“What’s going on?” Mum had asked. “You’re all dressed up.” She couldn’t talk. She and Dad had been going out for Saturday night ‘dates’ ever since Jayden was old enough to be left with a babysitter without kicking up a huge fuss. And they had to have somewhere special in mind tonight, because she was wearing those ugly feathery earrings that Dad liked.
“Going out,” Jayden had said. “With Charley.”
“She was here earlier.”
“Um, Lucy’s got her boyfriend over, so, you know, she wants Charley out of the house for a bit.” He’d made a mental note to text Charley his story.
“Mm,” Mum had said. “Well. Where are you going?”
“Just town. Maybe see a film if there’s anything good on.”
“Right.” She hadn’t believed him in the slightest. “Well, stay safe. You’re taking your phone?”
“Obviously, Mum.”
“Be back by eleven.”
Mum seeing right through him had made him doubly nervous, because it just hammered it home. He’d never lied to Mum about where he’d been going or who with, because he’d never needed to. He’d never had to text Charley with a made-up cover story for her to spout if anyone ever asked, because he really had been going out with Charley before. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone out to town with someone and Charley not being there. Maybe it had never happened.
He walked into town. It was freezing cold and already dark by the time he set off, but it gave him time to talk himself into a state of relative calm (read: come down from sheer panic) and by the time he reached the bottom of the high street, he didn’t feel like throwing up, running away, or both.
Darren was waiting at the end of the row of bus stops that lined one side of the high street. He was already a familiar figure, cut out in the gloom by his wild hair and that hedonistic way he had of lounging against walls, one knee bent and the foot flat up against the brickwork. He peeled himself off in a lazy roll when Jayden reached him, and Jayden’s nerves tripled when he saw that battered leather jacket.
“It’s…kind of odd, seeing you out of uniform,” he offered. In truth, the jacket hid most of the difference, although Jayden was relieved to notice that private school didn’t mean Darren wore black suit trousers all the time. His jeans were about as battered as the jacket.
“Same for you,” Darren said. “I can’t make any promises about my behaviour, though. Your uniform hides a lot.”
Jayden flushed. “Um…”
“C’mon.” Darren jerked his head up the road. “I’ll kiss you hello once we’re inside.”
“Is, um, is that a good idea?”
“Nobody cares in Milzani’s. The owner’s a lesbian.”
“An Italian lesbian?”
“Nobody said she was Italian,” Darren said, “but nobody’s going to go to a cafe called Backingwater’s, are they?”
Jayden’s anxiety loosened as he laughed. Partly because this was Darren, and it didn’t have to be awkward, and partly because maybe he didn’t have to worry about being seen by homophobic dicks after all. Maybe they could just be.
Milzani’s was a large coffee-shop-slash-bakery-slash-alcohol-free-bar that was jammed into the space between an estate agent and a travel agent. Its neighbours were closed, so its bright lights and the low hum of music spilled out invitingly into the street. When Darren held the door, Jayden felt nervous all over again.
A space for the band had been set up, but they hadn’t started. The cafe was three-quarters full, mostly with clusters of friends, but the odd table occupied by a couple. Straight couples.
“Relax,” Darren said, and then suddenly his fingers were sliding between Jayden’s. His hand was cool from the late October evening, and his palm dwarfed Jayden’s by a long way, but Jayden clutched back all the same. Darren had calluses, and they scraped lightly against Jayden’s skin. He couldn’t help but imagine how that would feel when…if…
He concentrated on breathing.
He zoned out so hard that Darren ordered for him and pulled him to a spare table against one wall by that captured hand. “Sit,” Darren said and grinned when Jayden stammered an apology. “No worries. You’re cute when you get flustered.”
Jayden blushed again. Hard. “I, um…”
“Try that,” Darren pushed one cup towards him. “It’s an iced cappuccino with extra cream. I figured it’s time you started figuring out the coffee world, because you’re missing out.”
