“Maybe I’m moving too fast?” Benji takes the step back that I thought I needed, but immediately, I mourn his presence in front of me, the way he towers over me, the way he looked down at me so intently it changed my body temperature.
“No!” I reach out for him and grab his arm. His forearm where there’s a fresh new tattoo under his jumper. He flinches just as I realise what I’ve done and lift my hand.
“Shit, sorry.”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t really hurt. Just a little tender.”
Tender.What a perfect fucking word for how I feel right now. I feel exposed, vulnerable, turned inside out. I feel like I’ve been thrust back in time to a moment in my life when I was full of uncertainty, trepidation and anxiety. I don’t want to go back there — to that last year of school when I was so scared of what the future held for me. I don’t even want to think about it, let alone kiss one of the ghosts from that time.
And yet I do. Idowant to kiss Benji. I want to feel his arms around me. I want to know what his lips taste like. I want to know if his skin is as soft and smooth on his neck, his chest, his inner thigh, as it is on his forearm.
Part of me wants to explain this conundrum to him, but I don’t. I just stand still, my chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.
“I should go and…” he drifts off, realising he can’t go anywhere.
I snort out a laugh, and after a second he joins me.
“What a fucking mess,” he says as he collapses back onto the sofa.
I don’t move. Now the moment has passed — the moment where he looked down at my lips and I knew, just knew he was about to kiss me — I want it back. I don’t want to go back to sitting next to each other with a metre of space between us. A metre that would feel like a canyon.
“It’s my mess,” I say.
“What?” His eyes lift.
“I’m making a mess of this,” I clarify.
“I don’t know. I’m the one who came on too strong.”
“You didn’t come on to strong. I just…” I move to perch on the coffee table in front of him. I make sure it can take my weight before I sit fully on it. “I fucked up by not telling you who I was sooner.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, that was, kind of shitty, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” he says immediately, easily. “You didn’t owe me any explanations. If we hadn’t got trapped in here like this, I would have left none the wiser. It would have been a normal tattoo appointment and I certainly don’t expect you to be outing yourself to me or anyone when you don’t want to, regardless of our history.”
“Were you always this…understanding?” I say grouchily. Because I am grouchy. If Benji had been as sweet then as he’s being now, I could have had a true ally in him. If I had known Benji had liked me back then, who knows what the years could have looked like?
A little pink appears in his cheeks. “I don’t know about that. I was a bit of a twat back then. Closeted, too.”
“Yeah, so you said. Dare I ask who the boy was? From the football team?”
“It was Miles Richards.”
“Really? Fuck, no!”
“Yep. The biggest, loudest, most seemingly hetero wanker of them all.”
“Do you…Are you still in touch with him?”
“No. Not really. About five or six years ago, he did send me a Facebook message apologising for how he treated me that year but it felt a bit copy and paste. Hey, maybe he also sent the same one to…What was your friend’s name again? The girl with the long black hair and piercings.”
“Raquelle,” I say in a quiet voice.
“Yeah. How is she?”
“I…I don’t know. She lives in Berlin now, I think. We kind of lost touch.” It’s my turn to have heat in my cheeks as I think about how Raquelle and I drifted apart all too easily by the time she graduated from university and stopped coming home so often. She never said it was because I transitioned, but it’s hard not to connect those kind of dots.
