“You never used to,” Jayden blurted out. “I would have remembered seeing you before.”
Darren eyed him. There was something…about him. The way he flushed after he said it, the way he talked with his hands, the endless babble, the fact that he was clean-shaven to the point where Darren doubted he had to do it at all, and the fact that—well. Mother was very particular about her appearance, and Darren knew hairspray when he saw it.
“I broke my collarbone last year and couldn’t play,” he said slowly and tilted his head. Comprehensive school uniform, judging by the polo shirt and the offensively coloured jumper under the blazer. Comprehensive, judging by the fact they hadn’t bothered to actually put the name of the school on the blazer anywhere. “The year before that, we practised in the school hall.”
Jayden’s eyes flicked almost imperceptibly to his blazer. “St. John’s?” he ventured.
“Yes. Are you gay?”
Scott accused him of having no filter. Mother preferred to phrase it as ‘too honest.’ Darren didn’t care. The flood of colour that washed up Jayden’s neck and face was all the confirmation he needed, even before Jayden folded his arms and hunched in on himself. Closeted or bullied. Or both, of course, but then closeted-to-Narnia types tended to deny it, in Darren’s experience.
“Yes,” he said, seeming to be going for firm, but his voice was shaking. “Is that a problem for you?”
Definitely bullied. Any kid at St. John’s asking the same question would have either sneered, or used the Daddy-is-a-diplomat tone.
“Nah, just curious.” Darren shrugged, packing up the violin. He obviously wasn’t going to get any more playing done. And if he was ‘too honest’ with himself, the cloud that caused it had lifted somewhat, blown off-course by Jayden’s slightly-less-than-angelic appearance. “Seriously, relax,” he added, when he zipped the case and Jayden was still hunched in on himself. “I get nosy, ignore me.”
Slowly, Jayden unknotted.
“Um…you don’t have to go. Stop, I mean. I mean, rehearsal doesn’t start for ages, you could always stay, and anyway, I’m still working on the storyboard so I’m sure nobody would mind if you kept playing, it was really good, and…”
“And I’m done,” Darren said sharply. Jayden flinched back, and he sighed heavily. “Sorry. I practice like four hours a day. Minimum. And the orchestra master insists on Vivaldi every year.”
“Vivaldi, as in The Four Seasons?”
“Mm.”
Jayden bit his lip. “I, um. I mean, I don’t know much about classical music, but I kind of like The Four Seasons.”
“Play it every summer for four years and I guarantee that you’d hate it,” Darren replied tartly.
“Um, well, I…was that Vivaldi too? What you were just…”
“Yes,” Darren said, hefting up the violin case and flicking off the light. Silhouetted in the gloom, Jayden was suddenly like a shadow, or a figment of his imagination. A ghost in the theatre. “Why are you here?”
Jayden blinked at him in the naked lights of the corridor as Darren shut the storeroom door.
“You didn’t say why you were here,” Darren prompted.
“Oh. Um. I’m….well, Mum’s…Stars? The amateur dramatics group? Um, they meet here every weekday. Five-thirty ‘til six-thirty. Mum’s a big enthusiast, and sometimes I write the plays, so I just, y’know, come here after school. It’s quicker than going home and coming back.”
“…You go to a comprehensive…”
“Woodbourne,” Jayden supplied as they passed back into the auditorium itself.
“…but sitting around here for two hours is quicker than going home?” Darren pushed.
Jayden went red again. “Well, I…”
Darren snorted and dumped the violin case unceremoniously on one of the front-row seats. He dug around in his pocket for his wallet and eyed the contents dubiously. “You want a coffee?” he offered. “Costa’s just round the corner. They don’t burn it within an inch of its life like Starbucks do.”
He didn’t bother waiting for Jayden to agree or disagree. He’d come or he wouldn’t, and it was no skin off Darren’s nose if he didn’t. Maybe in another world, Darren would have made a pass at him by now (he was pretty, in a sort of untouchable, ceramic-plate-on-a-shelf kind of way) but it wasn’t a good idea with things the way they were, and if Jayden wanted to slip away and disappear again, let him.
