First Time for Everything Read online
First Time for Everything is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Henry Fry
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Published in the United Kingdom by Orion Fiction, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fry, Henry, author.
Title: First time for everything: a novel / Henry Fry.
Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021045586 (print) | LCCN 2021045587 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593358702 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593358719 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Gay fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PR6106.R77 F57 2022 (print) | LCC PR6106.R77 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20211013
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045586
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045587
Ebook ISBN 9780593358719
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Sara Bereta, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Cassie Gonzales
Cover images (paper texture): Reddavebatcave/Shutterstock, Vedant Pathak/Shutterstock
ep_prh_6.0_139899382_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.
—Alexander Leon, 2020
Well, better dash. I’ve got another party to go to. Loads of single people…mainly poofs. Bye!
—Bridget Jones’s Diary, 2001
Part One
One
Usually when someone’s fondling my balls, I disappear. I try to pretend it isn’t happening. The whole thing makes me so uncomfortable I don’t know what to do, so I just vanish. Mostly they don’t seem to notice, I think. But on this occasion I’m having to answer questions, which makes it trickier.
“And is this a monogamous relationship, duckie?” the middle-aged Irish lady is asking. I wince as her thumb slips probingly around the tender bit of the left testicle.
“Yes, of course,” I say to the beige-tiled ceiling. Why does everyone keep asking me that? It’s just a normal relationship, like any other. “Can you feel the lump? Does it feel bad?”
She ignores me.
“And are you top or bottom?”
I swallow hard.
“That’s a very personal question. I don’t really see why it’s relevant.” She sets me with a look. “The GP just said I had to come here because of—you know—the area.”
My heart is thrumming in my neck. This is maybe the worst place I’ve ever been. I’m never coming back.
“We ask these questions to everyone—to get a better idea of your sexual history.”
“But this isn’t about sex. It’s about…”
I nod toward my crotch.
Her blue-plastic-gloved hand—the one that’s not currently keeping my scrotum hostage—lands on my arm and squeezes gently. It’s strange to be held in this way, even for a moment—oddly comforting.
“I won’t be sharing this with anyone, dear. Everything you say is confidential.”
I can’t bring myself to look directly at her, or where either of her hands is, so I focus on my lightly haired, startlingly white thighs. Then on my calves, then on my ankles, where the navy Topman boxers sit loosely inside the scrunched-up cave of my pulled-down jeans.
“Bottom,” I whisper.
“Thanks, dear,” she says warmly, removing the hand from the arm. Then, casually as anything, she says: “Any fisting, choking, or BDSM?”
I make a coughing, wheezing sort of noise and see that I’ve actually sprayed several flecks of spit onto the front of my pale-blue cotton shirt. My face heats up, even though the nurse hasn’t noticed and wouldn’t care anyway. She must see hundreds of scrotums a week. And globules of startled spit.
I try to get it together.
“No,” I say, as evenly as possible. “I’m just really not into contact sports.”
“Any GHB, GBL, mephedrone, or general recreational drug taking?” she goes on.
“No.” Then I think. “What about coffee? Sometimes I have, like, three oat-milk lattes a day and I feel a bit”—I shake my head from side to side—“floopy.”
She ignores me again. “Any chemsex orgies?”
“Is that a band?”
“Any animal play?”
I shake my head. She’s lost me now.
“I don’t have any pets…but I’d love a Shih Tzu.”
She gives Old Lefty another good squeeze. I make a “Gah!” noise.
“Ooh, sorry there, dear,” she says, almost sings. “And do you use condoms?”
Oh, so we are still talking about sex.
“Yeah, I’m not an idiot,” I say very quickly—too quickly. My tongue is dry. I swallow loudly and listen as the lie comes out. “Well, we use them most of the time. But, like, a few times we’ve been a bit drunk, or it’s the morning and it just sort of…happens. But it doesn’t matter, because Tobbs would never cheat on me.”
I really can’t remember the last time we used a
condom—maybe eight months ago?
I glance up. This time her stare is focused and intense.
“Do you often take risks like this?” she says in a low, serious voice.
