by Alexis Hall
For a moment Fen just stared at him. There was a streak of pink over the ridge of his cheekbones that Alfie wanted to lick up like sherbet. Then he looked away and began to clean the stems and tatters of cellophane from the countertop, his hands not quite steady. “‘Really good,’ was it? That must have been life changing for you.”
“Oh come on. You know I’m not good with words and shit. It was—” Alfie made a helpless flaily gesture “—great. And you were . . .”
Fen’s spring-day eyes flicked back to his—one of those chilly spring days, for sure. “What? What was I?”
“B-beautiful. I know I didn’t deserve to be with you after . . . because of . . . because of what I did. But you let me. You needed it just as much as I did.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t need anything from you.”
“You sure about that?”
The wire cutters slipped from between Fen’s fingers with a clunk. “God, you never change do you, you cocky piece of shit? You think the whole world is yours for the taking just because you’re Alfie fucking Bell. But I’m not. Not again. Not anymore. So why don’t you take your fifteen-years-too-late crisis of conscience and get the hell out of my flower shop.”
Fen had gone pale and taut and trembly, and it was familiar in all the wrong ways. Alfie wasn’t sure if he was remembering the Rattler or some deeper bit of the past—the other times Fen might have stared up at him with that same mixture of anger and fear—or if he was remembering something else entirely. Fen in pleasure, his body sleek and tight and shuddering for Alfie.
Suddenly, Fen slumped over, and for a horrible second Alfie thought he might be crying. But then realised he was laughing. Sort of, anyway. It sounded rusty and a little wild. Could probably just as well have been sobbing.
“You alreet?” Alfie asked.
Fen blinked, lashes glimmering, and nodded. “Y-yes. I just . . . I just—” Another burst of laughter shook him. “I just realised how utterly r-ridiculous I sound. You can’t really order someone out of a flower shop and keep your dignity.”
He had a point. It was kind of funny. He risked a grin.
“Don’t you smile at me, Alfie Bell.”
Impossible. “You started it.”
Fen put a hand to his mouth, covering its softness. “This isn’t . . . You’re not . . . Oh, why won’t you leave?”
Because there was something there. He could feel it—tender and full of promise—under the hurt. Except he didn’t know how he was supposed to explain that to Fen, or convince him to take a chance on it, to believe that Alfie could bring him something good instead of bad, when he had absolutely no reason to trust Alfie at all.
So he found himself leaning across the counter, offering a different kind of answer. A deep tremor ran through Fen’s whole body, like he wanted to pull away and press close at the same time. But he didn’t pull away. Which meant Alfie was close enough to feel the unsteady ripple of Fen’s breath against his lips as Alfie whispered, “Because of this.”
Fen’s eyes had closed, leaving his face open and full of longing. “This isn’t anything.”
“Liar.”
Alfie kissed him. Very lightly. Slowly enough that Fen could have stopped him. The tight set of his mouth yielded the moment Alfie touched him, and he moaned softly, breathlessly, though it was barely a touch at all. His hands clenched on the countertop, a circle of white skin appearing beneath the band of green wire he still wore on his finger.
Something was fucking with the focus settings on Alfie’s world. Flowers blurred at the corners of his eyes. He noticed, suddenly, the way the shop smelled. Cool and sweet, like Fen’s skin. And there was singing coming from the speakers, something sweet and weird about the joys of maidenhood.
But everything else was pinned on a single, simple kiss. His whole world: a song, a scent, and Fen’s mouth, not quite opening, but not closed either, a whisper of warmth, and the clinging tenderness of the exposed arch at the top of his upper lip.
Alfie drew back, just enough to shape words. “See.”
“No.” Fen’s eyes snapped open again, pale and cold behind his glasses. “No. That doesn’t count.”
“Why?”
“Because—” the words came out slowly, but very precisely, like they were razor blades and Fen wanted to hurt him with them “—I don’t like you. You’re a bully.”
“I was a bully. Now I’m just someone trying to say sorry.”
Fen’s fingers skittered clumsily through the debris in front of him. “With your mouth?”
“Well, obviously with my mouth?”
“No, I meant . . . the kissing thing. Oh God, why can’t I say anything right? And don’t you dare start smiling again.”
