“I’ve been here a year,” Rachel said when Darren passed her a plate, and beckoned him to curl up on her sagging sofa, covered with fluffy afghans in varying colours. He sank into the nest and found it surprisingly comfortable. “My last neighbour died.”
“Lovely,” Darren said.
“Yeah, he hanged himself on the landing. Lovely thing to find first thing in the morning.” She pulled a face. “He was weird, though. Literally never spoke to him.”
“No knickers-related invasions?”
“Nope,” she said loftily. “Weird, bald guy. I swear he shaved everywhere. He wasn’t fuzzy like you,” and she prodded Darren’s ankle where his work trousers had ridden up enough to show a slip of skin and leg hair above his sock. “You that hairy all over?”
“Not anymore,” Darren shrugged. “The boyfriend complained.”
“Is he here too?”
“Nah. Cambridge.”
“…He’s from Cambridge?”
“No, he’s at Cambridge. The university.”
“Jesus Christ, your boyfriend got into Cambridge?” She gaped, then frowned suspiciously. “Wait. Are you a student?”
“Nope,” Darren shook his head. “Didn’t want to go. I work for the police.”
“A copper?”
“Crime scenes,” Darren corrected. “I dust everything with a tiny paintbrush.”
“Messy.”
“Mm.”
Rachel eyed him over a forkful of egg. “You should come out on Friday night. With us.”
“Who’s us?”
“Me and some of the girls from work,” Rachel said. “Jodie would love you. Are you mixed-race or Jewish or something? The hair’s kinda crazy.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Jodie’s a massive equal rights freak,” Rachel said. “I mean, if you’re bi, she will like literally talk your ear off about how she hates biphobia.”
“My grandfather’s Iranian. Or was. He’s a bit dead now.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” Darren said. “Very dead.”
“I meant the Iranian thing. You’re having me on.”
“I’m not,” Darren said. “Never met him, mind. He died when Mother was a kid.”
“What’s your mum called?”
“Alison.” Darren smirked, and Rachel scowled. “Akbar, before she got married. Her mum was from Wexford.”
Rachel huffed. “Oh, my God, Irish-Iranian-Englishman. Jodie’s going to love you,” she insisted. “Come out with us Friday. You can’t have something else on, you only just got here.”
Darren rolled his eyes, but the remark stuck. For the first time, he didn’t. Rachel was right; he had no plans for the weekend, because weekends had always meant Jayden, and now they didn’t. Darren was going to have to fill up his weekends with something else. He’d have to start looking into sports clubs or something.
Until then, maybe baiting a hairy-armpitted nutjob who probably had a degree in black studies or something like that would fill up this first one.
“All right,” he said. “But I make no promises for my behaviour.”
* * * *
He spent most of the evening in Rachel’s flat watching TV with her and criticising her taste in actors until his phone rang.
“Boyfriend,” he said, flashing her the caller ID, and then, “Hey Jayden,” before he’d even gotten off the sofa.
“Night, Darren,” Rachel called after him; he waved over his shoulder and closed the door of his flat behind him as Jayden asked who he’d heard.
“Rachel. Neighbour,” he said. “How’re you?”
“I have like four essays already.”
“It’s been a week!”
“I know!” Jayden whined. “I have four essays, I don’t even know what the last one means because I swear, Darren, I swear that if you’re going to call Shakespeare up for misogyny, Othello isn’t the play to do it in because there’s like one scene of banter and then all the other issues come forward, and…”
Darren dropped onto his bed, clamping the phone between his right shoulder and his ear as he worked his trousers off. Might as well get ready for bed while Jayden rambled; it was half ten already, and tomorrow’s training session started at eight.
