The Rest of Forever (Completed)

Part 1

Eight o'clock Sunday morning in the middle of February and I'm jogging around my local park. I hate Sunday mornings, and I hate jogging. So why am I here? Because he is: Paul Adams, my best-friend-forever, the guy I'm totally, heartbreakingly, nauseatingly in love with.

I know, I know, I'm a total cliché. What gay guy doesn't grow up and fall in love with his best friend, right? I've read enough sappy romances in my time to know I'm not alone. There should be a support group or something. And in all those stories the supposedly straight (they're always straight) best friend suddenly wakes up and realises he feels the same. Cue sunset.

Except my best friend isn't straight. And, once upon a time, he did feel the same.

Not so sympathetic now, are you?

I was named Jackson by my mother in a fit of Gaelic traditionalism, that being her maiden name and her being an only child. I guess she didn't want the line to die completely, and at least my dad stuck around long enough to bestow us with his name—Campbell—saving me from the ignominy of being christened Jackson Jackson. You'd think with ancestry like that I'd be all peaches 'n' cream with a shock of curly red hair, but I'm not. Coal black, my hair is, like soot. So black it shines blue in the light and everyone thinks I must have dyed it. Guys fall over themselves to tell me they love it—black hair, blue eyes, skin pale as marble. Like a Disney prince, they say. They think I'm lucky: I'm not. I live in fear of going grey—at twenty-five, a possibility that gets more likely by the day—because I know when I do I'll look like a fucking badger, and then I'll have to dye it.

I quite like my eyes though, blue-green like the sea on a hot summer day. I just wish my lashes weren't so damn long, like a girl's, so thick you'd swear I was wearing mascara and kohl. To compensate I keep my stubble rough, not so long I look like one of the great unwashed but just a few mil, the second-shortest setting on my electric razor. I like it when guys stroke it, the soft scratchy sound it makes sliding over their palms. I like to rub my cheek across their chests, watch their nipples tighten.

A stranger's body holds so many novelties; men react in so many different ways to being touched. I'm a pretty tactile person in bed. I love nothing more than pinning a guy down and finding out exactly what he likes. Nothing beats the feeling you get hearing a new lover's breath hitch when something you've done surprised him in the best possible way. Not that most of the guys I've been with appreciate that. I suppose when you've left the bar at two and you're in work at nine, time for playing is limited. Wham, bam, thank you man; you can't stay I've got to be up early. Club sex is about scratching an itch, that's all. Shame it took me almost ten years to realise that.

I was a precocious adolescent. Sometimes I sit and look at the old pictures from that time and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing. I suppose everyone thinks like that when confronted with memories of their fifteen-year-old self. At least I never kept a diary: imagine the melodrama that would have gone into that! It's funny, but all through that period, fifteen to eighteen, as Paul and I discovered the truth about ourselves, each other, sex and men in general, I never looked at him that way. Never.

He was just Paulie, my best friend, the guy I'd known since pre-school. In my eyes he'd never changed from the kid I can still remember playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or crying because he'd fallen and hurt his knee. He was a constant in my life, the one thing I could always count on to be there.

The kids at school called us queer long before any of us knew what it meant, or how it really applied to us. Teachers knew better than to try to split us up, and our parents were pretty tolerant too, I guess. I remember the occasional conversation, Mum asking me if I had any other friends, or if I wanted them, but I never did. Paul was enough.