Page 77 of Pansies

“That’s what I thought too.”

“You don’t anymore?”

“No, I do…or I…I don’t know. It’s…” Fen sounded tearful, his words drowned in the wind and the waves. “There’s what you believe, and then there’s how it feels when it actually happens.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

Fen drew in a shuddering breath just on this side of a sob.“But what if I waswrong?4 Maybe I should have said, ‘No, don’t do this’ or ‘I won’t help you.’ Maybe she took it as encouragement that I didn’t fight her. Maybe I made her feel we’d be better off…better off without her.”

If Alfie’d been able to get a word in edgewise, he’d have protested. But he also didn’t want to interrupt. Knew he shouldn’t. Sometimes speaking was like throwing up at the end of a rough night on the tiles: better out than in, even if it was grim in the moment.

“And when I think about it rationally,” Fen went on, “I remember that we all have a fundamental right to choose how and when to die, that we get to choose what happens to our bodies. I believe that. I believe it to my very soul. But she was my mum, Alfie.” His voice broke on Alfie’s name. “She was my mum.”

Then he turned his face into Alfie’s shoulder and sort of cried. Almost tearlessly, breathlessly and silently, his body shaking a little. Alfie held him as best he could and made what he hoped were soothing noises and felt helpless and tender and impossibly moved that Fen would trust him with all this pain.

Eventually, Fen grew quiet again, and Alfie put him back together, tucking his hair out of his way and brushing a few traces of moisture from his cheeks with his thumbs.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Fen blinked at him. He looked battered, like a small ship in the wake of a huge storm. And Alfie burst desperately into speech. “I know you said there’s nowt to say about summin like this, but…she wouldn’t have asked for help if she didn’t know how much you loved her. And she wouldn’t have left you if she hadn’t known you’d do alreet.”

“She might think differently now.”

“No, she wouldn’t. She’d see exactly what I do.”

“A complete wreck?”

“Someone strong and true and sad, but whole and real and basically okay.”

There was a pause. And suddenly, Fen made an odd hiccoughing noise perilously close to a giggle. “‘Basically okay’? You’ll turn a boy’s head with sweet talk like that.”

“Oi,” protested Alfie. “I also said other stuff.”

“I know.” Fen managed a smile—weak, but real. “Thank you. For that and for listening. And, oh, everything. I have no idea how you do it.”

“Uh, do what?”

“Make me feel this hopeful.”

For some reason, this made Alfie get all flustered, and they sat in silence for a minute or two, watching the waves wash in and out over the dully gleaming sand.

“Do you want a Murray Mint?” asked Fen, eventually.

“Uh?”

“A Murray Mint. I’ve got a couple in my pocket. Do you want one?”

After everything they’d just shared, the sheer ordinariness of the question was bewildering. And also sort of a relief. Like the world wasn’t broken or spinning out of control, just knocked about a bit before resuming its usual course. “Yeah. All right.”

Fen uncurled and arched his hips off the rock, wriggling a finger into the pocket of his jeans. Now, Alfie told himself, was really not an appropriate time to notice all the lovely ways Fen’s body moved. Eventually, he sat back down and dropped a cellophane-covered sweet into Alfie’s hand.

“God, it’s been years since I’ve had one of these.” He took both ends of the plastic and pulled them taut, untwisting the wrapper and making it crackle.

“My dad somehow gets them. He’s got boxes and boxes. I think he might be some kind of international mint smuggler.”

The taste of the sweet was instantly familiar. Like nothing but itself.

“Oh, Alfie.” Suddenly Fen’s hands were on his face, and they were kissing, Fen’s tongue pressing between his lips, sliding deep inside him until their mouths were full of mint and butter and each other. Fen hadn’t kissed him like that before, as though Alfie was his to claim and savour. It left him breathless, a little shipwrecked, more than a little goofy.

“You know,” said Fen, afterwards. “This istechnicallyour third date.” And when Alfie gave a startled splutter of laughter, he held up his hand and began ticking them off on his fingers. “On our first date, I had messed-up self-harm sex with you. On our second date, I nearly killed us. So I’m continuing the trend by crying all over you and deluging you in ethical quandaries about my dead mother.”

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