Out of the Woods - 8. Starbucks

October came, and before long it was time to apply to universities. The school was filled with a palpable sense of frenzied movement as the Upper Sixth Oxbridge applicants hurried to finish their applications before the other students and, in the case of those whose attitude to life took on a slower, more lackadaisical hue—those students like myself—complete their personal statements.

The other Oxbridge kids had finished them weeks ago.

And I came to realise, far too late, that my lack of participation in…well, anything, actually, in terms of extracurricular activities, was blatantly obvious when written on paper. I had always known my fellow students were far more organised, far more motivated, far more active in the pursuit of their goals than I was; it was something I had acknowledged from the very beginning but only ever in theory, in the same way you acknowledge, seated under an apple tree in the height of an Indian summer, that winter is on its way. Tom had been telling me for years to get involved in community service, if not for the simple joy of giving back to society then at least because universities loved it. He had it easy—he had been doing it for years. He was one of those genuinely selfless people that actually enjoyed it.

And then, one week before the deadline, I came to write my personal statement and discovered I had nothing to put in it. There was nothing at all: I had been interested in nothing, had enthused about nothing, loved nothing at all. There was nothing to say of my childhood and adolescence but for a few photographs on our living room wall, and my novels.

When I was much younger, and unable to socialise with other children, I wrote novels. They were for escapism. They generally featured a young boy, who looked a little like me, and who had magical powers. This boy would be special, in some way, and he invariably fought monsters. I had written three and a half of these novels before I finally managed to pass my driving test and wrest a social life for myself; but, every now and then, the urge to read my childhood fantasies seized me, to remember how I felt and what I was like when I was younger and far less contorted.

October found me sat at my desk in my room with the door shut. I took out these novels and I read them, and then I read them again.

There had to be something useful there. There had to be, because they were the only thing setting me apart from the hordes of post-adolescent swats attempting to steal my place at Oxford, UCL or St Andrews from me. It was simply a matter of connecting my novels—as awful as they were—to my studies. It was simply a matter of forcing some semblance of academic legitimacy upon them.

They were escapist works. They were shoddily written, full of soaring landscapes, wide, melancholy moors, high mountains, dark and empty seas.

There was a painting that we studied as part of our module on the Romantic poets. It is called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich. It shows a man on the top of a precipice; he has his back to us and is dark against a vast, pale, overbearing sky and a wide and misty landscape below. We can’t see his face, so there is no way of knowing whether he meets sublime nature with fear or exhilaration—he is above the landscape, the taller figure, but paradoxically it is everywhere and he is dwarfed by it.

It was tenuous, but I found a link. By the time I left my room I had transformed myself into an ardent follower of the Romantic poets, some pathetic, nostalgic groupie whose novels were an earnest attempt to emulate Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, or Keats. I had glanced through the appropriate books whose previews I could find on Google Books, researched, via Wikipedia, the novels of as many writers I could think of directly influenced by or a direct influence upon the Romantic movement; considered for a moment or two the Gothic genre and its evolution from the former; pondered the significance of the Romantics on nationalism, psychology, the art of the German Expressionists, the Surrealists, the philosophy of the Existentialists; I studied for an evening, never leaving my bedroom, and by the time my personal statement was handed in it portrayed a very different Elijah from any of the Elijahs I had created before. This Elijah was a geek.

Even Mr Alders, my form tutor, was impressed. Despite that he didn’t dislike me I could never do anything to impress him—and I rarely chose to try. Everything I did and everything I said in his presence was met by a quietly ironic smile, as if he was inwardly laughing at me but his mother had brought him up too well to truly laugh at anyone in their presence. Everything he said to me, whether or not he was complimenting my achievements or commiserating my failures or simply engaging in conversation, had a hidden meaning, that a clever person might easily pick up on and wonder whether he was, in fact, being complimented at all—there was nothing sexual about it so much as there was the idea that he knew me, somehow, more than other people did; more, perhaps, than even I knew myself, and for him it tainted everything I did to the same questionable colour.

He could see right through me.

Some people can. I was coming to understand that Mark was one of them as well, but he wasn’t as aware of what he was doing as Mr Alders was. It was as if each of my faces was nothing more than a glass wall to Mr Alders, lined up one before the other, and it was simply a matter of peering through them until he found me, the real me, huddled at the far end. It worried me because I knew that everything I said around him he never really believed because he knew, instinctively, that it was false; and he didn’t know why I had so many faces except that I had them at all, and so it made him think of me as a devious, secretive person, only ever out for himself.

