“What do you mean, you have? Who with? Who is he?” I was going to kill the mystery man, just as soon as I found out who he was.
“It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point, is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
I still remember the pain, the anguish, all my grief seeping into those two little words. Liam was attracted to men, had even kissed one. I hadn’t even done that and I couldn’t help but wonder why it hadn’t been me; why I hadn’t been good enough for him.
Why I would never be his first kiss.
His flinty blue eyes fixed on my too-plump lips, his mouth twisted at the corner. It wasn’t hard to see he was contemplating kissing me, contemplating just what an awful experience that would be. Like I didn’t know he could do a million times better than me; like I didn’t know he was completely out of my league. Even if I wasn’t his best friend, with all the platonic intimacy that includes, he wouldn’t have been interested. Who would?
And he hadn’t kissed me, never mind I was holding my breath in hopeful anticipation. Of course he hadn’t. He’d laughed it off and changed the subject and if I went home afterwards and cried myself to sleep, well, he didn’t know about it because I never told him just how strongly I felt. Friends were easier: if we were friends I got to have him in my life, keep him close in the only way I knew how. And if, one day, he found a boyfriend, a man he wanted to get serious about, I’d smile and be supportive and love him all the more in the privacy of my own breaking heart.
Then, six months after the Big Revelation, it had happened. We’d been to a party, got drunk on a bottle of god-awful White Lightning cider, he’d struck out with his then girlfriend—Hannah Jones, it really is true boys flirt by being mean—and afterwards, in the shadow of my parents’ front porch, he’d kissed me. I can’t pretend it was anything special: my main recollections are of the bittersweet tang of the cider, too much spit, and him, overwhelmingly him, his scent and the strength of his body when I plastered mine against it. It only lasted about ten seconds before he pulled away and, with a cocky grin, left me standing there in the cold and drizzly March night.
We didn’t speak about it, despite my hoping and longing that we would. I wanted to know what it meant, why he’d done it, when we were going to do it again. Instead Liam was all business as usual, and when I saw him cuddling up with Hannah bloody Jones at school Monday morning, I wanted to kill them both.
I didn’t, of course. I’m not a homicidal maniac, no matter how close I sometimes got to feeling that I could be, that I might have turned into some demented bunny boiler and screamed that if I couldn’t have Liam, no one could. I went on being the perfect friend by day while my heart broke over and over at night. The kiss we’d shared had taken on a dreamlike quality, something examined and re-examined from so many angles, over so many hours, that it barely seemed real to me anymore. Kinda like how you write the same word a dozen times and it loses its meaning; a splintered fragment of a once-known language.
Then he did it again.
Another girlfriend, another party, another knock back and another convenient excuse to come to me to get what he knew I was ready and far too willing to give. That time, he was sleeping over at my house and we spent what felt like hours necking on my bed. Just kissing. We were sixteen years old and horny as hell, but I swear all we did was kiss. I don’t know why. Maybe we were afraid of going further.
The next day he acted like it had never happened, and so the pattern began.
Over the years I’ve made a thousand excuses—to myself, to others—for his behaviour. I’ve tried to explain it in a hundred different ways; told myself he was scared to admit his feelings, scared to come out. Except he wasn’t. The bastard came out even before I did. And had a boyfriend first—a real, live, actual boyfriend. His name was Will and I hated his guts. It didn’t last long but he took Liam’s virginity, stole it from me.
I gave Liam my virginity in return, during a dry spell when it seemed any warm body would do. He only wanted a quick leg-over, but to me, it felt like making love.
And so the years passed. College, A Levels, university. We both stayed in Manchester, although we moved out of our parents’ houses to rent a flat together. He went to Manchester University because he’s smart as well as beautiful, and eventually got a job in some trendy little advertising company writing copy for million pound campaigns. I took my more average exam results to Salford and studied journalism, then got lucky enough to land a job with the BBC when they moved their operation up north.
We have our own places now, although we live pretty close. I bought a boxy little new build in Hulme, whereas he lives in The Edge, the swanky plate-glass building located right in the city centre, whose sail-like structure used to dominate the landscape before some developer built the Beetham Tower. I think Liam’s parking space cost more than my entire house.
So we worked hard through the week and played hard through the weekend. When Liam had a boyfriend we went to the Village, but the women he dated thought gay bars passé, and with them we went to the trendy hotspots at Deansgate Locks instead. I’m not sure if he ever told them about himself, or if they thought he just humoured his gay best friend. It turned my stomach to think he was earning brownie points for being okay about me when he was screwing me behind their snotty, stuck-up backs.
I wasn’t single through all that time, of course. I got a boyfriend of my own after college, a couple through uni and one or two afterwards, but they never lasted long. Just until they worked out that they’d never replace my best friend in my heart, and as Liam never seemed to get along with them anyway, it was for the best. The simmering hostility gave me a headache, and it was easier to break up and remove the complications they brought into my life.
Which is how I ended up here: lying naked on my sweaty sheets, listening to Liam let himself out of my house. It must have been four or five in the morning—we hadn’t left the club until two—but he’d refused my offer to sleep over as he always did, and was probably right now getting into the taxi he’d called while I was still wiping the evidence of our tryst off my chest.
