by H. S. Valley
‘She seems interesting. A bit scary.’
‘She’s my favourite person in the world, including my actual family, and you should, one hundred per cent, be afraid of her.’
‘Good to know.’ I remember a passing thought from earlier. ‘Is she gay?’
‘You should ask her, not me,’ he says, and that’s as good as a yes.
Meggan is quiet in my arms now and I think about putting her back in her cot, but it’s a comfort to have something to hold on to. I don’t miss the sex with Liz, but I do miss her hugs. She made me feel significantly less … messed up. Of course, thinking of her now has the opposite effect. I tip back my mug and get rid of the contents in the most efficient way possible – quickly and without caring how horrid it tastes.
‘Another?’ I suggest.
‘Sure, let me put Meggsy back in her cot,’ he says, and nestles his mug between the pillows before he reaches out and takes her from my lap. She makes a sleepy burble and then is silent. I don’t really want to let her go. ‘For goodness sake, Te Maro, stop moping. I can’t have you all cuddly and drunk while holding the baby. It’s not safe.’
‘I’m not drunk yet,’ I protest, and it’s true. I’ve been practising my drinking and this is far, far from drunk.
‘Just cuddly, then?’
‘I … miss the closeness,’ I say, and it’s hard and horrible to squeeze the words out, but I hope I’ll feel lighter afterwards. Confession is meant to do that. At least, that’s what the school counsellor, Dr Peters, says. He’s been right about other things.
Elliott sighs at me, though. Maybe he’s about to tell me to stop being so maudlin, Te Maro, or maybe just to shut up with my stupid first-world problems. Instead, he says, ‘I miss not being judged for my upbringing. Not just where I’m from. The money too.’
Now it’s my turn to sigh. We are maudlin. ‘If it helps, I decided a few minutes ago that we’re probably friends.’
‘Probably?’
‘It seemed hasty to decide without your input.’
‘I’m OK with it,’ he says, and downs his second port in one wet mouthful. ‘Shall we hug on it?’ When I look at him he’s smirking, teasing me. Meggan is safely tucked up in her bed and he’s lying on his side, facing me, propped up on his elbow. He’s very long. ‘Since you miss the closeness.’
‘I’m not going to spoon you,’ I say.
‘Funny that’s where your head went,’ he says. ‘Prude.’
‘Perv.’
‘I could say the same about you.’ He gives me a look. ‘You’ve obviously been present for more than one of their amorous interludes and slept right through it.’ He gestures to the other bed. ‘Or pretended to.’
‘I really bloody hope not.’
‘I was making an awful lot of very explicit noises and you were right next to me, asleep. Oblivious.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘I literally moaned your name, loudly, repeatedly, and with an enthusiasm befitting the most devious acts.’ He pops the sipper top of the bottle with his teeth and pours us both another port. ‘I was half afraid you’d wake up and think I was very vividly dreaming about you.’
‘Well.’ I take a fortifying sip, knowing the exact liquid in my mouth has just passed though a piece of plastic he’s had his mouth on. There’s probably microscopic pieces of him in it and I’m drinking it. ‘I’m flattered you faked enjoying it, considering I’d have no idea what I was doing.’
‘What?’ He looks across at me. ‘Your mentor didn’t give you a proper run-through? Or are you just a bit slow on the uptake?’
I sigh. As much as I might want to talk about Mareko right now, it’s still hard to say the words out loud. Especially when Elliott’s lying there, looking like my mortal enemy, but in silk pyjamas and with his hair mussed. ‘We kissed. Once. A lot, but –’ I squirm. ‘Technically, just on the one occasion.’
‘That’s it? That’s what confirmed your bisexual meanderings?’
How do I explain the fact that I pretty much already knew? That, looking back, there was no way on this Earth I was straight and that the second Liz asked if I was attracted to guys as well, it was immediately the most sense my life had ever made. That I probably didn’t need to kiss Mareko at all, but that there was also no way I’d pass that up. Not right then, with the need to experiment lighting a fire in my pants and whole-hearted permission from my actual girlfriend.
