Chapter Text
It’s a good name for a speed-dating club. To the point. Has that snappiness to it, easy to remember.
Henry writes it down in his notebook, the cap of the pen pinned by his lips. His breath wheezes around it, the remains of a cold lingering like a stubborn crumb between your teeth. No one tells you that your immune system capitulates at forty. He’s currently forty-two, which wouldn’t be as daunting if he was remotely satisfied with his position in life.
If he had to explain that position in layman terms, it would be butt-naked, strung up on the ceiling, with a strap-on shredding his arsehole to the beat of Stayin’ Alive .
Now, Henry doesn’t judge, but that’s not really his cup of tea.
Earl Grey, with a flat teaspoon of sugar and a dash of milk - if you asked.
For the last four months, two weeks, three days and, approximately, six hours and twenty-three seconds, no one has been asking Henry about his tea preference. Henry has been making it by himself. This often happens at three o’clock in the morning when he’s rudely awakened by his roommate stumbling home drunk after another stand-up gig.
He has a roommate now. Might as well chuck him back in Uni and give him a Smirnoff Ice and baggy jeans slipping down his thighs. Not that he ever wore those. He has some class.
This speed-dating thing was Shaan’s idea. That it is a great way to broaden the horizon means little when they’re both acutely aware it will be just another fluff article in the Daily Mirror that 23% of women over thirty-five will read and promptly forget after telling their girlfriends.
That’s what five years of studying and eighteen years of working has come to. Fluff. Sugary, pink cotton-candy that’s as easily digestible as it’s malnourishing.
His most read article is an in-depth essay on Keira Knightley’s movie roles through time, which would be somewhat impressive if he at least met the woman.
He didn’t. She reclined the interview.
Which brings him here. 112 Kilburn High Road, northwest from the part of London where anything remotely interesting happens. A two-way street like any other, a Specsavers as its closest neighbor.
And there, hanging above the door, the gory, blue neon sign.
First Impressions.
“You’re not exactly making a great one,” Henry mumbles to himself. He takes a picture with his cellphone, squinting in the low sun to see if he managed to avoid capturing a wayward fingertip for once. Philip’s teenage daughters always flip when he does that, saying things like okay, boomer which Henry knows is supposed to be offensive.
Also, he’s not a boomer. He’s a millennial. By like three months, but it counts.
With a deep inhale, the kind Catherine says is good for his currently severely strained heart, he pushes open the door.
It’s an onslaught. An assault really. Almost like he’s up on that ceiling again, except someone’s exchanged him for a disco ball and the pink spotlights that were popular in the early 2000’s.
A long hallway leads to a room filled with the kind of lively chatter Henry pulled from his life like an infected appendix in his late twenties. Clinking of glasses, shrill laughter. Fun .
He’s late, but only by five minutes. According to his sister, he was under no circumstances to arrive early to a speed-dating event because he’s not that desperate .
He’s a little desperate, but that’s up to par. When your ex-husband cheats on you three times and is still the one to end it, you’re in need of a confidence boost. Ideally in the form of three hot, young men pulling you into their bed and filling all your holes at once.
His nose scrunches up.
Maybe just one hot, young man.
“Is this the speed-dating gig?”
Henry blinks.
Maybe this hot, young man. Not that he’s particularly young. A few silver strands split into dark curls around his ears. With an inch on Henry and broad shoulders, he fits perfectly into Henry’s fantasy of being manhandled on the couch, that straight row of white teeth digging into the flesh of his ass.
“It is,” Henry croaks.
He should have done this sooner. Tinder had done little for his self-esteem. He ended up deleting the entire thing the fourth time his ‘hi’ insert appropriate smiley face was answered by some form of dtf?
Henry is, in fact, dtf , though ideally after a dinner first. He’s a lady. He wants to be wined and dined and he really doesn’t think that’s too much to ask.
The man grins for a second time, thick lips curving nicely upwards and sending his honey brown eyes into a cascade of delicate wrinkles.
