Chapter 35
Aiden
Eggo still has blue face paint and yellow glitter in the lines of his beard. It looks like a seaweed-strewn shoreline, but sparkly. I don’t tell him. It’s too cute.
Today has been a perfect day. The kind of day that songs get written about. We had great food, fun adventures, and I was shown what it’s like for a child to be loved unconditionally.
And I love Eggo. My Eggo. My Finn. And he loves me. And this is the moment in my life to which all other moments will be playing catch-up.
“Tea?” he says, sauntering from the bathroom into the caravan’s master bedroom in only a pair of jocks.
“Ripper.”
I follow him through to the kitchen area, and Eggo busies himself filling the kettle and getting mugs from the draining board. It’s kind of awkward for a bit. We just look at each other, reach for things the other person’s about to grab, shuffle our feet, do that weird stoner-guy laugh.
“I . . .” Eggo begins. Laughs again. He pretends to pull something off his forearm. An imaginary bandaid. “I want you . . . boyfriends . . . us. I mean, blah . . .”
He sucks in a breath and scratches his beard. His fingers come away glittery.
Frowning down at them, he starts over. “The next time Logan asks us if we’re boyfriends—because he will—I’d really like to tell him that we are.
I want to be your boyfriend. I want you to be my boyfriend.
I’m fully in love with you, Aiden Campbell.
You’re . . .” Eggo glances around the caravan, evidently looking for the right word. “The dog’s bollocks, mate.”
I laugh. The first tidal wave of emotion hits me, and it’s relief.
Relief that he feels the same as me. Relief that I don’t have to keep my feelings to myself any more. That it’s all out in the open. That I’m not burdening him with my pestering affections and, in fact, probably haven’t been this entire time.
Next on the emotional menu comes the regret that we didn’t tell each other sooner. We could have been a cosy little unit for a while now. Maybe not all this time, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had a crush on him since 2019.
Then comes sheer, unbridled hope. And happiness. And I’m crying now, but fuck, it feels so good to be loved and wanted in the same way I love and want him.
Eggo swipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
“I fucking love you,” he whispers.
“I love you too,” I say finally.
There are two beaches in Weymouth. One’s comprised of beautiful holiday-brochure-like golden sand, with Punch and Judy shows, and a helter-skelter, and ice creams galore. The other’s filled with extremely stinky pebbles and rotting clumps of even stinkier seaweed.
Eggo stands barefoot—an amazing feat of endurance in itself—with his hands on his hips, inhaling the salty, sulfuric scent of decay on the pebbly beach.
“That’s the smell of the ozone, that is!” he exclaims.
I’ve got no idea what he means by this, and he offers no explanation other than to just repeat himself until I’m also referring to the stink as “the ozone.”
The rain has let off this morning, but the skies are still overcast, and it feels later in the day and later in the year than it should.
We’ve already checked out of our caravan.
All our stuff sits in the boot of Eggo’s Land Rover, and we’re now teaching Logan how to skim stones on the definitely too-choppy ocean.
“It’s a rite of passage,” his father says.
But Logan’s terrible at it. He overhand yeets the stone into the sea like he’s pitching a baseball.
“No, like this,” Eggo says, keeping his arm tight to his body as he flicks it from his side. It completes four bounces along the surface before disappearing.
Logan copies his dad, but continues to be shit at it until suddenly he’s not. It’s like something’s clicked in his brain and now the stone bops twice, three times, and drops below the water.
“Yooooo!” he yells, and high fives Eggo, then me. “Bruh, I have a question?” He looks between us both, but we already know what he’s going to say.
Eggo nods at me sagely. “Okay, so yes, we’re boyfriends. Friends who are boys but are also boyfriends.” He sends another pebble shooting off for six bounces. “Noice.”
“Huh?” Logan scrunches up his face. “What?”
“You were going to ask if Uncle Aiden and I are boyfriends?”
“Oh. Nah. I was gonna ask if I could have an ice cream. Can I?”
Eggo simply shrugs. “Sure.” He crouches down to Logan’s eye level. “Listen, you can only have an ice cream if you promise not to tell anyone about me and Aiden yet. It’s alright for Mum and Bran to know, but nobody at school can find out, okay?”
“Why?” Logan asks.
“They just can’t. Maybe one day in the future we’ll make a big announcement, but it’s one of those grown-up things where you have to wait for Aiden and me to tell people when we’re ready.”
“Okay.” Logan looks at me. “Can you eat bin chickens? Do they taste like chicken or bins?”
“It’s an actual disco inside your head, isn’t it?” I say.
“Huh?”
I smile at Eggo. Logan reminds me so much of myself when I was a kid, only his rugby is spiders and wildlife . . . and animal-related mortality rates. I wonder where he’ll go in his life. Where his passions will take him.
“In fact, bin chickens taste like a secret third thing . . . mint choc-chip ice cream.”
Logan’s eyes light up.
“So, we’re not telling anyone about us?” I say as we eat our ice creams on a seaweed-infested concrete jetty. Logan is near the end, lining up pebbles along the edge and then flicking them one by one into the water. “Except, I suppose, Abs and Orlando, and Gadget and Owen.”
“It’s probably best if we wait . . . until when, I’m not sure. Maybe after we retire, we can come out of the closet and be like, ‘Ta-da! Guess what? We’ve been in love this entire time,’” Eggo says.
My heart plays out a brand new rhythm in my chest. In love. But he’s right about not telling anyone else. I don’t want any accusations of favouritism, or people getting the wrong idea about us, or thinking that we’re just going through a phase.
“We’ll have to speak to Gadget and Abs and make sure they don’t say anything,” he says.
