Page 64 of Pansies

Another thought Alfie didn’t know what to do with, but he was saved from having to come up with an answer because Fen went on, “I’m pretty sure most people find the opera scene pretty romantic.”

“But don’t you think it’s a shitty thing to say to someone when you’re taking them on a date? I mean, what if she hadn’t liked the opera? What was she supposed to say? ‘Oh sorry, dear, it’s just not part of my soul. Wanna bang?’”

“I…I’ve never thought about it. But you’re right.” Fen smiled, his legs still around Alfie and as tight as a hug. “Okay, I promise I won’t think less of you if you don’t like musicals. As long as you promise to stop dismissing them on principle.”

Alfie nodded. “Deal.”

And for a moment, they were silent. Fen tucked his head under Alfie’s chin and seemed relatively content there, his palm warm against Alfie’s chest. “I sometimes wish I was in a musical,” he whispered at last, his voice almost lost in the idle rustlings of the breeze in the grass. “So I could sing things instead of feel them. Everything done with in one epic crescendo. Then dim the lights. New scene.”5

“You’re only saying that because you’re sad.”

That made Fen laugh—a short, sharp, bitten-off sound. “Yes, Alfie, I’m saying it because I’msad.”

“Yeah, but that’s because you loved her. And that’s…good, right?”

No reply. Just Fen, still and silver in the starlight, staringpast Alfie into the darkness. And then, “Mum really got me, you know? When I was growing up, it felt like she was the only person who did.” He raked a hand through his hair. “God, I’m thirty fucking years old. I should be okay.”

“You’ll get there.” Alfie was starting to feel nebulously guilty. He loved his mam and dad, and he knew he’d grieve if—when—they died. But he also knew it wouldn’t be like this, and he couldn’t decide if it made him a bad son. Or them bad parents.

“I know.” Fen sighed. “But it feels lonely without someone in the world who knows who I am. Not just everything I pretend to be.”

Alfie gazed at him helplessly. Their bodies were so close. Yet suddenly Fen was miles away. Like they were both blundering around in the dark, catching only accidentally at each other’s flailing hands. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had that kind of understanding. There were people who cared about him, of course, and people who were close to him, but it was always in pieces—thisbut notthat. He’d never particularly thought of himself as complicated, and he wasn’t. It was just hard to get everything to line up in a way that made sense to other people. Where he came from and where he was, what he had and what he wanted. Like this game of whack-a-mole with his sense of self.

Gay. Northern. Banker.

Partner. Brother. Son.

Why could he always be only some of those things?

“I’m sort of flimsy without her,” Fen was saying. “Tatters to blow away in the breeze.”

Alfie pressed his brow to Fen’s. Stayed there for a moment. “You’re right here, Fen.”

“Am I?” Again, the tightening of small touches, drawing theirbodies together. “My dad got my mum, you know, in that same sort of way. Sometimes I think that’s all love is. Understanding, smoothing away your strangeness. Making you part of the world, not separate from it.”

“Yeah.” If Fen noticed the roughness in Alfie’s voice, he fortunately didn’t comment. But it was all Alfie could do not to blurt out the truth, the blunt, ugly, pathetic truth, that he wanted this stuff so much it made his heart hurt. “If you were in a musical right now,” he asked quickly, a bit desperately, “what would you be singing?”

“I…” Fen faltered a moment. “I’d be Eliza Doolittle inMy Fair Lady. Played by Julie, of course, not Audrey.”

“Why?”

“Well, Audrey’s gorgeous, but she can’t sing for shit, and Julie Andrews is my big goddamn hero.”6

“No, dork-face. Why whoever it was in whatever it was.”

“Dork-face?” Fen laughed aloud this time. More of a giggle really. Sweet and shameless. “The song I’m thinking of is called ‘Show Me,’ and if I could sing it to you, I wouldn’t have to sit on this gate and make a fool of myself.”

“Make a fool of yourself, how?”

“Well, not counting all the twenty million ways I already have, at least I wouldn’t have to ask you to kiss me.”

“You don’t,” said Alfie, and kissed him. He’d meant to be gentle, gentle with the gorgeous mouth that had yielded so many of its secrets, but the instant they touched it wasn’t like that at all. It was full of teeth and sharp edges and the scrape of Fen’s stubble, and need was a red roar in Alfie’s skin, obliterating everything that wasn’t Fen.

He swung him round, and Fen didn’t even seem to notice, just clung and kept kissing, greedy and a little feral, until Alfielowered him onto the bonnet of the Sagaris. For a second or two, they were stilled like that, Fen sitting, Alfie standing, their bodies pressed together like their mouths, and even though he was half-mad for more—Fen naked underneath him, clawing, writhing, crying out—he didn’t want this to end either, this quiet moment of nothing more than holding.

He felt like he was on the brink of everything. It made him sort of messy inside, turned on and safe, and strong and weak, and just completely there, the gay-straight, north-south, rich-poor, right-wrong man-boy he was.

Already he was on the verge of begging:Don’t let me go.

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