“Do they make you sign it in pink?” Jayden managed to fumble out through numb lips, and Darren laughed at his shoulder, apparently unaware of that shaking in the middle of Jayden’s chest.
Just fucking ask him, you have no excuse now! screamed the voice in his head, the one that constantly argued with him about the best course of action, the one that had always been wrong before. The one that had told him to stand up to Canning before and had got his arse kicked for him. The one that had given him a crush on the terminally straight Jason Ackerman in Year Eight.
The one that had decided Darren’s elegance and sarcasm through a violin was a sure sign of batting for Jayden’s team. And had, apparently, been bang on the money.
“Um, Darren…?”
“Yeah?”
Jayden stopped. He just stopped, in the middle of Churchill Avenue, with the last dregs of teenagers still bleeding away from Woodbourne, and the sun sinking down over the rooftops in a cold October sky. Darren took four steps without him before turning and pausing, windswept and flushed, hands deep in the pockets of that battered jacket, eyes like chips of ice from a greener sea in his face.
He was fucking beautiful, and Jayden lost the ability to talk. He lost the ability to think, and then his hands were on Darren’s shoulders, curling into the chilly leather, rough with age and vaguely wet from the damp air—and Darren’s lips were cold at the edges and warm where they met, the faintest tang of apples on the seams. There was the faintest scrape of stubble under Jayden’s palm when one hand reached for Darren’s cheek of its own accord, and Darren’s fingers were strong where they gripped his elbow, and when Jayden drew back, there was a fraction of a second where it felt like Darren followed.
And from only an inch away, Darren’s eyes weren’t just pale green anymore. They were streaked with the thinnest strands of blue, like lightning bolts.
“I…” Jayden stepped back, dropped his hands, and stuffed them in his pockets, feeling the heat rushing to his face. His mouth wasn’t numb anymore. It flickered and sparked, like a buzz on the surface. “I’ve…um…been wanting to do that for a while.”
Darren nodded slowly. “Okay…”
“Sorry,” Jayden breathed, and turned to brush past him, hunching his shoulders against the cold and the embarrassment. Who did that? Who just grabbed a guy and planted one on him the minute he said he was gay? It was just so…so stupid!
“Hey!” Darren yelled, and Jayden paused. He could feel the shakes in his hands again. He was sweating unpleasantly despite the cold. To hell with it, he was bloody scared. “There’s an indie coffee shop on the corner of Market Square that does live music on Saturday evenings. Want to come with me?”
Jayden’s breath left him in a rush, and he half-turned, hot despite the cold, to watch Darren’s hair tangling itself in knots in the wind. And that steady, intense stare. “You…” he stuttered, swallowed, tried again. “You’re asking me out?”
Darren shrugged. “That depends if you agree to come with me or not.”
Jayden could feel himself smiling—grinning—and he knew he had to look like a complete ‘tard, but he couldn’t control it. Maybe it didn’t matter, because there was a suspicious tugging at the corner of Darren’s mouth, like he couldn’t quite manage a straight face either.
“Okay,” he said.
“Good,” Darren returned and hunched his shoulders. “Now come on, Jesus. I need to get the new sheets for tomorrow’s suicide-inducing boredom, and the shop shuts in like an hour. Let’s get moving.”
Jayden’s smile lasted all the way into town.
Chapter 8
Charley was waiting on Tuesday morning. The moment Jayden ducked through the alley, she was off the wall and bouncing towards him, latching on to his arm enthusiastically. Her smile took up most of her face.
“So,” she said, beaming. “You ignored my texts, you ignored me on Facebook, and you’re blushing!”
He was. He could feel it creeping up his neck.
“So, was he gay?” Charley crooned, squeezing his elbow in both hands. “Did you do it? Did you ask him out?”
“I, um…well, no.”
“Jayden!”
“Technically,” Jayden added, far too quickly judging by the way her face lifted again. “I mean…yeah, no, I didn’t. Ask him out, that is.”
“Technically?” she prompted.