“…and Leah’s trying to get me to join the hockey club but I can’t do drama and hockey and actually pass this degree, because this is insane, I’m thinking maybe…”
Darren hummed in the right places as he rummaged for his squeeze ball that the physiotherapist had given him, and flopped back onto the bed with it, crushing it and releasing it again in a slow rhythm. The damaged muscles in his shoulder protested, but not too sharply tonight. They were adjusting to the job and the hefting kit around pretty well, all things considered. Maybe he should start boxing or something, really tone them up.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yeah,” Darren said, “but I didn’t think I was really needed for your ranting.”
Jayden laughed, and Darren smiled at the ceiling, his chest aching suddenly with a pain that wasn’t physical at all. “I miss you,” Jayden murmured lowly. “I couldn’t sleep on Saturday night. The bed was cold.”
“You complained endlessly that I was a furnace and you hated sleeping with me, and now you’re complaining that you’re cold?”
Jayden huffed. “Stop arguing and just say something nice.”
“Like what?”
“Darren.”
“Fine.” Darren caved. “I miss you too. When I’m not asleep or trying to remember why I took this job.”
Jayden’s voice dropped. “You’re not liking it?”
“I’m liking it fine,” Darren said, “but it’s tiring and the volume crime instructor’s an arsehole. Wants me to shave my head.”
“No,” Jayden said instantly.
“I’m not going to,” Darren said. “I trimmed it…”
“Darren!”
“…but it’s still…what did you call it?”
“Fluffy.”
Darren groaned; Jayden offered a breathy little laugh.
“I miss you,” he repeated plaintively. “It’s cold and quiet here without you. And Ella’s exhausting, and Leah keeps pressurising me, and they’re always talking about politics, Darren.”
“Welcome to university,” Darren said flatly.
“You should have come here,” Jayden insisted.
“You should have come here,” Darren retorted.
It had been a bone of contention ever since the beginning of upper sixth form, when Darren had first applied for this training position. Jayden had been upset he wasn’t going to be within reasonable travel distance of Cambridge. Darren was equally bemused as to why Jayden wanted to go to Cambridge in the first place. Mother was a graduate of Oxford, and Cambridge was exactly the same: full of pretentious idiots without an ounce of common sense or feeling between them. He’d never grasped why Jayden wanted to go. He couldn’t shake the worry that Jayden wasn’t suited to go. He’d tried so hard to fit in at St. John’s, but at least there, he’d been trying to fit in with Paul and Ethan, who were harmless enough. Cambridge was even worse. He’d be trying so hard to fit in with people who were so different from either of them, and…
And Darren couldn’t shake the worry that Jayden would change.
“I just…” Jayden huffed. “Is it sappy if I say I just want a hug right now?”
“Yes.”
“You’re supposed to say no and that you want to hug me too!”
“If I start saying things I’m supposed to, you’ll worry,” Darren replied sensibly and turned over onto his front. “You’d better get on with those essays.”
Jayden groaned. “Don’t make me.”
“Go, student. Earn degrees and letters and…get drunk, or whatever it is you’re meant to do.”
“You’re mad.”
“You love me anyway,” Darren returned, and Jayden hummed.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “I do.”
Darren curled his toes inside his socks and half-smiled at his pillow. “Get off the line, Jayden,” he said.
“Hey!”
He hung up, and dropped his phone on the bedside table, trying to memorise the warmth in his stomach when Jayden admitted it. The same warmth he always got. The warmth that meant this would get easier, because that wasn’t going to change, even if they did, even if their lives weren’t together right now.
“Love you too, Jayden,” he told the ceiling, and everything was fine.
Chapter 4
“Essays on Friday,” Dr. Bell called as the room rustled. “And no excuses! I will email the marks back to each of you as I’m at a conference on Monday morning. Dismissed.”
“Hey,” Tim leaned over to whisper in Jayden’s ear. “Come with me.”
“Why? I have to do that essay.”
“So do I.” Tim shrugged. “C’mon. Post-lecture drink. Last class of the day, let’s move it!”
Jayden groaned, but shouldered his bag, and followed.
