Page 9 of Beyond the Hedge Maze

“If we find him,” Michelle interrupted.

“We’ll find him. I have a good feeling. Maybe he’ll be the one who will finally turn our boy away from his life of debauchery.” Sean ruffled his hair as he spoke, and Jesse winced.

He wasn’t proud of his reputation. Maybe he had been at eighteen, but now those memories were tinged with shades of embarrassment and more than a bit of shame. With Cambridge came liberation, and he had taken full advantage of it, sleeping with half the student population his first few years. How he escaped with his heart intact, much less escaped without an STI, was anyone’s best guess.

In the past year, he’d taken a break from his routine of casual hookups, got on PrEP, and went on dates with more intention beyond sex. But nothing fulfilling had come out of any of it.

His friends continued their light ribbing at his expense while he tuned them out, rolling his eyes and squinting at the bar to see the names of the beers on tap.

“Jesse, tell us a little more about him,” Tanvi prodded. “What does he look like? How did you meet again? Why does Sean know more about him than we do?”

Tanvi sounded muffled as Jesse’s attention narrowed across the bar. His own voice barely above a whisper as he spoke. “He’s right there.”

First seeing Oliver in the crowd, there was nothing he could have done about it. Not when the race was about to begin. And not only had he been unable to do anything about it, but he couldn’t afford to be distracted, either. Jesse had made the team by the skin of his teeth. He and Sean had trained every day for a year leading up to the tryouts, and there were mere fractions of a second separating him and the 9th man who didn’t make the cut. Since that day, he’d been working harder than ever to prove to himself, and everyone else, that he was meant to be there.

But there was nothing standing in his way now. Not his obligations to the team, nor a sea of people. In twenty steps, he could be at Oliver’s side. He wanted to know up close what was the same and what had changed after all these years.

He cleared his throat and tried again to get his friends’ attention. “He’s right there.”

Three heads snapped in the direction of Jesse’s gaze.

“Is he talking to McDavis?” Sean started.

“Fuck me, that man is dreamy,” Tanvi added.

Michelle was craning her neck to see over the people standing around. “Okay, we’ll talk about that later, love. But, J, he doesn’t look particularly thrilled to be talking to that guy.”

He watched as Roger put his hand on Oliver’s shoulder, and clocked the way Oliver tried and failed to shake him off. Without another thought, Jesse took off, no longer frozen in place. Sean followed, hot on his heels, and up ahead he noticed a man and a woman get up from a nearby booth heading towards Oliver. He didn’t recognize either, and hoped they were friends of his and not some allies of Roger’s coming out of the woodwork.

The man from the booth was the first to get to Oliver. “Hey man, why don’t you get your hands off my friend, huh?”

Mystery solved, Jesse thought.

“I don’t think I will. Catesby and I are old chums from Eton. We’re just catching up, aren’t we?” Roger’s tone was his usual brand of pompousness. Every shitty interaction he and Jesse had over the past two years came flooding back. Every snide joke about his race or his sexuality replayed on a loop, and with the race over, there was no reason to play nice anymore.

The path he took around the square-shaped bar put him behind Roger and he locked eyes with Oliver. Those, to his immense relief, were exactly as he remembered; the same cornflower blue that had consumed him all those years ago. All he needed was a smile; there was one more thing he wanted to make sure hadn’t changed.

Sean, the ever peacemaking captain that he was, stepped in first. “Roger, let’s go have a drink. The lads are over here.”

“Piss off, Murray. This is none of your business.”

Roger swayed, but had taken his hands off Oliver. Jesse remembered that a flask had been passed around after the race, and he wondered how much Roger had to drink before he got to the pub. Quickly Roger turned around, sloshing his drink down Jesse’s shirt as he roughly shoved at Jesse’s chest. “Of course you’re here, Alvarez. Come to rescue this pathetic waste of space, have you?”

Over Roger’s shoulder, he saw Oliver talking quietly to his two friends and wished instead that he was inserting himself into that conversation. He wanted to be the one there consoling him, to be the one taking care of him.

Jesse’s composure was slowly slipping. “Find some other place to be, McDavis. Oliver wasn’t bothering you.”

“Jesse, it’s fine. We were just leaving.”

Oliver’s voice rang out over the spectacle, and Jesse wanted to bathe in it. Immerse himself in the way it made him feel to hear his name from Oliver’s lips. It was somehow completely new and yet the same as he remembered.

“Listen to your boyfriend, Alvarez.”

Jesse ignored Roger’s taunting, side stepping the man to speak to Oliver. He said the first thing that came to his mind. “You don’t wear glasses anymore.”

One of Oliver’s eyebrows rose in question, but there was an unmistakable tilt of his lips, as well. A combination of pleased bewilderment that Jesse found insanely attractive, even if he did miss the glasses.

Roger shoved at him again, hard enough to make Jesse stagger. “I shouldn’t be surprised, your type always sticks together.”