Alfie did his best to seem grave. “Look,” he said, as gently as he could, “I know you keep saying you don’t like me and don’t want me, but that wasn’t . . . When we . . . I mean, it’s not how you act. At least, not all the time.”
“I don’t normally throw things at people I like.”
Alfie knew Fen had every reason to be mistrustful, and he had no right to be annoyed. Except the plant water incident still rankled. “Do you fuck them?” Unfortunately, that came out sounding a lot more aggressive than he’d intended.
Something darkened Fen’s eyes for a moment, and Alfie thought it was shame. He’d seen it often enough in the mirror to recognise it. And he knew just how it felt: a hot squiggle of pain and defiance, buried deep. Was that what he’d done to Fen? That was the very last thing he wanted.
“God, I’m sorry, I just—”
But Fen, who’d gone all sharp and scowly again, cut him off. “So I fucked you. So what?” He shrugged, the movement too abrupt to be convincing as a casual gesture. “I’ve wanted to fuck you since I knew what it meant. I used you for sex. That’s all it was.”
Alfie stared. This was . . . something. “Wait. What. You what? Since when?”
“Oh God.” Fen’s hands went up and tangled in his hair. “Oh fuck.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Well, no. Why would you? Normally when people are torturing you, you don’t want to sleep with them.”
The bitterness in Fen’s voice made Alfie flinch for him. Though it took everything he had not to protest the language. Torture, really? It hadn’t been that bad. Except to Fen, it clearly had. He wanted to say something comforting, but he didn’t know where to start. Honestly, it was probably best he hadn’t known. How much worse would it have been for Fen if he had? Or would it have changed everything? Opened the door in Alfie’s mind he hadn’t even known was there. His imagination strained, struggled, and then gave up. He just couldn’t picture his past with Fen in it. Not like that, anyway. He could get partway into an oddly appealing fantasy of holding hands on the pier and buying Fen candyfloss at the fair, or whatever you did when you were fifteen and a boy with a boyfriend, but it was a picture postcard. Not a life.
Fen had turned away. He was wearing a dark-blue dress shirt with short sleeves and a mandarin collar that made Alfie’s London-developed hipster-sense scream vintage. His shoulder blades pressed against the fabric like trapped wings. Before he could think better of it, Alfie rounded the counter and drew Fen into his arms, just like he’d wanted to do when he’d seen him standing in the Rattler. Fen didn’t even struggle. Just pressed against Alfie like it was all he wanted to do, his body finding places to fit so very naturally that it did weird things to Alfie’s heart. He leaned over Fen’s shoulder and brought his mouth to Fen’s ear, a fall of yellow-white-pink hair tickling his lips.
“Come on, Fen, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.” Fen’s body was compliant, but his voice was ice. “It’s fucked up and humiliating, and it sometimes feels like I’ve spent my whole life being humiliated by you or in front of you.”
“Nowt embarrassing about the night we spent together.”
“Are we thinking of the same occasion? I should have thrown my drink in your face. But instead I . . . I d
emanded you kiss me. Begged you to fuck me. How isn’t that embarrassing?”
“Because you were amazing and gorgeous and sexy as hell. I wanted to know everything about you. Still do.”
Fen shivered, which Alfie felt everywhere. “You already know everything about me. I’m the weird kid you bullied at school.”
“No. You’re a hot, interesting guy I once treated really badly.”
“And you think that’s a good basis to . . . what? I don’t even know what you’re doing here.”
Alfie drew Fen in a little tighter. He was so warm and strong, some wild thing temporarily stilled in Alfie’s embrace. “I told you, I just wanted to say sorry properly. Show you that I got it.”
“Okay.” Fen’s head was slightly turned away, the silken curve of his neck exposed and vulnerable. “You’ve done that.”
“And then I was thinking maybe we could go somewhere. Talk and get to know each other a bit? Put the past behind us.”
“Oh no, no, no. It’s way too fucked up for that.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Alfie nuzzled him. The secret curve of his ear. The flyaway strands of his hair. They smelled like flowers and a little bit of conditioner and a little bit of nicotine. “Let’s just try.”