Routine came quickly here. Jayden had fallen into it almost from day one: intense classes, intense seminars, and every day off spent in the library. Typically, he only saw Leah and Tim if he was caught during classes; the rest of the time he spent socialising with Ella and Jonathon because it meant he didn’t have to leave his room too much, or spend too long away from work.
This meant, naturally, that Jonathon and Ella became his de facto friends, with Ella next door and Jonathon only a little way down the corridor. Jayden’s other neighbour seemed to be perpetually absent; rumour had it that he had a girlfriend in London, and he disappeared every weekend to see her and otherwise didn’t leave his room.
The workload was more than Jayden had expected. He had heard of other universities letting students ease into it more, or students taking a laid-back attitude to the studying, but he couldn’t imagine it being possible here. By the first weekend, he was already behind on assignments, and had snatched every precious minute to text Darren or talk to him on the phone in the evenings, letting that deep, dry voice soothe him.
Ella was helpful too, helping him find things in the labyrinthine college library, and inviting him into her study group even though they were all law students. Jayden found the intense atmosphere helped him focus, even if they chatted around him about the application of various Latin phrases and case histories that reached back into the eighteen hundreds. But for the most part, he stayed in his room, unless—like today—Tim was instructed to capture him.
Leah issued the instructions, and Tim followed them. Tim was just that kind of person, Jayden figured, happy to follow the rules of someone more domineering than him. So Jayden let himself be taken down to the basement bar, and then Leah was waiting with three pints of the cheapest lager money could buy, and all of which looked disturbingly frothy.
“I want a Flake to go with it,” Tim said, poking the foam with the tip of his index finger, and Leah snorted.
“Just get it down you,” she said. “How’s our social leper?”
“Oh, shut it,” Jayden said, going red.
Leah (and kind of Tim, but he was about as successful at applying peer pressure as a Star Trek convention, so kind of not Tim too) had taken to calling Jayden a social leper, or variations on the theme, from the minute he’d decided he was too busy with work to join hockey club (her favourite) or drama club (Tim’s). He wanted to—he sorely missed writing plays, especially when Mum had sent him the programme for the play they’d picked at the local theatre to do at Christmas—but he just didn’t have time. Unfortunately, Leah was kind of a chubby, girly version of Darren, because her unhelpful and ongoing demand was that he simply make time.
“University isn’t for working all the time,” she’d sniped, and maybe Jayden wasn’t as bright as Cambridge thought he was, because he had to work all the time. His parents couldn’t afford to fund him like Leah’s or Tim’s or Ella’s, so he had to get top marks to make it all worth it. He couldn’t rely on anyone else to support him, not even Darren, partly because Darren’s job didn’t pay well, and partly because the odds of him and Darren still being together by the time he graduated were next to nothing anyway.
“I went Facebook-stalking last night,” Leah said, and Tim grinned a wide, toothy grin that showed off a scar from what Jayden imagined to be a healed lip piercing. “Guess who I checked out.”
“Who?”
“Your not-particularly-cute boyfriend.”
Jayden flushed.
“Oh, I dunno,” Tim said, still grinning. “I’m not gay or anything, but you know, last two people on Earth, I would.”
I doubt Darren would, though, the snide little voice in the back of Jayden’s head piped up, and he squashed it.
“I take back everything I said,” Leah announced and smirked. “I like him. Such an arsehole. And the sarcasm, his timeline was dripping with it.”
Jayden flushed harder. “Yeah, well…he is fluent in English, despite his, um, keyboard skills.”
“Don’t apologise, it’s nice.” Leah waved a hand dismissively. “People are far too proper around here. It was a good laugh. I doubt anyone in your wing has a status that says—what was it?” She fumbled with her phone, leaving Jayden to momentarily consider drowning himself in the crappy lager, before finding the app she wanted and grinning anew. “‘Two-hour traffic jam because someone hit a cat. It shouldn’t take four cars to hit one cat!’“
“Poor cat,” Tim said mournfully.
“He did go to private school,” Jayden hastened to point out; Leah rolled her eyes.
