The Cockney Canuck - 17. Chapter 17 Love Letters

The school bus that Monday morning was noticeably louder than usual. All the kids were talking excitedly to each other and there was only one topic of conversation. I had already listened to Daniel rattling on about it since we got up and as pleased as I was that he finally had something to cheer about, it wasn’t something that I personally felt the need to discuss with anyone. As far as I was concerned, it was just another Monday morning as I reached for my earphones in an attempt to block out some of the noise. I had deliberately sat in a different row from Daniel so that I could avoid any further hockey talk and stared out of the frosty window as the bus took the now familiar route to school. My solitude lasted for less than a quarter of the journey, before I were forced to shift along and make room for a bubbly looking ginger haired girl who I recognised from one of my classes.

“Hi Robbie,” she said and I nodded a brief greeting towards her. Naturally, I didn’t know her name and I hated it when that happened. I was hoping that she didn’t want to start a conversation, but I could hear her talking, so I turned reluctantly towards her and removed one of my earphones. “Sorry?”

“I asked you if you had a good weekend,” she said.

“Okay and you?” I was pleased that she didn’t want to talk about hockey, but I didn’t want to hear about her weekend either and I had my earphone back in place before she could even begin to reply. My obvious show of disinterest however, wasn’t enough to deter her from talking to me and despite initially trying to lip read; I finally gave in and took out both earphones.

“Do you like that stuff?” she asked. She was referring to the drum and bass, which despite the noise from all the other kids, could still be heard coming from the discarded earplugs that hung around my neck.

“Yes,” I said, scowling at her.

What did she expect me to say? Why would I be listening to something that I didn’t like’?

“Did you watch the game yesterday?”

‘Oh no, I knew it’.

I knew exactly what she meant, but I didn’t want to talk about it. “What game?” I said.

“The hockey game duh,” she said, as if I was the only person in the whole world that didn’t know about it. I really didn’t care for her talking to me like that, so I decided to piss her off a bit.

“What hockey game?” I said inserting my earphones knowing the reaction I was about to get.

“Oh my god!” she screamed “Didn’t you know. Canada won the gold medal at the Olympics”

“I’m not surprised,” I said removing one earphone again. “They’re really quick with those brooms. No one can touch them. Hurling or something isn’t it?”

“I’m not talking about the Curling Robbie, I’m talking about the hockey game, didn’t you see it?”

“No, who was playing, the Maple Leafs?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Do you know?” I said.

“Of course I fucking know you dork,” she said. This was coming from a girl who was usually one of the more reserved students in class.

“SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ASKING ME THEN?” I shouted at her, then put my earphones back in and turned up the volume for another shot of dance music before we got to school. I had obviously hit upon a raw nerve and a few of the kids nearby turned to see what the commotion was all about. Now I was in a bad mood and glared at a few of them until they looked away.

If I had learnt anything so far in Canada, it was not to say anything bad about hockey, because in Canada, hockey played the part of God. It was just about the only thing that anybody really took seriously and that game was about as serious as any sport could ever get.

Of course, I knew what she was talking about, I had watched the game the previous day on TV with Daniel, Nicola and Don as Canada beat their archrivals and neighbours the USA in sudden death overtime to win the gold medal. It wouldn’t have been possible to live in Canada without knowing this. You would have had to live deep underground without a cell phone signal, no access to any media, TV or radio and not seen or talked to anyone for days not to have known about this game. As a non-hockey fan, it was all a bit over the top for me.

We didn’t celebrate like this when England won at football, but then again, England never won at football or at least not during my lifetime, so I couldn’t be sure how they would react.

To make it interesting, I had decided to throw my support for what it was worth, behind the good old USA so there was plenty of banter in the basement of the Taylor household as I cheered on the Americans, if only to wind everyone else up. English sports fans have a long tradition of supporting the underdog when watching games as a neutral, and as unlikely as it sounds, the USA were the underdogs in that game. Canada was expected to win the gold medal in hockey, at their home Olympics.

