Page 61 of Pansies

Fen gave an impatient little sigh. “Isaid, did you ever run Lizard Lane?”

“God, yeah, all the time. Who didn’t?”

“I didn’t.”

Suddenly Alfie knew that he’d been keeping an eye on the wrong thing. He should have been paying attention to where they were going, not what Fen was doing. He recognised the rough, rolling fields on either side of them and the little stone walls edging the road. A road which, incidentally, was rather narrow and hadSLOWpainted over it in big, white letters. It was rising slowly to a tight turn and a downward swoop. Alfie knew because he had swooped that swoop on many breathless occasions. Once, just once, the hourly bus had come rumbling the other way, and he’d nearly swooped straight through a fence into the ditch beyond. The shock of that moment had been a bright, white flash, transformed almost instantly into hilarity. Because funny was way easier than scary.

“Uh, Fen.”

Nothing.

“Fen, can you slow down?”

The Sagaris growled as they tore over theSLOWsign. Around them, the fields were fuzzing into the sky, choppy somehow like waves.

“Seriously. Slow the fuck down.” He had to shout over the engine.

He’d taken her up to about a hundred and eighty on the track—a loud, hot thrill—and this was nowhere near that. But it was still too fast for this time of night and this road. It was dangerous. Pointlessly, miserably dangerous. As meaningless as a guilty wank over the sort of porn he hated to admit got him hot sometimes.

He wanted to reach over and grab the wheel, but that would be the worst thing he could do right now because it would probably end up flipping them.

So he just had to sit there. Wait for sanity. Or, well, a wall in the face. He kept telling himself it was going to be okay. That they weren’t going that fast. And it was late, so the chance of traffic coming the other way was negligible. And, even if they did spin off the road or hit something, as long as it was a stationary something, they probably wouldn’t die. Minor injuries, maybe whiplash, concussion, or some broken bones at worst. It would total his car though.

Oh, fuck the car.

They crested the hill. Alfie braced himself in his seat.

He was scared. He was actually fucking scared. Which got him really angry. And then came the adrenaline, in a crazy burst like the popping of about ten thousand balloons, making everything louder and brighter and softer and slower and…more, just more.

It was a wrestle round the curve, but they made it, in a stomach-flipping whoosh of speed, about as well as Alfie would have managed it, on this road, in this car, in these conditions. Fen’s hands were pale on the wheel, his touch light, almost careless.

Alfie wanted to shake him until all his teeth fell out.

Then they were gliding along the straight—totally safe—and Alfie was kind of gliding too, bodiless, cold and empty to his fingertips.

“Stop the car. Stop the car right now.” Wow. Was that his voice? It filled up the whole space.

Unfortunately, there was nowheretostop the car that wasn’t the middle of the road.

So Fen had to keep driving, a faint tremor creeping up his arms.

At last, they came to a sort of lay-by where the side of the road met a gate leading into the fields. Distantly, Alfie remembered this had been a hookup spot. He’d parked here and fumbled withgirls, waiting for it to get good, always slightly relieved when his cluelessly groping hands had transgressed some invisible up-or-down boundary and been slapped away.

Kev had told him it didn’t mean anything. That it was basically like the Somme. You gave a little ground, and then took it back again, and then took a little bit more. They’d been studying war poetry that year for their GCSEs, and it had gone to Kev’s head. But Alfie hadn’t particularly felt like waging a war over a couple of inches of some girl’s skin.

It had got easier, later, at university and then after, but it had never really felt right, not until Greg had grabbed his hand at Fire and moved it straight to his dick. No shame, no uncertainty. No fucking Somme. Just sex, pure and simple, and so bloody good.

Fen was sitting there, still as a mouse in the den of a cobra, staring out of the windscreen as if he didn’t dare look at Alfie.

“Get out.”

A twitch. A flutter of hands.

“I said, get out my fucking car.”

“I can’t… Okay… Please don’t… I can’t find the door release.”

Alfie leaned over and pressed the button for him, and Fen undid his seat belt and scrambled out. The grinding of gravel beneath his shoes echoed endlessly in Alfie’s ears.

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