I think she was hoping it was a phase, something I could get out of my system. And when Mareko came to visit over the holidays, she saw a chance and took it. I think she thought that him being Silvia’s brother would somehow put me off and the awkwardness she anticipated would throw an unflattering light on men in general. Because he was like family, because I’d grown up with him on the periphery, and because she thought he was a nerd. But Mareko was a gift. A hot, heavy, teasing gift. And I was a seventeenyear-old boy with cock on the brain and he was a swarthy sex-god who could lift me with one arm while discussing the nuances of magic under a full moon. He was something I didn’t fully recover from and very definitely one of the reasons Liz and I broke up.
‘There was some light … I dunno …’ I don’t want to use the word humping. ‘Rubbing? I suppose? How strong is this port?’
‘Don’t change the subject. Tell me about this alleged rubbing.’
‘Uh, no.’
‘I can tell you the pathetic details of my own selfdiscovery, if it eases your mind?’ he offers. ‘I know you Defensives like things to be fair. Reciprocal and all that.’
‘Yes, apparently you haven’t had enough reciprocity lately.’ I do not need him telling me stories of getting off with anyone else I know and can vividly picture. Though it is comforting to know it wasn’t as easy as he’s making it look.
‘Te Maro, stop flirting with these big words and tell me about the time you frotted the former head boy.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. It was … enough to know.’ Tiny bit of a lie. I may have made a spectacular mess in my pants.
‘You tiny, innocent flower petal.’
I can let him believe that. ‘Shut up.’
‘Be nice, I’m sure no-one else wants to talk to you about this. Silvia surely wouldn’t want to know a single deviant thing about your dalliances with her brother. She’d get her moral knickers in a twist even knowing it happened, wouldn’t she?’
‘Probably.’ He’s right, of course. ‘But it – it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Lizzie knew, so it wasn’t particularly immoral in that sense.’
‘She knew? That you were kissing your best friend’s brother? Did she know he was humping your leg?’
‘He didn’t –’ Another lie, he totally did. ‘And yes, she knew. She – We’d been having some problems and she asked if maybe there was something to it and suggested that maybe I made sure I didn’t completely prefer guys.’
‘That’s such a cliché,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to sleep with her so you must obviously be gay. What is it with straight people?’ He sounds a little bitter.
‘She wasn’t entirely wrong, to be fair.’ I shrug. ‘And some things bear testing.’
‘You barely tested anything, by the sounds of it.’ He takes a sip of his drink, his lips loose around the pink straw. ‘I can’t see why Mareko bothered.’
‘It was enough,’ I say. ‘And he was very supportive.’
‘I bet you aren’t even bi.’
What?
‘I am – How can –’
‘Come over here and prove it.’
Oh.
‘I’m not going to kiss you to prove how gay I am.’
‘Then do it to prove how gay I am.’
Wow.
‘I’m not questioning that.’
‘Neither am I, but I’m bored and soaked in port, Te Maro, and woefully single, and you’re just sitting there talking about how you made out with a guy who literally came top in every interesting subject this school offers, and it’s more than a little … inspiring.’
&
nbsp; ‘Then go have a cold shower. We’re barely even friends, we can’t just –’
Can we? Is that a thing we can do? Just … hook up? The tiny part of me that was curious about Elliott is swiftly shrivelling into its raisin form – a weird, wrinkled little thing, desiccated by anxiety.
‘I assure you I could.’ The look on his face makes it clear he’s trying to chat me up, and doesn’t seem remotely selfconscious about it.
Do some guys just … do this sort of thing? Could I be one of those guys?
‘Technically, Sam and Silvia think we were anyway,’ he says, and shrugs. His face is calm, his expression a picture of ‘why not?’
‘They won’t actually believe it.’ I hope that’s true – that they’ll accept it when I say I slept through the whole charade. I expect if they’ve hooked up next to me before they’ll know it’s possible.
‘If they won’t believe it, then what’s the harm?’ he says, like the only reason I might not want to jump him right now is the curious disapproval of my two best friends.
‘Stop it. I’m done with this conversation, it’s getting weird.’ Talking about it so blatantly feels too real, too open, too not-accidental.
‘Liz’d hate it if you actually enjoyed yourself, wouldn’t she?’ he says and offers me the bottle.