I sat contented for the rest of the journey just listening to my music without having to hear anything about Sidney Crosby or the golden bloody goal. Then finally, as we approached the school and I switched off the sounds she turned towards me.

“You don’t like me do you?” she said.

“What?” I asked removing my earphones again and she repeated the question. “I don’t even know you,” I said. “How can I not like you?” As far as I could remember, this was the first time that I had ever had any kind of conversation with her.

“I’m in two of your classes,” she said.

“AND?” I shouted but she didn’t reply.

I knew that I could be quite obnoxious at times, especially early in the morning when I preferred to be left alone, but I regretted being so offhand with her. I could see that I had upset her and I turned to get a better look at her face. “I’m sorry,” I said, “what’s your name again?” I gave her my best smile.

“Marissa,” she said, as she stood up in a huff, turning her back on me.

“Marissa that’s it,” I said pretending that I had only forgotten her name instead of never knowing it. “Look Marissa, I didn’t mean to be rude, can we be friends?” I looked up to see Nicola standing in the aisle next to us as everyone funnelled out of the bus. She gave me a disapproving look and I mouthed “What?”

‘Maybe she thinks I’m trying to chat this girl up or something’.

I tried to talk to her as we got off the bus and told her that I would see her in class, but I couldn’t remember which ones she was in and that didn’t go down too well either. It didn’t matter because when I opened my locker, I had something else to think about as I discovered another two notes posted through the door. This was starting to get exciting. Finding a love note from a mystery girl stuffed in your locker when you get to school was enough to cheer up any teenage boy. Finding two meant that I was definitely doing something right.

‘Nicola is going to bloody hate this! I can’t wait to show her how popular I am’.

Most of these notes were silly teenage heartthrob stuff and very tame, but a couple had been quite explicit and even edged on the side of porn. There had been seven notes so far and I kept them all in my locker, as a possible back up plan should things go tits up with Fran.

‘This is what straight boys do. I’m just keeping my options open and making the most of my popularity. If I’m going to be straight then I’m going to do it properly’.

I laughed to myself at the stupidity of it all. I had only been on a couple of dates and suddenly I was behaving like Casanova! They had gone better than expected though and now I couldn’t wait to have sex with a girl and tell my friends about it instead of having to cover everything up. Being a straight kid, I decided, was going to be a lot more fun than being gay. I was already reaping the benefits, as I grabbed the two notes that had been left for me that morning. I would have a quick butchers on my way to homeroom, to see if there was anything juicy in them. The first one was pretty tame stuff with nice handwriting, nothing raunchy, but on scented paper, which was a nice touch. The second was a bit long winded by the look of it. I only managed to read the first few lines before reaching the classroom.

“To Robbie.

I’ve been watching you since your first day at school and I’ve noticed you looking at me too. I am a boy in your homeroom class but I cannot...”

‘Fucking hell’!

I stopped dead in my tracks causing the guy behind to walk into the back of me.

“Careful there buddy,” he said, it was Alex one of the jocks. I muttered an apology of some kind, but my mind was somewhere else.

‘This is from a bloke’!

I couldn’t believe it.

‘A boy has written me a love letter! And he’s in my homeroom. Shit! He’s probably watching me read this right now’.

I quickly folded it up and shoved it deep into my back pocket, as I walked into the classroom while at the same time trying desperately to scan every boy’s face that I could see for a clue.

In the sudden rush of excitement, I nearly forgot to say good morning to Fran, my girlfriend, who was sitting patiently at her usual desk waiting for me to make eye contact with her. I was too busy watching the boys, but I finally saw her and smiled, before taking my usual seat to her right. I mouthed the words ‘good morning’ to her and she blew me a kiss, which was spotted by a couple of the other kids, who found it funny and giggled. Fran was now officially my girlfriend and everyone knew that. It had been over a week since our first date and we had followed that up with a trip to the cinema at the weekend, where I was given another opportunity to practice the art of French kissing.

