Starting The New Year Off With A Bang

My unintentional beginning of 2022...

Photo Credit: Ian Schneider

It began in a small, boxy patio, with dubstep music wailing at us from the indoors.

I was up in Newcastle at a New Year’s Eve party. Tom sat beside me. His tweed jacket had holes in it. His ginger curls peaked out from underneath his flat cap. He had green eyes and a wicked grin; the kind of grin, I imagined, that had made schoolteachers reel as they marched him to detention.

Tom was 25, about two years younger than me. But our age group was just about the only thing we had in common. He was a Northerner, a true blood Geordie. I was a Southerner from London, that far-off dystopian metropolis, supposedly full of wankers, some four hours away by train. As we sat in the garden, Tom struck his extra-long matches to light cigarettes for friends and strangers. I can’t remember much of what he said to me, because I could only understand about ¾ of it. But he listened and he made me laugh.

Later that night, I was dancing by the DJ. I finally let the music pound through my body. My cheeks burned, red hot from the MDMA. I ran my hands along the silky sleeves of my black dress. I swayed with the room, feeling more in touch, more in tune with my body.

Tom was beside the bar, glancing at me. We made eye contact, and within a few seconds, he was standing in front of me. He leant in at my shoulder. I felt his firm hand at my waist. He half-shouted in my ear over music,

“I’d love to take you home with me tonight.”

I froze. It was a simple, beautiful question, really. Yet it terrified me. It was the exact thing I had discussed with Barbara, my therapist, for months on end. What was I going to do if I was triggered? The danger of it all made my skin crawl. I wanted to hide.

“We’ll see,” I said, trying to brush him off confidently. Meanwhile, my insides were lighting on fire.

I stumbled out of the room in search of my friend. My mind ran wild. What would she think? Was it safe? Was I safe? Could I ever be propositioned again without feeling like the world was going to end, feeling like I had a fortress to defend, to draw up the bridges, prepare the flint to light the cannons and summon the armies? My sex life had been as dry as the desert for nine months, as I tried to piece my life back together after the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. I was a shell of my former self. I knew logically in my mind that I wanted him. That it would be okay. Freeing, even. Yet everything in my body was screaming against it.

I found my friend, giggling in a heap on a beanbag in the front room.

“Hey! Do you think it’s safe if I get with Tom—”

“Don’t get with him, Tash!” she wailed, “It’ll be so embarrassing for me if you get with Harry’s younger brother.”

I was stunned. Her answer barely scratched the surface of my somersaulting thoughts. The question of my own survival and bodily safety, perhaps the most important thing I had to defend in the whole world. And all she could think about was the social repercussions? For her? It was probably…kind of…okay if I got with Tom then? I reasoned with myself. Almost everyone at the party knew Harry. And so if Tom did anything to me, I could text my friend and she’d know where to find me. They could track me down somehow.

I found Tom on the sofa by the dancefloor, shout-talking to one of his friends. I prodded him on the shoulder. He stood up and I pulled him into the hallway.

“Okay. But you have to know that I am not alright. I need to take things really slow. Okay? I’m kind of fucked up. I had some really fucked up shit happen to me this year—”

“I get you,” Tom said. There was a shimmer of calmness in his eyes, “I’m fucked up too. We’re both fucked up.”

He nodded towards the door, the rim of his flat cap dipping. I gulped and nodded gently back at him. I grabbed my coat.

We headed down the street, and the dubstep faded away into the distance. Tom reached for my hand. The skin of his palm was roughened. It felt like a smooth, molded stone, like the few times I had walked across a heated marble floor. Warm, but with a hardness to him. His hand was so much bigger than mine. We walked the hills, along short rows of tucked away houses. We crossed the fluorescent beams coming from a chippie on the corner. The streets layered in dampened mist. The birds chirped. I checked my phone. It was 4am. We were in The North, a place so foreign to me. But this was Tom’s home.

I told him about my job in New York, and the money and the stress and the pace and the lack of space and the one-upmanship of it all. I told him I felt that I lived in a world where I didn’t know what I wanted, but whatever I earned, it would never be enough. And about my friend who wanted me to pay £5,000 for her wedding gift and bachelorette party.

“That’s clapped,” he said to me. I understood him, and yet, his words were strange to me. Ones from my mother tongue that I had not and would never use. Our language was like two banks of the same river, following each other, but never touching.

We arrived at his small, half-broken front door. We headed up the worn, brown-carpeted stairs. My nerves started to nip at me. What would happen when he tried to touch me? How was I going to react? His room was on the top floor. It was freezing cold. There was nowhere else to go but his bed.

We got under the covers with our clothes on. Tom took off his jacket, his flat cap, his shirt. He loved the silkiness of my dress. His touch was firm as he felt along the outer layer of my body, along my waist. My stomach squirmed. My dress slipped off and out of the bed. I gripped his pale, freckled, muscular shoulders. He felt warm and sweet. It felt comforting. I felt myself glowing, flooded with gratitude. The insane, mind-boggling danger I had faced all those months ago melted away. And now there was pleasure, the joy and the ecstasy of it all. That was waiting for me on the other side.

Tom was intuitive. He knew the way I liked to be touched. The way I liked to be licked and eaten. And the way I liked to have both my hands pinned down at once, half-strangled, even, as he pounded the full weight of his body into mine. My exhaled breaths were warmed against his pale, freckled chest. His freckles.

I felt hungover and crumpled after a night of dancing. My eyes were stinging and stuck with my contact lenses. But Tom saw me differently. He seemed enamored and driven crazy by my bush, driven senseless by my dark pink nipples in the frozen morning air. He cherished the body I saw as mundane. The body that I looked at every day in the mirror. Plain. Ordinary. In the same way, I cherished the dark blue bird tattooed on his pale chest. His freckles. I kissed more of them.

In the late morning, Tom cradled me with one arm and propped his head up with the other. His witty green eyes glinted, inches away from my nose. I let myself be held, as we swam in the depths of each other’s searching gazes.

“You’re a posh lass,” he said, “Shouldn’t you be prancing around in your petticoats? Betrothed to a public-school toff?”

I replied by gripping his balls under the covers, feeling the full girth of him rise up as he skipped a breath.

“Steady on,” he chuckled.

We ordered burgers around noon and ate them in bed and cuddled. I tried to put a finger on what I liked about him. The two halves of England. I thought of the ruggedness, the heartiness, the “working-class” nature of the North. It was nothing like the formalities and the stuck-up-ness, apparently, of the South. The Queen and the wealth and the establishment. Still, we had met, skin to skin, in the middle of his sheets. There was beauty in that. There was magic in that.

We were two ships that should have passed each other in the night. Yet somehow, in each of our lonely lifeworlds, Tom and I had been led astray and found each other. One-night stands come in many flavors, but this one had a special intensity. There was something in Tom holding me in his arms, and me kissing his forehead. It was a reminder to both of us. We still had it in us. And that, yes, lovers do exist. Even if for its only for a blip in time.