PROLOGUE
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
-C.S. Lewis
Jasper
I lookedout the kitchen window to see my best friend sitting on the curb outside his house across the street.
“I’m just popping to Jackson’s,” I yelled to anyone who was listening. Mum and Dad were arguing upstairs, probably thinking we couldn’t hear them because they’d shut a couple of doors between them and us, and my brothers would be in their room fighting over the Nintendo controller. They wouldn’t miss me, and even if they did, they’d know where I’d be.
With Jackson.
Always with Jackson.
I watched as he rested his chin on his arms that were folded over his bent knees, closing his eyes, his face pinched in an expression I didn’t recognise. We’d been best friends for over a decade. There wasn’t an emotion I couldn’t read on him usually, but lately, he’d been different. Quiet, secretive, distant.
He thought he was keeping it to himself, offering me half smiles that didn’t reach his eyes, trying to cover up the lies I knew he was telling me about why he didn’t want to hang out with me, avoiding being anywhere near me.
I knew why, too. I was being weird.
Jackson was maturing faster than me. He’d hit puberty—his body widening, his muscles more defined, the fine hair appearing on his chest. The girls at school noticed it too and flocked to him. But me… I watched on from a distance. Comparing myself to him. Well, that’s what I told myself.
But recently, I’d begun to wonder... I shook my head to erase the thoughts. I was terrified to even contemplate it. Unsure where it would go and how much it would wreck my life and my friendship with Jackson.
I whispered my mantra silently:it was normal to think of him so much, to dream about him, for him to pop into my mind while I fisted my cock in the shower.
Normal. Totally normal.
So why did I feel so guilty?
Huffing out a breath, I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked from the house across the quiet road.
He looked up when my shadow fell across him. “Hey, Jas.”
“Hey. Can I sit?”
He shrugged and then shuffled over, despite there being plenty of room for me anyway.
“You okay?” I asked.
Our gaze locked, and my heart stopped beating; the pulse hammering in my ears the only reminder that I was alive. I waited for him to say it—to tell me to back off, leave him alone; that he didn’t want to be friends with me because I was being some weird, creepy lech, but he didn’t. Instead, his brown eyes turned glassy, and he chewed his bottom lip.
“My dad,” he said after a while. His dad was so hard on him. A reverend in the local church, he thought any problem in life was a result of someone’s sin. He even told Jackson that his mum’s cancer was her own fault and that praying for hours over her would be enough to save her.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t.
“Sorry,” I replied, not sure what else to say. “You wanna talk about it?”
He sniffed, wiping his face on the sleeve of his sweater before he turned to me. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
I stared at my hands for a second, looking at my chewed fingernails. I’d been biting them a lot more recently. “You can tell me anything,” I said to the floor before I leant my head against Jackson’s shoulder.
He smelt nice—of soap and the aftershave he bought himself with his Christmas money.
“Hedoesn’t want me talking about it.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