“He asked me,” Jayden blurted out, and the blush exploded. It didn’t feel real. The words felt heavy in his mouth, almost awkward, and he stuck his hands in his blazer pockets when Charley squealed and threw her arms around his neck.
“So…?” she prompted again, rocking him in a tight hug. “When’s it happening!”
“Saturday.”
“You have a date!”
“I have a date.” That sounded even stranger. He’d been awake most of the night, thinking over the exact way Darren had asked him, and the exact shape of his mouth and wondering if he would be at the theatre this afternoon. If he was, would it be okay—would it be expected, even?—that Jayden kiss him again? Or would that be weird and too soon?
“I take he’s gay, then?”
“Yeah,” Jayden said and flushed. “He, um. He texted me at lunch and asked if I wanted to check out this bookstore in town after school—no, that wasn’t when he asked me out, that was…”
“It sounds like he was asking you out,” Charley said.
“Well, he wasn’t.” They finally started moving, and Jayden felt so high and dizzy, he didn’t even feel the usual pre-school dread. “I mean, you know, okay, he was…he was flirting with me, but…anyway, he met me at the gate, and Canning was there being, well, Canning, and Darren got in his face and…I thought they were going to end up hitting each other, and Darren shoved him into the bins, and…when we left, I asked why he was so pissed off, and he said he hated homophobic people because he’s gay, and…”
“He just said it like that? Just out with it?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, my God. So firstly—and this is important, Jayden—firstly, you were wrong. And secondly, he’s out!”
“Well, he might not be out, but…”
“He’s out to himself,” Charley interrupted. “That’s important! You can’t go on a date with anyone who’s closeted.” Jayden wasn’t sure being closeted to yourself existed, but then Charley watched a lot more crappy soap operas than he did, so he decided to let it slide. It had probably been a storyline on Emmerdale or something. “Jayden!”
“What?”
“So? He said he was gay, and? What did you say?”
“I, um…” Jayden felt his face catch fire again. In retrospect, it was horribly embarrassing. But it had been so…good. “I didn’t. I, um…I kissed him.”
“Oh, my God, Jay!”
“Charley!” he hissed. They had turned onto the main road; there were other kids now as they approached the gates. “Look, just…don’t tell anyone, okay? I mean…I don’t know if…you know, it might not work out.”
“He’s gay, you’re gay, what’s not to work out?” She sniffed, and Jayden rolled his eyes as they passed through the gates. He glanced at the bins; Canning wasn’t there. The first coil of anxiety began to make itself known. He wasn’t looking forward to how Canning was going to react to being beaten by…by a faggot.
“It’s just one date, and it was just one kiss, and…”
“And you like him, and he obviously likes you.” Charley poked him in the arm, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum as they crossed the reception area. “I’ll come round on Saturday afternoon and help you get ready, because this is big, Jayden! Your first boyfriend! I told you we’d have boyfriends by Christmas!”
She was talking too loudly; Jayden snapped at her to shut it, then softened, and said, “He’s not…that. It’s just the one date. It’s way too early to say…”
“You need to add him on Facebook so I can stalk him,” Charley said suddenly. “Wait, why haven’t you yet?”
Jayden flushed
and admitted, “Can’t find him. I think his security settings must hide him from the search engine.”
“You can do that?”
“April does.”
“Because April’s antisocial ever since she decided she was too good for us,” Charley sniffed.
“Yeah, well, Darren’s not really sociable either, so…”
“Add him anyway. Get him to add you. You need to be able to check this guy out before you go on a real, legit date with him, and I mean the actual, proper, sussing him out, not eyeing up his…”
“Charley!”
They stopped at her locker, and Jayden was smacked with her French textbook. “Don’t give me that,” she said. “And I need to meet him.”
“If the date goes okay, and if we have another one, and frankly, Charley, I think I need to get used to saying ‘date’ because this…” Jayden physically flailed for a moment, his hands fluttering uselessly about. “This doesn’t feel real yet,” he finished and flushed.
Charley cooed and hugged him again. “You’re adorable,” she said decidedly, and Jayden couldn’t decide whether he’d been insulted or not. “Are you not seeing him until Saturday?”