I’m not upset, I told myself, curling around a pillow which smelled faintly of him, of his cologne and sweat and musk. I’d done this a hundred thousand times over the years we’d been fooling around, and I could handle it. I just had to remind myself that I could handle it.
If I didn’t get to sleep until the sun was up and the birds outside were singing, well, that was just my own stupidity, wasn’t it?
*
“I can’t do this anymore.”
I froze with my pint half-raised to my lips. “What?”
“This. Whatever it is we’re doing. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I lifted the pint the last couple of inches and sipped, willing my hand not to shake. If either of us was to call time on our little arrangement, I’d always imagined it would be me; I’d be the one to break. What had Liam got to lose?
“Viv suspects something, I’m almost sure of it.”
“So?” I returned the pint carefully to the raised table against which we were leaning.
“So I care about her, Toby. I want this one to work.”
My guts twisted. “When did you decide this?” I asked, trying to keep the bitter edge out of my tone.
“You know I like her,” he protested, not really answering my question.
“You like them all, Liam. That hasn’t stopped you before.” I was hissing the words, the venomous, sibilant accusation slicing through the thumping bass of the Village bar.
“Well maybe Viv’s different,” he snapped, blue eyes flashing with angry light. “We can’t keep doing this, Toby. We’re too old.”
Screw him, ‘too old’. We were twenty-bloody-eight. We’d been doing whatever it was we did for almost half our lives. We couldn’t just…stop.
“We should be…friends. Real friends.”
“We are friends,” I snapped. “Friends with benefits.”
His laugh was utterly humourless. “Is it a benefit, though? Or was it all a big mistake?”
I recoiled like he’d slapped me. If he’d slapped me, it would have been easier to deal with.
“Do you regret it?” I asked, unable to bite my tongue and make myself stop.
“No… I don’t think so.” His smooth brow furrowed in a frown and suddenly it seemed he found the scratched tabletop the most interesting thing in the world.
“Then why?” I asked, plaintive and a little whiny.
“When did you last date someone?” he asked instead.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A year ago, maybe.”
“Exactly. Don’t you think that’s a problem?”
“It’s not my fault every guy I meet is a prick.”
Liam sighed, long and loud. “What if they’re not, Toby? What if they were just nice guys who really liked you but couldn’t get close because we’ve got this crazy co-dependent thing going on and we wouldn’t let them?”
We?
I stammered half a response.
“I’m as much to blame,” Liam admitted. “Probably more. I started this whole thing, after all. That’s why I think it’s got to be me who stops it.”
“What if I don’t want to stop?” I whispered the words, my eyes wide and beseeching.
“Oh, Toby.” He cupped my cheek and I butted my head into his hand like a cat seeking comfort. “That’s why we’ve got to, don’t you see? Before one of us gets hurt.”
Before?
Something in my irritated snort and eyeroll must have given me away, because I can’t say I’d ever seen Liam contrite before, but that’s exactly how he looked. Instead of speaking, however, he rose from the high stool on which he was half-sitting, took my hand and led me onto the small, crowded dance floor. With the bass thumpa-thumping in our ears and the heat of a hundred closely-packed bodies surrounding us, he kissed me, in public, for the very first time.
It felt like goodbye.
*
We didn’t see each other for two whole months after that night. We kept in touch via occasional text messages and one strained phone call early on, but it was too painful, too raw for me to engage. Liam had his life and I had to let him lead it. I also needed to find a life of my own.
I went out with other friends, acquaintances, even escorted a receptionist from work who wanted a guided tour of the Village with some of her loud, obnoxious girlfriends. It was the longest separation from him I’d ever know and I missed him like a limb, like I’d lost one of my senses, given it up after he took me home and left me standing in the doorway, the ghost of an impression of his lips against mine the last thing I had to hold onto.
I vacillated between extremes for a while, yo-yoed from going out every night desperately seeking a man to help me forget, to staying in, closing the door and locking myself away from the rest of the world. My friends thought it a good thing Liam had called time on the physical side of our friendship, convinced he had been poisoning my other relationships. They took me to the cinema and for meals at ethnic restaurants, even bowling. Anything to provide an alcohol-free distraction.
I even thought I was starting to get over him. Starting to… Until he called.
Just the sight of his name on the screen of my phone was enough to stop my heart. His husky hello jump-started it again, a rapid tattoo I was sure he must be able to hear through the connection.
“Toby? Toby?”
I swallowed thickly. “Hey.”
“Hey. Um… I was wondering… Do you fancy doing something tonight? We’ve not seen each other in ages and, well,”—he cleared his throat—”I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” The words slipped out, too keen and too honest. “But what about Viv?”
“We, ah, um, we broke up.”
“I’m sorry.” A small part of me probably was, even if the rest was doing a happy dance.
“Yeah, well, turns out she wasn’t the one for me after all.”
I could have told you that! my inner voice screamed, but I bit down on actually speaking the words.
