“Am I getting a lift home, or have you got Binita lined up?”
He rolled his eyes at that, some of the old Alex returned. “She’s just a friend. I know she fancies me, but I’m not interested. I’ll pick you up near the bus stop.”
THE PASSENGER
(IGGY POP)
When I climbed into the Polo after the school day ended, Alex presented a much more coherent frame of mind.
“Why did you kiss me back, Matt?” he demanded before I’d even buckled my seatbelt.
“Hello, mate, had a good afternoon?”
“No, not especially. We had to complete a really tricky practical in chemistry, hydrolysing peptides, and I made a complete hash of it.”
“Why’s that then?” I threw him an innocent look, trying to keep a straight face.
“Oh, let me think. Possibly as I’ve spent the last week believing my best friend hated my guts? And when I plucked up the courage to confront him, I found myself snogging him in an abandoned multistorey carpark? It was a kind of surreal lunch hour.”
I clicked open the glove compartment and picked through the mixtape collection he’d amassed, trying to play it cool.Best friend. I very much liked the sound of being Alex Valentine’s best friend. A thrill of pleasure hummed through me. Oh my God, kissing him had been wild. He hadn’t been the only one who’d failed to concentrate all afternoon.
“You still haven’t answered.” He frowned at me.
“You still haven’t started the engine. Are we going to sit here all evening?”
With an aggrieved huff, he turned the key in the ignition and pulled away. I fiddled with the radio, covertly admiring the flex of his thick forearm as he rested his hand on the gear stick and imagined what that hand would feel like wrapped around my knob. Which is why I failed to notice he’d taken the wrong exit off the roundabout until we were a few minutes down the road.
“We need to talk,” he announced. I threw him a quizzical look. Four words guaranteed to strike dread into the soul of any teenage boy.
Talking and driving, it seemed, were mutually exclusive. After twenty minutes of listening to REM’sGreenalbum, which I was prepared to defend as their best until I dropped dead, Alex turned the car down a bumpy dirt track. Even a townie like me recognised the edge of Highgate Common, a patch of moorland more suited to rural Wales than the industrial Black Country, but somehow had resisted being converted into yet another boxy housing estate. At least it afforded joggers and doggers somewhere safe to do their business. With a light drizzle beginning to fall, very few of either were about. Alex pulled the car into one of the low-lit scrubland parking areas then switched off the engineandthe music.
Great, so we were having a serious sort of talk. I had half-hoped “talk”had been a euphemism for more kissing.
“So.” He shifted in his seat towards me, way more composed than he’d been at lunchtime. “You kissed me back.”
“I did.” I nodded, staring out of the window at absolutely fuck all.
“Does Brenner know? Does your other mate, Phil, know?”
“Oh yeah, I found them straight away after lunch and told them all about it. Then I fondled Brenner’s fat smelly dick for a few minutes and Phil wanked himself off watching us. Of course they don’t fucking know! Are you going to tell your parents?”
He seemed a bit chastened after that outburst, which he didn’t deserve, but I didn’t care. I’d been dealing with this shit for years. It wasn’t my fault that he’d only now discovered the full horror of it. That something perfectly natural for boys like us was viewed as abhorrent by people we cared about.
“No, I don’t think so. Not yet. They’d be really upset. Would you tell yours?”
I guessed Alex’s parents’ version of“really upset”and my parents’ version were a little different.
“No. I never will, either. Nor my mates.”
He digested that for a moment. “Have you…have you met…um…kissed other boys?”
I thought about lying, aggrandizing my sexual experience, like most teenage lads would. But he’d been scared shitless up on the roof, and I’d sort of run out of fucks to give.
“No. But I’ve had plenty of sex with girls.”Really bad sex. Sex that made me want to vomit afterwards.“To cover up. To blend in. To appear less gay.”
His eyes widened as the force of my words sank in, his mouth opening in a full ‘O’. I felt pretty uneasy myself, to be honest. Someone else on this planet now had possession of my most precious secret. And sharing the burden hadn’t lightened the load, if anything it was doubled. Because now I had to worry about Alex accidentally outing me, as well as himself.
“But I…I still don’t think I’m gay,” he insisted, stuttering over the unfamiliar word. Great, this gnarly chestnut again.