He didn’t, though. He caught up at the door, and they fell into step halfway across the lobby. The security guard—Darren had never caught his name over the insane accent—waved to them, and Jayden waved back, which surprised Darren a little. For all the word vomit, he seemed kind of shy. Certainly he made no attempt at talking until they actually reached the Costa counter, and only then to protest when Darren got out his wallet and slapped Jayden’s hand away from his own.
“You can’t do that!”
“Watch me,” Darren said and handed over a twenty to the giggling barista. She glanced between them, went pink all over again, and rang up the order.
“Well…um…thanks, I guess.” Jayden was as red as she was. It was kind of attractive.
“You get Thursday’s.”
“Um, okay. I mean, you’ll be…you stay back on Thursdays too?”
“I do now,” Darren said and watched Jayden go even redder. It was definitely attractive, he decided.
“Do you…I wouldn’t have taken you for the espresso type,” Jayden said.
Darren wasn’t surprised. Jayden had gone for a hot chocolate. Clearly, he hadn’t discovered the joys of caffeine for last-minute work yet. (But then, in a shitty school like Woodbourne, Darren couldn’t say he was surprised.)
“The Four Seasons is a lot easier if you’re vibrating from the caffeine,” Darren said and pulled a face. “Someone once said—Stravinsky, I think—that Vivaldi composed one concerto four hundred times, instead of four hundred different concerti. There’s something in that. Get shot up, play the same arrangements in different orders, and you’re close enough.”
“You don’t like Vivaldi, then?”
Darren shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t, it was merely…overdone. Paul had taken one look at the sheet music when it had been given out, and even he’d spotted a pattern. And Paul had all the musical know-how of a dead cat.
“So, um, you get like all shot up on caffeine before you play? I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with it, I just, um…”
“I’ve been drinking coffee since I was eleven,” Darren said. “If I need a pick-me-up, it takes something a little stronger.”
Jayden laughed nervously, taking his cup in both hands when the barista pushed them across the counter. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and she giggled and waved at them. “That was, um. What?”
“She’s a fag-hag,” Darren said bluntly.
“You mean, she thought we were—oh God. I mean,” Jayden hastily interrupted himself, and Darren watched in no small amount of amusement. “Not that, you know, that would be—it’s just—you know, well…”
“Anytime you’re done digging that hole,” Darren offered when the red colour to Jayden's face started to head for purple.
“I’m going to…”
Whatever Jayden was going to do was lost when a back that had been facing a shop window turned, and a hand shot out to shove him hard in the shoulder, nearly sending him into the road. The drawled, “That your boyfriend, Lady Jay-Jay?” put it into a sharp context, and Darren smoothly inserted himself between Jayden and the lanky, blond idiot in a Woodbourne uniform before anything else could happen.
“You got a problem?” he asked.
He’d known the victim when he saw him, and now he knew at least one of the bullies. He wasn’t a particularly big kid, but he had that tense, mean look to his face: the jutted jaw, the hard lines that usually belonged on a pissed-off forty-year-old, the sneer from a permanently curled lip. Run-of-the-mill. A pest to anyone he thought he could get away with pushing around, and meaningless to
anyone who refused to take it.
“You know you’re getting a coffee date with a fag, don’t you?” It came out as downtcha, in some mangled bastard child of a New York accent and a London butcher’s assistant in Brixton market.
“I don’t smoke,” Darren said. Coldly. The frigid tone that Mother had inadvertently taught him. The one that worked—and it worked now, the stranger blinking and flinching back for a brief moment, so quickly that Darren would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking.
“Darren.” Jayden was tugging on his arm. “Let’s just…let’s go, okay, let’s go.”
“Wouldn’t want to keep you from your makeout session,” the stranger sneered.
Darren squared his shoulders. “You calling me a fag?” he asked, his tone dropping out of Mother’s and into Scott’s. Scott’s angry tone. Scott’s if-I-don’t-like-your-answer-I’m-going-to-hit-you tone.
“I called your boyfriend a fag. Open your fucking ears.”
