Page 1 of Darien
PROLOGUE
The one and only time that they kissed, Darien had thought it would be the last. He thought he would never see Noah again, that this was their only chance, and it surprised him how sad that thought made him.
He knew he would remember this moment for the rest of his life. They were in their shared dorm room. It was bare and undecorated on Noah's side except for a stark periodic table posted on the wall right over his desk, but covered in bright movie and music posters on Darien's side.
It was late at night, that was when they'd always done their best talking. So late that even the normally noisy dorm rooms was nearly silent as the exhausted students tried to grab a few hours of shuteye. Beams of dirty golden light from the streets below straggled in, but that was all the illumination in the room.
All day, whenever they were together, Darien had been trying to find the courage to tell Noah about his decision. They weren't only roommates, they were also best friends, and Noah didn't even know that Darien had been struggling with any sort of big, life-altering decision at all. It was a strange feeling, and he sighed as he turned to look at the other bed, at the small, slender shape he could just barely make out.
What he did see was the shine of Noah's eyes, almost liquid in the low light and so dark blue that they were nearly black, a twilight sky. Serious, always solemn, those eyes only really lit up on the rare occasions when Noah smiled.
Noah wasn’t smiling. He was looking at him, waiting. Even in the dim room, that was clear, even before the other man spoke.
"Whatever it is, get it out already."
So Noah knew more than Darien had told. That didn’t shock Darien much. For a moment, all that Darien could feel was deep, soul-crushing sadness, radiating through his whole body. How could he even consider this? And yet, he'd done more than consider. Far more.
"I'm leaving," Darien spoke abruptly because he wanted to get the words out and be done with it. "I'm dropping out of college."
The astonishment was clear. It would have been clear in a completely pitch black room. Darien knew that he couldn't have said or done anything more shocking if he had stripped naked and started hula dancing.
"What?" Noah finally managed, and Darien heard, rather than saw, the other man rolling onto his side to face him.
"I'm leaving. I got a chance to do something big, Noah." Darien took a deep breath. As excruciating as he'd thought this would be, it was a thousand times worse. Surely most college roommates didn't have a relationship like this? It felt like breaking up, and from the way Noah drew into himself, it seemed that he felt the same way.
“You can’t leave,” Noah informed him, and there was a hint of panic in the other man’s voice. He was usually pretty calm but not at the moment. Noah took a second to modulate himself and then continued on. “You can’t just leave. You have plans, remember?”
Darien shook his head, and then, acting on pure instinct, he shifted over onto the other bed and sat close to Noah, so that he could see him even through the gloom. He knew he’d had plans. He was fully aware of that. It was just that some things were too good to resist.
“We both know that life doesn’t go according to plans,” Darien said, fighting the strangest urge to reach out and touch Noah’s face, to see if his cheek was as smooth as it looked. Of course, if he let himself be completely honest, the truth was that he’d been having those feelings for quite some time now. But Noah was his friend, and that had always seemed more important.
It was a little hard to hold those feelings off now when he knew that this whole thing was coming to an end. But he’d thought this through. He knew what he was doing, he assured himself.
“I auditioned for a band,” Darien spoke slowly, and it was genuinely odd to hear the words come out of his own lips. He hadn’t admitted, not to anyone, what he was doing, because he hadn’t seen how he had a chance of even being considered. Yes, he could sing, but he’d never been formally trained. There had to be hundreds, thousands, of boys that were better singers, better dancers, and just plain better looking, out there.
“What?” Noah asked, his face seemed permanently etched with an expression of shock. Darien did his best to ignore it and rushed on before he could be derailed.
“I got in. There’s a contract, Noah. I’ll make more money in a year than I could ever hope to make doing anything else. I can come back to school, maybe in a year or two, and pay my way through.”
His mother and father, who had adopted him when he was a baby, didn’t have the funds to put him through school. He was reliant on student loans, and he hated it. What if he didn’t qualify, or there was some sort of mix up?
He preferred to rely on himself, to say the very least. And this was a way he could do that without being a burden to his parents, and when he came out on the other side, with his degree triumphantly clutched in his hand, he wouldn’t be in debt for the rest of his life.
“Darien, you’re quitting school to join a band?” Noah didn’t sound so much disapproving as he did utterly shocked, and Darien gave a wry little grin and a nod. Yes, it was completely unlike him, and he knew it, but desperate times did require desperate measures, as the tired old saying went.
“Yeah,” Darien hardly believed it himself, despite having been offered the job. He didn’t even know who he would be singing with. He’d been told it would be a group of four, three, plus him, but he had yet to even meet them. “Noah, it’s a really good project, this band. It’ll be made up entirely of gay or bisexual—”
“Please don’t do this,” Noah whispered, interrupting Darien, and his face was pale, his eyes wide, as he sat up in bed and looked at Darien, his gaze beseeching. “If you leave, will you ever come back? Even if you do, in a year or two I’ll be more than halfway through my degree.”
It felt a little bit like being punched in the gut, to be told that. Somehow, he hadn’t thought about that. When he’d pictured this, he had thought that he could come right back to Noah, to school, to being Noah’s roommate and best friend. But Noah was going to move on, of course he was.
“This is a dream come true,” Darien tried to bolster himself, taking a deep breath but unable to look away from Noah’s bright eyes. “To put myself through school? To come out on the other side without debt?”
He looked at Noah, then shook his head. Noah, staggeringly brilliant, as well as utterly gorgeous, couldn’t understand. He qualified for all sorts of scholarships, and not just because he was an orphan, either. He had never failed a class. Never even come close. Hell, the guy rarely got even one answer wrong, even on a pop quiz.
Darien knew he was smart, too, but he didn’t have Noah’s same genius thing. Or maybe, Noah had just had to work harder through his life. Noah had lost his parents young, though that was all Darien knew about it. Noah didn’t exactly like to talk about it, but he’d been in and out of foster homes for his whole life.
So he worked for everything he got. And as Darien sat there, staring at Noah, trying to resign himself to the fact that he could lose this man, he started to wonder if it was even worth it. If maybe he shouldn’t just forget the whole thing.