It was something of a strange joke of ours, because I had gradually gotten over my fear of him telling everyone, to the point where I could smile self-deprecatingly and silently acknowledge his advantage—after all, it wasn’t really advantage, not really. Because what would he say?

I often imagined the scene unfolding in the secret recesses of the Staff Room: Mr Alders, seated on the floor, while the other teachers sat with their legs crossed around him, drinking cartons of milk through plastic straws.

What do you mean? they would say in chorus.

He would smile his quietly ironic smile, so different from Chris’ because it was older, carried not by ego but by the gentle condescension that the older man feels for the younger. But even with his veritable smile Mr Alders would have difficulty being taken seriously when he turned to them, like a grandfather telling a story, and said—

Elijah is lying. He may look like a seventeen year old boy to you, but he’s not. You should never trust anything he says because he’s not what he seems.

But, how? they would ask. What is he lying about?

And Mr Alders would shake his venerable old head and say, Everything.

Someone would snort derisively.

It sounded as absurd in my head as I imagined it would out loud.

He did, however, once compare me to Steerpike, the Machiavellian antagonist of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, in book club, in front of a classroom of kids, and I was forced to laugh and pretend it was funny. He knew what he was doing, of course. They all mistook it for a joke.

But he was very impressed by my personal statement.

‘Do you know, Mr Laurence, this personal statement isn’t half bad. Somehow it seems to be describing another student entirely without ever having crossed that precarious boundary into fiction.’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

‘No, Mr Laurence. Thank you. Because when you invariably get into the university of your choice, on the grace of this excellent personal statement, I shall rest easier in the knowledge that you are too far away to trouble me. I’ve always preferred Cambridge to Oxford anyway, and St Andrews is too cold for me.’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

He wasn’t impressed that I had written such a wonderful personal statement, of course; not as he would have been with another student. He was impressed that I had lied quite so convincingly, even for him. He had thought he had the measure of me, and he was shocked to find that he didn’t. It made him stop for a moment and regard me quietly, as if he had gotten so used to looking at me that he had stopped, at some point, and since then I had grown without him noticing. He handed my personal statement back with a nod.

Somehow the secret understanding that we shared had made me, in a twisted way, his favourite student. I wasn’t sure this was something I was pleased by but it was there regardless. He dismissed me with a quiet smile and I made my way back to my desk, jumping as my thigh began to vibrate on the way.

It was Chris. It was always Chris. He was the only one who insisted on calling me at the most inconvenient times. I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how he managed to ensure that every time he rang me, he did so in class, or in front of my mother. It was like he’d swallowed my timetable.

I excused myself and headed for the restrooms.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I snapped into the phone. In the cubicle beside mine, somebody coughed and flushed.

I tried not to consider what they had been doing.

‘Hey,’ said Chris, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘You want to grab a drink sometime?’

‘I can’t.’

I didn’t meet up with Chris in Starbucks as we’d agreed on the evening my grandfather stayed for dinner. Something came up.

Nothing particularly important. There was something about his insistence that put me off. There was something about the shamelessness of his pursuit, and the fact that he never seemed embarrassed by it—the way, in fact, that he seemed to delight in putting himself out there because doing so shocked me and he knew it—something about it put me on edge. I just didn’t know how he said the things he did without blushing.

‘You can’t…’ he said, and I could hear his thin lips curling, ‘or you won’t?’

‘Both, I’d imagine.’

‘Both? Don’t you ever worry I’ll start to think you’re not interested?’

Next to me the cubicle door unlocked with a sharp snap, and then the door to the restrooms creaked open.

He hadn’t even washed his hands.

‘I don’t think that’s possible. I could refuse for years and you’d never give up.’

He smirked. ‘So, Friday in town, after school. I’ll slip my tongue in your ear. Outside Urban Outfitters?’

‘I can’t do Friday. I’m seeing Sophie.’

Chris laughed. ‘Okay,’ was what he said, but what he really meant to say was, I don’t believe you. ‘We’ll see.’

He was about to put down the phone when I stopped him.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, you going to ask me on a date?’

‘No. I just can’t understand how you always manage to ring me during lessons. Do they not have lessons in that crap school of yours?’

‘Of course they do. I just really, really needed the bathroom. As, I’d imagine, did you.’

He cut me off, leaving me grinning in a stinking cubicle.