Not that Gadget would. He’d known about our affair for over a year, and he hadn’t even told me. And I can’t see Abs blabbing. If anything, he’ll wear his “carrier of Aiden’s secrets” badge with pride.
“You think we’ll be together until we retire?” I ask, nervous again.
“Of course we will,” Eggo replies without hesitation. I bite my lip, stopping my smile before it turns into something maniacal. “We’ll get married too, and you can get your green card that way.”
I can’t tell if he’s taking the piss. “Wait, for real?”
Eggo shrugs. “If you want to. But I mean, it’s not for ages yet. I’ve still got a good five years left, easily, and you have longer. And then I guess, if you’re up for it, once we retire we could move to Cornwall together.”
He looks at me and smiles, and I know he’s trying to pass off his comment as nonchalance, like it’s no big deal, but I see the way his chest rises and falls too quickly.
I see the slight wobble to his lower lip, the almost imperceptible crease to his brow, and I hear the faint tremor in his voice. He’s nervous.
Two years ago I wouldn’t have picked up on any of these cues, but I’ve learned to read Finn Eggington better than any other living person.
I swallow down the weird obstruction in my throat, switch my ice cream to my other hand, and entwine my fingers with his.
He doesn’t even look around to see if there are other people about. Anybody could walk along, recognise us, and snap a quick photo. We’ll have to learn to be more careful.
But not right now.
“I would fucking love that,” I say.
Eggo lets out a little relieved sigh.
“Another question . . .”
“Yes. The answer is yes. Whatever it is that you want, it’s yours.”
I lick my ice cream to give me something else to focus on. “Uh . . . Okay, but I was gonna ask if maybe you . . . wanted to live together . . . maybe.”
He smiles at me. Looks off to the horizon. Looks back and smiles again. “Yeah, maybe I do.”
Logan runs up the jetty to gather more pebbles and then waddles down to the edge with his collection.
“Your house is nicer than mine,” Eggo says, watching his kid play.
“It’s bigger, and you have more stuff than I do, and a dog.
So, it would be . . . easier to keep that all where it is.
” He’s still speaking casually, trying to pass it off as though he’s not bothered either way, as though he hasn’t given it much thought up till now.
But it’s one of those things that I can’t pretend I haven’t considered.
Moving in together has been part of my regular daydream rotation since he kissed me at Halloween.
“I have a spare bedroom too, and no lodger. We could make it Logan’s room, so he can stay with us. We could paint it Spider-Man colours.”
Eggo doesn’t answer me. Instead, he drops to the ground in a squat and buries his face in his elbows. His shoulders shake with silent tears.
I take his ice cream away to free up his hands, give him a few moments, then crouch beside him.
“Nope.” He scrubs his face dry and stands. I stand too. “I don’t deserve you.”
I’m about to argue with him, explain why it’s the other way around, that I don’t deserve him, but he cradles my jaw with his damp palm, and I forget what words are.
“This is it. Peak life. Right here. This is . . . literally everything I’ve ever dreamed of.” Eggo laughs like he’s just delivered the punchline for a hilarious joke. “I’m living the fucking dream, mate. I’m joy-maxxed to the fucking eyeballs right now.”
Same, though.
“Do you remember when we were outside Bosley’s pub, and it was Halloween, and I said that I felt as if I was always chasing things that might make me happy?” I ask.
Eggo’s brow creases, but he says nothing.
“I realised a while ago that I stopped looking for the next thing to make me happy because . . .” Okay, it’s cringe, but here goes.
“Because it was you. Is you. Everything about you makes me happy. Being with you. Spending time with you. The way you are with Logan. The way you are with your family, the Cents boys, everyone. You give me this . . . inner peace that I’ve just not been able to find before. ”
“Fuck, I love you,” he says. The words are strained, like they're being passed through a narrow tunnel. “Whilst we’re talking about Halloween, can I make a confession?”
I raise a brow.
“That night I told you that I’m more observant than people give me credit for . . .” He waits for me to respond.
“Yes, you did say that.”
“It was a fucking lie. I’m sorry. I . . . actually only ever ‘observed’ you.” He laughs. “Honestly, I notice jack shit about anybody else. Never have. Couldn’t give a toss about them. It’s just you. Since you moved to Bath, in fact. I even spent the entire U20 tournament staring at you.”
“I left London for you,” I say, and immediately find a sailboat on the horizon to focus my attention on. My ear has also suddenly become very itchy, so I hand his ice cream back and wiggle my finger in there to avoid his reaction.
I don’t tell him about the solid two years of petitioning—nagging—I did to the Cents’ coaches. Well, to any team in the Westcountry who might find a position for me to slot into, and one that would be less than an hour’s drive from him.
Eggo drops his arm over my shoulder, pulls me in, and kisses me . . . somewhere. I’ve got no idea where his kiss lands, but I’m not complaining. “I’m gonna make sure you’re never chasing happiness again. I’ll chase it for you.”
I raise my eyebrows because I sense Eggo’s going to his silly place.
And I’m not wrong.
“I know you’re a winger, but you’ve done enough running,” he says.
We both snort with laughter.
“How have I fallen in love with the cringest man of the century?”
“It’s not your fault, princess. I’m fucking irresistible.”
We don’t talk about us or moving in together or dealing with our teammates and coaches for the rest of the day, but every time I catch Eggo’s eye, a soft smile creases the corner of his mouth.
After the beach, we go back into the clubhouse soft play, and Eggo gives Logan strict instructions to exhaust himself to a point where napping for the duration of the drive home is the only outcome.
“I’m just not sure how much longer I can play ‘what animal am I?’” he says to me, as we sip our zero alcohol beers and use the club’s Wi-Fi to look up other places we can take cute family holidays together.
“How are you feeling about Disneyland Paris?” I ask.
“With you? Piece of piss, mate.”