Page 3 of For Real

He was on the edge of a conversation, not quite part of the crowd, thin and wary and absurdly young. There wasn’t much of him from this angle, just a curly flop of dark hair and the pale gleam of his wrist as he pushed it out of his face.

“How does he even know about this place?” Sam sounded fifty percent shocked, fifty percent admiring. “At his age I was still sending laundry back home so my mum would do it, not coming to kinky sex parties.”

“He’s adorable,” Grace cooed. “Like a bijou sub-ette.”

“You can’t have him, Gracie. No breaking Britain’s youth.”

“But we could get him a little kennel. Give him his own Converse to chew on. And…and an iPod for listening to Panic! At the Disco.”7

I’d only half been paying attention. “Listening to what?”

“A popular beat combo,” explained Sam, smirking.8

“Someone should talk to him, though.” Grace glanced across the room again, but I could have told her he’d moved away. “He looks a bit lost.”

“What are you going to do?” Sam’s voice softened. “He’ll be fine, honestly. They’re pretty careful who they let in. Think of the trouble we had getting Grumpy Bastard here through the door. And he’s probably just got a deceptive face. He could actually be forty-two or something. Uh…dude, where are you going?”

That last bit was for me. But I ignored him.

And found myself in the next room, searching for the boy. He was easy to find. Deceptive face. Bollocks to that. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

I put a hand on his shoulder—so frail and sharp—and spun him round. He seemed surprised but not frightened. If anything, slightly irritated.

He wasn’t particularly attractive. He was too unformed, all angles and irregularities, acne divots peppering the edge of his jaw.9

I gazed down at him, into his oddly dark blue eyes, the sort of eyes that would always look as though they had liner round them. And I said, “You shouldn’t be here. This isn’t Junior Kink-Off.”10

He shook me off with a restless kind of ease. “Thanks for the unnecessary, unwanted advice. I think I’m good.”

I should have let him go. But I didn’t. “Is this your first time?”

“First time at a kinky party? Or first time having a dickhead acting like he knows what’s better for me than I do?” He didn’t give me time to get out a comeback, which was probably a good thing because I didn’t have one. “Yes to the first. No to the second.”

Don’t laugh. Not something I often had to struggle against. But he was a little bit magnificent in his defiance. A little bit magnificent, and a little bit absurd. “I think I probably deserved that.”

His eyes widened, flashing all their blues at me. In a handful of years, I thought he might be stunning. Not pretty, not handsome. But people would look at him.

There was a silence, just long enough to be awkward.

“Wow. Um.” He pushed the hair back from his forehead. “I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t expecting that.”

I shrugged. And now I was awkward too. Damn him. “Well, I know I can be kind of a dick. But I try not to actively persist in it.”

“Wow,” he said again. “Most people just do, y’know?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I suppose you’re right. They do.”

And now he smiled at me. All teeth. The way only people who hadn’t learned self-consciousness knew how to smile.

“I know it sounds patronising but you should be careful.”

“Dude, I’m nineteen.”

I choked on air.

His hair had flopped again—Get it cut, I thought—and he shoved it impatiently out of the way. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. How can a nineteen-year-old possibly know what he wants. Well, I do. I…feel it like…here.” He tapped a closed fist in the incorrect location for his heart. “I feel it, okay? Like being gay. It’s just there.”11

I stared at him. At this too-thin, too-sincere boy. This person.

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