He needs to stop being quite so on the nose with his comments. It’s creepy how well he reads me. Or is it? Maybe it’s just Minder things again. I feel myself closing up at the thought, the tendrils of friendship curling back inside me. ‘I don’t care what she thinks,’ I say and wave the bottle away.
He turns and tosses it back towards his bag. ‘She probably expects you to mope around and pine after her, wank into one of her old T-shirts and cry about how sad and lonely you are.’
‘Are you trying to chat me up or depress me?’
‘Perhaps neither. It’s late, we should turn in,’ he says, and peels himself off the mattress. ‘It’s been entertaining, Te Maro, but the booze is making me sleepy and you’re being very boring.’ And just like that, he sucks his straw clean, then sets his mug on the floor, reaching for mine as well. It’s empty, its contents already burning a happy hole in my gut.
What just happened? Had he been serious? Did he actually want to … And now I’m supposed to just, what? Sleep next to him? Continue raising our egg-baby and making his breakfast and pretending that he didn’t just blatantly proposition me in my own bed, while we were uncommonly alone together, all soft and careless with alcohol and fatigue?
He doesn’t offer to swap sides, even though he’s in my spot. He doesn’t even switch our pillows over, just plumps mine, arranging them just so before leaning over to check on Meggan. He settles back, smoothing the sheet over the edge of the duvet and burrowing down. I still haven’t moved.
‘Are you coming, Te Maro?’ he says, and reaches out for my jaggy little piece of quartz, which I’d put on the bed end. He taps it and it dulls to a barely discernible glow. The audacity of him touching it barely registers.
I don’t know how to move like a person anymore; my body feels weird and his body feels too close and too … possible. And he’s expecting me to sleep on his pillow. I wriggle into position between him and the wall, jerky and awkward like a half-drunk Great Dane trying to climb into a Christmas stocking. I slide further under the covers, hyper-aware of where my knees are and just how much space there is between us.
His elbow encroaches on my side of the bed for a second and I wonder if we’ll just lie here all night, side by side, staring up at the ceiling, not touching. Then I feel the bed dip and he’s moving and my heart bangs in out of nowhere, assuming he’s going to kiss me in the dark and I won’t be prepared. He doesn’t, of course, just rolls towards the baby, and as my eyes adjust I realise I’m over here with nothing. And all these inches between my hands and him. Too many inches to excuse an ‘accidental’ touch. And why has this even happened? This morning he was merely conventionally good-looking and surprisingly inoffensive to spend time with. Then he goes and says one stupid thing and my whole outlook shifts. Why am I like this? Blind for an entire lifetime ’til something clicks into place and then it’s all I can think about.
Elliott Bloody Parker – giant pain in the arse for our entire schooling until about two minutes ago when he says, ‘Come over here and prove it,’ and my entire body is suddenly like, YES, PLEASE. And then he laughs and says, ‘We should turn in … you’re being very boring,’ and then … this. This. Lying in the dark staring at the line of his neck and knowing, somehow, what he’d feel like pressed against me. I can guess what he’d taste like. And there’s literally nothing stopping it from happening, except for the fact that the whole thing scares the shit out of me.
CHAPTER 10
IT’S ONLY NATURAL
Breakfast is the same as every other morning. Except that I’d woken up hard and forgotten Elliott was there for a second. My usual practice of self-comfort was interrupted by a mild heart attack when my knuckles brushed his hip and I ended up staring into his wide grey eyes with my fingers wrapped tight around my dick, both of us wondering what the hell was happening. So breakfast is actually a little uncomfortable. At least Silvia and Sam haven’t arrived yet and we don’t have to deal with their un-subtle eyebrow waggling and casual questioning of ‘how we slept’.
‘How do you feel about baked beans?’ I ask, assessing the various dishes on our table.
‘Negatively.’
‘OK.’ I wonder if beans have become a metaphor. Maybe he just wants to say no to me since I said no to his offer last night.
‘Just a bacon roll will be fine.’ He sounds as tired as I feel. It’s been days of not sleeping now, and our midnight chat didn’t help any.
‘Right. Bacon roll with aioli. Cool.’
