Junction X by Erastes

path to his front door, my knuckles whitening as I gripped the steering wheel. I knew then what I was, how I felt and what was wrong-not-wrong with me. For about thirty whole seconds, I didn’t bloody care. My blood was on fire and my skin tingled. I was warm and complete. I felt like a boy who’d just asked the girl of his dreams out on the best date he could afford.
    Thirty perfect seconds. Then the real world crept back and the colours bleached a little. Elation is a bubble that lasts for tiny tiny moments but leaves something of its memory in scents and sounds so that later, when you need that boost, you can close your eyes and remember happiness.
    Like an automaton, I put the car away and went straight upstairs to see the children before lights out. They were pleased as Punch to have an outing with Daddy to look forward to. That feeling of smug rebellion stayed with me for a while.
    The guilt and the worry took longer to resurface. I argued with myself over coffee and liqueurs. What was I doing that was so wrong? All I was doing was taking Alec somewhere he’d enjoy, and I was going there anyway. There was nothing odd that he should accompany us. No one, no one could point a finger and say there was anything strange about that.
    But I remember sliding down into my chair, closing my eyes as I wrapped my hands around the brandy glass. I remember smiling as the music poured from the radio. I remember knowing that it was wrong. And I remember holding that glass close to me on that first night as if this secret— my secret—were captive in the glass and would be easy to keep. Yes—it was wrong and I just didn’t care.
    Trashy novels would state that my world changed in an instant, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t see the world change. You don’t, if you are standing too close. I don’t know when it started to change, but I remember knowing when it had. It was like standing in a field after the densest fog has finally lifted and finding out, after thinking that you were so good at navigation, that you are not at all where you thought you were. You find you are not safely in the wheat field where you started out, but high on a cliff with cormorants below you. It was dizzying, disorientating. It wasn’t until after I realised that I felt a strong physical and mental attraction for Alec that all that confusion I’d been feeling meant something. Stupid? Naïve? Yes. Yes. All those and more.
    What then, I remember thinking, am I going to do about it?
    Nothing, of course. The implications of “doing anything about it” were unthinkable. A thirty-three-year-old man turns to a seventeen-year-old boy and says…what? You’re beautiful? I haven’t been able to get the image of your face, your lips, your legs—God help me—out of my mind for days? One shout to his father and Edward Johnson’s perfect life would end there. What Phil and I, consenting adults, did in secret, was no one’s business. Even though that wasn’t true either. But Alec was untouchable.
    Untouchable.
    The word echoed around my mind as if I’d shouted it. Untouchable. No one could know. Most certainly Alec himself must never know.
    Was I then mad then, to make excuses to see him? I was already concocting schemes to do this. Other fairs. Model villages.
    Would it not be better to break the connection and treat him as the teenage son of a neighbour? It should be his father I was cultivating. I should be inviting Albert to evenings at the club, introducing him up and down The Avenue. I should be planning dinner parties with just the four of us, perhaps thinking about a joint Christmas. I shouldn’t be thinking of ways to take Alec out of The Avenue in my car, just so I could be alone with him.
    But God help me, I was. And it made me feel alive.
    Later that week, I finally got back in touch with Phil. One of the reasons we hadn’t seen each other since Claire leaving him was that he’d been throwing himself into his job—which is what I