Actually, Sophie was in Durham that weekend for her grandmother’s birthday; she had a free last period on Friday and so was leaving early. I was glad: last week we had been wandering through the Royal Arcade in town when she had spotted a watch she liked in a shop window. She had dragged me inside before deciding, relatively quickly, that she didn’t like the watch so much after all. Relieved, I had turned to exit the shop, when she called me back.

‘It’s Christmas soon,’ she had said, as if all of her incessant shopping could be attributed to the fact that it was Christmas soon. ‘If I look now, I’ll know what dad should get me.’

As I had waited patiently for her on a leather chair obviously picked for its form rather than function, watching as the assistant took every other watch out of the window, I wondered when it would start to get irritating.

It always starts like that.

As soon as it occurs to me that, really, it should be getting irritating about now, I begin to get irritated. At first it’s a tiny, wriggling fish of a thing, so easy to dismiss; but it grows at an alarming rate, taking on a philosophical air and a panicked edge, until I begin to feel trapped and claustrophobic. Until I begin to wonder how many more times I’ll be forced to zip up her dress at the back in the Reiss changing rooms, and how many times I’ll have to tell her I love her shoes, absolutely love them, because I know the more enthusiastic I am about them the faster she will buy them, and the quicker we can leave the shop and move on to more interesting things.

And so, to compensate for my sudden disenchantment, I had started texting her more often. It served two purposes:

a) It alleviated my guilt.

b) It ensured that, when the inevitable break-up occurred, she’d struggle to find faults in my behaviour.

It had happened enough times before that I knew there was little I could do to fix it; the more I clung onto it the more I would come to resent her. And it would rapidly snowball, growing stronger and stronger, making me itch and panic, until the sight of her face as she smiled at me made me want to punch it.

I wasn’t there yet, I knew, but it wouldn’t take long. I’d rather have spent Friday afternoon with Chris’ tongue sliding into my ear outside of Urban Outfitters than listen to Sophie for another moment; if I withdrew from contact with her the relationship would last longer, but she’d notice and wonder and grow clingy—thus speeding up the process.

So I couldn’t distance myself, and I couldn’t spend Friday with Chris, and I had no choice but to continue with Sophie as if nothing was wrong.

God, how I needed a walk in the countryside.

Or a hedge maze, with green walls so high they blocked Chris and Sophie and everything out.

 ***

On the walk down the drive that afternoon I found myself following a familiar figure. It was the back that first alerted me: if I were to be shown a photograph of it I’d be unable, I knew, to recognise it from any number of backs, because there was nothing deformed about it, nothing wrong at all—so far as backs went it was perfect and lean. But in motion it was strangely taut and unbending, completely, unerringly straight.

Irritatingly so.

But the sky was so beautiful; feather-light, neither white nor blue but a fading, sliding, changeable shade in between, lined with thin threads too pale to be clouds but too corporeal to be not. A wide expanse of light, suffusing everything in its pale, crystal clarity, shot with fiery reds near the horizon—a horizon so delightfully hazy and yet so far away that I felt I could follow it forever, simply keep walking, climbing over the old stone walls that kept Nature apart from Civilisation, away from suburbia and keep going, jumping the wooden fences I’d find there, continuing onwards, past the cows, past the horses, past the deer and the sheep and the gypsies, following the lines of coral pink as the land grew steadily darker and the sky, in contrast, paler, until it too began to fade as the light seeped away.

And then there would only be me and the wind; and I wouldn’t see the grass under my feet, only feel it, nor the branches above me, but I would know they were there by their whispering and groaning; and I’d walk, and I’d lie down, and I’d sleep.

Except for Jamie’s back, which I couldn’t stop staring at.

Jamie, who wasn’t as crazy as me, but whose crazy was angry and petulant and not in the pool; it sat on the side in armbands and screamed, barely even dipping its feet while mine hid in the deep end, forever holding its breath, often so deeply submerged that nobody knew it was there.

I wondered what it would be like to be non-functional. To be so disturbed, so scared, so angry and lost, that your every waking minute is a struggle. Every step you take is a struggle, not because you are too weak to take it but because moving one foot in front of the other requires a togetherness, a mental acuity, that comes so easily to other people but that, for you, is so difficult; because your mental limbs are everywhere and wander wherever they want, take their own directions, disregard utterly what you say whenever the moments come that you can find the voice at all, and if your mental limbs ignore you then what hope have you over your feet? They wander so many different directions that they slowly tear you apart.

