Pansies

by Alexis Hall

  Fen had taken his hand away. Wrapped his arms around himself. He was trembling very slightly, which made Alfie physically ache to hold him. Let that slender body shake in the safety of his arms. “Well, sometimes you just can’t. Things happen and . . . and you can’t. And all the love and money in the world won’t make a difference.”

  Some piece or reflection of the light gleamed for a moment on Fen’s cheek, and he flicked a hand idly across his face. Another gleam, this time on the other side, another flick. Oh God, was he crying?

  “Alfie.” He sounded breathless, close to panic. “I’m . . . s-so sorry. But I have to go. Right now.”

  Alfie opened his mouth to say something hopeless like, It’s all right, or Don’t worry, but it was too late. Fen was reaching for his hat, sliding out of the booth, jerking clumsily to his feet, briefly, awkwardly caught in the tablecloth, causing their knives and forks to rattle on their empty plates.

  Alfie grabbed for one of the trailing ends before Fen dragged the whole thing with him as he fled. Which was the right thing to do, of course, but it did mean Fen was gone. And Alfie was left sitting there. On his own. With the whole restaurant staring.

  Nobody had ever done this to him when he was straight.

  A middle-aged woman leaned over the space between the tables. “Ye should gan after him, pet.”

  Suddenly whatever paralysis had held him was gone. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket, threw down far too many notes, paused briefly to mutter something apologetic to Amjad, and chased Fen into the night.

  11

  Alfie thought Fen would be long gone, but he wasn’t. He was standing by Alfie’s car, half-swallowed by the darkness, his head bowed, his hands braced on the bonnet.

  Alfie didn’t hesitate. He just went over there and gathered him up. And Fen let him. Let him fit them together, Fen’s back to Alfie’s front, and wrap him up in his big arms, and hold him like that. He wasn’t crying, now. Wasn’t trembling. He was simply cold, his soft breaths clouding the air a moment before they dissipated.

  Alfie wanted to ask what had happened, what was wrong. But he didn’t dare. At least not yet. In case he broke this moment: him holding Fen, like none of the bad stuff mattered, like Fen trusted him. Could take comfort from him. Or whatever else he needed.

  “Look. Dragon smoke.” He leaned over Fen’s shoulder and breathed out too, so they mingled in the mist.

  Dragon smoke? How old was he, twelve? Well, it was probably better than the cameo conversation. Even thinking about that made his stomach twist itself into embarrassed little knots.

  Somehow, even in the tight circle of Alfie’s embrace, Fen swizzled round. When they were this close, the height difference really seemed to matter. Truthfully, Alfie kind of liked it. Especially the way Fen had to tip his head back. There was something intimate about it, trusting, a bit wanting, like he was waiting for a kiss. Which he wasn’t. But the possibility was there. Had always been there, since that night outside the Rattler.

  Very softly, as though Fen was a deer and his voice was a gun, he tried, “What did I say?”

  “N-nothing. It was me. All me.”

  “What’s wrong, pet?” The endearment slipped out before he could stop it. But it wasn’t really an endearment, it was just the warmest thing he knew how to say. It was what his mam had said to him through all his tiny childhood tragedies, and somehow made them better.

  “Well . . . basically everything. But there was no need to come after me.”

  “Oh aye?” Alfie made as though to pull away. “I’ll nip back and get pudding, then.”

  Something that might have been a laugh, and the press of Fen’s fingers, tugging him closer. “I’m so sorry I wrecked your evening.”

  “Aww, Fen, you didn’t wreck my evening. But can you tell us what’s going on, maybe? One minute you were sort of fine, the next you really weren’t.”

  Fen was staring unhelpfully at a spot somewhere at the base of Alfie’s throat. “That’s my life right now. Sort of fine, then really not.” And then he was pulling away, as Alfie had known he would. Though knowing didn’t make that little parting easier to bear, or the sudden cold where Fen’s body had been. His breath came harshly through the darkness, but when he spoke again, he was oddly calm. Stripped of everything. “My mother died.”

  For a moment, Alfie was . . . blank. “You what? You mean, Nora? Your mam, Nora? Fuck me. How? When?”

  “A while ago now—about a year and a half? Long enough that I shouldn’t be like this.”