Fen sighed. “That’s not how it works. You can’t make me feel better about all the shit you did to me. It’s not some kind of scale you can balance up with a few good deeds now.”
“No, I get that. But I’d really like to make this right between us. Just a little bit. I think it’d be good for both of us.”
“I don’t know.” Fen shifted restlessly in his arms—though he still wasn’t moving away. “I’ve lived quite a lot of my life being overly aware of you. Whereas you’ve been vaguely aware I still exist for less than two weeks.”
“So?”
Fen’s jaw pulled tight, like he was biting his lip. For a long moment, he didn’t answer. And then, “It’s not fair,” he burst out. “You shouldn’t be able to do this, and I shouldn’t let you.”
“It’s not just about me. If I had nothing to offer you, nothing you wanted, you wouldn’t have gone with me that night, and you wouldn’t still be talking to me now.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Alfie Bell.” From over his shoulder, Fen flicked him what was probably supposed to be a sardonic look. “If I want a big cock to ride, I can get that anywhere.”
It wasn’t a good time to think about that. Really not a good time. Alfie tried to file the image away before he could get completely distracted by it. (The shift of muscle beneath gold-stippled skin, head thrown back, throat naked, mouth open—wait, stop, stop right now.) “Aye, but you still chose me. You knew exactly who I was and you went with me anyway.”
“I know.” Fen drooped. “And I wish . . . Oh, I don’t know. How do you always manage to get everything you want? Why do you get to treat me like you did and then expect my forgiveness five seconds after remembering about it?”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m just trying to . . . y’know . . . put the past behind us.”
“It’s not fair,” Fen repeated, helplessly. “How can I be this stupid and pathetic and miserable? Why are you never the one who suffers?”
Alfie could have disputed that in quite some detail, but it didn’t seem like it would be helpful just then. “Dunno. But I’m not really sure what to do about it, short of you sticking my head down the toilet this time.”
Fen was suddenly quite still. “You shouldn’t joke. You’ve no idea how often I’ve thought about it.”
“About . . . putting my head down the bog?”
“About getting even. Of making you feel even a tiny bit of what I did.”
“Fuck.” Alfie let out a long breath. He kept thinking he understood. Then realising he didn’t. He felt like the obnoxious one in the Chronicles of Narnia who Aslan had to rip the dragon scales off. “I really hurt you, didn’t I?”
Fen’s glance was strangely desolate. “Yes, Alfie Bell, you really did.”
The bell jangled into the silence, startling them both. Alfie had practically forgotten he was standing in the middle of a flower shop, holding another guy. And while you could maybe get away with that in London, at least in certain bits of it, this was South Shields. Every instinct he possessed was pulling at him like a Rottweiler on a lead, but he was determined to be better than that. To show Fen—hell, to show himself—he could be better than that.
Except then Fen basically clawed himself free. Leapt so far away it was like Alfie had suddenly starting generating a Fen-repelling field. It felt kind of weird—not good—to be on the receiving end of that sort of recoil. What did Fen think was going to happen? That a roving gang of violent homophobes was spot-checking local flower shops for inappropriate male-to-male contact?
He needn’t have worried, though. An old lady emerged through the crack of the laboriously opened door, moving as slowly as if she was made of glass. Fen knew what she wanted without having to be told—a single gerbera daisy, the colour of sunrise, which he wrapped up in paper for her like it was precious. The exchange was clearly familiar to them both. A ritual. They didn’t exchange more than a few words, but Fen’s gentleness made Alfie feel strange and awkward. Lonely, somehow.
And when she was gone, something was different. The quietness in the shop had a heaviness to it now. And Fen . . . Fen looked breakable, in a way he never had before. Not even when Alfie had been tormenting him.
“You alreet?”
Fen shrugged. “She comes by every Friday. The flower is for her husband.”
Well. That seemed nice. Didn’t it? “Aww,” he tried.
Fen gave him a glittery look. “He’s dead.”
Alfie tried to feel sympathetic. And not totally set up.
“He was in the Royal Air Force. He died in 1944, at the age of twenty-two.”
“Oh. Uh. That’s harsh.” Wow. He was so bad at this. It just seemed too big somehow—as if it could crack open the universe if you thought about it too much, sadness running out like yolk. And, truthfully, Alfie was . . . a little bit scared of sadness. It was about as alien and taboo as falling in love with men should have been. “I mean,” he blundered on, “I’m sorry. Must be hard and stuff.”