“I’m in a monogamous relationship.” I hear this come out much more West Country than I would like. I’m an urban professional now, not the son of a couple who run the chippy’s in the arse-end of nowhere. I take a breath, I try to flatten my “r”s and shorten my “a”s. “And I don’t see what this has to do with, with…whatever’s going on down there. This is…something else.”
The woman looks up. Jacqueline is her name, the laminate badge spearing her pendulous bosom informs me. I’ve been in too much of a whirl to notice anything until now, when this sudden, vivid realization that I’m here, actually here, shakes my vision. This tiny square room I’m in with this woman, her frizz of dyed magenta hair beautifully illuminated by the blue computer screen on the desk behind her, giving her an oddly religious aspect. I really am here, me, Danny Scudd, the most sexless man in all existence, spending Friday afternoon in the STI clinic, the place I’ve always avoided, because there didn’t seem much point in coming.
I look up at Jacqueline, looming over me like a disheveled Madonna. I feel bad news coming, not in my gut, but in my ball.
“There’s something there, though, isn’t there? A lump?”
After a few thoughtful facial expressions, Jacqueline says, “Oh yes, darlin’, they do feel a little boggy.”
“Boggy?” I gasp.
“Boggy.” She nods.
“Does that mean it’s—cancer?”
She stands up, bins the blue gloves. She has a nice face, but it’s tired, drooping like a St. Bernard’s. She must be in her late fifties, around my mum’s age. I imagine the bleached barrel that is Mary Elizabeth Scudd spending eight hours a day inspecting young men’s bits, and then coming out with a word like “boggy.” She’d probably love it.
“Oh, heavens, no!” Jacqueline leans in and winks at me. I get a powerful waft of supermarket-bought geraniums. “The bad ones don’t hurt, and if it was cancer I’d feel a lump like a small hard pea attached to the testicle. What we’ve got here is either gonorrhea or chlamydia. Rejoice!”
“Ohhh!” Is this something to rejoice about? That sounds pretty serious to me. I have an impulse to take out my phone and text my best mate, Jacob. In fact, I wish they’d been able to come with me; it would have made this awful experience slightly less traumatic. “Does that mean I can’t have kids?”
Jacqueline blinks at me a couple of times.
“Now, wherever did you get that idea from?”
I shrug. “Instagram?”
She shakes her magenta halo. “You’re all right, treacle. Never you worry.”
I lean up awkwardly on one elbow, trying to see what she’s really thinking.
“Are you sure it’s not cancer?”
Jacqueline smiles to herself, some emotion I can’t quite work out.
“It’s not cancer, dear. Not even close.”
She turns and goes over to a little plastic trolley, opens and closes its drawers, fiddles with packets of things. I notice for the first time that she’s wearing Crocs, also magenta, a color that really fights with the pale-green scrubs.
I lie back on the white bed, pants and trousers still around my ankles, the low buzz of the striplight seeming to get louder and louder. There’s so much spinning around my head I don’t know which thought to settle on. What does this mean? What does any of this mean?
“How will we know which one it is?” I say.
“Which—testicle?” Jacqueline says, donning another pair of blue gloves.
“Which STI.”
“Oh yes!” she laughs. She actually laughs. Doesn’t she realize this exchange is scarring me for life? “We’ll run some tests now, as well as treat you for both.”
She’s standing above me again, this time brandishing a needle.
“Roll over.”
I do not move. She smiles again, though with less patience.
“Roll over, there’s a dear.”
“Oh—OK.”
I roll around like a giant worm, taking care not to knock the boggy balls. I stick my bare arse up in the air, wondering if this was indeed how I ended up here in the first place.
“Sharp scratch.”
My eyes are scrunched shut and every muscle I have is tensed as the pain centers in the middle of my right cheek.
“Try to relax,” Jacqueline says, in vain. Next thing I know, she’s tapping me on the shoulder. I jiggle back around, my feet still trapped in the boxer-jean shackles.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Not compared to choking or fisting, no.”
Jacqueline laughs with such force I press myself back against the plastic bed, which rattles unnervingly.
“Oh dear, you boys do make me laugh,” she says, thumping her rib cage. I ignore “you boys.” But I know what she means, of course.
“Now, we’ve just got to take a few samples for testing….”