  “You mean, sad? Fen, if my man died and I wasn’t sad, I’d think there was summin wrong with me.”

  An impatient flick of Fen’s fingers. “It’s more than that. And I’m sick of it. I want to be normal again. To be myself again.”

  “You don’t think you’re you?”

  “Well, I didn’t used to burst into tears in restaurants.”

  “But,” Alfie persisted, “it wasn’t a wild, random event. Something must’ve made you cry.”

  “It was . . . it was you. Well, sort of.” Fen’s toe scuffed idly at some loose gravel on the road. The clash of pebbles sounded far too loud. “This ridiculous conviction you have that you can fix everything for everyone.”

  “I don’t believe I can fix everything. I just like to, y’know . . . try.”

  Suddenly Fen glanced up, the movement catching Alfie’s attention. “But what if you didn’t try? Or didn’t try hard enough?”

  The cold air dug its fingers into Alfie’s bare arms and scratched. “Um, I don’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” There was a pause. “Alfie?”

  “Uh. Yeah?”

  “Can I drive your car?”

  That was kind of the opposite of whatever it was he’d been expecting. Especially after the conversation they’d just had. He was about to say no and insist on some kind of answer, when Fen pushed his glasses onto the top of his head, and Alfie forgot basically everything. Instead went all chick-flick silly because Fen’s eyes were naked, and beautiful, and looking right up at him. And Fen was monochrome in the moonlight, all silver and shadows and secrets. “Well . . . if you really want. Just round the car park, though, okay?”

  Fen nodded eagerly.

  They got into the car, and Alfie drove them round the corner, where they swapped sides and Alfie smooshed himself gingerly into the passenger seat. It felt so wrong.

  “You can drive, right?”

  Fen gave him a look. “Yes, of course. I just had to sell my car.”

  He turned the key in the ignition, and the Sagaris shuddered in response—in response to someone who wasn’t Alfie—the needles performing their dance, the engine stirring itself from slumber like a lion. Fen released the handbrake, put his foot down, and the car leapt forward. Then juddered to a bone-jarring, neck-snapping halt.

  Alfie actually yelled.

  Fen . . . Fen laughed. Kind of wildly. “Sorry. God. God.”

  “Mate. Seriously. Be careful. There’s no traction control.”

  “It’s got a bit of a kick.”

  “Yeah, she has.”

  Alfie was just about ready to call the experiment off when, suddenly, they were moving again, smoothly this time, at least as smooth as the Sagaris ever was. They thundered back and forth across the car park, spinning occasionally wide at Fen’s attempts to corner. Alfie’s hands were clutched white-knuckled against his thighs, but really, there was no need to panic. He reminded himself he’d been exactly the same until he got used to her. All that power and lightness, the way she roared. For a TVR, she handled pretty well. And Fen seemed to know what he was doing. It was fine. It was all going to be fine.

  “Can I take her for a spin?”

  No. Absolutely not. Never. “Uh.”

  “Please? I’m sick of going round in circles.”

  No. No. No. “Uh.”

  “It’s Friday night. The roads will be empty. I won’t hurt anybody. Or damage your car.”

  There were a million things Fen cou
ld have said or done that might have made Alfie say yes. He could have looked at him. Or touched him. Reminded him how shitty he’d been in the past. Or of his recent pathetic failure to hang a shower rail. But Fen didn’t do that, which was maybe why Alfie volunteered his agreement. “Yeah, okay. But carefully, right?”

  Fen’s smile was moon bright as he careened them out of the car park.

  It wasn’t careful. Not by anyone’s definition. But it wasn’t dangerous. Well, not for anything except Alfie’s insurance. And Fen had been right: the roads were pretty clear.

  So it was fine. Absolutely fine.

  But Alfie was still tense all the way to his toes. He forced himself to look out the window. At the sea and the sky, blurred to the same shade of dark. And that was why, even though he knew every quiver and growl of the Sagaris probably better than he knew his own body, it took him a while to notice they were edging seventy in a forty zone. He yelped out Fen’s name, and the car slowed almost at once.