Fen, however, had no such concerns. He came at the subject with a kind of fearlessness—a sort of naked, desperate bleakness—that left Alfie unsettled and admiring at once. “I don’t know . . . how that happens. How you do it—how you keep living with grief. Forever.”
“God, I dunno, mate. My granddad died when I was a teenager, but you sort of expect your grandparents to die, don’t you? I was sad, but it wasn’t really a big deal.”
Fen was silent, arms folded so tightly it looked almost as if he was hugging himself. Alfie could have hugged him instead, but when he reached out, Fen jerked away.
Which meant he had to fall back on words. And there were a hundred, maybe a thousand, things he wanted to say, but he couldn’t get any of them to line up properly into letters and words and sentences. “My friend Kitty told me that when bad stuff happens, you just sort of learn to live with it. It sort of becomes who you are, like.”
“People aren’t patchwork quilts. Pieces of pain all stitched together into the shape of something human.”
“No, but . . .” But what? Shit.
Not that it mattered. Fen didn’t seem to care or want Alfie’s comfort. His attempts at it, anyway. He uncoiled, straightened, tipped his head up challengingly. Which would have been a little bit adorable—he looked so pointy like that, all chin and nose and cheekbones—if there’d been any warmth in his gaze. “So what now, Alfie Bell?”
“That’s sort of up to you.” Alfie shrugged. “I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you really want. But what’s the harm in dinner or summin?”
“Well, you know my terms.”
“Your terms?”
A short, sharp nod.
The conversation—and Fen himself—had wavered about so much that it took Alfie a
moment to get it. “You want to shove my head down the netty? And afterwards you’ll come to dinner with me?”
“Well—” the faintest ghost of mischief curled the corners of Fen’s lips upwards “—maybe not immediately afterwards.”
Alfie might have laughed if he hadn’t been otherwise preoccupied. “I wasn’t . . . That was . . . Give over, mate, you know I was kidding.”
“Fine.”
“You can’t be bloody serious.”
Fen adjusted his glasses—a swift, neat little flick with his fingertips—and said nothing.
“You’re being unreasonable.”
“Am I?” Fen’s voice rose abruptly. “Then tell me, Alfie Bell, why the fuck should I be reasonable? Why do I owe you that?”
Alfie had been on his way to annoyed, but it didn’t last. How could it, when Fen was right? He groaned. “You don’t. Of course, you don’t. You don’t owe me anything.”
“We finally agree on something.” Fen had the meanest eyebrows. Especially when they went all twitchy and sardonic. He’d folded his arms again as well, so Alfie could see the twist of sinew over the bones of his forearms and the deep groove of muscle between. The faint gleam of gold at the tips of the lightly curling hair.
He stifled a sigh. “All right. If this is really what you need, let’s do it.”
“What . . . You—” Fen’s lashes fluttered, almost like they did in pleasure, pale suggestions of moving light “—you . . . you’re going to let me . . .”
“Well, not if there’s an alternative. But if I have to, I have to.”
Except now Fen seemed to be hesitating. And while this would probably have been a really good time for Alfie to make a strong case for not having his head shoved down a toilet, instead he found himself getting all reckless and belligerent. He wasn’t exactly keen on the toilet-head-shoving thing, but on a solely abstract level, there was something almost appealing about the parity of it all. Checks and balances. Punishment and redemption. What went around coming around.
He’d felt the same way as a kid when—or, at least, after—his dad had taken a belt to him. Which wasn’t something that had happened . . . all that often. It was hard to explain to southerners, though, who went straight from “hit occasionally” to “horribly abused,” which Alfie thought was kind of weird considering a lot of London friends barely knew their parents. Greg actually called his mater and pater, which might have been a joke of some kind, and spoke of his nanny with a great deal more warmth. At first, Alfie had assumed he meant his grandmother, but it turned out he meant the trained professional who had been hired to raise him. Before he’d been sent off to school to learn bread-making or whatever. Apparently this had done Greg no harm. Which was what Alfie was inclined to think about his own upbringing.