I felt like I could be like that, sometimes. Often I thought it wouldn’t be difficult, just as often I thought it wouldn’t be difficult to turn into my mother. It was a matter of perspective; of moving the goalposts while staying exactly in the same place but persuading yourself, as you do it, that the goalposts have not moved—and if you zoom out enough that distance looks the same. Your thumb looks so small from far away but when you bring it to your eye, well, it takes up the whole room.

I wondered if it was like that with Jamie.

Jamie, who on top of all this was outed—Jamie, who was officially gay. I wondered how that might feel; I wondered how he felt about that.

I called his name. His head jerked back; he spotted me; he turned quickly away again.

And he started walking faster.

I almost let him—after all, I didn’t need to talk. I didn’t really want to talk. I loved the walk down the drive for the sole reason that there was no talking, nothing at all, nobody I’d have to be fake with; I could watch the sky all day, wandering out of this world altogether just by following it. I certainly didn’t need to talk to Jamie—the very act of which was as delicate and exhausting as surgery.

But it was rude to ignore people. And it was definitely rude to walk faster to avoid them.

So I began to walk faster too.

And, to let him know I was following, I called his name again.

He sped up. Before long he was practically jogging.

And then I was sprinting, not caring who saw, knowing that I had to be quiet about it because if he broke into a run he’d shrug me off with the ease of swatting a fly; and when I caught up with him I clapped a sudden hand on his shoulder and made him flinch.

‘Hey,’ I said, gasping for breath.

‘Hey.’

‘So, do you live near here?’

‘No.’

‘Then where are you walking to?’

He sighed angrily. ‘Nowhere.’

I grinned. ‘Sure you are. Is your car parked somewhere outside the school grounds?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you can drive.’

‘Yes.’

I was surprised they let him on the roads.

I hadn’t said it out loud but I saw him flinch, and for a moment I felt terrible. ‘I’m not crazy, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m perfectly safe to drive.’

We said nothing for a moment; I nodded, strangely chastened. ‘Is it because you’re in a car?’

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘Is it because you’re in a car… So you climb in, lock all the doors, and then you’re alone? And then you feel safe.’

He didn’t reply, and for a while we walked together in silence. When we reached his car I stopped with him, wondering whether he’d open up his secret little sanctuary wide enough to offer me a lift.

He didn’t. And it was only as I watched him drive away that I realised I now couldn’t get home—I wasn’t even sure why I’d walked down the drive at all. I’d missed the first school bus and the second wasn’t for hours.

I couldn’t call Tom—rugby season had begun and he was now at practice. I’d need to be moments away from being picked up by killers or sex offenders before I ever rang my parents for help, and Sophie had already told me she had an important essay to write and couldn’t be bothered that evening, and despite that Mark was the most gorgeous human being I’d ever seen besides Tom I’d yet to take his number so I couldn’t ask him, and I’d left my wallet at home so I couldn’t even take public transport…

So that left Chris.

He’d be so pleased.

He picked up after barely two rings, already smirking. ‘Wait a second. You’re ringing me?’

‘I’m stuck, and I’d really appreciate a lift.’

‘Oh you would, would you?’

‘Yes. I just said that. Can you pick me up?’

He paused, as if to consider it a moment.

***

I’ve always hated sitting in the passenger’s seat. I’ve always hated the pressure of social norms associated with it—because you are more equal to the driver than someone sitting in the back, and as such you’re forced to act like it; and so you can’t sit in silence and stare out the window like you might in a taxi, and you feel you have to make conversation—in fact, it is your job to make conversation even more than the driver, because the driver is driving.

And you can see the driver, where you can’t in the back. In the back you’re in your own compartment, your own little world, passively being towed by the front—but in the front there isn’t the isolation. You’re in the driver’s world, and you have to acknowledge that he’s there—you can’t help but acknowledge, no matter how reluctantly, that he exists. If you’re persistent you can perhaps get away with closing your eyes and pretending to sleep but even then, only after at least ten minutes of talking. And I always liked to watch the houses pass by, which you can’t with your eyes firmly shut.

Chris wouldn’t let me do that anyway.

‘So how was school?’ he asked mockingly, like a father to a sullen child. His limbs all looked effortlessly graceful as they shifted gears, one hand on the steering wheel and one wrapped loosely around the gear stick, long fingers strumming. There was something predatory about the way he moved.

‘School was good.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Got my application off.’

