Bad at Endings.

Chapter 3

So I guess that's it then.
The ball is in John's corner now.
I have spent an entire night thinking over.....whatever this mess of a situation I seem to have gotten myself in is.
And by the time the first faint rays of sunlight were creeping lazily over the horizon it had also slowly started to dawn on me that, perhaps, I had surprised John just a little bit too much with my sudden appearance here.
The last time I had seen him I had left him standing on a beach with an empty promise that I would see him again the next day.
I had been in a car back to London that same evening.
Because giving people I care about a proper goodbye is, apparently, something I'm really shit at.

Lord knows what he thought when I didn't show up the next day.
Or the day after that.
When he realized we never exchanged phone numbers and so had no way to contact each other ever again.
Thinking back on it now it must have felt an awful lot like a break-up.
But.....we'd only really been together for two weeks.
That's not a relationship.
That's just two weeks.
Two weeks of making make believe with a pretty boy you're never going to see again because that's what people do on holidays.

Although.

It had felt real to me.

And real things scare me.

So I'd ran.

All the way back to London.

I'd ran just as I'd done yesterday when he cornered me in a supplies closet and held my hand and looked at me with those bottomless eyes that give me a strange sense of vertigo every time.

He confuses me.
And, maybe, I confuse him too.
Especially if he's not openly out yet.
If the John on holiday and the John here at school in his private life that he's lived for 17 years and counting are two vastly different people he has tried so hard to keep separate.
And now I'm here.
And with my presence where it doesn't belong I'm inadvertently trying to mix these two sides of him together while, maybe, they are irrevocably unable to combine.
Like oil and water.

Maybe I'm the oil-slick of John's life.
Shiny, colorful and mesmerizing to look at, but, when it comes right down to it, bad for your health and almost impossible to get rid of.

God, I really didn't get much sleep last night.

But I did decide that I'm going to give John space.
After all, we only had two weeks together and he's known these people at this school for far longer than that.
It might be a bit unfair on my side to demand him to choose me over them.

But I wish I could.

I wish he would.

But after the way I left him, he has every right to not entirely trust me, to be confused by me.
And if I push him I'm afraid I'll only end up pushing him away.

So I will go to school and stay out of his way and give him time to decide whether he still wants anything to do with me or if I was just the summer experiment of an inherently straight boy after all.

Straight boys experiment, right?

I wouldn't know.

I've never felt anything other than this.

And I still feel it.

This longing for him.
For the perfection that we had for just those couple of days.