Chapter Seven Marching Orders #2
He took Nathan’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. Part comfort, part question. Then he laced their fingers together, cause it felt as if this was the moment they stopped pretending it was just friendship in the shadows.
Nathan didn’t pull away.
Didn’t move at all, really.
Freddie’s heart stuttered. So he slid his other hand along the back of Nathan’s neck, slipping into the soft, cropped hair at his nape. It was a move born of habit, of the late-night touches they never talked about. The ones that lived under blankets and behind locked doors.
It was comfort, sure.
But it was also want . Heavy and aching.
Freddie tightened his grip in Nathan’s hair, and for one suspended second, all he could think about was yanking him forward and tumbling them both onto the bed. No more pretending, no more maybes. Just them. This. Real .
What he hoped they’d have in Ibiza.
His voice dipped, teasing and warm. “Ibiza, babe. Sun, sea, and…” He waggled his eyebrows before leaning into whisper, “Sssss…angria.”
Freddie chuckled, at least expecting a snort from Nathan. A roll of his eyes. A reaction. But Nathan didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile. He stared at the floor as if it had more answers than he did.
So Freddie leant in, nudging his forehead to Nathan’s. “Want me to kiss it better?”
That got a reaction. Nathan’s lips twitched. Almost a smile, but not quite. Then he darted his gaze towards the open door. “Your sister let me in.”
Freddie sighed and stood, rolling his eyes.
He’d quite like his sister to walk in on them.
To know . Then maybe she could finally get over her own years-old crush and stop doodling Mrs Carter in the corners of her old school notebooks.
And he was halfway to slamming the door shut, because he knew Nate wasn’t ready for anyone to know yet, not even the fifteen-year-old girl he used to climb trees with, when Piper popped up in the doorway, holding a mug as if it was a marriage proposal.
“Made Nate a tea.” She held up a cheap, mismatched mug from the back of the cupboard, stamped with one of their mum’s failed business logos from her brief “inspirational kitchenware” era. This one read: Cuppa Ambition: Pour Dreams, Add Boiling Water.
Freddie stared at it as if it might bite. “You trying to off him?”
Piper lifted the mug to check the cracks. “I don’t think this one will break in his hand. ”
Freddie turned back to Nathan, deadpan. “You fancy a tea that tastes like regret and smells like lavender PVA glue?”
Nathan grimaced. “Hard pass.”
Freddie turned back to his sister. “He said he’d rather lick the pavement outside the kebab shop.”
“You’re such a knob.”
Freddie blew her a kiss, then kicked the door shut with the back of his heel and clicked the dodgy lock made from a bent nail and a bit of hope into place.
He turned, leaning back against the door, and raked his gaze from Nathan’s battered trainers to the slump of his hoodie-covered shoulders. The curve of his neck. That moody pout.
Freddie tilted his neck. “You know, if you weren’t sat there looking like you’re auditioning to be the fifth member of Arctic Monkeys circa Favourite Worst Nightmare, you’d be proper fit right now.”
Nathan huffed out the smallest laugh, barely more than a breath.
But Freddie caught it. And fuck, he’d take that as a win.
Cause he was gorgeous. Literal sex on legs . When he wasn’t sulking as if the world owed him a medal and hadn’t delivered.
“You staying the night?”
Nathan looked up, and something in the way he chewed on his lower lip set Freddie’s nerves humming.
As if he was trying to gnaw away a scar.
Or stop himself from saying something that would leave another.
Freddie’s stomach twisted. He knew that look.
Knew it the way he knew every mark on Nathan’s face, every breath between words when he was about to bail. And suddenly he felt sick.
This was it.
He was gonna pull out of the Ibiza trip .
Freddie had been stashing every quid he could from his shifts at TGI Fridays, stuffing it in an old pencil tin at the back of his sock drawer, careful to keep it away from his mum’s eyes.
Nathan had been doing the same. Pocketing the barely there “wages” his dad tossed him for working at the garage, plus whatever he made under the table collecting glasses at the Wetherspoons by TGI’s, the shifts his dad didn’t know about cause he always told him he was crashing at Freddie’s those nights.
Which, technically, wasn’t a lie. Even if after those shifts, they’d take the long way home.
Past the seafront, through the quiet back roads of Worthbridge and share a bag of chips under the orange streetlights.
Sometimes they’d walk all the way to the pier, where the shadows were deeper, the world a little quieter. And sometimes…
Well. Sometimes things got a little handsy. A little breathless.
But that was new. Still fragile. Secret.
Two months, three weeks and four days.
Not that Freddie was counting.
