Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
DION
NOW
The room is spinning. Of that I am certain as he stands in front of me, looking down at me with those criminally blue eyes.
I should look away from them — even though they’re the colour of the summer sky they are too bright like the sun — but I can’t.
I’m starting to think that him holding my gaze is the only thing that is stopping me rotate with the room.
“Did you hear me?” he asks when I don’t do or say anything for a long time.
“I heard you,” I reply, and I also hear an edge in my voice. A sharp edge.
His smile disappears, and who knew such a small change in his facial expression would have the ability to make my heart feel like it’s cracking open.
“But you don’t think it’s a good idea?” he prompts.
I want distance from him. I need space to think and to try and process what he’s just told me.
It was him. The Valentine’s card.
And it wasn’t a joke, when he asked me to the Leavers’ Ball.
Benji Smith liked me. Benji says he really liked me.
This is revelation enough, but what’s completely throwing me off-balance is the realisation that I liked him too. I liked him then, even if I never admitted it to myself.
And I like him now.
Am I brave enough to admit it to him?
“Maybe I’m moving too fast?” Benji takes the step back that I thought I needed, but immediately, I mourn his presence in front of me, the way he towers over me, the way he looked down at me so intently it changed my body temperature.
“No!” I reach out for him and grab his arm. His forearm where there’s a fresh new tattoo under his jumper. He flinches just as I realise what I’ve done and lift my hand.
“Shit, sorry.”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t really hurt. Just a little tender.”
Tender. What a perfect fucking word for how I feel right now.
I feel exposed, vulnerable, turned inside out.
I feel like I’ve been thrust back in time to a moment in my life when I was full of uncertainty, trepidation and anxiety.
I don’t want to go back there — to that last year of school when I was so scared of what the future held for me.
I don’t even want to think about it, let alone kiss one of the ghosts from that time.
And yet I do. I do want to kiss Benji. I want to feel his arms around me. I want to know what his lips taste like. I want to know if his skin is as soft and smooth on his neck, his chest, his inner thigh, as it is on his forearm.
Part of me wants to explain this conundrum to him, but I don’t. I just stand still, my chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.
“I should go and …” he drifts off, realising he can’t go anywhere.
I snort out a laugh, and after a second he joins me.
“What a fucking mess,” he says as he collapses back onto the sofa.
I don’t move. Now the moment has passed — the moment where he looked down at my lips and I knew, just knew he was about to kiss me — I want it back. I don’t want to go back to sitting next to each other with a metre of space between us. A metre that would feel like a canyon.
“It’s my mess,” I say.
“What?” His eyes lift.
“I’m making a mess of this,” I clarify.
“I don’t know. I’m the one who came on too strong.”
“You didn’t come on to strong. I just …” I move to perch on the coffee table in front of him. I make sure it can take my weight before I sit fully on it. “I fucked up by not telling you who I was sooner.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, that was, kind of shitty, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” he says immediately, easily.
“You didn’t owe me any explanations. If we hadn’t got trapped in here like this, I would have left none the wiser.
It would have been a normal tattoo appointment and I certainly don’t expect you to be outing yourself to me or anyone when you don’t want to, regardless of our history. ”
“Were you always this … understanding?” I say grouchily. Because I am grouchy. If Benji had been as sweet then as he’s being now, I could have had a true ally in him. If I had known Benji had liked me back then, who knows what the years could have looked like?
A little pink appears in his cheeks. “I don’t know about that. I was a bit of a twat back then. Closeted, too.”
“Yeah, so you said. Dare I ask who the boy was? From the football team?”
“It was Miles Richards.”
“Really? Fuck, no!”
“Yep. The biggest, loudest, most seemingly hetero wanker of them all.”
“Do you … Are you still in touch with him?”
“No. Not really. About five or six years ago, he did send me a Facebook message apologising for how he treated me that year but it felt a bit copy and paste. Hey, maybe he also sent the same one to … What was your friend’s name again? The girl with the long black hair and piercings.”
“Raquelle,” I say in a quiet voice.
“Yeah. How is she?”
