It’s nobody’s business where Cornelius learned knots — Billy from the pub still calls him Con when they talk, with an exasperated sincerity that makes his blood pressure spike. Hal doesn’t call him anything while they’re fucking, or he calls him lots of things but none of them register as particularly important.

Hal’s cock stands proud, achingly sensitive and angry-red from an earlier round of abuse — Hickey rubs at the piss-slit with his thumb, pressing in with his fingernail. He’d had a nice bit of business slapping Hal’s soft cock with a bare hand, pinching and twisting just enough to make him complain — now his balls are tightly bound with cotton shoelaces, constricting the scrotum and forcing each tender testicle apart. (Hal came to him tastefully shaven, after a telephone call that he, Hickey, had spent deriding his modest sand-colored pubes. It’s a dark thing to realize that nothing about the size of his cock can be attributed to optical illusion.) The veins in his prick stand out like sculpture; and every mole and every burst blood vessel is precisely placed for maximum visual appeal. He’s already come once like this, spunking all over his own softly-muscled belly — tied up to the bedposts of some disgusting piece of ancestral furniture, probably where Philippa was conceived or something, and being thoroughly debauched by a terrible little Irish Marxist and his small cruel hands. The last thing Hickey wants to do is to be outpaced twice.

Hal is stark naked apart from his tennis socks, and his body is painted in varying shades of pink with occasional detours into bruise-purple. His long horsey thighs have ceased to strain and instead fall open, slack. The blood pooling in his scrotum makes it stand out, heavy and flushed, but the aperture behind or the niche between his buttocks is warm and downy, sweat-wet. Hickey hooks his fingers into it and probes for Hal’s asshole, just to feel him shift the angle of his hips in expectation. But he’d like that too much, and it would disturb the scene somehow, ruin the tableau of him. Hickey plants himself between Hal’s knees, as Hal complains and wanks himself off against the top of those rosy tennis-player thighs. It’s the next best thing to turning Hal over and spunking all over his hole, without the trouble of untying him, and his disciplined strokes bring him where he wants to be soon enough. He shoots his load against the knots restraining Hal’s balls, and stripes them in spunk. Like an artist signing his masterpiece; like a weird parting shot. Hickey comes laughing.

Having achieved his own amusements, Hickey slinks back against the pillows. He hunts for a cigarette, then lights it. There is always some risk of discovery when the two of them undertake these little acts of class warfare — police, the cleaners, Hal’s sisters all turning up at once without warning. This is no time to be passive. He could press the dully glowing end of the cigarette into the velvet skin on the head of Hal’s prick, or grind it into one of his softly raised nipples until it blisters — that is an image that haunts Hickey’s own fantasies, heated visions of disembodied body parts being burned or pierced or raised in welts with no particular care for their owner. Hal is easy to parcel out in Hickey’s filthy imagination; in the flesh he has an inconvenient force of personality, even when he’s been fucked into insensibility.

From his abject position, Hal asks, “Give me one of those, would you? I’m dying for a swallow.”

The smell of smoke seems to perk him up. Hickey holds out the cigarette in his hand and Hal inclines his head to take it; for a moment he is only a pert little mouth, a shoulder, the line of a chin and a throat. Hickey presses the filter-end to Hal’s ready lips, and feels against his knuckles the tugging of his breath.