She peels open a little plastic bag and pulls out a little plastic spoon, sort of like one you might get in an ice-cream tub at the cinema. Fondly, I think of the time one Christmas when my parents took me to see Little Women. We had a chocolate-mint-chip each.
This lovely thought is fleeting, however, because then Jacqueline takes hold of my little bishop in a turtleneck with the same lack of interest I might grab a banana on the way out the door. She’s obviously done this many, many times. It’s disorienting, looking down and seeing a middle-aged woman’s hand circling my poor guy.
“Another sharp scratch.”
I have no time to react, which is for the best.
This is not a sharp scratch. This is a popping open of the pee hole, an inserting of the ice-cream spoon, a terrible feeling, like it’s too big and going to snag on whatever the hell is in there, and then a deep feeling of sickness. I don’t want to look, and yet I can’t look away.
Jacqueline peers at the spoon after she brings it out, her flaking scalp in my face.
“Oh dear,” she says darkly. “Not enough gunk. We’re going to have to go deeper.”
These are words you never want to hear.
This time I lie back, crunch my eyes closed, and try to hard-core disassociate. I wonder what Tobbs is doing. Has he also panicked in the work loos on a Friday afternoon upon realizing his testicles feel bigger and lumpier than they ever have, started to hyperventilate, gabbled excuses to his boss, and made an emergency appointment with his GP, who recommended he reroute to the nearest sexual-health clinic?
Unlikely, seeing as he barely washes. He’s authentic and worldly like that. He’s probably too strong-constitutioned to get an STI anyway—that’s what he’d say. Although that does beg the question: If he doesn’t have it, where the hell have I got it from? He’s the only guy I’ve been with for over a year. More than a year. OK, he’s the only guy I’ve ever really been with, if you get my drift. And, if he does have it, does that mean…
I’m good at drifting off, forgetting where I am. But Jacqueline isn’t so hot on extracting the “gunk,” and makes heavy work as she dips in a couple more times. I can’t help but be dragged back into this horrible little room.
With a whistle of glee, she decides there’s enough to send to the lab. After that, I’m treated to a couple more jabs in the arm and some leaflets about HPV and hep A and B, being, as I am, in a “high-risk group,” an NHS synonym for “homo.”
“The tests will come back in five working days or so,” she says over her shoulder. “It could be either, or even a UTI. If it’s chlamydia, then that’ll probably have been gestating for three to four weeks. Bubbling away inside the balls, there. Symptoms of gonorrhea typically show up shortly after exposure, so you’ll have contracted that in the last few days or so.”
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“No, no,” I try to correct her, thinking how Tobbs and I last had our typically brusque coitus on Monday night—unprotected. “I can’t have just contracted something. I’m in a relationship.”
She turns, clutching a plastic envelope containing tubes of my blood, poo, pee, and “gunk.” She smiles kindly, though something in the eye is sad. Poor boy, she’s thinking. Poor stupid boy.
“And it’s not an open relationship, is it? I know you boys are into that sort of thing.”
You boys.
When she says it this time, my brain fizzes gently above the eyebrows. But again I say nothing. I’m sure my facial expression doesn’t even change. I don’t want to make a fuss.
“No, no,” I say, though I hear my voice crack. “That’s not for me. It’s just a normal relationship.”
Jacqueline shrugs and seals the plastic envelope with a rub of her thumb.
“Normal’s different for everyone, dear. No judgment. But you do know you’re more at risk being the receptive partner—and having unprotected sex?”
“Yes, I know,” I say, maybe too sharply. I’m not sure I did know this, though. “Tobbs wouldn’t lie to me; he’s a really nice guy.”
“Nice guys can catch HIV, too.”
There is definitely some judgment in this.
“No, no—I didn’t mean that. And wait, who’s talking about HIV?” I can feel the fuzz of distress growing, the electric fingertips grasping my temples.
Jacqueline smiles with a genuine warmth.
“Well, if you’re not always using condoms, it might be worth thinking about PrEP. When taken daily, pre-exposure prophylaxis is ninety-nine-percent effective in preventing the spread of HIV. It’s highly recommended if you’re having risky sex.”