The Sensible One (boyxboy) ✓

Chapter Fourteen

I don't suppose it was really possible to expect it, and after all I was still too young to really wake up and smell the roses, somehow that youthful acceptance that had allowed me to wallow in my deep and scarring shame had managed to stick to me throughout my adulthood.

Never had I truly looked back and thought, perhaps he did not express to me the full truth.

In part I believed it was due to the fact that this deeply embedded shame was something I never told anyone, so frightened that anyone would remember me, have spoken to Weston, know what I had done and tell the world, force me to confront my dark side.

So scared I had only attended my sixth form review for about thirty minutes, declared that I had been in a class two years above my own in an attempt to make sure I was not directed towards anyone I might have known.

I didn't believe Weston would tattle to the whole school, betting on the fact that he was embarrassed as well, but I trusted he spoke to someone about it, that this was why he eventually came forward to me about it, through their nudging.

Whoever that was had the ability to crush me in their hand.

When I was sixteen, two months before my birthday, we were paired together for a geography project, which we completed marvellously, and from the satisfaction of a practical partnership with good results we became friends.

I think on some level I did start to seek him out because I was always attracted to him. He was very much my type, softer features but still a nicely defined jaw, light brown hair with natural highlights, gentle looking but take-charge enough that I could follow him without worrying we were both following each other into a brick wall.

He helped me study for maths, a subject in which he was more talented, and I would stay over at his house and he would play movies I was rarely able to see in my own relatively strict household. Ordered fast food I had only seen others eat on occasion and we stayed up all night watching pirated horror movies over the internet.

We seemed to naturally drift together, some awkward hesitation between us as we began to push boundaries, first just small things. When we were laid together in his bed I remembered inching closer so that our knees touched to see if he would move away, he did not. Then I woke up and was hugging him and when he woke up he didn't pull away, nor made a funny face, just yawned, rubbed his eyes and asked me if I wanted an energy drink. 

All in all, back then, I had been more in the closet than he. At the time I did not know what my father's opinions on the subject might have been, we never discussed those sorts of things, but I felt that hardness in him that warned me to keep to myself just a while longer, and as a boy with too many other things to be busy with I never considered seeking a relationship a main priority either.

Weston was more liberal in that sense. I remembered the small poster on his wall, of a half naked David Bowie, casually pointing a revolver upwards dangerously near to his face.

Those eyes and long hair with a middle parting, I had always liked to stare at it, imagine it on my own wall, but I knew something like that would have immediately raised questions in my own home.

So instead of saying anything I only tiptoed further, watching the line between us nervously.

I wasn't the first to initiate a kiss. That happened on my birthday.

My father at the time thought I was ruining my chances at a solid education, and made it well known. I had accidentally spurned my mathematics teacher somehow, and learning from him became a chore that left me struggling in the subject, the low grades prompted my father to rant about my lack of value and respect as a son born into a middle class family with all the monetary benefits.