He grinned. ‘Oxford?’

‘Yup.’

‘You nerd.’

His sister had been in Oxford for no more than a week before she dropped out to try her hand at professional tennis. The family were big on tennis, and the kids had been playing for years and were all rated nationally: and you could tell easily from his long, lean body.

I’d played him before, and he mercilessly thrashed me.

I shrugged. ‘I won’t get in.’

He glanced at me.

‘Why not?’

‘Laziness. I haven’t done enough extracurricular stuff.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not for you, anyway.’

‘What?’

‘Well, I just mean… You’ll hate it there. They work them ridiculously hard. Stephanie hated it, and she was only there for a couple of weeks. Face it, Elijah, you’ll hate every minute.’

‘I can do it.’

‘Yeah, but you can’t just float on like you can at other universities. Nobody’s clever enough to float their way through Oxbridge, and the only reason you want to try is ego.’

‘You’re going to lecture me about ego?’

He leered. ‘I’m not going to lecture you on anything. I like you just the way you are.’

We fell silent.

He was right, of course. But that didn’t give him the right to just nonchalantly pass judgement on me like that. Nobody had the right to pass judgement on me.

Not even Tom.

Soon it became apparent that we were going the wrong way for him to be taking me home. I had known for a while, in fact, as we skirted suburbia and then left it again just as quickly for Deer-park, just on the outskirts of the city centre where the university kids lived—I had known, but I had found myself reluctant to talk to him.

‘I asked to be taken home.’

He laughed.

‘Actually you didn’t say anything about the destination. And so, due to a deficiency in instructions, I decided we’re going to Starbucks.’

‘Starbucks.’

He smirked. ‘Starbucks.’

‘Don’t you think, if I was interested in you, I’d have agreed to go to Starbucks before now?’

There could be no rattling him—he honestly didn’t care what I said. Something in his life, something I had missed, had touched him and left him utterly sure of himself, or else utterly brilliant at hiding his own insecurities to the extent that I couldn’t see even the slightest hint of hesitation in his gaze when he turned to sneer at me. There was nothing there but mischievousness and shameless interest.

Or perhaps it wasn’t that—perhaps I was simply projecting. Perhaps it was the opposite, and Chris had never been touched by anything at all, nothing had happened to sully his emotional development, and so he had turned out perfect, precisely as Nature had intended for him to be; perfect from his milky skin to his lilac-blue eyes to his sly, knowing smile, and to the fact that he was so supremely confident that nothing could shake him at all.

Or perhaps he was a liar, like me.

I blushed.

‘We could get out of the car now and get coffee,’ he said slowly, ‘or we could get out of the car in fifteen minutes and fuck in my bedroom. The choice is yours. But either way, you’re not going home until we’ve done one of them.’

And I thought about what a prick he was—what an arrogant, cocky little prick. And I thought about how glad I was that he was a prick, how glad and relieved, because a prick was a thousand times more interesting to me, at that moment, than an obsessive-compulsive shopper.

I opened the door. ‘I’m not even sure what you’re doing is legal. It’s certainly morally wrong.’

He grinned.

‘Well, hopefully, whatever happens, when we’re done you’ll be too tired to report me.’

 ***

So there we were, seated in Starbucks, and if I didn’t dislike him so strongly I might have considered it a date. There was definitely something there, in a twisted sort of way. He kept looking at me, and then looking at me, his eyebrows raised and his lips curled into a thin, ironic smile. He lifted the coffee cup to his mouth without taking his eyes off me; when he took a sip and when he licked the froth off his top lip, slowly, his tongue working its way from left to right, he did so watching me too.

And I was shocked, because I hadn’t expected the cliché to be so sexy.

He had bought a plateful of chocolate éclairs, all pert and golden and enticingly stuffed. He had eaten two, and I had eaten one, ignoring the voice in my head that begged me, for the sake of my 29” waist, to slip into the restroom and throw it back up. There was one left and it goaded me softly, but thankfully Chris was distraction enough.

His long finger stroked circles on the table. I watched it, mesmerised by the fluttering grazes, the elegant paleness of it, the teasing repetitive motion. Individually, taken exactly on its own, it was the smallest, most innocent gesture, slightly eccentric, a funny thing to do; but combined with his long legs that spread under the table, gently rubbing mine, and his sly, curling smile, thin lips effortlessly contorted, and his lilac-blue eyes that never left me, roaming over my body deliberately, almost indecently—combined with these things it was transformed completely and the transformation made me blush.