Henry wouldn’t call himself a traditionalist. Perhaps a little conservative. Not conservative conservative. He’s what Percy, his roommate, would call a closeted raging gay. The raging being the closeted part. He’s been openly gay since Philip caught him snogging the next-door neighbor, a cute Indian boy with a slight accent that had Henry’s then fourteen-year old body parts tingling interestedly. Philip, the bugger, had naturally run to Catherine in the hopes of seeing his younger brother punished for his heinous crimes.
Catherine had invited the boy over for dinner and that was that. Uneventful, in the grand scheme of things. Mary had a coronary of course.
Not literally.
Well, yes, literally, but like seven years later. Hardly his fault, though Philip carefully reminds him of the fact every year on her birthday, standing by her grave at the cemetery.
Whatever, Henry pays for the flowers.
So yes, he’s certainly not the most sexually freed man to ever be graced with interest in other men. That’s partly because he’s been in a relationship with the same man for twenty years, married for twelve of them.
Like Percy says, you get accustomed to a certain butthole. Sniffing out new ones might be dismaying at first, but then you learn to enjoy the different aromas, spicy and bitter and perhaps berry-scented depending on your personal lubricant-preference.
Henry bought a blackberry one at Tesco the other day. Thank fuck for self-checkouts.
“So,” the man says, still firmly placed a shallow foot from Henry’s slightly hunched frame. Henry tries to do something about that, the hunched part, lifting his chin and facing those soft eyes dead-on. “What brings you to a place like this?”
A come-on. Even in the man’s American dialect with its gentle, washed-out vowels, it’s easy to tell.
Now, Henry isn’t in on the newest lingo. He recently jumped away in fright when someone said they wanted to smash him, but even he knows the good old variant of ‘come here often?’.
“I’m writing an article, actually,” Henry says, because he’s a dork and incapable of flirtation, even when he’s thirsty as fuck.
Percy taught him that one. Despite being five years Henry’s senior, the man is a dictionary. A goddamn parental guide to horny sexting.
The man raises a brow. “An article?” he prompts, genuinely sounding interested, which is either an attempt at small talk or Henry’s lucky day. “About what?”
Sound erupts from further ahead. It’s a good excuse for Henry to lean in. The man smells like sandalwood, some expensive cologne that would break Henry’s budget.
“About whether physical first impressions result in more surviving relationships than digital ones.”
A terrible caption. He’ll have to workshop that.
The man’s mouth twists, a widening of sorts. Paired with the permanent furrow between his brows, it’s hard to tell whether it’s interest or thinly disguised disgust.
“Depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose.”
Henry leans back and folds his arms over his chest. He’s been told it makes him look muscular, a hard feat next to the other man. “And what are you looking for?”
Now, that was flirting. Maybe he’s better at this than he thought.
The man breaks out in another grin. God , he’s gorgeous. Henry wouldn’t mind licking him up with a bottle of whipped cream and a dazzle of chocolate sauce on top.
If he’d been 10% as sexually adventurous with Basil, maybe they’d still be cuddled up on the couch watching Great British Bake Off. And jerking each other off, in this particular universe where Henry would dare to miss a second of Noel Fielding’s dark humor.
The man leans in, a glint in his eyes. It might be the disco ball reflecting, or perhaps Henry has gone full-on twilight and started sparkling in the light of this radiant sunshine of a man.
It should probably worry him that his pop-culture references are limited to young-adult books from 2005 and a baking show.
A piece of gum twirls in the man’s mouth, fresh mint mingling among his cologne.
“I’m looking for fun ,” he says, the gum smacking like fireworks and Henry seriously considers dipping forward and swooping the thing out of the man’s increasingly enticing mouth.
Henry can be fun. He did dress up as Dorothy for Liam’s Halloween party a week back. Some would call that fun. Even if he sat for an hour on the staircase, nursing a vodka redbull and petting the residential house cat.
She was cute. Made him want a dog.
Henry is taking too long to answer. Surely that’s why the man leans back, extending his hand like they’re in a business meeting and he’s Henry’s lawyer.
He looks like a lawyer. A tailored suit clings to his muscles like Henry would cling to his erect cock. A delicate leather satchel is pinned over his shoulder. Easy to envision in a court room somewhere, banging his fist onto the table as he shouts ‘Objection, your honor!’.