“Water under the bridge.” I could practically see him shrugging, the shoulders of his beautifully tailored suit rising with the rippling movement. “So, tonight? You doing anything?”
You. “No.”
“The Village?”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed? “I’ll meet you there.”
I spent forever getting ready. The dress code for the Village is generally lax, but that didn’t mean nobody made an effort. Liam would be in jeans and a black, close-fitting T-shirt if I knew him, and my own attire was similar, although the dramatic graffiti-style wings stencilled onto the back of my top added a splash of colour. It was early June so I left my jacket at home, the short capped sleeves of the T-shirt showing off the new tattoo an old uni friend had talked me into getting a few weeks earlier. The itching had finally stopped, my skin healed, and I wanted to show it off while it was still new and vibrant.
Liam noticed it immediately, grabbed my arm and shoved my sleeve up over my shoulder to examine it.
“What changed your mind?” he demanded. I’d been talking of getting it done for months, but had always put it off.
I shrugged. “Just seemed time to bite the bullet.”
Liam nodded, frowning in concentration as he traced the outline of the dark blocks of colour.
I waited with baited breath for his response. He wasn’t tattooed himself, but several of his exes had been. I wished I could have had some gorgeous twining, tendriled thing, but I lacked the definition in my biceps to make such a design work. Instead I’d opted for a more Celtic, tribal theme, large blocks of blue-black covering my upper arm and shoulder with stripes of unmarked flesh forming striking geometric patterns through the ink.
“I love it.” He released me with a broad smile that I returned in kind, secretly relieved, even though I hadn’t got it for him.
I made tentative enquiries, as the night passed, what had gone wrong with Viv. Personally, I thought any twenty-something woman named Vivian was bound to have been born with a stick up her arse, but Liam had seemed to really like her. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming about what had gone wrong, although I had my suspicions cemented when he insisted on acting—in his own words—as queer as he possibly could.
For the record, Liam doesn’t flame. By appearance alone you’d say he was a quiet, staid, nice boy you could take home to meet your mother. Only those closest to him knew he’d probably promptly seduce her, and your father, too. He was irresistibly attractive, smart, wealthy, softly-spoken and unfailingly polite. Who would suspect that beneath such a polished exterior lurked a playboy party animal with a wicked—in every sense—sense of humour? Certainly few people would guess his sexuality was as fluid as the fine-spun silk from which his suits were tailored.
I loved that I was privy to those details, that I alone knew every facet of his complex personality, and loved him anyway. Loved him because of all the things he was, not despite them.
I stood at the crowded bar and simply watched him. It was three in the morning and he was dancing at the front of the club’s raised stage, surrounded by a host of squabbling admirers. The music had turned hard and heavy, mirroring the atmosphere, the dirty bass dripping down the walls. Liam was lost in a tangle of limbs, some Hindu god come to life. Hands were groping, hips slamming, bodies writhing as Liam ground against the guy next to him, their faces close. My heart thudded in time with the slowing bass and the room began to tilt sideways as they danced closer, arms snaking around each other, and Liam crossed the last of the distance between them to claim a hot, sweaty kiss.
I was across the club in a trice, elbowing revellers out of my way left and right, spilling drinks and getting shoved back as I shoved them. I didn’t care who I trampled in my haste to get to the foot of the stage. Not so long ago I’d have sighed to myself and let Liam get on with it, but not this time. He wasn’t doing this to me
again. We’d been best friends since we were four years old, lovers for half our lives and dammit, it was about time he gave me a chance for more. I was done passively letting him use me, letting him think he could pick me up and drop me whenever a better offer came along. I might not have the muscles or the looks of the guy currently slathered all over his face, but I must have something to offer, some worth. Liam was always telling me I’d make someone a great boyfriend. It was time he put his money where his mouth was.
The stage being some four feet high, I was at knee-height to Liam when I stood on the dance floor in front of him. Any other time that might have seemed a disadvantage, but I was not in the mood for feeling daunted. I slapped his legs and tugged on his jeans until he finally surfaced for air and decided to investigate. Looking down and seeing me, he dropped his new friend and crouched, our faces close.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
“What?”
“Him.” I indicated the other dancer, who was watching us with undisguised interest. I wondered briefly who I thought I was, if I was Liam’s boyfriend, if he cared.
“What about him?” Liam backed away far enough for me to see his confused expression.
I almost gave up. If he really didn’t know why I was upset… But this felt important, it felt like a turning point. Passive little good-time Toby was dead.
“Get down here.” I half-helped, half-hauled Liam off the stage. He landed on his feet, steadied himself against a stranger and turned back to me, his expression still bewildered. The bass thumped and bodies swarmed around us and there was no way I was going to say everything I wanted to say in front of dozens of curious strangers—none of whom were even bothering to hide their interest in our conversation—even if I could have made myself heard above the music.
Liam followed placidly as I led him out of the club. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour but already the sky was paling, the deep violet fading and the tall buildings of the city centre standing in stark relief to the night like watchful guardians, the twinkling red and orange and white lights at their extremities shining brighter than the stars.
The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters Page 16