“Darren…”
“But if he’s my boyfriend, doesn’t that make me a fag?” Darren asked lowly.
“Well,” the boy smirked, showing a row of thick yellow teeth. Smoker. “I guess it does.”
His voice jumped an octave to shriek when Darren slammed him back against the shop window, the glass shudderimg alarmingly under the force of it. Darren ignored the flex and the creak, squeezing his fingers around the fat bubble of a throat in a greasy neck that felt, frankly, a bit like a Big Mac that had been left to sweat in its box for a few hours.
“I don’t like being called a fag,” he said calmly, tightening his grip when the boy choked and scratched at his arm. Panicking. “Next time I hear that word from you, you’d better be offering me a cigarette and a lighter. Got it?”
The boy wheezed and managed a shaky nod.
“Darren, let him go. Let’s go!”
Jayden sounded panicky next to him, and the shop owner was hovering uncertainly. There’d be police called soon, and as fun as it would be to let the kid choke, Darren had better things to do with his evening than listen to Mother negotiate with a policeman. Or hear it all over again when he got home.
Darren dropped him.
“You should give up the fags, by the way, makes you short of breath,” he advised coldly, getting an angry glare but no verbal (or physical) reply, before turning on his heel and following Jayden’s anxious tugging on his sleeve. He hadn’t even spilled his coffee.
Jayden almost hauled him back to the theatre, fingers wrapped around the edge of his blazer sleeve. They didn’t talk until he had pulled Darren through the lobby, past the security guard, and slammed the auditorium door behind them, as if the smoker were chasing them.
“Okay…” Darren said slowly.
“You…I mean, you really…why?” Jayden asked in a rush. “Why would you…?”
Darren shrugged. “Why not?”
Jayden stared. The colour had gone: he was sheet-white, his fair hair only a shade or two darker than his skin, those big, dark eyes almost black compared to the rest of it. “Why?” he repeated insistently.
Darren shrugged again, irritation prickling at his back and neck. He took a sip of the cooling espresso to cover it, feeling the dark taste sweep over his fading anger. Why indeed. Because the guy had got his back up? Because it was Jayden? Because he had a mean streak wider than Mother’s, and the guy was asking for it? Pick one. “He a regular of yours?” he asked instead.
“A…what?”
“Does he regularly make a habit of shoving you around?” Darren clarified.
Jayden snorted and folded in on himself. He turned away, stalking to the edge of the silent stage, and pulled himself up on it, clutching his cup almost protectively to his chest. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “He’s not the worst. And he skips school a lot, so…”
“You get a lot of flak at school?”
Jayden shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’m gay and they know. What do you expect?”
Darren shrugged, dropping into the front row of seats. “Just saying, if it were me, I wouldn’t take shit from a creep like that. Couple of ‘your mum’ jokes and a well-placed right hook, and he’s done.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I could punch Ben Canning and get away with it.”
Darren smirked. “I’d offer, but I think I’d have to scour my hands with acid to get the grease off.”
Jayden finally laughed, some of the anxious pinch to the sides of his eyes easing. He glanced at the violin case, fidgeting with the label on the cardboard cup, and gracelessly changed the subject. “Do you play any…modern music on that?”
“You have any idea how old you just sounded?”
He huffed a little laugh.
“I do a mean Oasis tribute,” Darren offered, and Jayden’s face lit up. “All right. Let me finish this and I’ll murder Wonderwall for you.”
For once, faced with Jayden’s smile, he found that he didn’t mind.
Chapter 3
Jayden could hear the music from the lobby door: the ebb and swell of a string orchestra in full voice. It was only three-fifty-five, but he couldn’t recognise the piece to tell if they were nearly done yet.
It was a sweltering day, and the auditorium door had been wedged open with a chair. The orchestra teacher (tutor? Conductor? Maestro?) clearly had no appreciation for actually using a theatre, and had the standard lights up, so Jayden could hover in the doorway and watch as the piece crashed and roared into a violent crescendo. There must have been thirty boys in the tidily assembled seats, and Jayden couldn’t pick Darren out, even after he managed to pick apart a cluster of violinists from the rest.