“I have no intention of doping up on caffeine like you do.”
“Only when the music calls for it.” Darren smirked.
“How long have you been playing?” Jayden asked, the curiosity overcoming his nerves, and Darren’s smirk eased into a languid sort of smile that was breathtakingly beautiful in the warm light of the cafe.
Talking to Darren was easy. It had been easy in The Brightside, and it was easy here, despite the warm weight of his hand over Jayden’s, despite the cut of his slightly-too-tight T-shirt once the heat got to him and he removed his jacket, despite the boot that slid between Jayden’s feet when Darren got their second round, swapping the slightly too bitter cappuccino for a variety of sweet tea with a Chinese name that was actually pretty good.
Darren, Jayden learned, had been a pianist since he was five and a violinist since he was ten. But he was also so much more. He was into rugby (Jayden mentally groaned) with a dash of football on the side. He’d boxed before his father made him give it up to concentrate on his studies. His parents wanted him to go to music college and become a world-famous violinist, but Darren secretly had brochures from high-ranking engineering schools. He broke out in freckles in the summer (and Jayden instantly decided they would be together in the summer, so he could see that.) His grandfather on his mother’s side was Iranian, hence the wild hair.
And he was the most gorgeous, laid-back, confident boy that Jayden had ever met. He just laid their hands out on the table intertwined, like he was daring anyone to say anything. When the band started up, he shifted his chair around to sit next to Jayden instead of opposite him and slung an arm around the back. By the first interval, that arm was around Jayden’s shoulders, relaxed and easy, and the warm weight of it was something almost dizzying in its casual intimacy.
Darren just didn’t care. He didn’t care if everyone else in the cafe realised they were gay. He didn’t care if anyone could walk by and see him with his arm around another boy. He didn’t fear anything, and Jayden was both desperately envious of his ability to shrug it all off, and completely won over by how normal Darren was acting. There was no secrecy, no sneaking around, no sense of something being wrong about the whole affair. It was such a far cry from the taunting at school and the rude introduction to the bins or the lockers or various classroom doors that Jayden pinched himself multiple times to check if he was dreaming.
“This is my first date,” Jayden admitted quietly in the hubbub of the interval. For a moment, he thought Darren hadn’t heard, but then the arm around his shoulders contracted lightly. “I mean it. I mean…there’s like no other gay guys at my school—okay, out ones, but still—and I always thought I’d go to university before finding anyone who wanted to date me, never mind…”
“Believe me, there’ll be some poor sucker in your place who wants to date you but is too afraid to say it,” Darren said. Jayden caught fire; Darren sounded so matter-of-fact he could have been reciting a laundry list. “Too late now.”
“Are you ever not stupidly charming?” Jayden demanded, and Darren laughed.
“Occasionally,” he admitted. “But I don’t usually spend a whole evening flirting with someone either. Or,” he added gleefully when Jayden felt his face head towards purple territory, “someone who reacts quite like that. That’s amazing. But chill out, you’re going to pop a blood vessel.”
Jayden hid his face in his coffee cup. Darren laughed quietly beside him for a moment before dropping his head onto Jayden’s shoulder and tightening his arm in a quick
hug. His curls tickled at Jayden’s neck.
“Sorry,” Darren said, “but it’s just so easy.”
“You’re awful.”
“Mm.”
Jayden dared to slide a hand over onto Darren’s leg, resting it just above his knee as the band returned to their instruments and began to mess around with a couple of chords, warming back up. The denim was warm; the way that Darren simply let him, without comment or even a look, was calming, and as the music started back up, Jayden found himself rubbing circles into the worn cloth with his thumb, and wondering if Darren’s skin was the same kind of rubbed-down smooth as his jeans.
* * * *
They left at ten. Milzani’s was on the south side of the town centre, nearer to the housing estates than the pubs and clubs, and as they passed the empty bus stops, Jayden dared to slide his arm into the crook of Darren’s elbow and squeeze.