Gossip played a big part in student life and most gossip centred on relationships between other students. Who was going out with whom, as well as who had dumped whom, who was cheating on whom and who was leaving whom for whom? Teenagers were the same, I guess, the world over and for the first time in my school life, I had joined in the game that everybody seemed to want to play, or talk about, or both. Most people knew Fran and everybody seemed to know me, so there were a few tongues wagging when news got out that we were dating. Considering that many of the boys had Fran down as a lesbian, the gossip was likely to be quite interesting.

‘Boys don’t go around writing love letters to other boys who they don’t even know, do they or do they? How does this boy even know that I’m gay anyway? Or rather how did he know that I used to be gay’!

I had suddenly forgotten all about the other notes that I had been sent from various girls. They weren’t important anymore; the only thing that I could think of was the note that was burning a hole in my pocket, begging me to read it. As we stood for the national anthem, I resumed my search, scanning the classroom for the kid who wrote it.

I had only managed to read enough of the note to realise that the author was a boy and was in my homeroom. He is obviously gay, but not out or I would have known about him. I knew that there were thirteen boys and eleven girls in my homeroom, so the boy who wrote that note, was one of a dozen guys here.

‘This has to be a joke; someone is trying to wind me up. Maybe Nicola is responsible, she’s probably got one of her friends to do it. I need to read it properly before jumping to conclusions. What if it isn’t a joke though? What if it’s genuine and there’s a boy in this classroom who wants to get to know me in that way and do things like I did with Tom’?

Just when I was getting used to the idea of being straight and having a girlfriend who could blow kisses to me across the classroom without people thinking that we were a couple of freaks.

‘I don’t deserve this, just when things are finally working for me, this boy shows up and decides to send me a bloody love letter. This wasn’t fair, where the fuck did he come from’?

It was as if he had been sent to test my resolve or something, to see if I would crack and fall back into old habits. I was doing so well in the straight world, now I was really going to be put under pressure. What if this kid turns out to be a real cutie like Rory, who sat a couple of desks in front of me, or David, who sat behind Fran? I turned my head around to look at him, he was cute all right. He smiled at me and I smiled back before turning away embarrassed.

‘Shit it’s him. It’s David and he’s so fucking sexy, I’m never going to be able to turn him down. He just smiled at me, was he trying to tell me something’?

If there was a boy in this class who I really wanted it to be, it was David. That would have been just too sexy for words. I needed to stop thinking about this or it was going to drive me nuts. So much, for my resolve, it had only been five minutes and I already had a list of boys who I wanted it to be.

‘I might as well end my relationship with Fran right now and tell her that I’m gay, if this was going to be my reaction to one stupid note, which may well be a fake’.

At the end of our first period lesson, Fran casually walked over to me and put her hand around my back, almost as if she were laying claim to her property. It sent out a clear message to anyone watching who didn’t already know that we were dating, nothing else needed to be said. Until further notice, I was now her property and no longer fair game. I wondered if the mystery boy had seen her do this and what he would think if he did.

‘Will this deter him from trying anything if he knows that I have a girlfriend? Maybe he will have to admit that he was wrong about me. Who knows’?

“So how’s my little angel today?” said Fran.

I looked around; surely, she didn’t mean me. I had been called many things but nobody had ever called me an angel before.

“I mean you, you dork,” she said.

‘That’s more like it’.

She was the second person to call me that today, but I still had no idea what it meant.

The next class for me was science and one of the few that I didn’t share with Fran so after telling her that I’d see her at lunch, I was off on my own heading upstairs. The plan was to stop somewhere quickly to finish reading the note. We were allowed five minutes to get to the next class before the bell rang and I was well ahead of time, but my plan was ruined by a voice from behind me.

“Hey Robbie man wait up, we got plenty of time.” I looked around to see Rory catching me up with a big smile on his face. He was in my science class and in my previous two lessons, I had sat next to him and he had helped me by letting me read his notes from some of the lessons before I arrived. He was also one of the first boys that sprang to mind after seeing the note that morning and was near the top of my list of possible suspects. I wasn’t going to be able to finish reading the note with him walking next to me, but if I sat next to him again, it might be possible to compare his handwriting to the writing in the note. This was beginning to get really bizarre.

