Page 11 of For Real

His were the colour of damp irises. Glorious. And I was mortified.

“It was me, wasn’t it? Shit.”

I managed something that might have been a smile. “Don’t flatter yourself, Junior.”

“What’s the matter, then?”

What could I tell him? That I missed so profoundly something I might never even have had. And that the things he wanted were the things I wanted, and I couldn’t find them either. Horrifyingly, my eyes prickled with fresh tears.

He threw his arms around me and hugged me so tightly. That silly, too-earnest, too-beautiful boy. After a moment, I bent down and pressed my face into the damp skin of his neck, breathed in rain and mist and a touch of sweat, and hugged him back. Until he was shaking slightly against me, and the cold had saturated us both.

“I fucking hated you,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry.”

“Like who the fuck does that? Explodes your brain and then chucks you out.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He pulled back and touched the corner of my eye with the tip of one icy finger. “It was me a little bit, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I told him. “It was you. A little bit.”

“Good. I mean not…good good. But I kind of needed to know it mattered.”

“I’m sorry I tried to pretend it didn’t.”

He peered at me as though he was trying to see through frosted glass. “You’re kind of sorry a lot.”

I nodded. “When I’m a dick, yes.” I didn’t want to get into the complexities of apologising. The terrible powerlessness of being unable to do anything except wait for mercy you couldn’t earn and didn’t deserve. I hated being forgiven almost as much as I feared rejection. It felt too much like a debt you couldn’t pay. Instead, I said, “You shouldn’t be standing around in wet clothes.”

“Why?” He gave me a sullen look. “What are you going to do? Get me out of them?”

The words were more challenge than flirtation but, oh God. A child should not have been able to make me blush. Except he wasn’t a child. Which was why I was blushing.

“Mate,” he went on, “it’s fine. We’re not in the eighteenth century. I’m not going to, like, catch a chill and die on a chaise longue.”

“I could put them through the tumble dryer, if you want?”

He scowled. “Look, I didn’t want your whore taxi, and I don’t want your pity tumble drying, either.”

“Actually, it’s a guilt tumble drying.”

“Wow, you’re really selling it.”

Whether you were on your knees or not, people still had their ways to flay you. I drew in a breath, and it shuddered in the space between us, like my skin to his command. “If I hadn’t made you leave, I would have waited there, at your feet, and begged for anything you wanted to do to me. And, afterwards, I don’t know, maybe you would have stayed the night, and maybe we’d have washed your clothes. It’s nothing I wouldn’t have done before.”

He shoved his hands squelchily into his pockets. “I seriously prefer that version. Especially the begging bit.”

“Well, I’m not begging to dry your clothes. Just offering.”

After a silence that contained the rise and fall of at least six or seven civilisations, he nodded. While he was working off his shoes—without stooping to untie the laces—I went to get him a towel.

When I came back, he was still standing in my hall, his socks balled up and stuffed into one hand. He seemed very small in his dampness, somehow, and his knobbly, naked toes were oddly beautiful.

I imagined his hand in my hair, pushing me down. How it would feel, that moment of instinctive outrage, and then the long, dark slide, the shame and the pleasure of being not-quite-forced to do the things I wanted. I would lick the gleam of rainwater from the arch of his foot.

I led him down into the kitchen.

---