  The look Fen flashed him was utterly unrepentant. He was all gleams. His grin, and the uncertain light playing over his glasses. It would have been so hot except Alfie felt nothing but a faint sense of foreboding. He would have done pretty much anything to make Fen happy—even letting him take the wheel of his beloved car, a privilege afforded to no one—but this didn’t seem to be actually making him happy. Whatever was going on with Fen right now, it wasn’t joy. It was some brittle, sharp-edged thing, like his anger. Another part of his too-suddenly revealed sorrow.

  Alfie seriously wanted his car back. “Think that’s enough for now, eh?”

  Instant disappointment. “A little longer?”

  God, he sounded like a kid at bedtime. So, instead of saying what he meant, which was, No, stop, just stop, and let me hold you again, he found himself agreeing idiotically. He cleared his throat. “Maybe take it easy like?”

  A nod from Fen, but this time Alfie was keeping an eye on him. Both eyes. And if he’d had any extras, they’d have been on the case too. The dial twitched, always on the edge of too much, too fast, but it was never quite enough that Alfie felt he could say anything.

  Fen was pushing his luck. Unfortunately there was nothing Alfie could do to stop it, except be a total arsehole and insist Fen get out of his car. Except he didn’t want to be a total arsehole. Not to Fen. Not ever again.

  The thing was, Alfie understood comfort driving. It was something he’d done a lot of himself. When he needed to feel in control or have some space. It wasn’t travel, as such. It was just movement through a place where your decisions were simple—left, right, straight on—and yours, and none of them mattered at all. But this wasn’t like that. This was something else, reckless and a little bit hopeless, like trying to run away from a monster that had already got you. It would have made him sad, if it wasn’t his car, and he wasn’t stuck there in the passenger seat, worried and helpless.

  That was when he realised Fen had been talking to him. “Sorry, what?”

  Fen gave an impatient little sigh. “I said, 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 had SLOW painted 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 the SLOW sign. 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. So, 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.

  They were gliding now 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 nowhere to stop the car that wasn’t the middle of the road. So Fen had to keep driving, a faint tremor creeping up his arms.

  Finally, 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 with girls, 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.

  He got out and slammed the door. Took in a deep, deep breath of very cold air. Came slowly round the car to where Fen was waiting.

  Calm, Alfie, be calm. Don’t yell. Don’t be that bloke.

  “What the fuck was that?” And Fen . . . flinched. He didn’t move or pull away, but he flinched. Which made Alfie even less calm. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
<
br />   “N-nothing.” Fen was still leaning away from him, his head bowed very slightly, like he was Jesus fucking Christ turning the other cheek. “But, look, can you just back off a bit? You’re really tall when you’re angry.”

  Suddenly, Alfie felt enormous and crass and sort of lumpen, as if he were going to tear through his own shirt like the Hulk. He blundered backwards, trying to be less, well, big. Looming. Everything. “Fuck, I’m not . . . I’ve never . . . I’ve never lifted my hand to anyone. Don’t be scared of me, Fen.” His voice cracked, embarrassing even here in the darkness with only one other man to hear it. “Please don’t be scared of me.”

  Fen’s chin came up again. “I’m not.”

  “I’m sorry I got all shouty, but I don’t understand why you did that.”

  “Honestly, neither do I really.”

  “So you hijacked my car for no reason?”

  “I wanted to feel something that wasn’t grief.” He pushed past Alfie, climbed onto the gate, and sat down on top of it, his feet resting on the lower bar.

  Alfie watched him, bemused. “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m sitting on this gate?”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Well . . .” He shifted awkwardly. “I thought you wanted me out of your car so you could drive off and leave me.”

  “I’m angry, not a total prick.” Alfie stepped after him. Leaned his elbows on top of the gate and stared at the empty field, lightly speckled here and there by starlight, long grass waving restlessly in the faint breeze. He could feel Fen, just the shape of him, by the heat of his body, the angle of leg and arm and hip.

  Fen shrugged. “I wouldn’t have blamed you. I deserved it.”

  “Don’t be daft, man.”

  “I could have damaged your car.”

  Alfie pushed off the gate and wheeled round. Either out of instinct, or because he had no choice, Fen parted his knees, and Alfie stepped between them, his hands sliding up Fen’s tight, denim-rough thighs. “I don’t give a fuck about the fucking car. I care about you. She’s got no air bags, you know.”