Ben had seen this guy around, but that was all. They were reading different subjects at the Uni, in different colleges, joined different societies. Both Arts, and you'd think that might make a difference, but Cambridge is a big university, or collection of colleges, and sometimes if someone caught your eye you had to make the actual effort to meet them.
Ben knew his name, though. When someone catches your eye you make the effort to find out their name, isn't that right? Michael Craddock, reading English and Politics, over the river in another college. He was already famous/notorious, only a couple of months into the first term of both their degrees.
It's funny the people that get that touch of magic about them, because it's not always the ones that you'd think. Michael wasn't beautiful – he wasn't exactly beautiful, anyway. He had a humorous face. Ben meant both that it was a face that clearly laughed easily and often, and that was, frankly, a little bit funny in its mobility and exaggerated expressions and slightly rubbery, once-broken nose, wide eyes and freckles and wide broad canvas for emotion. When he told jokes people laughed at him, and sometimes they just laughed at him, because it was a pleasure to watch the thoughts cross his extraordinary, ordinary, ridiculous face.
Ben was beautiful. It wasn't particularly a matter of vanity to say so, he didn't think. He'd been told so, with frequent repetition, for most of his life, sometimes with envy, sometimes lust, sometimes aesthetic admiration, occasionally outright resentment. (He could understand it. His family was rich – although his own trusts wouldn't disburse for oh, a good long while. His parents were canny, and their parents before them who made the family millions in trade and exports. Ben was privately educated, extensively tutored and somewhat naturally gifted. In short, he was a lucky duck and he ought to know it. He didn't expect it to sit well with those who'd had to tread a rougher, more pebbled path through life, through no fault of their own).
He got plenty of offers, and back then it was the same. In the two months since starting college, he'd worked his way through a fair few of the offers he'd got, and it was fine. He wasn't looking for anything else. He was nineteen: a year out for a bout of meningitis had put him back a year in school. You're not looking for love, at nineteen, fresh out into the world and free, really free, for the first time, now are you?
YOU ARE READING
Erase You
RomanceMichael is a musician, Cambridge-educated but living in London. He's successful, attractive and has plenty to keep him busy and happy. So why can he still not get over his old college boyfriend, Ben? Fortunately his old Great-Aunt Millie, a notor...