He knew what it meant, and he knew what it was doing to me. That was the point. I couldn’t help but stare at that finger, knowing that it shouldn’t be circling the table at all—that it wasn’t really circling the table at all.

What it was really circling was the velvety skin around my nipple.

Fuck.

His eyes fucked mine from across the table. He lowered himself further down into the chair, capturing my knees in his grasp, no longer gentle or hesitant now but brash, lewd and gleeful. He chuckled softly.

I was so hard it was hurting.

I picked up the last chocolate éclair and brought it to my mouth. I left it there, hovering, lips parted, watching as Chris’ smile widened. I bit down on it, feeling the cream ooze out of the sides, over my lips, over my chin, falling heavily onto the table. I lapped slowly with small, darting gestures, my tongue making its way around the shaft of the éclair, my eyes never leaving his. I lifted my foot to brush the top of his thigh.

He jumped.

I stood up and made my way to the restrooms, almost unsteadily, placing my hand on chair backs and tables as I went. Thankfully I’d had the foresight to adjust myself beforehand. I could feel his eyes undressing me as I walked, and my heart beat hard for the thrill of it.

I hated him, obviously. But I’d never wanted him quite so badly either.

I hadn’t even closed the cubicle door before a hand roughly tore it from mine and he grabbed my face, thrusting me back against the partition wall. Those walls are flimsy. Another blow like that and we’d be horizontal and making out in front of some guy sitting on the toilet.

‘I want you,’ he whispered. He crushed his lips against mine, his breath hot on my skin and his hands gripping my hair. I opened my mouth to give him access and his tongue pillaged me. The heat from his mouth and the heat from his groin made me shiver and sweat. His fingers fluttered and groped over my hips, under the thin fabric of my shirt, marking a burning trail over my torso to stop at my nipples. He rubbed and pinched, and I gasped.

And an angry rap from the other side of the partition wall I leaned on made us jump apart.

I laughed.

We should have checked for feet first.

Chris drove us both back to his house. His parents weren’t home. We were quiet in the car, horny and quivering with anticipation. He parked up, his expression serious and, in solemn procession, he opened the door and led the way into the house.

I wondered what I was getting myself into.

***


After, as we lay on the bed, brutal slats of light from the shuttered window dissecting his face in long lines, I realised that I may as well have been alone in the room. I may as well have been in my own room—I may as well have done it with a stranger. He had turned away from me, towards the wall, his bare shoulder rising and falling gently, completely at odds with the angry patchwork I’d left on his neck and the shadows like knives from the window; and I was glad his head was turned. I was glad he couldn’t see me. I was glad, because the last thing I wanted was an intimate moment.

The room was cold, and, when he turned back a moment later, I was forced to pretend that it wasn’t. He reached out and touched my arm, and I realised I ought to put my clothes back on.

‘When are your parents getting back?’

He checked his watch. ‘Not for a while.’

I stood up and began searching for my socks as his eyes followed me, a frown on his face. I could feel him thinking—it seemed almost as if I could hear it, and it was loud in the silence of the room—and the thought of him doing so made me hate him.

‘Did you hate it?’

He said it so calmly that for a moment it was as if nothing had been said; I thought, mildly, he can’t possibly have said what I thought he said—surely he did not. Surely, he asked whether I took milk in my tea, or which bus would be best to get home. For a moment I stopped what I was doing, not yet acknowledging his question and not yet quite decided whether I would, in fact, ever acknowledge it at all—but I had already acknowledged it, I realised. I had stopped what I was doing.

I turned, and he seemed impassive. He wore that familiar, arrogant smirk, but it seemed flimsier. He looked at me too intensely, as if he was overcompensating.

Or perhaps as if he was daring me to lie to him whilst holding his gaze.

I tried to smile. ‘Of course I didn’t hate it.’

I should do more, I knew. He wasn’t convinced, and I’d upset him, and as much as I loved to hate him I didn’t want to see him upset. I knew that I could fix it, if I wanted to, but I was suddenly so tired. I didn’t even want to think of the effort required.

It would be an exercise in manipulation, as it always was; it would be a challenge, for me to rise to, that would require a certain pattern of movement and a certain number of words, arranged in a certain way; and I would have to judge, with each step, his reaction, to tell the success of the previous step, and whether I should amend the step to come. He deserved it—he deserved the reassurance, of course he did, and I hadn’t hated it, that much was true—but I felt so drained. In that moment I knew that there would be no familiar rush of gratification waiting for me at the success of it and so no real incentive; I wondered, for not very long, whether simply making him feel better was enough.