“Um, I usually see him Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“So you’ll see him today?”
“Maybe,” Jayden admitted, and bit his lip. “I don’t know what to do. I mean… He kissed me back, Charley,” he said in a whisper. The bell was due to ring soon; the corridor was filling up.
Charley slammed her locker door. “Do it again!” she said, far too loudly, and Jayden winced. “No, I’m serious. If he likes you, and you like him, then get some kissing in. You don’t have to date to kiss.”
There, at least, she had a point. And nervous though he was about seeing Darren that afternoon at The Brightside, Jayden was semi-sure that he wouldn’t be able to not kiss him in the end. Not when he knew what it was like. Not when he knew that Darren was quite happy to kiss him back.
Maybe Darren would kiss him first.
“This is all complicated,” he said to Charley as they reached her classroom, and she laughed, hugging his arm.
“Yes,” she said, “but you got yourself into it.”
She was right there.
* * * *
Mr. Weber didn’t say a lot that was worth listening to, but even he was right when he pulled Darren out of practice for being distracted. All right, so scales was a punishment (there was nothing more boring on this earth), but at least he was right.
Darren hadn’t been able to shake yesterday out of his head since, well, yesterday. It had been a bad idea. He’d known it, even as he’d asked. The last thing he needed was to let himself imagine that he could make anything work with Jayden, and then have Jayden prove him wrong and run a mile the first time he saw one of Darren’s bad days. And the last thing Jayden needed on top of his issues at school was a boyfriend out of school who was more fucked up than all his tormentors put together.
It was a bad idea.
But the minute Jayden had kissed him, Darren’s sense had left. It hadn’t been the best kiss he’d ever had. It had been sudden, and awkward, and Darren hadn’t been expecting it in the slightest, but…
But it had short-circuited everything in his head, and he’d just thrown out the invite to Milzani’s without really thinking about it. And now he had a date, with a guy who deserved a lot better, and there was both no way of backing out of it without giving Jayden entirely the wrong impression, and no way that Darren wanted to.
It was wholly selfish of him, but when Jayden appeared in the doorway at the end of practice, hovering uncertainly as Mr. Weber swept out and Darren could finally stop with the bloody scales, that selfish part of him just noted how good he looked backlit by the lobby like that.
“Um, hi,” Jayden said, and grinned nervously, hands deep in his pockets, as the others filtered out with a variety of goodbyes called over their shoulders. “Um. So. I don’t…I mean, I don’t really know what…what’s standard after you kiss someone in the street, but, um…”
Darren watched him ramble as he approached the stage and dropped his arm until the violin rested on the seat. His shoulder ached. His lower lip sparked with the memory of that sudden kiss. He hadn’t felt that alive in…months. Months.
“I…” Jayden stopped where the carpet met the stage. “I kind of…” Darren watched the flush work its way up his neck. “I kind of want to kiss you again,” he admitted.
Darren smiled and dropped off the edge of the stage. He deliberately dropped too close, and Jayden didn’t back up. At this distance, Darren could just about make out the wide black of his pupils against the dark brown of the iris. “Okay,” he said, and those pupils expanded slightly.
The first kiss had been sharp and sudden and taken him completely by surprise. In a way, with that forewarning, the second was more awkward. They didn’t quite fit right, and Jayden’s hands didn’t know what to do with themselves, clutching intermittently at Darren’s blazer and letting go again in random bursts, like he wanted to ask permission but didn’t want to break the kiss to do so.
Darren took over. He cupped Jayden’s neck with his left hand, tilting his head until they almost fell into their proper places. Jayden used some kind of lip balm—nobody’s mouth was that smooth without help—and Darren opened his mouth to taste it, pressing forward and resisting the urge to smile when Jayden gave a muted gasp and raised his hands to clutch—hard—at Darren’s hair. Too hard, but Darren didn’t mind.
For a while. After a particularly hard tug, and having determined the spark of leftover flavour at the edges of Jayden’s tongue (some kind of peach, presumably from his lunch), Darren broke the kiss, stroking his fingers across the nape of Jayden’s neck as he let him go, tweaking spray-stiff hairs before sliding his hand over the shirt-covered shoulder and stepping back.