See, Henry’s pop-culture references also include chick flicks from 2001.
Anyway, the man has clearly come straight from work, unless he’s one of those psychopaths who actually enjoy living in the kind of suit he’ll be buried in. And it’s six o’clock on a Saturday.
Definitely a lawyer.
“Alex,” the man says, his palm warm and dry in Henry’s embarrassingly clammy one. It’s not Henry’s fault the man is stirring up some intriguing visuals.
“Henry,” he answers, because he knows his own name and doesn’t at all falter because he’s holding the hand of one of the contestants for top 40 over 40.
The man, Alex, lets go after the appropriate amount of time, which Henry would easily add another two seconds too if it was up to him.
“Well,” Alex says, gesticulating toward the room at the end of the hall. His eyes crinkle. “Should we meet the rest of the hopefuls?”
Oh, Henry is hopeful alright. With a surprisingly firm nod, he gestures for the man to go first. Out of chivalry, obviously, not because of the astounding view it gives him of the man’s firm butt.
Henry loves a firm butt.
Alex stops when the room comes fully into view. Ahead of them is a bar, currently occupied by several people of different genders that is delving into the liquid courage with fervor. There are four long tables made from colorful plastic. Two to the left, two to the right. Mismatched chairs, very chic.
Henry side-steps the wooden sign on the floor. Gestures to the right with a pointed thumb.
“Shall we?” he asks, a regular Mr. Darcy. He’s two seconds from extending his hand, only to flex it enticingly at his side afterwards in a five-second movie shot that sometimes sends Henry over the edge when his vibrator is on its highest setting.
Alex frowns.
Looks down to the sign.
Back up at Henry.
“I’m going that way,” he says, mirroring Henry’s thumb by pointing to the left.
Henry blinks.
On the sign, in large, white, block-letters, because they’re all children here, written clear as a pink, disco day –
Heterosexual couples to the left, same-sex couples to the right.
Henry hasn’t had a full-sized cock up his butt in over a year. Probably a good thing with how his stomach threatens to escape down his rectum.
And then, because he’s an eloquent human being with a bachelor in creative writing and a master in journalism, he says –
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
Henry’s mouth seems to linger on the vowel. A perfectly round shape of plush, pink lips. A joint would fit expertly inside that ring. Alex wouldn’t mind sharing a joint right now. Small puffs of smoke dwindling through the air, hazy as the world blurs around them.
Perhaps Henry is simply filtering the sweaty, perfumed cloud of the bar through his mouth, tasting anticipation on his tongue.
Or he’s looking at Alex with disappointment.
Now, Alex rarely disappoints. He’s actually exceptionally good at not disappointing. Ever since he moved to London at nineteen to start his law degree, he’s disappointed exactly one person.
The fact that he’s been doing so for the last twenty-one years and counting is not relevant. Easily dismissible in court.
Alex is a partner at Luna & Co. A highly acclaimed firm, primarily working with family law. This may seem angelic enough, but Alex specializes in divorces. Dirty divorces. The kind where one partner, the richest, does the equivalent of running the other over with a tractor by taking all their money. It’s hardly the kind of occupation that gets you a cake and a party at the pearly gates to heaven, but it’s challenging, fun and the number one reason Alex owns an apartment on King Henry’s Road and an electric blue Porsche.
The color of Henry’s eyes, in fact, which is a fun coincidence even with those eyes dimming at a rapid pace before him.
It’s not like Alex has never been hit on by a guy before. He’s a good looking dude, and not afraid to admit it. Except for the silver taking root at his hairline, he could easily pass for someone in his early thirties, especially in a dim place like this with the added foggy vision brought on by liquor and sex-drive.
He works out once a day. Ideally in the evenings. He’s not a morning person. If he’s not in his office by seven, his inbox will be filled to the brink and his secretary will have to hook him up to a caffeine drip to get him through to lunch.
That he’s been needing that drip more often than usual lately has nothing to do with how he’s officially over a year into his forties. The way his bones sometimes creak beneath the bar when he squats, when he punches out twenty pull-ups in a row, is not wear-and-tear.