I couldn’t be bothered to make him feel better. All I wanted to do was find somewhere dark and think.

God, I hated how messy everything felt. There was both deathly calm in my head and a chaos of half-muffled screams; I hated how my mind was reflected in the room, with the bedding askew, the clothes on the floor, and the lamp we had knocked over on the way in. It was like there was no escaping it.

I picked up a sock and pulled it on, wiping his cum off my chest with it first. I didn’t care, at that moment, that my feet would be sticky. I reached for the other.

It took only the smallest sound from him, as he turned over once more to face the wall, for me to realise I couldn’t leave him like this.

I gave myself a second to do nothing. I counted to five.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and I dropped the sock in my hand. I climbed back onto the bed. ‘I’m awkward at this bit. I never know what to do.’

He turned around, expressionless. His auburn hair was ruffled; I remembered how soft it had felt and I knew, even though the thought of touching him revolted me, that running my fingers through it, hesitantly, like so, would help my cause.

I ran my fingers through his hair, feeling him lean in.

‘So you didn’t hate it?’

I pressed myself into him, laying my limbs in line with his own, carefully ensuring that as much of myself touched as much of him that I could. ‘How could I hate it?’ I whispered against his skin, even though at that moment I hated the taste of it. ‘You know it was great.’

He watched me for a moment, his lilac-blue eyes roaming over my face. ‘You don’t need to run away,’ he said. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘Of course we didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘I’m pretty awkward at this bit too, you know.’

‘I know.’

We had reached the part where I threw him a rope; where I picked something of myself and offered it up, solemnly, for him to keep hold of and care for. I’d pick something easy, something that said nothing about me but sounded sincere, because if I told him anything truly personal he wouldn’t hear from me again. ‘I hate this bit,’ I whispered. ‘I hate that I never know what to say.’

He reached out and touched my face.

‘I don’t think you’re the only one with that problem.’

I always know what to say.

We fell silent, and I watched the tiny expressions shift on his face that reflected the path of his thoughts, like sunlight dancing in the shallows; I tried to predict the direction they might take.

There was always the chance, with letting them think, that they might reach the wrong conclusion—or perhaps that they’ll reach the right conclusion, but the one that is least desirable. It’s not their fault, if course: if you allow them to wander the woods on their own, how can you possibly control where their feet might take them?

And so I came closer, my breath on his neck, and I asked him to kiss me. I watched as he visibly unwound, becoming loose and pliable and warm. A small smile spread over his face, so different from his usual sly smirk.

When he smiled like that he almost looked like Tom.

We kissed for a moment, making scalding tears build behind my eyes.

‘So, you didn’t hate it?’

‘No.’

‘Because I thought that maybe—’

I pressed a kiss onto his cheek and bit back a sob. ‘I didn’t hate it.’

It was true that I didn’t hate it. But I hated the feeling that it left behind, and I hated that I could manipulate him so well—I hated that it made me think he was pathetic for falling for it, pathetic and stupid and repulsive, but really I hated that I could do it at all.

Because most people can’t do it. Not at my age, anyway. I had been doing it since I first discovered I would never be able to shout loud enough to be heard.

That malaise, the pale hands that reached out of the earth and grasped for my heart, grasped for my arms, pulled me to stationary—it followed me all the way home. As he drove me home I had to act as though I was happy, as though I was glad we had talked, as though, at some point, I’d be happy to do it again.

I hate sex. I hate having sex. I hate the gratuity of it, the lull and the false sense of security—the way, each time, I am fooled into thinking it will be different, better, because how could anything that feels this good possibly be bad, be bad for me, cause me so much emptiness afterwards?

Each time it ends and I am suddenly sober. Each time it ends and I am struck, suddenly, by the terror of understanding that the bedroom where I lie is the flimsiest thing in the world, a velvet curtain stirred by a wind, behind which something so much bigger and darker lies, a precipice, looming just out of sight—our bed is made of glass and merest act of opening my eyes once the deed is done is enough to see everything shatter underneath me and suddenly I’m falling, falling endlessly, falling into a far lonelier reality than the one I left.

Because falling is like dying, I’d imagine. You can fall with as many people as you like but, ultimately, you’re falling alone.

When he rang the next day I ignored him.