Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 8

boyfriend, they've been together almost a year and he strikes me as the jealous type. I suppose it couldn't have been easy for him when I landed back in Paul's life again six months ago after all those years apart, but I don't want to make this easy for him dammit, I want him gone.
    As I look at my best friend, smiling and chatting beside me while we lope down the quiet street, the guilt comes flooding back. Had I honestly expected Paul to wait for me? Why would he after what I said; after I moved three hundred miles away just to escape how he felt? It was a miracle he was even talking to me now. Who was I to come swanning back into his life after a seven-year hiatus and just expect to pick up right where we left off?
    We part at the end of the road, he to head back to the townhouse he shares with Curt, me back to my lonely little one bed flat. I watch him walking down the street, marvelling again that the beautiful man is really Paulie, my Paulie, the gangly lightweight I'd left behind when we were both eighteen.
    The years have been good to him, that's for sure. He's filled out in all the right places, finally grown into his five-ten frame (still shorter than my even six feet), his chest broadened, the hint of a six pack lurking underneath his sweaty T-shirt. Yeah, there's a reason I get up at six-thirty every Sunday to go running in circles like a fool. Wherever that tight, toned ass leads, I'll follow, daydreaming about wrapping his slim thighs around my waist and staking a claim to the man who's been mine since we were four years old.
    Except he isn't mine. Not anymore.
    I step into my flat, stuffy and stifling after the frigid air outside. One good thing about living on the fifth floor: heat rises. I'll never have to worry about my electricity bills– the storage heaters are essentially decorative. Stripping off, I pad naked to the minute wetroom the developers installed off the bedroom for the sole purpose of adding another five grand to the asking price. Like a one bed flat needs two bathrooms. I shoehorn myself into the tiny space, elbows knocking the walls either side as I slide the glass door shut and turn on the shower, gasping as the water gushes scalding hot. A quick adjustment and it's more bearable, but already my skin shows up red and blotchy, tingling in the sudden switch from cold to warm.
    As I slowly soap my body, I suppose that I've changed, too. The light smattering of hair dusting my chest hadn't been there when I was eighteen, for a start. Sparse and short, like iron filings, and as black as the hairs on my head. My chest is more toned than it was back then, abs cut, stomach flat. I'm not the scrawny twink I once was, that's for sure. I like to keep in shape and I've been going to the gym at least twice a week since I was twenty, even occasionally getting in a workout between cruising the cute guys and arranging hook-ups.
    I admit, when I first came out– and for several years after– I was the proverbial kid in a candy shop. Sex with men is so easy if you know where to look. We're honest about what we want, and about getting our needs met. At one point if I'd gone more than a day without getting my dick sucked I'd consider it a dry spell. Everything had been simpler then.
    I don't think Paul's ever been like that. I was the cocky one, always louder and more outgoing than him. When we were sixteen I dragged him to our first ever gay bar. We went every week after that; it was our Friday night thing. We were jailbait and we didn't even know it.
    Well, I was jailbait. Paul never seemed that interested. He'd hover in a corner nursing a warm bottle of beer, an inscrutable expression on his face as he watched me dance and kiss and grope an endless succession of attractive strangers. No amount of cajoling or teasing would get him out of that corner to actually speak to another guy. Not unless that guy was me, not unless I took pity on my shy, gangly friend and took him by the hand, placed his arms around my waist and forced him to sway along with the music. Too late, I know now what that look on his face was. It was love.
    ****
    "Jackie, can we talk?"
    I stop packing and look over at my best friend. He's hovering, wringing his hands over the open suitcase spread across my ageing single bed. I put down the T-shirt I'm holding and sit, patting the mattress next to me. He remains standing.
    "What's up?" I ask, unsettled by the anxiety rolling off him in waves, charging the whole atmosphere of my