#underrated skill

In the solid daylight of soberness, [Merlin] would have noticed he was endangering his friendship; but whilst the alcohol had dethroned his brain, and made of his penis a lively successor, he noticed only that he was hard, and Arthur was hard: and grabbed him by the tie to annihilate him. There was a blinding transition, from sharing space to impinging on space; in a moment they went from smiling stupidly at one another, to kissing stupidly at one another. Arthur cracked his shoulder against the wall; but having brought Merlin down with him by his grasp on his shirt, kept kissing incoherently on him. It was something like inhaling, instead of kissing; they were trying to subsist on the kissing, rather than breathing: and doing it not entirely shabbily, Merlin liked to think, since they were both still living, and snogging.

Next morning Merlin performed his morning ablutions of pissing, and puking. He had stumbled into the bathroom for the one, and realised he needed the other. Thus could he be found at 8.00 on a Sunday, bringing back the mimosas for curtain call; though fortunately he was doing it in solitude, whilst Arthur slumbered in bliss. He was throwing up his guts, and his feelings, of which he was having too many at once.  He was realising now, with his head over the toilet, what he had been too muddled to realise last night; or, at least what he had been too muddled to contextualise. In the stupor of wine he had put his fingers in Arthur’s bum; and never considered what the act would do to him, or to Arthur, or the friendship. He had been in that mad dreamland in which the drinking soul reels about amidst such improbable things as inconsequence; he had been running about in that grand fairyland where today is today and tomorrow mere fancy: and now in the cold light of puking what he had left were his grubby conscience, and pants. He felt as if his heart were coming up with his guts. It was one of those moments in which it feels as if the soul must be coming up; and in communion with the toilet he realised what no God or science has answered, of what petty stuff is man made. He was a creature of sick; the physical sort, and the soul sort; and letting out a bit of his philosophical discovery through his nose, he flushed the toilet, and lay down on the floor.  

— Though Love Like Light Can Flee

Therein was the rub: not that he had done what men had been doing since time immemorial, by putting his dick in a hole; but that he had done it with someone he loved. With a straight man he loved, with his whole moronic heart. All their friendship he had been killing without mercy those small and futile hopes which the ordinary friend raises by making the ordinary gestures of friendship; and now he was choking on them: rather like Arthur had choked on his cock. The irrational heart of him had sat up, and said, not entirely irrationally: he put our dick in him; a not tremendously heterosexual thing to do. Arthur, an ostensible straight, had got on his knees, in front of a definite bisexual, and licked him till he was coming. He had taken Merlin; and afterward stood to be taken by him. So after the initial sickness, the troubled night he had spent wondering if he had not a heterosexual mate, but any mate at all, he had a lift in him; that tremendous surging of longing which men kill or are killed for. The love was huge in him; the franticness of it was beyond the confines of his small and human body, so that he had to feel the unease of his own inadequate skin.