“Thank you,” he said. “They were pretty good, actually.”
“Surprisingly,” Darren said. “I usually avoid the live mike nights like the plague.”
Jayden sniggered, bumping their shoulders to throw Darren off-stride a little. “Where are we going?”
“I’m going to walk you home, and then I’ll cut through the park back to Beauchamp.”
“That’ll take you ages!”
Darren shrugged. “It’s a nice night.”
“But…”
“Jayden, I am walking you home whether you like it or not,” Darren interrupted. “I suggest you put up and shut up.”
Jayden flushed, bit his lip, and blew out a lungful of air in an exasperated sigh. “Fine,” he conceded. “But don’t blame me when you get, like, a massive head cold or something. It’s going to snow next week.”
“It’s going to try,” Darren corrected as they left the town centre behind entirely for the residential areas. “And when it does, I’ll wear a hat.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“…Your hair fits under—oh my God, forget I said that, I…”
Darren started laughing, and Jayden bit down on his urge to ramble out some sort of apology for the faux pas. He felt shaky and nervous again, now they were alone, with his hand in Darren’s elbow and being walked home. Being walked home. Like a proper date. Because it was, and at the end of their proper date and walk home, Darren was going to kiss him, and Jayden had a serious case of butterflies. Butterflies the size of saucers and made out of razor wire. And it was so stupid because they’d kissed before. They’d kissed—Jayden mentally counted up—at least eight times now. At least.
But this was a date. A proper date. And…
“Are you even in there?”
He flamed red.
“You’re good at that zoning out thing,” Darren commented.
“Sorry.”
“I dunno. Could be a good thing. I was asking if I’d sufficiently charmed you yet.”
“Um…sufficient for what?”
“For you to agree to go out with me again,” Darren returned easily, and Jayden managed—somehow—to keep the blush at a steady pink.
“I, um…I think so, yes,” Jayden mumbled as they reached the corner of his street. He stopped, pulling Darren to a halt under the streetlight with him, and the orange light bouncing off those curls was oddly pleasant. “I mean…I really enjoyed tonight. And…I really like you, so…”
“We’re on the same page then.”
“Yeah. But, um…?”
“But?” Darren prompted.
Jayden slid his hand down to tangle with Darren’s. “You owe me a kiss,” he blurted out.
Darren’s eyebrows climbed for his hair. “I what?”
“You said you’d kiss me hello when we got to the cafe, but you didn’t. So, um…you owe me two kisses. A hello and a good night.”
For a brief second, Darren simply stared at him, and the butterflies began to chew on Jayden’s stomach in aggressive retribution, but then a smile bloomed from one side of Darren’s face to the other, and he laughed shortly.
“I guess I do,” he said and slid both hands up to cup Jayden’s face, fingers settling behind his ears, warm and firm and certain. And the kiss tasted of dark coffee and sparks of half-dissolved sugar and for a long minute, Jayden simply forgot to breathe.
“Hello,” Darren whispered against his mouth, and then he pulled back, dropping his hands to loop both arms around Jayden’s waist. Jayden fumbled for a moment, unsure what to do, before deciding on dropping his arms over Darren’s shoulders and feeling the cold leather under his fingers, hard and unyielding.
“Hello,” he echoed and grinned stupidly.
“You coming to The Brightside on Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Darren breathed. “Then…good night, I guess.”
Jayden closed his eyes and pushed into the kiss, opening his mouth and coaxing Darren into deepening it. His hands tangled themselves in that wild hair without Jayden’s permission, but he didn’t care: he was standing on a street corner at twenty past ten at night, freezing cold, and kissing the most amazing guy he’d ever met. He could have died, right then, and he would have been okay with it.
And then Darren was letting go, slipping away into the night, dragging his fingers along Jayden’s arm to squeeze his hand before he disappeared, and Jayden leaned against the lamp-post for balance as he watched him go, dizzy with the sheer shock of his life right at that minute.
He had never felt more alive.
