Page 23 of Taste

I didn’t want to hurt them, ever. As far as history was concerned, Mabel didn’t deserve my venom. They never had, despite the past suddenly rearing its ugly head.

“We agreed, we don’t mention the past, ever. Is that clear?” I muttered through my teeth, still raging but doing everything I could to keep it under control.

“Fine,” they hissed back.

“Fine.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Finley.”

“Don’t even go there, Mabs—”

“And don’t you dare to deadname me again. That shit is not cool.”

“I know. Sorry.” It wasn’t the first time that name had rolled off my tongue, and I vowed to try to make it the last. But erasing years of your life was not an easy trip to take, even if, right now, erasing my entire life felt like a better option, because this mess I was in was becoming unbearable.

“Is Mark still around?” I asked weakly. “I need signatures.” Lies. All lies.

I’d expected him to be running around with his mobile stuffed between his shoulder and his ear as he put in orders for tomorrow while effortlessly calling out to his staff in that cheerful tone of his. I’d expected him to be here, or to at least have said goodbye.

Mabel huffed out that he’d probably already left, gone home to catch up on his sleep. I could read from their hunched shoulders that it was another excuse. They didn’t want me anywhere near Mark Quinton and wanted me out of their sight as well.

Yet when I turned around to leave, he was standing right behind me with an expression on his face I had never seen before. He looked shocked. Crushed. Exhausted. Heartbroken and sad, clearly having heard every single word I’d said.

* * *

I didn’t speak to Mark Quinton for weeks after that.

We went right back to the silent indifference, the hatred once again brewing within me. He’d been right: I was hard. There was nothing soft or kind about me. But those words I’d shouted at Mabel that day were no different from what I’d said to his face many times before, so I didn’t get why he was so upset about it. Well, I did. We’d gone way beyond a bit of harmless flirting, way beyond those personal boundaries I had so carefully erected.

I had grown up on an insular, dilapidated farm in Yorkshire, part of a closed-off village of pretty houses around a communal village green. My father was stern and distant. My mother was silent and subdued. My childhood was a quiet, joyless existence, where running barefoot in the grass was the closest I came to escape and home was a terrifying place. Family had always been a chain around my neck, yet straying from the path my parents had lain in front of me had never been an option.

I’d been home-schooled until I was finally sent off to sixth form in a nearby town, the teenage me high on a twisted view of freedom. Except it wasn’t freedom; it was a world into which I didn’t fit. I hated that I was immature and weird, and I yearned for something different. I barely passed my exams before choosing a hospitality course, swaying my parents’ goodwill with childish ideas that opening a simple bed and breakfast would bring visitors and well-needed cash to our stretched-to-the-limit farm.

By then, my confidence had grown, and I’d been adamant that I should shoulder the responsibility of fulfilling these plans in return for them allowing me to take another course at a city college an hour’s bus ride away. My parents agreed, and off I went before they changed their minds.

That success was a strange experience, and I exploited it to the maximum. I enrolled for every course I could get my greedy hands on, gaining a scholarship for a second year. I talked my parents into allowing me to rent a small room in a shared apartment during the last term, so I could spend more time studying and less time back home. Yet again, my parents supported me, assuming I would return their investment at the end of the year.

I never did because there was no way I could, not after seeing there was a whole world out there where I was slowly finding my feet. Instead, I blagged myself evening work in a small hotel, cleaning and running errands. I taught myself the computer system at the reception, and they gave me a few shifts. I served breakfast and ran the dishwashers in the restaurant late at night and finished my course at the top of the class. I had the grades to carry on and the guts to fight for more. I was finally good enough for something different and swiftly left the north behind with a posh, embossed letter outlining my scholarship for a hotel management degree at a London college. I’d never looked back.

London had been an eye-opener in more ways than one. In a community of students from every part of the world, I discovered falling in lust, messing around and sex. I found out there were also options I’d never imagined, and I suddenly pitied the younger, sheltered me who had thought my future had lain in marrying a girl from the village. That ‘me’ had been someone completely different from the man I was today.

I’d always known I liked boys far more than I liked girls. Because Ireallyliked boys in every way, and no higher power came down to strike me dead the first time I kissed a man or put my hand on a dick that wasn’t my own.

For a while, I’d still sent my mother a card every year, I didn’t tell her much, just that I was fine and working hard. I didn’t leave a return address because I couldn’t risk her trying to find me. It was bad enough being totally cut off by my family, the people who had brought me up, but I didn’t want to risk my father’s wrath or my mother’s safety. I remembered all too clearly where my father’s temper would land whenever something didn’t go his way. It had always been on my back, my shoulders or my legs—only my face when he’d drunk too much—and it was always my fault. My mother had done nothing to stop it, knowing full well where my father’s temper would turn without me as a punching bag.

My sexuality was a shameful secret I’d chosen to carry around like a burden in my youth, but I didn’t have to make that choice anymore. My parents’ ideas of life, faith and common decency had been fuelled by ignorance and an unhealthy obsession with alcohol and violence. I hadn’t understood that until I’d experienced a life outside of home.

I’d been thrown into the real world with a skewed view of the universe, and once free of those parameters, I fucked my way through my education, hoping that maybe one day I would get my attraction to men out of my system. I didn’t. Willing men and lust-filled thoughts clouded my judgement everywhere I looked. I hated myself for what it meant. I hated that I could never go back. I had all these unhealthy thoughts around the shame of never being able to make my parents proud and enormous amounts of guilt for not realising they’d needed help, not only with the way they lived, but also to run the farm. As a child, I’d never offered to help and then I’d conned them into letting me go to college, which threw me back into an endless loop of self-hatred.

I’d once asked my mother why she’d never walked away. She’d replied that she’d nowhere to go, so why should she? Strangely I understood, because I’d had nowhere to go either. When I finally found an exit, I took it. I was officially no longer my father’s son, having declared my rampant homosexuality to my horrified parents in an unpleasant phone call on my twenty-first birthday. My mother stopped responding to my texts shortly after, and my father put the phone down whenever I tried to call.

I’d been fully out and proud every day since that phone call, but in a way, I was still ashamed that I’d chosen the coward’s way out, because I’d never fought for my freedom. I’d run away and cut off everything I had ever known. Just in case my doubts got the better of me, I’d cemented my decision on a blustery winter evening, getting my first tattoo painfully etched across my chest, and that was the point—a statement my father always made as his fists rained bruises on my skin.Pain builds character.

Every letter the tattooist had finished off had burnt another bridge into my past. I would never go back. Never return. Never again be that goddamn frightened boy. Every painful prick was stained with a weird mix of shame and release. A reluctant freedom of sorts. A whole new shameful secret embedded deep in my skin.

I was alone by choice now, and alone I would remain. I was level and steady, walking my own path with no distractions, apart from the occasional tryst to satisfy my needs. There had been someone once, whom I had loved with a strength that had frightened me, a few happy years where my life had been complete. It had ended, like everything else, and those were memories I chose not to bring to the surface.

Until fucking Quinton had shown me what I had been missing. I had dealt with the world perfectly fine on my own for years. Now I went to bed at night imagining his breath in my hair and his arms around my body. I wanted him to love me like he had that night. I wanted to be his, for him to take me away from all the loneliness and tell me I was worthy of a life that was different from this. That perhaps I was someone who meant something, that I was someone to him.

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