino cherries in his daiquiri, trying to skewer it. Maraschino cherries did not belong in a strawberry daiquiri, but they were tasty.

‘At least you’re self-aware. So, what happened?’

Theo gave her a precis – the game, the win, the party, the couch. He got to the kissing part before she interrupted.

‘Were you drunk?’ Theo could hear in her voice that she was about to declare war on Jake Cunningham and all his demesnes.

‘No! Well, we both were, a bit, and when we kissed, yes, but he ... he realised and then he, uh ...’ Theo was assaulted by a vivid image of Jake, his lips kiss-swollen and his hair rumpled from Theo’s fingers, saying, ‘If you behave I’ll blow you in the morning.

’ And then a sort of highlight reel of Jake doing just that.

‘I don’t want to know what you’re thinking about,’ Priya said.

‘Noted. I stayed the night, and then in the morning we, you know.’ He raised his hands to gesture and realised there was no appropriate gesture.

‘Morning sex without night-before sex. Your dream.’

‘Get stuffed.’

Not that she was wrong. He did like morning sex, because the fact you were already in bed, and frequently already naked, smoothed out some of the awkward steps between not having sex and having sex.

He liked waking up next to someone, warm and close, and the type of sex you had when that leisurely closeness turned hot.

Sarah, who had been a dedicated morning runner, had not felt the same way about morning sex.

‘So, how was?’

‘Was good.’ He wasn’t sure why he was being cagey. He and Priya had always been open about the details of this sort of thing, often to the peril of people sitting nearby in cafes and restaurants. This felt different, though. Maybe because men were not a shared interest.

‘Here’s to bisexuality,’ she said, raising an imaginary glass.

‘I don’t know if I’m very good at it,’ Theo admitted.

Priya blinked at him. ‘What do you mean?’ She held up a hand. ‘Actually, give me a sec, I need another daiquiri first. Minimum of two daiquiris before I hear about dicks attached to men.’

She secured another drink, pausing to flirt with the bartender some more, and when she sat down immediately put her mouth on the straw. Presumably ready to start chugging. ‘Hit me,’ she said, a bit muffled.

‘I kinda freaked out. About, uh, you know.’

‘I absolutely don’t know.’

‘About blowing him.’

She let the straw fall out of her mouth. ‘Was it ... weird-looking or something? Does he not manscape?’

‘No! I mean, it wasn’t weird-looking. Also, manscape ?’

Priya shrugged, unapologetic. ‘It’s a good word.’

‘If you’re Cosmopolitan circa 2012, yes.’

‘You’re deflecting.’

He sighed and got it out there. ‘I freaked out about not being good at it,’ he said into his glass.

Priya snorted. ‘Theo.’

‘Don’t laugh at me.’ It felt unfair, her laughing at him after Jake had laughed at him. Even though he knew neither of them was really laughing at him. Jake had sucked his dick, and teased him, and been hot and understanding, and the only thing Theo had done was be weird about it after the fact.

Priya was studying him. ‘You like going down on girls. What’s the difference?’

‘It’s not that I don’t like the idea, it’s just —’

‘— you don’t want to be bad at it?’ She shook her head. ‘You are the worst perfectionist I know.’

Those were fighting words, coming from her.

She took a sip of her daiquiri. ‘I mean, the first couple of times you went down on girls weren’t smooth sailing, and you persisted. Why is this different?’

Priya knew about that because the internet had not been a useful resource for troubleshooting. Priya had been a useful resource. There had been diagrams.

‘I guess ... it just feels different now. I’m in my mid-twenties, I should know what I’m doing.’

Priya gave him a deeply unimpressed look. ‘Now who’s imbibed a whole lot of shit from Cosmo ?’

‘I know, I know.’

‘I think it’s a pretty common experience for queer people to feel like this,’ Priya said, not teasing anymore. ‘Jake wasn’t a dick about it, was he?’

‘No.’

That was part of the problem. If Jake had been even just a little annoyed, Theo might have been able to stop thinking about the whole situation.

But, instead, he’d been sexily sympathetic.

Now, rather than putting the whole experience in a box labelled embarrassing, do not open , the memories were just roaming unchecked around Theo’s brain.

‘He was chill about it. We ... managed.’

‘I’ll bet. So what’s the problem? It sounds like it was fine.’

‘I’m being weird about it. Weird around him.’

‘You? Never.’

‘I don’t like you.’

‘How are you being weird about it?’

‘I think about it every time I see him!’ he blurted. He lowered his voice. ‘It’s so fucking distracting.’

‘Mm,’ she said. ‘And?’

God, her eyebrows were cruel. ‘When I texted him to say we shouldn’t do it again, I said I had a good time, and that I hoped he had a good time. When he replied, he didn’t say he had a good time.’

‘When you ... texted him to say you shouldn’t do it again,’ Priya repeated, slowly. ‘Can I see the messages?’

Theo handed over his phone. Priya perused the messages while Theo finished his daiquiri and wished for death.

‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘I think I like him after all.’

‘Why?’

‘I mean’ – she tapped the phone – ‘he gave you what you wanted, right? You said you wanted to forget about it, and he didn’t bring it up after that.

It would have been a bit much if you’d been like, I think we should forget about it , and then he’d followed up with, I had a really good time sucking your dick, I’m sorry you don’t want to do it again . ’

‘I guess.’

Priya narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You’re so salty about this. Why?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yeah, you are. Are you all sad because he wasn’t like, Oh em gee, that was the best sex of my life, I’m so pleased we fucked and then you told me we shouldn’t do it again over text, I just want you to rip all my clothes off and put your mouth all over my — ’

Theo threw half a maraschino cherry at her. He missed, which was for the best, because her blouse was definitely silk.

‘I didn’t want him to say that ,’ he protested. ‘It just would have been nice if he’d said he also had a good time.’

‘But you know .’

‘I guess.’ Theo nudged disconsolately at the remaining cherry. The paper straw had lost the structural integrity required to act as a skewer.

Priya was watching him. Her eyes narrowed, and then she grinned. ‘You like him,’ she sing-songed, as though they were back in the mall after school, drinking iced coffee and gossiping.

‘Of course I like him, we’re friends.’

Priya’s eyebrows had become a fully-fledged participant in the conversation. ‘Uh huh.’

‘I can’t be into him, Priy. He’s my teammate.’

‘Yes, nobody has ever been into someone they can’t be into. ’ She did a very uncharitable impression of his voice.

‘Sometimes people have casual sex with their friends,’ he tried. ‘And then go back to being friends who don’t have sex. That is a thing that people can do.’

‘ People can do that, but in this case there is no evidence that you are people.’

The problem with Priya was that she’d known him for too long. She knew about every person he’d ever had sex with (three people, before Jake). And she also knew that each time he had been in a relationship with those people. Sex always made the most sense to him in that context.

Or at least it had , until he’d been playing Mario Kart with Jake Cunningham.

‘What are you going to do?’ Priya asked. She was using the tone he sometimes heard her adopt with agitated solicitors who called her out of hours.

‘Not do it again,’ Theo said firmly. Very firmly. With implacable firmness.

‘Are you going to be able to survive without showing him you’re good at giving head?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m getting us another round, and we’re going to talk about how you can be less weird tomorrow.’