Rory and Fran were the first two kids that I became friends with when I started at Stephenson. He was in a lot of my classes and had made an effort to get to know me because of the English connection. It didn’t really matter to me where his family came from; it was his looks that attracted me.

There was something about Rory that told me from the first time that I met him that he was gay. I never figured out what it was because it wasn’t obvious, and I doubted if anyone could tell just by looking at him, but he seemed to give off this gay scent or something that always had me drooling over him.

He wasn’t very tall, but he had the most gorgeous, short, dirty-blond hair. Rory was certainly a good-looking kid and always seemed to have plenty of energy. He walked around with a spring in his step and was almost annoyingly cheerful and good-natured which somehow didn’t seem right. I was always under the impression that teenagers were supposed to be moody and bad tempered, as I was. He had very dark grey almost black eyes and a little gap between his front two teeth, which was always visible when he was laughing. I thought that he was cute, but I had no idea what I would do if I found out that he was the boy behind the note.

As he caught up with me, I turned and smiled at him looking directly into his eyes and holding my stare for as long as I dared, before looking away. I didn’t see anything there that would give him away, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for either.

“So are you and Fran dating?” he asked. “Sorry I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

I didn’t mind him asking, but I wondered why he was so interested. “It’s alright,” I said. “It’s not a secret. I think that we are anyway. Why?” I looked back into his eyes but he quickly looked away this time.

“No reason,” he said, “I’m just being nosey I guess.”

“Well we’ve only been on a couple of dates and I don’t really know her that well so there’s not much to report I’m afraid.”

He laughed as we reached the classroom. “It’s okay you don’t need to report anything. I’m not like the rest.” I looked over at him again after hearing that and I wondered what he had meant by not being like the rest.

“So did you watch the game yesterday?” he said changing the subject to something that I really didn’t care to talk about.

“You’re talking to the wrong person about it Rory. I don’t really understand ice hockey,” I said.

“I was talking about Arsenal against Chelsea,” he said, and Rory instantly went up a couple of notches in my estimations.

Rory was proving to be a difficult kid to work out. He didn’t talk a lot about girls and I didn’t think that he had a girlfriend. There was definitely some kind of vibe that I was able to pick up from him but it wasn’t enough for me to be certain about him either. Despite this, I was sure that I caught him watching me a couple of times during the lesson. If he was responsible for the note, then he was playing this very cool.

As soon as the bell rang for lunch, I said goodbye to cute little Rory and rushed downstairs to my locker, determined to finish reading the note that who knows, maybe he had written to me. I changed my books for the ones that I needed in the afternoon and took a quick look around to make sure that the coast was clear, before retrieving the note from my pocket and carefully unfolding it in the locker.

“To Robbie.

I’ve been watching you since your first day at school and I’ve noticed you looking at me too. I am a boy in your homeroom class but I cannot reveal to you who I am yet until I know that I’m right about you.

I am a boy and I’m bisexual although no one knows about me. I am certain that you are gay or bisexual too but like me too scared to let anyone know. You see me most days in class and we sometimes talk but we are not really friends. If I am right and you are gay or bi-sexual then maybe we can meet up outside of school to talk and get to know each other better. If you like me in the same way as I like you then maybe we could have some fun together if you wanted. This is not a hoax or a silly joke or anything. I am taking a big risk by doing this but I’m sure that I’m right about you. If you don’t tell anyone about this note then I’ll know that you are interested and I will let you know soon who I am.

From Boy X.”

My hands were shaking as I folded it up and put it back in my pocket. I was sure that this wasn’t a joke, it was for real. One of the boys in my class wanted to have sex with me or have fun together as he had put it. I knew that it meant the same thing and suddenly at that moment, it was as if somebody had raised the stakes in a poker game. I was excited, but frightened as well and I wasn’t even sure any more if that was what I really wanted.