‘Thanks.’ He pauses. ‘You seem weirder than usual this morning,’ he says. ‘Is it what we talked about last night?’
I just look at him, a pair of tongs in one hand and a soft, round bap, fresh from the oven, in the other. The roll is supple and warm in my hand and it feels exactly like I’d imagine grabbing his butt would feel.
‘I guess,’ I say, since that’s probably less weird than telling him I almost accidentally had a wank beside him twenty minutes ago.
‘Will you stop being weird soon or do we need to talk something out?’
‘I might be weird forever.’
‘That does seem more likely.’
He doesn’t try to make me talk again, just eats his bap with one hand and coddles our egg-baby with the other. All morning, he pretends like nothing is wrong; I can tell he’s pretending because he doesn’t look me in the eye once.
He talks to Blake in first period, which is worrying. Manaia is with them, grinning like a cat. I’d say it was a bad omen, but I don’t know how things could possibly get weirder than they currently are. Though it does make me wonder how I’d feel if Elliott and Blake became civil again while Liz and I still aren’t talking. I can’t even look at her without my gut turning over. It might be guilt. Shame, perhaps.
Silvia ends up answering the unasked question of what Elliott and Blake were talking about. There are new living arrangements, apparently. Not new in the sense that Elliott’s going to be vacating my room anytime soon – quite the opposite. He’s moving in with me. Sam’s moving in with Silvia and Manaia is taking Elliott’s place by moving in with Blake. I don’t know how they organised that, or what they’ve all done to convince Blake it’s a good idea. Or Manaia. Is she doing it just to terrorise Blake? Or as a favour to Silvia? Does she just want a bit of drama in her life? There’s going to be more than drama if we get caught. No-one’s dared do anything like this before, and I’m somehow not surprised it’s the three of us testing the limits of our luck. I wonder if our parents will hesitate to expel the lot of us, though, if it comes down to it. I guess we’ll finally find out if anyone actually monitors the cameras in the girls’ corridor.
When I mention the risks, Silvia assures me it’s al
l just for the duration of the assignment. Another three weeks. Not permanent. She adds, ‘Don’t mention it to anyone, Tim, especially your mum – I know you trust her, but she’d have a professional obligation to do something about it and we shouldn’t put her in that position.’ Silvia swears she wouldn’t be breaking the rule herself, but really, ‘Why is there one rule for the straight students and another for everyone else?’ She insists that she’ll take it seriously when all the bisexuals (myself included) are locked up by themselves in case they accidentally sleep with someone, since that seems to be the driving force behind the typical gender segregation. I’m not remotely convinced that’s the reason she’s going along with it, but I’m hardly going to argue with her. Not now. Not when I’m still entertaining the idea of temptation and Elliott Parker and the thrill of illicit, no-strings hook-ups. Not when he still manages to look irritatingly good on just as little sleep as I’ve had. When his stupid oversized cardigans looks like they need to be snuggled against and his hair is begging to be tousled. When his hands are suddenly a thing that would be better off all over me and his mouth seems far too empty without my tongue. Not that I’m getting carried away.
I don’t say much for the rest of the morning, stuck as I am in my head, and Elliott scolds me again for being boring and takes Meggan from me so he has ‘someone to talk to’. I’ve been replaced by an egg-baby who only makes seven different sounds, all of them seemingly dependent on how shit I feel. I don’t know what bizarre magic they’ve all been infused with, but she’s creepily accurate at reading my mood.
Elliott and I walk to lunch together, and I imagine another version of us stealing back to our room to make out instead of sitting down to bolognaise and garlic bread and a bracing cup of PG Tips. No such luck. Maybe I could suggest it. Apparently he’s allowed to suggest things.
We sit with my friends; Hana, Nikau and Matt are arguing about indoor netball (again) and Ana’s focused intently on her phone. Silvia and Elliott somehow end up nattering about osmosis and I wonder how he can dare call me boring when he’s literally talking about the properties of water right now. Silvia’s an Alchemist so she’s right into it, and I think of all the times I’ve zoned out while she’s talked endlessly about crystals and night-blooming herbs. I suppose it’s nice she has someone to talk to.