So it wasn’t just the holiday he was afraid of losing.
It was this . Whatever the hell this was. Whatever it was becoming. And how easily it could break with one sentence.
Nathan drew in a long breath, as if it might brace him from the impact of what he was about to say. Then when he spoke, his voice was low, flat. “I can’t go to Ibiza.”
Freddie rolled his eyes. “Yes, you can. You’re eighteen, Nate. You’re a fucking adult. If he kicks you out, you come here. You know Mum’ll have you.”
But Nathan was already pacing. Dragging one hand through his hair, the other hanging useless by his side. He paused in front of the Kasabian poster on the wall, eyes fixed on it as if it might give him an answer, before he finally turned to face Freddie.
“Katie’s pregnant.”
Freddie flinched. “What?”
“Katie.” Nathan hung his head. “She’s pregnant.”
“What the fuck’s that got to do with—”
Nathan lifted his gaze. “It’s mine, innit?”
The words dropped like a stone in Freddie’s chest. Heavy. Irrefutable.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, heat rising through his chest like panic. Grief. Another rabid thing he didn’t have the vocabulary for yet. His knees weakened and for a second, he genuinely thought he might slide down the door and curl into a ball.
Instead, he stayed frozen, staring past Nathan into the space between them. Then he blinked hard, forcing himself to come back to the moment. He bit his lip, suddenly aware of how familiar that action was. How Nathan had done the same when he walked in.
“How can you be sure?” Freddie asked.
“That she’s pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
“She showed me the scan. Been to the doctors already.”
Freddie swallowed. “And… you sure it’s yours?”
“I shagged her, Fred. You know I did. Three months ago.”
Of course, he knew.
Freddie remembered every word Nathan had spilled that night.
Half-cut on cheap cider and guilt, cheeks red from cold and shame as they’d walked the long way home from the house party.
Nathan had told him how Katie had offered, how the lads from the football team had egged him on, how he hadn’t even wanted it, not really, but went along with it, anyway .
And after?
Afterward, Nathan had grabbed Freddie’s hand and yanked him out of the party.
They’d walked the stretch along the seafront, cider still on their breath, cold wind biting at their cheeks, Nate talking too fast to outrun what he’d done.
Said it felt weird. Awkward. That he hadn’t really known what he was doing and hadn’t enjoyed it.
That he wasn’t even sure he’d done it right.
Turned out, he’d done it a little too right.
Freddie had tried to smile through it, nod along, pretend it didn’t matter. Pretend it didn’t gut him from the inside out. But when they stopped, past the pier, the sea slapping gently against the rocks, something in him cracked wide open.
And he kissed him.
Not a joke. Not a dare. A raw, aching need that had come out of nowhere.
Okay, so maybe it hadn’t come out of nowhere
Freddie had wanted to kiss Nathan for ages. And he’d accepted, somewhere deep down, that he probably never would. Watching Nathan snog girls at parties was supposed to numb the want, dull it to something bearable. But it never did. It sharpened it.
Worse still when last year, after the cup final, when they were both knackered and Freddie crashed at Nathan’s.
He’d gone to sleep on the floor as usual, but Nathan had reached down, grabbed his hoodie, and hauled him up into the narrow bed beside him.
They’d lain there in the dark, breathing too hard and too close, until Nathan whispered a quiet, “Night, Fred,” while brushing Freddie’s hair off his forehead as if it was nothing. As if it wasn’t everything .
After that, the touches shifted. Softer. Longer. Loaded.
But never a kiss.
Never that .
Until Freddie had to wait downstairs at that party, knowing Nate was upstairs losing his virginity to Katie Brewer. Knowing exactly what was happening. And in that moment, the pain of silence outweighed the risk of rejection.
So he kissed him.
And for three months, they had something. Quiet, hidden, theirs.
Now?
Now the girl who gave Nathan his first time was having his kid. And Freddie had never felt more like a footnote in his own story.
“Didn’t you wear a condom?” Freddie blurted. Feeble. Desperate. Grasping at straws because, fuck , this couldn’t be happening.
“Yeah.” Nathan scrubbed a hand down his face. “But I told you… I dunno if I got it on right. It didn’t, like, fit properly. She said it was fine, that she was on the pill.” He swallowed. “She says she reckons she must’ve missed a few.”
Freddie stared at him, heart hammering so loud he couldn’t think. Silence swallowed the room whole. Thick. Suffocating. He couldn’t even hear his sister’s music thudding through the paper-thin walls.
“Say somethin’.”
Freddie blinked himself back in the room. “What d’you want me to say?”