His colleagues would call it ‘pain leaving the body’. Which is funny, because Alex’s pain feels firmly rooted despite presumably having left his body at five different points during his workday.
He’s been sitting too much, that’s all. He’ll have to look into one of those standing-desk-thingies.
Back to Henry. He’s a good-looking dude. Alex is an adult. He’s not one of those no-homo bros who backs up ten steps if a man so much as winks at him. Alex can admit when someone is easy on the eyes. He didn’t exactly mind taking Josh to see the first Avengers movie back in 2012, when the kid was nine and hadn’t fully grown to dislike his father yet. Chris Hemsworth is a hunk .
Alex has been called a hunk plenty of times. In fact, when he folds his hands on the back of his neck, he knows his suit jacket strains just right around his triceps.
“Well, well,” Alex says, grinning at the other man as he sees him trail his gaze over Alex’s extended arms.
If he were one of those asshole-Chads with an inferiority complex, he’d dim it down, run with his tail between his legs before he ‘catches the gay’.
Alex banged one of the female associates in the bathroom before coming here. He’s hardly insecure in his sexuality. “Good luck in there, Henry, I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
The man never told Alex what exactly that was, but he can guess. A blue cotton sweater pulled over a crisp, white shirt. Khaki-pants tight over lean, but muscular, thighs. His soft-looking blond hair pushed to one side.
Commitment. Permanency. A relationship.
Ugh.
It’s a nice smile though. The corners of his mouth curls up in surprise, escaping into his flushed cheeks. His eyes are trailed by more wrinkles than Alex sees in the mirror, though Henry’s pale skin still has that youthful glow.
It might simply be the disco lights.
“You too, Alex,” he says in that deep, chest-rattling voice.
He turns, walking towards the right side of the room where he’s welcomed by a woman wearing the ugly 90’s neon logo as a pin on her chest. He stops politely to hear whatever she has to say, his legs hip-width apart.
Those really are some tight pants.
The bar is a trainwreck. Just another place trying to be hip with its casual decor and laid back atmosphere. Give Alex a stuffy white-clothed place any day, at least it’s not pretending to be something it’s not.
This whole thing was Nora’s idea. Pathetic really, taking advice from your ex, even if said ex has been your closest friend since you were nineteen and realized you had no romantic or sexual chemistry whatsoever outside a drunken hook-up leading to two blue lines and existential panic.
The catholic in him hadn’t been beaten out by then, and Nora wanted to keep the baby. And that is how they ended up with Josh Holleran Diaz, a brown-skinned, wailing thing clocking in at just beneath eight pounds.
Now he’s 5.9, drowning his decently sized frame in thick wool sweaters and shouts the loudest at any march for insert some random marginalized people’s rights .
Alex is a lawyer. He knows shouting. And marching. He cares about animals and indigenous people and whatever war is currently going on somewhere in the world. He does. Truly. He just doesn’t have a single second available in his life to sign petitions or walk the streets or write increasingly angry essays and send them to the Daily Telegraph.
Alex reads all of Josh’s essays though. Prints them out and keeps them in a folder and everything. He’s not that absent.
Point is, Nora wanted him to actually try meeting someone. Outside whatever dating app is currently most popular – Hinge , if you’re asking -- and consider meeting them more than once.
Which is redundant when Alex only needs to see them once to get them back up to his apartment. A second night is rare. Then again, he doesn’t mind a surprise repeat if he casually meets someone at a club after a late-night work event.
Nora seems to think Alex needs friends . Alex has friends. He occasionally golfs with his colleagues. And he eats lunch with Luna and Richards almost every day. Or at least the two times a week he doesn’t eat it on his desk, stuck in a Teams-meeting.
“Hi,” a woman says, curling her manicured fingers like a contented cat. A whiff of flowers follows her slim frame, boobs spilling delicately out of her cocktail dress. It’s black and backless, long blond hair trickling down her spine.
Alex wouldn’t mind being her friend.