“I … I don’t know. She lives in Berlin now, I think.
We kind of lost touch.” It’s my turn to have heat in my cheeks as I think about how Raquelle and I drifted apart all too easily by the time she graduated from university and stopped coming home so often.
She never said it was because I transitioned, but it’s hard not to connect those kind of dots.
“Oh, that’s sad. I mean, it’s also not. These things happen, right?”
“These things happen,” I repeat, a little mechanically.
“I’m sure you have lots of other friends now.”
I can’t help but smile. “Yeah, I do. Do you … Do you see me differently now I’m a man?
” I ask, and the warmth in my face intensifies.
It’s not like me to ask such a direct and vulnerable question.
But it’s also not like me to be sat in front of a customer, who is also a ghost from my past, our knees brushing occasionally, thinking about doing things with him that would get me fired on the spot.
Benji leans towards me, resting his elbows on his thighs.
“I don’t know, if I’m honest. The full picture is still coming into focus a bit.
Like, I can’t believe you’re … that person.
But also I totally can believe it. And in that respect, you’re exactly the same.
The same confidence, the same cool style and attitude.
The same sense of humour. The same unique way of looking at the world.
And the same big, brown eyes that I’m pretty sure will haunt my memory as soon as I leave here. ”
“My eyes! Have you seen your eyes?” I blurt.
“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Wrinkles pinch in the corner of those weapons of his as he smiles.
“Nothing’s wrong with them. That’s the problem.”
His blush returns and deepens. “Also, I don’t know you as well as I would like. Even back then, I felt you held so much back from people. But maybe,” his eyes roll down my body, “maybe that makes a lot more sense now.”
“I …” I stutter as I find not my words, but my bravery. “You’re right. I do hold myself back from people. Back then, yes, because I had so much to figure out about myself, but also now.”
Benji nods and then he looks down at one of his hands.
He tracks it as he lifts it and places it on my knee.
His touch is light at first, barely-there contact.
But when I don’t protest and when I drop my gaze to also watch his fingers intently, he applies a bit more pressure. He squeezes, and I sigh.
I can’t remember the last time I was touched like this: with meaning, with hope, with a tenderness that matches what I feel inside.
“It must have been very hard,” he says, eyes still downcast. “To have gone through what you’ve been through so far.”
I swallow around a knotted ball of tears and emotions and anger and despair that’s left over from my hardest moments, my hardest years. Yes, they’re all behind me - please, God - but bits of them have stayed with me, buried in my bones and swimming in my veins.
Nodding as I look up at Benji, I bring a hand to his face. “And you too. Your illness, your mum.”
He gives me a single nod back before leaning into the cradle of my palm. “Yeah, it’s been a shit few years.”
“But not all bad? Before then, I mean? You’ve had a nice life?”
He blinks his bright blue eyes open and pins them on me. “No, it’s not been all bad. I’d like to tell you about the highlights one day.”
One day. A future one day where we’re not locked in the studio together, forced to share our wounds and scars.
“I’d like that,” I answer honestly.
“And you? You’ve had some good times?”
I think about the studio we’re sitting in.
About Keeley and Mari and Emmy and all the other people I work with.
I think about my parents, and Lyla and Devon.
How they’re both doing so well. How we’re still a close, loving family despite my younger siblings now living further afield.
I think about the other friends I’ve made and the things we’ve done together — travel, concerts, dinners, drinks, nights out, nights in — and about the handful of lovers I’ve had over the years.
The ones that made me feel whole and special and worthy of love, even if I didn’t want theirs.
“Yeah, I’ve had some good times,” I say, and his body sinks down with his exhale, like that answer was of devastating importance to him.
“Good, good,” he says and then he’s doing it again, staring at my lips.
“You still want to kiss me?”
“I still want to kiss you.” he says with a smile that makes my heartbeat surge.
“And you wanted to kiss me fifteen years ago. Even though you said what you said?”
His smile flatlines. “I really don’t know what I said. I’m sorry … I can’t remember.”
I can remember only too easily. But also, I want to forget.
So I lean forward and press my mouth against Benji’s.