“By the way,” he wrote, “there are two of us…”
I sat in the semi-darkness of the room, the light of my phone screen the only illumination. My friend Joanne lay curled up in the bed opposite, her breathing settling into the slow and steady rhythm of sleep. On a mattress at the foot of the bed, Maria was swaddled in blankets, already slumbering. We had spent the penultimate night of our trip in Milan drinking cocktails and dancing like wild things, sauntering tipsily back to Joanne’s apartment soon after 2 a.m. The girls had fallen into bed upon our return, but I was still buzzing with energy. I wanted more, so I had turned on my Grindr app.
“I think I’m interested,” I wrote back.
It was a dry October night and the city streets were washed in the buttery light of the street lamps. I had my phone thrust out in front of me, a map on the screen. I was a blue dot gliding through a maze of grey streets, moving ever closer to the big red pin that marked the place where sexual fantasy would become reality. I walked hurriedly, passing parked cars and crossing empty streets, feeling eager and bold, buoyed up by the night’s cocktails.
When I reached the building, I was told by a voice on the intercom to go to the third floor and I was buzzed in. I couldn’t find the light switch in the hallway, so I ran up the stairs in the dark, too impatient to wait for the lift. When I got to the third floor, a door opened, light pooled out into the landing, and I was greeted by the thickly accented “Hello” of a well-built guy of about thirty, his eyes and hair dark, his skin tan. There was a little dog yapping and jumping about at his feet and, behind him, another figure, tall and blonde.
“Come in, come in,” said the first, “I’m Uri.”
“And I’m András,” said the second, ushering me through to the sitting room.
András was a dancer from Hungary – “in Milan for, oh, seven or eight years now” – and he had a softness to his features that bespoke kindness. Uri took an opaque bottle from the array of bottles on the table, tall and elegant like the skyscrapers of a cityscape, and poured me a drink. He was Israeli, he told me, but he had been in Milan for nine years. They had been a couple for six.
Conversation sprang up between us with ease. We spoke of ourselves, work, travels, and we spoke of Milan. We spoke, too, of Israel and Palestine, Uri’s grandmother and the camps, Northern Ireland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We spoke and we drank, each in our separate chairs, the dog scampering between us.
Uri dominated the conversation, frequently interrupting András or me to counter an argument or lead the conversation in a different direction entirely. András quieted him often – “Let him finish, Uri!” – but I was so taken by his dark, rugged features and his cocky smile that this overconfidence only added to his allure. Besides, I too was feeling confident and I took to quieting Uri myself, putting a hand on his thigh and asking him to hear me out, fizzing up inside at the contact.
After we had been talking for some time, András went out on the balcony to smoke. When he had gone, Uri came close to me, cast a furtive glance over his shoulder and kissed me. He moved away again quickly, smiling like a guilty child, and conversation resumed.
My glass was never allowed to empty as we talked and the alcohol that burned my throat as I drank drained away swathes of time, too. So, in my memory of the night, I remember the three of us standing in the middle of the room without quite being able to recall what had preceded that moment.
Conversation fell away, giving way to kissing and the removal of clothes, desire and instinct taking over. Hands moved urgently over bodies, fingers digging into skin. We migrated to the bedroom and fell upon the bed, a tangle of bodies. The sex comes back to me now in flashes, snapshots punctuating stretches of lost time – descending Uri’s torso, kissing, licking; twisting around to kiss András’ chest, his nipple, his armpit; bodies moving together rhythmically, hot and close, scaled by hands and lips; an ear being bitten...
I awoke with my arms around Uri, who had his arms around András. It might have been any time. I let my hands stray over Uri’s body and we began a sleepy foreplay, my hands moving past him to include András too.
Before long, it occurred to me that I should check my phone and maybe send a message to the girls if it was after 8 or 9. I rose from the bed and went into the sitting room in search of my phone. A barrage of missed calls and messages awaited me. One message from Joanne read:
“We have rang your Dad. We are going to contact the police if we don’t hear back from you soon. PLEASE get through to us.”
It was 2:20 in the afternoon.
I stood there, naked and dazed, the full implications of the message too hard to comprehend, my mind still clouded over by sleep and alcohol. Uri wandered into the room and when he started to kiss me again, I gave myself over to him, happy to delay thinking about all that awaited me in the outside world. “Shh,” he said, “we have to be quiet,” and so we were.
Afterwards, the urgency of the missed calls and messages impressed itself on me in a way it hadn’t before. I got dressed hastily, bade both Uri and András goodbye, kissing each of them in turn, and left, bounding down the stairs and out into the street below. I sent a message to my friends to tell them I was on my way and reluctantly rang my father, reassuring him that I was fine, that I had merely lost track of time, that there was nothing to worry about.
As I scurried back to Joanne’s apartment, the awkward business of calling home out of the way, I found myself smiling stupidly as I turned the night’s events over in my mind. I thought of Uri, his roguish smile, his cockiness, and of András, his gentle manner, his dancer’s body, and I wondered how their day would unfold, how they would talk about what had happened. I wondered, too, whether András knew of the secret moments shared by Uri and me.
The following day, as Maria and I left Joanne’s apartment building and stepped out into the streets of Milan for the last time, I found myself wanting to stay, the excitement of my nocturnal adventure still aglow within me, and wanting, too, to message Uri and András, to do it all over again – without the alcohol, without the secret moments – and to commit every little thing to memory - every touch, every kiss – rather than just a smattering of tantalizing snapshots.
But perhaps this is the way it had to be the first time for it to happen at all. Perhaps perfect sobriety would have turned it into a nerve-racking affair, making the blissful abandon I experienced impossible. And perhaps the transgressions – the stolen kiss, the silent sex – were important, the kind of thing you remember and carry with you, the kind of thing you learn from.