Part the Seventeenth

How he made it back to his own home was something of a mystery; he only knew that when he woke in the early hours of the following morning, in the same soiled trousers and shirt he'd been wearing the night before, it was to the knowledge that he had possibly the worst hangover in the history of mankind, that he had to do a gig in London that very night, and that Colin was standing at the foot of his bed. He let out a scream that was rather less than masculine and scrambled up the bed to the headboard, where he pulled the quilt up to his chin as though it could protect him from what he assumed would be Colin's wrath.

It took him a moment to realise that Colin didn't look wrathful at all; it was something of a relief, given his attitude the previous evening.

“How the fuck did you get in?” he asked.

Colin smirked. “You were so out of it last night that you didn't even lock the door when you got in,” he said, coming round the side of the bed and picking up a glass of water and two white pills from the table. “Aspirin,” he explained, tipping the pills into Thom's lap and holding out the glass, which Thom took uncertainly with a mumbled, “Thanks.”

“So,” Colin continued, sitting down at the foot of the bed, his tone suddenly brusque and businesslike, “did you protect the poor damsel in distress?”

Thom coughed mid-swallow and dribbled half of the water down his front. “What?”

“Jonny,” Colin clarified. Thom was painfully reminded of the state of his boxers, and he shifted uncomfortably, feeling his face flush bright red.

“He wasn't much in distress,” he admitted, finishing the water and putting the glass back on the table. “I... um... you know about him and Wesley?”

Colin gave him a sharp look. “It depends on what you mean by know. How much do you know about them?”

Thom swallowed again, his throat suddenly very dry despite the water. “Um... well, I saw them. Last night. They were... er... you know...”

“Fucking?” Colin said matter-of-factly. “I know that much, Thom. There's no need to be coy about it. As I said, I'm not my brother's keeper; and Wesley was there first, after all.”

Thom felt his jaw drop. “He... what?”

Colin snorted. “They were dating all through Jonny's fifth year,” he said. “Didn't you even notice, Thom? It drove me to distraction while I was away in Cambridge, but I thought it would be all right, because you were there to keep an eye on him... and you didn't know. Did you? You never even thought to ask -”

Thom thought that was a little unfair. “We spent that whole year concentrating on the band, Coz,” he began. “I didn't even think he had a sex life. He was still just your kid brother back then.”

But that wasn't strictly true, Thom reminded himself. At first, he and Jonny had been forced together largely by necessity; Jonny missed his brother, Thom missed his best friend, and each had clung to the other as the closest connection to the absent piece of their puzzle. But at some time during those first awkward couple of months, Jonny had stopped coming over just to talk about the band or practise songs, until eventually Thom had started to forget why he'd only barely tolerated Jonny's presence in the first place. And all that time, Jonny had been doing... God knows what... with Wesley.

“When I came back for the Christmas holiday, he told me all about it,” Colin said, his expression turning misty. “He was always strange like that – so shy around everyone else, so open with me. That was how it started. The pair of us, I mean. He was scared, and he knew I'd dated boys, that I knew what to do. It's really not that strange, is it? Older brothers give their younger brothers advice like that, don't they? About girls... how to treat them, what they like, what they want to do, how they respond... but we both realised from the beginning that there was something else there, nothing to do with Wesley at all.”

“He didn't just want your advice,” Thom said quietly.

Colin glanced over at him, and for a brief instant Thom saw something strange in those dark eyes; fleetingly, the most vivid impression of human suffering Thom thought he would ever witness. It was gone in a second, lingering only long enough for Thom to have been certain that it was there; in the next moment, Colin had composed himself again. “I suppose that if you watched them last night, you will understand enough about how they both prefer their... liaisons... to be played out?”

Thom thought about the fighting, the complete disarray of Jonny's front room, the bruises Wesley had sported, the way Wesley had held Jonny down when they'd fucked... “Jonny likes to give up control,” he said slowly. “And Wesley... he likes to take it.”

Colin rubbed a hand over his face, nodding. “Jonny was only sixteen. He was sheltered from those things. And he told me about this boy, this handsome, talented older boy who had shown an interest in him – it had started out innocently enough, piano lessons, would you believe – and all of a sudden he was telling me about how this boy had fucked him over the piano in one of the music practice rooms at school -”

Thom felt a violent jolt in his stomach. “Wesley told me about that,” he said. “And then he told me he was lying...”

Colin shook his head ruefully. “Not a lie. It sounded like a strange kind of dating to me, even at the time. Perhaps if it had been a girl it might have been different, but because I knew what it was like, I knew about boys, it was too odd. And Jonny was telling me that he liked it, and that he liked the other things Wesley liked to do – holding him down, tying him up with his belt or his school tie or scarf, even slapping him – and that Wesley liked him to struggle, that it seemed as though he couldn't enjoy it otherwise, and Jonny was happy to oblige him. And... Wesley was asking him to do other things... controlling everything he did... and he was afraid that he wasn't going to be good enough and Wesley would give up on him. He wanted me to teach him.”