Her name turns out to be Tanya, and no amount of top-shelf Macallan can make her ramblings about her BookTok interesting. This is why he doesn’t talk to his conquests. A woman gets decisively less intriguing with each Instagram-post she shows you of perfectly aligned books captioned pink month or fall tbr or fictional men I’d like to fuck .
Actually, Alex finds himself sliding through the images on that last one – because seriously, Mr. Darcy? – until the buzzer rings and he gently nudges the sparkling phone back to Tanya and her french nails.
It doesn’t get much better from there. Hannah is a petite brunette with cascading curls. She’s a veterinarian, which sounds nice enough until she starts crying over a story of a dog they had to euthanize earlier that morning. A waitress hands her a pack of Kleenex, and the fact that they have Kleenex at a speed-dating event is enough to question the longevity of a place like this. Alex gently pats her hand, he’s not an animal – pun intended – and then promptly moves to the next contestant, leaving a sobbing Hannah to a bewildered looking younger guy.
At least the whisky is good. Spicy and warm, a hint of smoke tickling his nostrils. It curls around his tired bones, mending them in a way paracetamol never manages. It almost makes the last conversation pleasant, even if he has no intentions of taking fifty-three year old Jeanie back to his apartment. She’s funny though, a gynecologist who’s stories of ‘the things she’s seen’ are enough to shed Alex of any intention of getting laid tonight.
Which is probably why he lingers by the bar, nursing a third – fourth? – drink as he watches the other side of the room. There are some hot young chicks by what he assumes to be the Lesbian table. Too bad they shoot for the other team.
They could be bisexual though, the woke part of Alex’s brain points out. Or pan. Or demi. Or whatever the cool kids call it these days, a ‘not-zero’ on the Kinsey Scale.
Henry is still sitting by the table, a glass of red wine between his large palms. The same color stains his lips where they’re pulled into a white smile, his head dipping down and giving him a gentle double chin as he laughs.
Alex can’t hear it from here, but it’s easy to see the shake of those shoulders, bent forward where he seems to carry the world firmly upon them.
The man he’s talking to is about their age. Chestnut-brown hair, fluffed up and unruly. He’s pale, but not in the almost blue-tinted way Henry is, more like a guy who actually sees the sun every once in a while, whenever it decides to grace them with its presence in London. Alex watches as the man smiles crookedly. He picks up a piece of pen and paper from the substantial amount littering the table, and scribbles down what is surely his name and number.
Huh. At least one of them got lucky tonight.
Not that lucky, though. The man jumps from the table, showing off his ripped jeans and hooded sweatshirt, before grabbing his coat and leaving for the evening.
Henry seems pleased enough. Holds the paper in his hand as if it’s the Bible itself. A dumb smile lingers on his face, one that morphs in surprise as Alex sits down across from him.
“Cute guy?”
Henry blinks, his eyes glassy. “Uhm, yeah –” he starts, waggling the paper in the air –“I suppose so.”
“You suppose so,” Alex repeats, mimicking Henry’s accent. It’s a little posh. Not unlike some of the clients traveling through his office halls. “Then why didn’t you bring him home?”
A grimace crosses Henry’s face, dissolving in a chuckle. Red wine stains the air between them, a delicate disruption to the thick perfumes. “Maybe I’ll call him tomorrow,” he says, shoulders lifting in a fluid shrug. “Ask him on a date.”
Alex raises a brow. “You can’t call him,” he says, a touch of indignance coloring his whisky-clad tongue. “Give it three days, then text.”
Henry’s head cocks, sending his perfectly aligned hair tousling over his forehead. It makes him look boyish, especially when his tongue darts out to wet his darkened lips.
“Why?”
Alex snorts. “Jesus tits, when did you last go out on a date?”
Henry’s eyes do a twitchy squinting thing. “2004.”
Jaw-dropping doesn’t cut it. Alex’s entire face must have fallen through the floor, stuck in the deepest pits of hell somewhere, because that’s certainly where Alex would be if he hadn’t had a date in twenty-fucking-years .
“Okay, dude –” he says, lifting a hand to call a waiter –“we’re going to need another drink”.