Quarantine
Their eyes met across a crowded Zoom.
It was Wednesday. It was quiz night. It was the peak of the lockdown quiz trend, and he’d been looking forward to this all week. The Group™ was back together again, and that meant that she’d be there too, a pixellated minx grinning at him from the corner of his laptop.
The Group™ had started their first year years ago, but nobody could quite figure out how they actually knew each other. She’d done an anthropology unit with her, and she shared a flat off Holloway Road with him, and he knew that guy somehow, the guy who was with her for a bit before splitting up and insisting they were still friends even though they all knew they were fucking on and off for years, and she knew him through protests, probably? It was something like that.
They’d meant to do some kind of reunion thing back in September to mark ten years since they’d first met, they had set up a WhatsApp group called “reUNIon?” and everything, but everybody’s busy, everybody’s so fucking busy, and it almost happened in October but then so-and-so had to go to New York for work that weekend and then in November what’s-his-face moved abroad and went almost totally AWOL and then Christmas was obviously out because everybody had gone “home” even though they hadn’t lived there for years and then half of them were doing dry January and then what’s-her-name had twins (fucking twins!) so that was that for a while, and then coronavirus hit and suddenly nobody had anything to do. And they started spending time together again.
His palms were sweaty. He was the host, and he was the only one on the Zoom so far. Hopefully somebody else would join soon. As long as it wasn’t the guy who had got really into sourdough during lockdown, and couldn’t talk about anything else exc-
shit. There she was.
It was just the two of them, for the first time in years. It was time to show her how he’d grown into a confident man with a career, and a pension, and a hairline that wasn’t receding that much for his age, who was comfortable in his own (now slightly wrinkly) skin.
“Hi. Uh, how’s working from home this week?”
Fuck’s sake, man. You’re thirty. You’ve got better chat than this.
“Same as ever. Lockdown, right?”, she said.
She scanned her screen. It was still just the two of them.
“You know, while it’s just the two of us, it’s funny,” she continued. “I don’t think you ever knew, but I had a massive thing for you back in the day.”
He felt a maelstrom of feelings all at once. It was like his brain was his inbox and his emotions were frantic emails coming from all sides like the SOAS alumni relations team asking for donations. This was good, right? She liked him! But wait, she had a massive thing? Had in he past tense? That’s not a good tense.
“Oh right?”, he said.
“Yeah, I often wondered if we’d end up together.”
“Well”, he said, seizing the moment, seizing it harder than he’d seized the first and only job offer that came his way after graduating in the worst patch of austerity imposed by the Tory/LibDem coalition, “better late than never, right?”
He smoothly enabled the waiting room that would stop the rest of The Group™ from joining the call. It was like suavely, suggestively locking the door, but with an added air of conference calls. Unlike a conference call, he started to take his shirt off. She saw where this was going, and quickly moved from the kitchen, where her housemate was heating up a frozen pizza for the fourth time this week, to her bedroom. She got the impression of firm pecs - or perhaps some burgeoning moobs, it was hard to tell at this resolution. It left a lot to the imagination, and she liked it. She thought of six packs past, the lithe torsos and unblemished skin of her uni conquests, spirits eager, not distracted, bodies willing, not wobbling. She took her clothes off hastily, partly through untrammelled desire, partly because she hadn’t worn a bra for months. She adjusted her laptop screen to an optimal angle and lay back carefully, self-consciously, her elbows pinned to her sides to stop her breasts flopping into her armpits, hoping her camera wasn’t good enough to pick up the odd rogue hairs which defied plucking, determinedly worming their way back to the surface, yearning for destinations unknown.
She reached for the lube, gave it a couple of vigorous pumps, and started squelching in and around her enraptured flaps. Maturity had brought expertise and efficiency, and she was soon arching her back as she skimmed her fingertips across her greasy love nubbin, feeling herself splurt and splutter as she spasmed. And as she watched him grapple with his own moistened meat, contorting his face like a dog eating a lemon, she felt the thrill of the experience mix with the relief that it was her and her alone doing this. Back at SOAS, the boys she fucked were young and taut and in their slim muscular prime, but the sex itself was terrible, all bitten nails and unwashed fingers scraping away at her clit, scratchy stubble against her inner things, sloppy uncertain tongues and stilted arrhythmic heaves. Yet as soon as the boys grew up, became men who listened and sensed and responded, men who took pleasure in pleasing, men who learned to love, they sagged and faded and stressed. What use was a delicate and skilled tongue tip, a virtuoso of vag, an artisan of arse, if he wasn’t fully in the moment, if his mind was on meetings and his waistline on the wane?
But here it was just her, doing what she knew, watching him on the screen, imagining him how she used to want him, imagining him doing what she imagined he could now.
Suddenly, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen his own video in the corner of his screen. His pre-cum-flecked snail trail, sweaty and matted against his stark white belly, which hung ponderously over his birds’ nest pubes, the occasional grey glinting in the light from the screen. His hand, jerking erratically, beating a rhythm against his work laptop, the IT department asset tag sticker lifting the corner and scraping his knuckles. His wizened ballbag, skin folds hanging like curtains, swaying with the motion, too loose against his dangling jizz orbs like the wrinkled surface of an old mouldy apple, uncannily soft, sprouting wiry tufts of pubes, a beige nightmare made flesh. And his straining glans, gleaming in his grip, peeking out like a shy tortoise, coyly withdrawing, tasting the air again.
He tried to block it from his mind, his disgust at the absolute state of himself. But the more he tried, the more he was drawn to it, and as he finally made eye contact with his own mirrored image, he withered, his puckered pecker limp and slippery and unfulfilled in his frothy fingers.
He groaned, and pulled his laptop towards him.
“I’m so sorry,” he explained hurriedly, “I just... I guess I’m distracted, I accidentally made eye contact with my video, it weirded me out, and it’s also been a long day, I keep thinking of work, and the whole pandemic, and... can we try again? Not now, we’ve got the quiz, but another time, can we be in each other’s support bubble? Can we drive to Barnard Castle and check our eyesight together? Can we make up for lost time, can we refind ourselves? I love you, I think I always have, and I feel so trapped and scared here in my flat, watching the news and watching the deaths, I’m scared I’ve wasted my life, I’m scared of death and I’m scared it’ll be me and I’m scared it’ll be you, and I’m scared I’ll never say or do what I think matters. Can we start again properly, can we give this a go? Can we isolate together, quarantine together, can we help each other through this? Because all I know right now is that I’m alive and you’re alive and we’ve missed chances before and I never want to miss a chance again. What do you think?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get that. You’re on mute.”