‘I am supposed to be straight I have a girlfriend, I shouldn’t be even thinking of boys in this way. Boys aren’t cute, girls are cute, Fran’s cute, boys are buddies, pals or friends but not cute’.

I knew that I should be angry that some queer guy was trying to get into my pants or find it amusing, chuck it in the bin and forget about it altogether. The fact that I was able to do neither, should have told me something. Far from being annoyed about it or forgetting about it, I was fascinated by it and even excited by it. The thought of a guy, who I obviously thought was cute too, was drooling over me and wanted to do stuff with me, was driving me crazy.

‘Shit this is the last thing that I needed just when I’m feeling good about being straight. Some queer fucker comes along and tries to tempt me into becoming gay again. How can he even think that I’m gay anyway? I don’t act queer do I. How can he even know this? Anyway he has it wrong, even if he did catch me looking at him it doesn't mean anything, it certainly doesn't mean that I’m gay. Does it’?

* * * * *

“You’re lucky,” said Fran. “My parents think that you’re really nice, and they’re not easy people to win over.”

“But I am really nice” I smiled cheekily, “it’s not luck.” It was the end of lunch and we were walking from the cafeteria to our first class of the afternoon with Fran’s friend Laura.

“So did you enjoy yourself on Friday?” she asked with a shy smirk. I knew that she was referring to the kissing part and not the movie, which was quite bland.

“Yes, of course,” I replied, meeting her eyes. “Did you?”

I looked past her to see her friend Laura rolling her eyes at our poorly disguised innuendos.

“When do you want to do it again?” she asked.

“Oh…all the time,” I said and I boldly grabbed and held her hand as we walked along the busy corridor.

As soon as I did this, just about the very first person that I saw was Nathan, walking towards us in the opposite direction. He smiled at me and I saw him looking down to where Fran and I were holding hands, before looking back at my eyes. For some reason this made me nervous and I tensed up to the point where even Fran noticed and gave me a concerned look. Nathan and I said a brief hello to each other as we passed and I couldn’t help turning my head back to look at him as he walked away.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important.”

I had never talked to Nathan about my sexuality, but I had probably been guilty of leading him on somewhat and I felt bad about it. I hoped that I hadn’t got his hopes up over nothing but I suspected that I probably had. I wanted to run after him and apologise, but that would have been daft and I would have made a laughing stock of myself for sure. Maybe I was worried about nothing; after all, I hadn’t actually hurt him, stood him up or insulted him. I had only flirted with him a couple of times. It was silly, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day.

“If you want to, you can come over on Saturday and I’ll show you my art studio?” said Fran.

“Wow okay. Do I get a free lesson?” I asked.

“Maybe” she said, “it depends on whether my parents are there or not.”

I didn’t know quite how to take this. She was joking I’m sure, and it wasn’t what I had in mind, but I had already decided that I would go for it, if or when the opportunity arose. Now that I was convinced that I was straight, I wanted to experience sex with a girl just like every other straight guy and I didn’t want to wait. I had been surprised by how much I had enjoyed our kissing and if this was anything to go by, then sex with Fran was going to be good. I wondered how many dates I would have to go on, before it was acceptable for us to have sex, or would we need to get married or something first.

We were quickly becoming an item at school and we now spent every lunch period together and sat as close as we could in every class that we shared. It didn’t matter to me I enjoyed her company and it wasn’t as if we were able to do anything at school. Any physical contact other than holding hands between male and female students was strictly forbidden within the school grounds. It was clearly written somewhere in the school rulebook. The older grade twelve students who were mostly seventeen or eighteen flaunted this rule quite a bit, but in grade ten, it was not tolerated. I always found it amusing though, how the rules only referred to physical contact between male and females, which meant that it must be okay for two boys to go at it.

* * * * *

The end of the Winter Olympics seemed to also mark the end of the winter weather and in Canada that meant the big thaw. On Tuesday, the temperature had reached a whopping +1º centigrade, which was significant because it meant that the layer of snow that had covered everything since the day that I had arrived was now very quickly melting. For the first time ever I was able to see grass in the back garden as white slowly turned to green.