Chapter 10
For the last two years, Jayden had had a life plan. Get the sixth form scholarship to St. John’s. Get straight As in his A-levels. Get into the University of Cambridge. Get a boyfriend. Live. In that exact order.
Somehow, he’d turned it over, and gotten the boyfriend before any of the rest fell into place. And being able to say ‘boyfriend’ in relation to himself was strange and heavy and amazing.
It was maybe a little soon for it. After that first (perfect, amazing, wonderful) date, they still mostly met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes they went for coffee to feed Darren’s addiction. Sometimes he played, but more often he abandoned the violin the minute Jayden showed up. Sometimes they worked on their homework or their revision (they had eight GCSEs in common, and Darren was scarily laid back about them). And always they’d end up kissing. Darren was an amazing kisser, and Jayden wanted to curl his toes just thinking about it, and once on the way back from Costa, Darren had taken his hand, right there in the road, and had held it all the way back to the theatre.
If Jayden got any higher, he was going to float right off the planet.
Darren was…perfect. Well, no, he wasn’t—he was sarcastic and he didn’t really talk about feelings and he had this slightly off air about him some days, like there was something going on inside his head that Jayden wasn’t allowed to know about—but…but he was perfect, all the same.
He kissed like the world was ending and he didn’t care because Jayden was right there. He let Jayden touch his hair and didn’t complain. He would play for him sometimes, especially if Jayden bought the coffee. He had big warm hands that felt so welcoming if he slid one around Jayden’s back, or held his hand. And he’d hold his hand! He held his hand in public, and he hugged him goodbye once when he left for home on Thursday night, right in front of Mum. He didn’t kiss him in public (or in front of Mum, thankfully) but Jayden didn’t want him to either.
And it was all the other stuff too. He liked some of the same music. When he’d finally added him on Facebook, Jayden had spent half an hour sifting through Darren’s timeline and had finally worked out that he could write like a normal, vaguely intelligent person, he just chose not to. He wasn’t into plays or books at all, but he watched a lot of TV. They both agreed that Lost had started off well, and Heroes had held it together for a bit longer, but the entire Star Wars and Star Trek franchises were exercises in time-wasting for nerds. He’d text him in classes and leave cryptic Facebook messages on his wall that nobody understood but th
em, and ignored Charley’s blatant online bullying attempts to get him to spill all Jayden’s dirty secrets. He didn’t think Jayden was stupid because he was bad at maths, and he wasn’t some stuck-up snob just because he went to private school.
He was gorgeous, and he was Jayden’s, and life was perfect for the whole of November.
All things considered, they didn’t have a lot of date-dates. They saw each other every Tuesday and Thursday—because Jayden wasn’t giddy enough to forget that Darren had agreed to be in the play, and had forced him into staying later and later on Tuesdays to rehearse with Pete—and they usually went out on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings. They went to the cinema a couple of times (and Jayden ignored the films entirely, because Darren held his hand like it was completely normal, and leaned over and kissed him in the middle of a really important part of last Saturday’s venture, and it was amazing) and back to Milzani’s one evening when Jayden’s parents were out and couldn’t grill him too much, and it was…
It was a relationship. Jayden was in a relationship. He had a boyfriend.
He’d never said the b-word to Darren. He didn’t even dare change his Facebook status yet. Darren was so laid back, so casual about everything, even the bullying, Jayden didn’t want to risk having such a serious talk so soon. He thought maybe in December, in time for Christmas. Then it would be a whole month and a bit—a month and a half, even—since they’d kissed for the first time and Darren had asked him out, and that was more sustainable, right? It wasn’t just testing the waters after a month and a half, right? They had to start swimming eventually.
Until they did…until then…part of Jayden liked keeping it a secret. Part of him liked having a secret. Mum didn’t believe in secrets. Charley definitely didn’t. She didn’t even know the concept of secret. To be able to have Darren, and keep him separate from everyone else, to keep him all to himself…
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