“And you did.”

Colin sighed. “And somewhere along the line I found that I'd fallen for him as hard as he'd fallen for Wesley. I wanted to protect him... it was the best way I could see of doing that. And somehow it never stopped.”

Thom knew then why Jonny had so emphatically protested the notion that Thom needed to be worried about his situation with Colin. Perhaps Colin had hurt his brother, but only physically, and only because Jonny had wanted it – had asked for it – and, as Jonny had said, Colin could never refuse him anything. He could see in that instant precisely where the balance of power lay in their strange relationship; Colin might have held the cards, but it was Jonny who dealt them out.

“You said they dated all through Jonny's fifth year,” he pressed. “What happened?”

Colin looked down at his lap, picking at a fingernail, uncharacteristically reticent all of a sudden. “I think that's something you should ask them,” he said after a moment. “As far as I know, they hadn't even spoken to each other in years, until a few months ago. Jonny learned about the Club from him, it's how I ended up joining it. I don't know any more than that.”

Thom could see that he wasn't going to get any further on the matter, so he changed tack. “Wesley knows I saw them,” he confessed. “I think... when we were, um... he was trying to pretend I was Jonny all the time. But he knows about Jonny and I. And... he knows about you and Jonny, doesn't he?”

Colin's head jerked up sharply. “How do you know that?” he snapped.

“He said something the other day... I just wondered. Jonny started things with you, and he started things with me, and yet Wesley was there first... why can't he just stay with Wesley?”

Colin gave a hollow laugh. “Jonny's inability to stay faithful is one of the reasons he comes to me asking for punishment so regularly,” he said. “Or were you labouring under the delusion that he considers monogamy one of his virtues? Oh, he has his reasons, sure enough, but this notion that my brother is some chaste innocent little flower... wholly misguided. It's the pretty face, isn't it? The doe eyes? You can ask Wesley, he'll tell you the same thing – Jonny might not mean it, but whether or not the intent is there, he's little better than those groupies who kept showing up naked at his hotel door in America.”

Try as he might, Thom couldn't get this thought out of his mind. Having been used to the facets of his character that Jonny chose to project, he knew he'd been surprised at the things Jonny kept hidden; the makeup and stockings, the boy who would dress as a girl at his brother's whim, who would suck off his best friend in a roadside bathroom, who would blush at a birthday cake before going home to be fucked over his sofa by a man with fantasies of dominance that had warped him before he should have known of such things.

“You shouldn't condemn him for how he is,” Colin warned, and Thom jumped; he'd almost forgotten Colin was in the room at all. “He was made like this by the way he grew up. You know, until the day he asked you if he could join the band, I don't think anyone had ever denied him anything. He was the baby of the family, the teachers' pet... not that he was a brat. I didn't really mean that. Otherwise I could have felt justified in hating him, perhaps, but I never did... I never would. I think that's why he was always fascinated by you, because you'd finally given him a reason to fight for something. And now I think it's hard for him to say no to anyone else, because he learned that distinction so late in life.”

Thom was reminded vividly of something Wesley had said, when he had told Thom about he and Jonny and the piano lessons. He couldn't say no. Probably bent over for half the school. It was that, more than anything else, that convinced him Wesley had been telling the truth; at the time, he thought Wesley had just been saying it to get him off, but now it sounded as though the other man had been trying to warn him.

Thom wondered whether Jonny told all of his conquests that he loved them, too.

“I've been stupid, haven't I?” he said dejectedly, feeling horribly naïve.

“Not at all,” Colin reassured him, in what was clearly intended to be a consoling voice. “Just... let him down gently, when you tell him, all right?”

Thom stared at him, his mouth suddenly feeling as though it had been stuffed with cotton wool. “Tell him what?”

Colin's eyes were narrowed dangerously, and alarm bells started to ring in the recesses of Thom's skull, too late for him to escape. “That you can't possibly stay with him, because you can't trust him to be faithful,” he said simply. There was a measured coolness to his tone which told Thom that he'd been building to this throughout the entire conversation. “It will hurt him, at first... it will hurt both of you, I trust. But you've said no to him in the past, haven't you? It'll be easier this time. And...” He paused, allowing himself a small smile. “You know that, in the end, it will be for the best.”

He got up from the bed then, and clapped his hands together, as Thom continued to gape at him in a stunned daze. “Right! Coffee first, I think, and then something to soak up all that nasty alcohol. We've got a long day ahead of us, haven't we, Thom?”