I had made it through half of a Canadian winter but I would be lying if I said it was difficult. It was an absolute doddle. The only times that I was ever cold was when I was outside mucking around with Daniel in the snow or the few times that I had had to wait for a bus outside school. The rest of the time, I was much warmer than I had been in England, where the houses and buildings were badly insulated and draughty.

Canada is geared up for long cold winters with lots of snow. It happens every year and they know what to expect and how to deal with it. I arrived there in the middle of winter, when snow covered everything for as far as you could see. There was a period where it snowed almost every day and the temperature would drop to ridiculous levels like -20º. There would be warnings; the snowploughs would go out to clear the roads and everything just carried on as usual. People still went to work, we would still go to school, the trains still ran on time and the planes still landed at the airport no matter what. I remembered there were days in England when the whole country would grind to a halt, after just one snowfall.

Winters in England were usually cold, wet and windy. It hardly ever snowed but at times it rained every day and even when it wasn’t raining, it was still usually overcast which made everything and everybody look grey. I never liked the cold and so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to experiencing a Canadian winter, which I expected to be even worse than in England. Whenever I talked to Tom, he would always ask me how I was coping with the cold and I suppose that was a reasonable question to ask if I were living in an igloo or something. The truth was though like most Canadians, I spent most of the winter inside and everywhere that was inside was warm. Whether I was at home or in school, shopping or anywhere else, I was always warm and comfortable.

* * * * *

Each time I went to my locker, which was usually, three times a day I would open it carefully hoping to find another note tucked in there somewhere, but so far, there had been no further contact from the mysterious Boy X. I had read the note over and over again hoping to discover something in it that I had missed, or maybe a clue that would give him away somehow. Not that I was in any particular hurry to expose him. I wanted to know who it was to satisfy my own curiosity of course, but if it ever did become obvious who it was, then I had no idea what I would do.

I had to admit to myself that the thought of a boy in my class liking me in that way was a real turn on for me and it had excited me a lot more than any note from a girl had. After all, I had six other notes stuffed in my locker that were from girls and although I had found each one exciting at the time, I hadn't spent more than a couple of minutes trying to work out who had sent them. It didn’t really matter anyway because it was unlikely that I would have ever taken up any of these offers. Despite what I wanted to believe, I was never going to be a stud or a ladies man. I had a girlfriend now and Fran was more than enough female for me to handle. It was a nice feeling knowing that I was popular with some of the girls in school, it boosted my ego no end and at the same time annoyed the hell out of Nicola, which was always a good thing. I was learning how to flirt with some of the girls and it was fun.

On Wednesday, Fran and I went to lunch on our own again away from the school and we managed to talk a bit about what we expected from each other. She told me that she didn’t want our relationship to be too serious not in the beginning anyway. She wanted to have fun but not to jump into things too quickly and my interpretation of this was that she wanted to wait a while before having sex. I admired her for this and it didn’t bother me at all, if anything I was actually relieved to hear her say this.

“So are you still going to come over and pose for me on Saturday?” she asked.

“Of course” I said “but I’m not sure why you would want to paint me.” I was actually looking forward to seeing her studio and spending the day with her and her family. Her parents had invited me to dinner, which Fran had told me would be served late in the afternoon and would be very Italian. I would also be able to meet Fran’s younger brother Roberto and her younger sister Claudia as well as her older brother Philippe, who I had already met briefly of course on the night of our first date. Philippe was hot and I was looking forward to getting another opportunity to talk to him again and grab a few sneaky looks at him.

Fran was never the jealous type; she didn’t seem to mind how much I talked to other girls or even flirted as long as I never cheated on her. I had given her my word that I wouldn’t do that and I was sure that I wouldn’t need to either. I was certain that I would be able to resist an approach from even the hottest of girls but I wasn’t sure if the same thing would apply to Boy X should he emerge from the shadows.