Something tugged at the back of his mind. Stars never used music in their plays.
The baton flashed in the light as it came down, and the strings died away in a long, soft warble that was almost tragic. It floated on the air for a long minute after the bows had all been lifted, and the deep voice of the tutor (conductor? Maestro? Teacher?) rang out in a strange harmony with the dying music.
“Pathetic.”
Jayden was startled.
“I put in all this work, and for what? For boys with no understanding of the beauty and power of the heavens! Holst’s greatest work, and you play with the same bored expressions on your pretty little faces as you tune your strings! I wash my hands of you! If I see a single one of you on Tuesday, it will be too soon!”
The enraged man swept down off the stage and snatched up his bags like a woman flouncing out of a bad date. Despite his vehemence and his authority, he was a short, chubby little man with heavyset jowls and a gut threatening the integrity of his suit. He stalked past Jayden apparently without even seeing him, and Jayden stared after him incredulously. That was criticising the orchestra?
He made his way to the front. The orchestra were packing up and chatting, apparently wholly unperturbed by the conductor’s outburst. Darren was evident at twenty metres, as he had remained seated and placed his violin aside to rummage through his bag. As Jayden hopped up onto the boards, more sheets were produced from the bag and arranged neatly on the stand.
“Here.” Jayden thrust the espresso towards him.
Darren stared.
“You said I could get it next time,” Jayden reminded him, biting his lip. Was that a bit weird? He’d only met him once, after all, but Darren had been so…so…not nice, exactly, but so…different that he’d gone straight to Costa and gotten their orders before even coming here. It had felt right.
Darren took the cup. “Thanks,” he said, and it seemed genuine enough. Jayden forced himself to relax. “Pull up a chair. I have to do some retuning, I was completely off-key in the last movement.”
“I can’t believe he said it was awful,” Jayden admitted, pulling up an abandoned chair. The others were filtering out in small clusters, the noise beginning to die down.
“He always says that,” Darren shrugged, plucking the strings with his index finger. He held the violin in his lap, the coffee cup sitting by his right foot. “Mr. Webe
r’s a bit temperamental.”
“A bit?”
“Very,” Darren confirmed. “In my second year, he told Mother my piano skills were ‘adequate.’ He then suggested I study music at university. He doesn’t do praise.”
“So what’s criticism?”
“Lots of angry German words,” Darren said and grinned. He had a very crooked grin, and Jayden felt his breath catch a little at the oddly perfect imperfection. And then his breath caught again at his own observation. “I learned my business German from Frau Reiswitz, and my angry German from Herr Weber.”
“Was it Vivaldi today?”
“Holst.”
Jayden blinked.
“The Planets?” Darren prompted, never lifting his head (or his full attention) from tuning the violin. He seemed to have found the string to blame. “You’ve probably heard Jupiter. Weber’s trying to convert them into strings-only. He’s lining up a recital at end of next year, but…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Some of the pieces can be done in strings—I quite like Venus on strings, actually—but others…today was Mars. It sounds weird. Too high, too…trivial. It doesn’t have the weight to it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jayden blurted out. “I mean, I’m sure you’re right, I’ve just…”
Darren rolled his eyes, smirking as he set aside the violin and picked up the coffee cup. “Are you always this nervous?” he asked.
Jayden felt the colour flooding his face again. No, he wanted to say. It’s just you. But why? Okay, so he didn’t know Darren, like, at all, and he had that cool, sardonic, don’t-give-a-shit attitude down so effortlessly and it made him a little bit intimidating, but it wasn’t like Jayden hadn’t met intimidating people before. Darren was just a boy.
Just an attractive boy, that sarcastic little voice in the back of his head piped up, and he bit his lip to shut it up.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Darren mused, almost inhaling a mouthful of coffee. “God, I needed that. I hate Thursdays.”
“Why?” Jayden asked thickly.
“Double English, double biology. Followed up by Weber being a queen. I hate Thursdays.”
Vivaldi in the Dark Page 2