Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 8

shock, I'm pliant when he grabs me, apparently willing, and then his fingers are in my hair and his mouth is pressed to mine, cow eyes closed. My vision zeroes in on each delicate lash as it flutters and his lips brush against mine. I'm trembling but he's steady as a rock, holding me firmly, as assertive as I've ever seen him. My eyes drift shut. Maybe I can do this, maybe I can pretend, give him what he wants and hope we can go back to normal again afterwards. Maybe kissing him will wipe away both our memories of what came before, maybe I can steal his words from his lips, take them back like he never said them to begin with.
    His tongue darts out and tentatively touches mine, hot and wet and rough. I feel him sag as he makes a needy whimper in the back of his throat that leaves my blood cold. If we do this, nothing will ever be the same between us again.
    I break away and stare at him, wild-eyed. His face is contorted, lower lip, wet from our kisses, loose and trembling. He's falling out of the apple tree at the bottom of his garden all over again, I know he's going to cry but dammit I can't make this better. We aren't ten years old anymore, and I can't think of anything funny to say to cheer him up. The half of me that's still his best friend feels lower than a worm's tit for doing this to him. The other half of me clings to its sense of outrage and betrayal in order to do what needs to be done.
    I wake up sweating. How many times have I dreamed of that day in the years since? The look on his face, the moment I knew I'd destroyed everything we ever had. I was only trying to save it. He never understood why I did it, how scared I was of losing him if something were to go wrong. I never understood that the decision had already been taken from me, that the moment he confessed his true feelings was already make or break. My reaction was almost irrelevant.
    I finished packing and the next morning I left, as I had always planned to do. All the way to the city on that hot, sickly-smelling train a ghost sat beside me. I looked out of the window so I didn't have to face it. I told myself that I didn't need him, and pretended that it wasn't him I was looking for, half-expecting to see standing on the platform of every station we stopped at. I don't know if I believed my own lies or not.
    I lost myself in new surroundings after I arrived, which was easier to do than you might think. I'd grown up in a largish town which boasted two gay bars and a theme night at a club every second Thursday of the month. Moving to a place that had not isolated bars but whole streets, an entire village nestled along the banks of the canal running through its centre, was too much temptation. My days were spent enrolling at the uni, making friends with my classmates and the fellow students who shared my halls. My nights were an endless round of drinks and dances and men, never staying in any one bar too long, or with any one man, either. New friends were ten a penny, so who needed only one? Certainly not me.
    Except I did.
    Fresher's 'flu, they call it. Everyone gets it at the start of a new term. Hundreds of people from all over the country stuck in the same stuffy auditoriums, breathing the recycled, air conditioned germs. My third week from home and I was laid low. Everyone was. The girls in my hall were unsympathetic to my plight, they just rolled their eyes and laughed. 'Men', they said, like that was a fucking answer. Didn't they understand that 'flu is lethal to us guys?
    Lying in my narrow bed, sweating and shivering, my head pounding, the world tilting at a crazy angle every time I opened my eyes, I dreamed of Paulie. Suddenly the one guy I'd been trying so hard not to think about was the only person that I wanted to see. I missed him. He always took care of me when I was ill, playing nursemaid as my mum hovered, tongue clicking with disapproval, while he ferried soup and cold compresses and honey and lemon to my sickbed. She said he coddled me: I know he saved my life on more than one occasion.
    I know what you're thinking: selfish bastard. I was, but in my defence, I was eighteen. It took that first bout of delirium to make me really stop and realise what I'd lost. I'd put off thinking about him, about how wrong everything had gone, about how much I was hoping, deep down, that one day he'd just show up and everything would go back to how it was before.
    Loneliness engulfed me. I don't think I'd ever felt it before– I'd always had