As exciting as it was to have a potentially hot boy chasing after my body in school the truth was it had made me realise that despite my feeble attempts to push it to the back of my mind, the gay half of me wasn’t going to go away. It was always going to be there just below the surface ready to surprise me and waiting for the opportunity to take me over completely. I felt disappointed that I hadn't been able to rid myself of these feelings which had the potential to cause me so much damage, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself from being excited by the prospect of having a secret admirer, who was the same sex. It felt as if I was at war with myself, my good side battling with my bad side, but I wasn’t even sure which was which at the moment, such was my conflicting emotions. I wasn’t able to talk to Fran about any of this of course, as liberal minded as she was, she might have had a bit of trouble getting her head around this one.

Despite the potential damage, it could cause me; I desperately wanted this kid to be real and not turn out to be some silly prank. I needed him to exist now in order to justify all the time and effort that I was putting into this mystery boy. The thought that a boy who I obviously knew was attracted to me and prepared to risk everything in the hope that I would feel the same way was actually the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. Whoever it was had made it clear in the note that he wanted to have some kind of sexual relationship with me. I had already decided that I wasn’t gay, there would be no going back and yet already I was facing a clear challenge to that decision. One simple handwritten note is all it had taken to throw my life back into turmoil, but it was exciting and at the time, it wasn’t a problem. I began to spend a bit more time getting ready in the mornings, a bit more time looking in the mirror and paying more attention to what I was wearing. Rather than just throw on the first t-shirt that I found in the drawer I would pick something out that I thought looked good or something that maybe showed off my chest a bit more or my butt. Both Daniel and Nicola had noticed the extra effort that I was making and both assumed that I was doing it for my new girlfriend. Even Fran thought it was sweet of me to want to look my best around her. I was happy to accept the praise and while I did want to please Fran, there was someone else who I wanted to please as well and the crazy thing was I didn’t even know who that person was or if he even existed at all.

I had made up a list of possible suspects. I had picked up definite gay vibes from all of them at one point and had exchanged certain looks and even flirted with each of them at various times. Admittedly, it was something that happened a lot between adolescent boys at school. I knew that like me, many teenage boys were confused about their sexuality and most of them would at one point experience at least some gay tendencies. Top of my list was Rory, simply because of the looks that he had given me in the showers and the fact that he always seemed to be following me around. I was sure that he was gay, but maybe he was too obvious.

The one boy who I really wanted it to be was Nathan, but he wasn’t in my homeroom or even in the same year as me, which ruled him out as a possible candidate. After passing him in the corridor on Monday, I hadn't seen him at all until Thursday afternoon when I caught up with him at the bus stop again. I was late getting out of my extra math class and he was already there when I arrived. He had his friend with him again, the girl that was with him on the first day that we met and she was sitting next to him in my seat. I said hello to him and nodded to his friend before walking to the back to allow them some privacy. Nathan had other ideas though and I he cheered me up by waving me over and pointing at the seat to his left.

“Robbie, this is my best friend Ginny,” he said as I took my seat next to him and I said hello to her properly. “And this is Robbie, the guy who I was telling you about.” Ginny seemed a lot more interested in me after he said, that, which made me wonder what he had told her about me. It didn’t matter anymore the moment that I felt Nathan’s leg rub against mine. He acted as if he didn’t notice that he had done it, but it was so blatant that I failed to see how it could have been a mistake. I couldn’t say anything in front of Ginny and he obviously knew that, but when I looked briefly into his eyes, there was a message there that told me everything that I wanted to believe, I was sure of it. Then as his bus arrived and he got up to leave, he did it again and touched his leg against mine before treating me to that wonderful smile of his again, which sent me into a trance. Every time that I saw him, I was captured by his beauty and that day was no different. The kid had me in knots after just a few minutes in his company and his magic rubbed off and stayed with me for ages afterwards. He was all I could think of all the way home, even eclipsing the note from Boy X and leaving Fran a distant third behind both.