“Um,” Jayden said. His eyes were almost wholly black.
“I have your blazer,” Darren said, finding his voice. His lips were buzzing like he’d kissed an electric fence. His entire face felt too reactive. He felt vaguely like…like there was something humming under his skin, trying to shiver its way out.
He didn’t entirely mind.
“Um…thank you,” Jayden said breathlessly. “I, um…thanks.”
“You seen that kid again? Canner?”
“Canning. No,” Jayden admitted. “I think he skipped today, I don’t know. I don’t actually have many classes with him, because I’m usually in top set and he’s…well, not.”
Darren grinned, tossing him the plastic bag with his cleaned blazer in. Mother hadn’t noticed the addition to her tab. Darren doubted she ever would—and if she did, he could say it was his.
“I…are we still…are you still up for Saturday?” Jayden asked over his shoulder as Darren pulled himself back up onto the stage to pack up his violin.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Um, I mean, that’s good, I just…I wasn’t sure if, you know, you’d rethought it, or…”
“Nope,” Darren said breezily.
Jayden took a breath. “You didn’t tell me you were gay,” he explained.
“I told you yesterday.”
“I mean…earlier. I mean…you…you ought to know, I’ve been, um, interested in you for a little while,” Jayden confessed, and Darren abandoned the violin to sit cross-legged on the edge of the stage and watch the progress of the blush that was inching its way up his neck. “And I told you I was gay, but…”
Darren shrugged.
“You said Mila Kunis is hot.”
Was that what this was about? “You’re not an experiment, if that’s what you mean,” Darren said, and Jayden’s skin went from pink to red in half a second. “I’ll admit, I’m not sure where I stand on girls. Mila Kunis is hot. But I’ve been noticing boys since long before I started noticing girls. And I’ve never noticed a real girl.”
“She is a real girl.”
Darren laughed. “I mean a girl I’ve actually met,” he cla
rified. “I’ve met boys I like. I’m looking at one right now. But not a girl. So maybe I’m bisexual, but I’m not straight.”
Jayden bit his lip. “Okay,” he said. “I just…you know…I didn’t…I didn’t think there was anyone gay in, like, this whole town, and then you come along and you were…you were flirting with me, but you also said the Mila Kunis thing…”
“Isn’t it a little early to be over-thinking things?” Darren suggested. “You could come with me on Saturday and decide you never want to see me again.”
“I don’t think so,” Jayden blurted out, then clapped a hand over his mouth and went up the colour ramp into purple. Darren laughed aloud, some of the shivery feeling using his throat as an outlet.
“Oh, really?” Darren pushed. Jayden bit his lip and approached the edge of the stage again. The height of it was enough to put their faces level again, and Darren reached to grasp Jayden’s narrow hips in his hands and watch that flush change colour back to a cherry red.
“Really,” Jayden said and began playing with Darren’s hair again. He wasn’t holding eye contact, and his breath caught when Darren very deliberately licked his lips. “Um…can we talk on Saturday, and just…I just want to kiss you.”
“We’ll get stuck if you keep it up.”
“I don’t mind,” Jayden whispered, and then his hands were fists in Darren’s curls, and that was definitely a peach he’d had at lunchtime.
Darren shut up and, for once, went with the flow.
Chapter 9
Jayden was terrified.
It had started with Charley coming over at two, rejecting most of his wardrobe, only leaving his hair alone because it had to pass her approval for school as it was, and spending a good couple of hours deciding (rather than helping him decide) what outfit would look best. Or as Charley put it, what outfit would knock Darren senseless with lust.
Jayden wasn’t entirely sure that was the route he should be going, or if it would even matter. Darren had, after all, watched him wash hot chocolate and cream out of his hair in a public bathroom.
It had gotten worse when he’d made a salad for dinner and ducked out of Mum’s usual offer of letting him get a pizza on Saturday nights when she and Dad went out. He didn’t want to taste of pizza and garlic bread on his first ever date, especially when he was ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain Darren was going to kiss him again.
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