“So?” she asked pointedly. “When’s he coming to visit you?”
“Um, I don’t know. Probably Christmas. Depends if he can get the time off and stuff,” Jayden fumbled.
“Invite him sooner,” she said imperiously. “I like him, he’s a right cunt.”
“Leah!”
“Weeey,” Tim crowed and high-fived her. “In the common way, right, not like the toff way.”
“Tim, you’re a toff. Your dad is a QC.”
“But I’m not a toff,” he insisted, pulling on one ginger dreadlock. “See?”
“Yeah, okay,” Leah said sceptically, putting her phone away. Jayden’s buzzed, as if on cue. “In a year, you’ll have shaved your head and be wearing Armani with the rest of the department.”
“The class war never dies!” Tim insisted.
Jayden privately had very little idea of what the class war was meant to be, but did know that he was easily the most working-class person at the table. But clever enough to get here, the voice in his head insisted in an unusual show of support, and he opened the text message without feeling quite so scrutinised.
Darren <3 Mobile: Whos leah rutherford? n y do ur nobby m8s keep frendin me!!
“Now you’ve woken the beast,” Jayden grumbled, and Leah snickered.
“Good.”
The girl who keeps trying to get me to join hockey club. She’s stalking your Facebook.
Y?
How should I know?
Ur m8!
I don’t even know why you do what you do half the time, never mind a girl I’ve known for a month, Jayden complained, then added a bunch of kisses. If Darren was online, it meant he was talking to Paul, which meant Paul would be in on the texting as well. Jayden privately thought that Paul took more of an interest in their relationship than he did in his own. Which might explain why his latest girlfriend had dumped him for ‘not being honest with himself.’
Gd point. And sure enough: Paul says hi. actualy he says have u shaged the colege dean yet but i think hes just jel that the lse dean is a raging dyke.
Jayden laughed and showed the text to a curious Leah. Paul had gone to LSE, the London School of Economics, and Ethan, perpetually joined to his hip, had strayed to the heady distance of University College London. They were even flat sharing somewhere in Soho.
“So your gay Muslim boyfriend,” Tim said carefully when Jayden had explained, “has
two equally closeted gay friends? Mate, I’d watch out if I were you.”
Jayden rolled his eyes, relaxed back in his seat, and wished every evening could be just like this.
* * * *
“Hey, come with me.”
Darren had gotten used to this, and simply tipped his head back to stare at Rachel over the top of the sofa. Ever since he’d moved in, she’d decided she was free to come and go as she pleased. Whether he locked the door while he was at work or not—she obviously had a key.
So he didn’t argue, or ask what she was doing in his flat. He simply said, “Why?”
“You’re being boring and alone, and I’m alone and bored, so let’s watch The L Word and eat pizza.”
“I had pizza last night.”
“Let’s have Chinese, then.”
“I’m watching the football.”
“It’s not your team.”
“What’s my team?”
“I don’t know, but I’m saying it’s not your team, so come over.”
“It is my team.”
“Not anymore. Come on!”
“Urgh,” Darren said, but heaved himself off the sofa anyway. He was at a loose end without Jayden. He’d taken up boxing at a local club on Mondays and Saturdays, but it just didn’t fill the gap that going-to-Jayden’s, going-out-with-Jayden, dating-on-a-regular-basis-alone, and dating-on-a-semi-regular-basis-with-Paul-and-Ethan-crashing-in had left behind. Rachel, despite her habit of just appearing unannounced, was a welcome relief from the endless, boring evenings on his own. “I’m not watching The L Word.”
“You’re so gay.”
“I am happy to watch lesbians getting it on,” Darren said, “but frankly, I’m hungry and I’m bored and I don’t really feel like a wank.”
Rachel laughed. “I thought men were wired to always feel like a wank?”
“Urban legend,” Darren said dryly. “Where’s the Chinese, then?” he asked as he was re-deposited on her sofa instead of his.
The Devil's Trill Sonata Page 3