I’m hyperaware of how quiet it is in this bathroom now, and what kind of racket I must have been making.
“You’re welcome.” He stands up and lightly slaps my cheek, then pinches it.
“Do you want . . . need . . . anything,” I start.
“Later, okay?”
I nod. This would actually be easier, less awkward, and a lot less pressure if I could practise it in the comfort of one of our bedrooms.
“I’m gonna head back out there now,” he says. “You need to give it a few minutes before leaving so that your face can get less blotchy,” Lando says.
I put my hands to my cheeks. They’re warm and sweaty. “Okay. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Lando watches me for a few seconds, a soft smile playing around his mouth. He’s probably proud of himself, of his achievements, of the amount of noise I ended up making despite my best efforts to remain silent. Then he turns to leave.
“Hey, Lando?” I say, pulling him back before he opens the door. “What does cum taste like?”
He cocks his head to the side, curious. “You’ve never tasted your own?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me you’ve never swiped a finger over your stomach and licked it?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Next time, I’ll save some . . . and we can snowball,” he says.
“Snowball? What’s that?”
Lando doesn’t reply. He winks at me instead, turns, and leaves.
A moment later and cool as a cucumber, he says, “Oh, hi, Pi.”
Nooooooo.
No. Pi’s there? Pi heard everything?
“Hey there, Lando,” Pi replies, his voice cutting through the awkward stillness of the bathroom. “Is my best friend in there with you?” Lando must nod, because the next second Pi says, “How ya going, Abs?”
I facepalm, pull up my trousers, buckle my belt, and leave the stall. Pi’s just finishing up at the urinal.
“Alright, mate?” I say, desperately avoiding looking at him because I know with unequivocal certainty that if we lock eyes, I’ll explode into a hideous ball of liquid magma and cause hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage. Lando has long gone.
Pi moves over to the sinks, and I semi-follow him.
“So . . . uh, how much of that did you hear?” I’m tugging on my ear as though I might unlock a secret chamber I could crawl into and die.
“Everything, mate,” Pi says, staring at me in the mirror. “I heard everything. And it’s disgusting, by the way.”
“What?!” Great, my best friend thinks I’m a pervert.
“Cum.”
Oh.
Ohh.
“It tastes disgusting,” he says. “Girls are lying to spare our feelings. It tastes like . . . Mate, have you ever been writing Christmas cards and you’ve got about a hundred envelopes to lick, and there’s always like one or two envelopes that, after you lick them, you want to slice your tongue off and lob it out of the window?”
