“Yes, please.” I hold on to his arm as though he might change his mind any second. “I’m playing.”
“You are?”
“On Owen’s team. I really want you on our team too. Please?”
His face cracks, and a soft smile breaks his previously stoic expression. “I’ll play so long as I’m not on Mathias Flaffius’s team.” He laughs. “I’m pretty sure that’s not a real name.”
“Is too. It’s ancient Greek,” I say, holding back my smirk. “He’s named after Flaffius the Interrupted. A legendary Athenian philosopher.”
Harry stares at me for a moment, his laughter ghosting his lips, and I think he might kiss me. He doesn’t. Instead, he swills his pint.
“What’s the other favour?” he says.
“You’ll do it? You’ll play?”
He shrugs. “Gadget already asked me, and I already said yes. Next.”
I pause for a second and gather my thoughts. “Do you reckon your mum would be able to help us out with security . . . maybe give us a discount? For the charity match, I mean.”
“I don’t see why not. I’ll ask her.” Harry stills, and stares off into the darkness. Presumably he’s thinking about Lionel, or Lincoln, or whatever this security guard’s name is who he’s been mad crushing on for however many years. “What happened after you walked in on Owen and Flaffius choking their chickens?”
My laughter shoots out through my nose like a pig snort. “Well, nothing really. They drove me home. My body continued its mutinous tirade at my place.”
“You should have called me. We could’ve hung out.”
“I didn’t know you then.”
“Oh, yeah.” He’s still staring off into the treeline at the very edge of the pub’s boundaries. “Do you ever do that?”
“Do what?” I say.
Harry glances towards the swings, but the girls have left to return to their families. Regardless, he still lowers his voice. “Choke the chicken.”
“Oh . . . well . . . I mean, I have . . . but I don’t . . . not often anyway. It rarely occurs to me as something to do with my time, like . . . I just don’t get the urge.” I could probably count on two hands the number of times I’ve masturbated in my six or seven years since puberty.
“Can I ask you a potentially rude question, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to?” he says.
“Sure. Though if it’s about asexuality, you should know that I’m still figuring this all out, so don’t take my word as law.”
Harry scoots closer to me on the bench. “Are you . . .” He drops his voice even lower. “Impotent?”
It takes me a few seconds to figure out how I want to phrase my answer. “Technically, no. I do still get erections, like a reflex thing, I think. Like . . . it’s just a natural auto bodily reaction. But honestly, it . . . feels like I’m mentally impotent.” I can’t look at him and have to angle my body away. “Sometimes it feels like I’m broken.”
Harry twitches in response to my comment, but doesn’t say anything. He just lets me continue.
“Kids our age are sex-obsessed. It’s natural to have that all-consuming urge to reproduce—to come. Normal teenagers, and adults even, think about sex all the time. Don’t you?”
“Yeah . . .” he says, but there’s some hesitancy. Maybe he doesn’t think about it as often as the average person our age. Maybe he’s more like me than I first thought. “I do. A lot. But I don’tjustthink about that. I think about other things too, like . . . I want to have a relationship more than I want sex.”
I turn to look at him. Harry makes a weird, puffy lipped expression, his eyes wide. I want to take that piece of information home and replay it in my head, dissect it later.
“But you still wank?”
“All the fucking time, mate. I think I might have a bit of a problem. As soon as I’m left alone anywhere, I’m wanking. I need to go to wanking rehab or something,” he says.
We laugh until we both sigh and become silent again.
“Another horrifically personal question?” he asks.
