I snort. “If it’s the same one I’m thinking of, it wasn’t my best work.”
Benji rubs his forearm as he often does. “No, maybe it wasn’t your best work. But it was still beautiful.”
I watch as Benji approaches me and wraps his arms around my back. He looks down at me with one of his dreamy smiles.
“Did you spike your own drink? You look a bit drunk, Mr Smith,” I tell him as my hands find his hips.
“Drunk on love,” he says, and it’s one of a thousand cheesy things he’s said to me. Like I always do, I tut him and roll my eyes. But inside, inside I store it away like I did that Valentine’s card for fifteen years. “I was going to ask you to dance with me, tonight.”
“Oh, really? In front of the kids?”
“Yes, in front of the kids. Just like I should have done sixteen years ago.”
“Sixteen years ago, I probably would have said no.”
“You did say no, remember?”
“I didn’t know what I was saying no to!”
“Well, you know what I’m saying now. Will you dance with me, Dion Ravel?”
I look up into his sky-blue eyes. “Yes, Benji Smith.”
And I do. It’s just swaying, mostly, but every now and then, Benji dips me or twirls me and takes as many kisses as he can in between. When the song ends, I expect our dancing and kissing to end, but it doesn’t. In fact, Benji seems to take the sensual beat of Sébastien Tellier’sLookas an invitation to kiss me long and slow. I feel him start to harden against me just as I’m aware of my own dick swelling in my underwear.
“Benji,” I pull back, biting my lip, “we should go back to the gymnasium.”
“You’re right, we should,” he says before diving down to take my mouth again. This time, there’s nothing slow about our kiss. His fingertips dig into my backside and he presses me closer to him.
“You want to do this?” I ask, breathless, after managing to detangle myself from him again.
“I’ve wanted to do this since that first time I saw you in here,” he says, eyelids heavy with lust.
“Well, fuck.” I sigh with deep-rooted contentment. “You better turn the lights off then.”
There are many things I didn’t know could be good about relationships but one of the biggest surprises is the sex. The intimacy that can blossom between two people who know each others’ bodies for more than a few weeks is mind-blowing. It’s what I’m reminded of now as — lights off — Benji leads me into the depths of the room. The chances of a student, another teacher or worst of all one of theparent-volunteers finding us are slim but I appreciate Benji not taking any chances. And yet the risk, excites me, the same way it did our first night together, even though again I was confident we would remain hidden.
Without speaking, Benji leads me to a bench at the back of the room. I recognise it as the place where we used to leave our larger artworks to dry overnight, and there are almost certainly more splatters and drips of paint covering it, although there are no paintings. They’re all on display now that assessments have been done. A quick wave of nostalgic nerves washes over me as I close my eyes and feel all the tension in my body that I felt when submitting my final pieces and having them examined by a stranger. It’s not a dissimilar feeling to how life felt when I first came out as trans; like here I am in my most vulnerable form, and I know you’re going to judge me. Just by existing, I know I’m going to get judgement.
Is it any wonder I have continued to live at home like I have? Where I am loved and valued and cherished without question or interrogation. When the outside world can be the damn opposite, why wouldn’t I want to hold onto that place where I can rest, and breathe and just be?
But home isn’t the only place that loves and values and cherishes me. In fact, home is no longer a place. Home is Benji.
This is what I feel as he shrugs off my blazer and folds it neatly at the end of the wooden bench. This is what I feel as he starts to unbutton my shirt and slip it off my shoulders. This is what I feel as my nipples harden, not from the cool air in the room but from Benji’s hungry gaze. I mourn feeling it like I used to before top surgery, but seeing it, and seeing the way he runs a finger along the rightscar, tracing the tattooed vine that’s wrapped around the fading line, I feel more than enough.
As Benji caresses my body, slowly, lazily almost, like we have all the time in the world, which is a lie, I start to take off his clothes. His suit jacket, his loosely-knotted tie, his button-up shirt. I’m so used to seeing him in his tracksuits that I nearly jumped his bones earlier when he pulled up to my parents’ house to pick me up in a suit and tie, so I have absolutely no complaints that the night has taken a turn in this direction.
When he’s topless, like me, I stroke the top of his stoma band. He wears one most days now. Preferring how it gives him a bit more security when he’s doing sport, which is nearly every day, and it certainly helps us when we want to be intimate in certain positions. I’ve come to love the band as part of him. I know he likes it when I run my finger along the top seam, grazing his stomach and ribs. I do it now and he shudders with a long shiver and an even longer sigh.
“God, I love you,” he says, pulling my gaze up to his eyes.
This is not new information. Benji told me he loved me less than a month after that first night in the tattoo studio. I said it back a week later. But every time he says it, it feels like the first time. There’s an element of surprise in it. Maybe it’s because it’s him — the boy I thought I hated at school — or maybe it’s because it’s me he’s saying it to, but I hope it keeps surprising me for the rest of my life.
And then we move. It’s like a well-rehearsed dance. Me on my tip-toes, him leaning down. Mouths slamming together. Tongues tangling hungrily. Moans melting into each other. Benji’s hands cup my face, holding me in place. My fingers dip into the rolling muscles thatstretch across his shoulders. We kiss until we’re breathless and rutting into each other, so horny we’re falling out of rhythm.
I think about dropping to my knees to take Benji in my mouth, but he is quicker than me and uses his hold on me to push me back towards the bench. I fall to sit on it and in a blink of an eye, Benji’s kneeling between my legs, his erection tenting the trousers I imagined him ironing earlier in a way that feels obscene and perfect. His fingers are quick to undo the zip on my trousers and even quicker to pull them down my legs with my boxers until I can awkwardly pull one of my shoed feet through the hole. He grunts with pure satisfaction when this is done, pushing my legs as wide apart as they’ll go.
“Mine,” he says with a smile that is too wide and too proud to make such a claim greedy or possessive. Although it’s still true; I am his.
