Vivaldi in the Dark

Chapter 7-2

Darren made good on his offer. In the middle of last period, Jayden’s phone buzzed in his blazer pocket, and he slid it surreptitiously out in the middle of Mr. Mayfield’s poor attempts at explaining covalent bonds to a room full of teenagers who couldn’t care less, couldn’t understand if they tried, or both.

Where the f***s wdbourne?

Jayden bit his lip to stay silent. Figured. Darren had probably never come further south than the town centre before.

Catterley Road. Other side of Catterley Lane Park from St. John’s, and the main gate is beside the fire station.

K c u @ 330

Jayden pocketed his phone again, grinning. April, nearly face-down in her frantic note taking, gave him a quizzical glance, but couldn’t be distracted for long. It was just as well. Before she’d decided she was going to get a scholarship to Woodville High for sixth form, she had been even nosier than Charley—and unlike Charley, wasn’t above phone-theft to find her answers.

Jayden had a plan for this afternoon, and it involved actually asking Darren out. Properly. Because, really, he had outright said (okay, heavily implied) that Jayden was attractive on Thursday. And he was just…flirty like that sometimes. And maybe he had mentioned how hot Mila Kunis was, but maybe he was bisexual instead of gay. Bisexual instead of straight, more importantly. And the invite to go to the bookstore…

It felt like being asked out.

In any case, Jayden was fairly sure Darren wouldn’t, you know, blow up at him or anything. He had been really supportive about the gay thing, and he hadn’t said anything like Jayden deserved Canning’s hot chocolate, or something like that. He’d hugged him, hadn’t he? How many guys would hug gay people? How many homophobic guys would? So he was obviously okay with it. So even if he was straight, and just weirdly flirty or whatever, then it wasn’t like he was going to go mad and hit him or anything.

Right? Right.

So Jayden was going to ask. Today. He’d be all casual, and he’d be cool about it so Darren wouldn’t get weirded out, and hopefully—hopefully—his GPS (Gay Perception System) would be right. And Darren would say yes.

His palms were sweating just thinking about it, and he ducked out of Darren’s text and sent one to Charley. I think I’m going to try asking the guy from the theatre out.

A moment later, his phone buzzed again. She was bored in her French class. Darren? The cute 1?

Yes.

Thort u sed he woz sr8?

I think I might be wrong. Maybe.

Hopefully.

Ooo gd luk!! xxx

He closed the phone as the bell rang. Three-twenty-nine. Maybe he could ask in Costa. Or on the way from Costa to this bookstore. Or maybe in the bookstore itself. Maybe that would be best, because then if Darren said no or got awkward, Jayden could just go home, and anyway, it was bound to be quieter and more private there, and…

And if he said yes, then maybe Jayden could kiss him. And nobody from school would see.

Caught up in the daydream, Jayden almost floated to his locker, emptying most of his books into it so he wouldn’t have to drag them around with him all day. And that floating was his mistake: he didn’t notice the absence of jeers in the corridor, or the lack of being rudely introduced to the locker door by Stapleton’s elbow in passing. He didn’t notice anything until he was out of the main door and saw the legs on the other side of the bins.

Shit.

He kept his head low and walked fast, but the shout came only halfway across the tarmac, and still a good twenty metres from the gate itself. And Jayden knew better—knew much, much better—than to walk away from Ben Canning.

“Hey, lady boy, saw you texting in Mayfuck’s class. Who was it, your girlfriend?”

Ben Canning was a shrew of a bully—wiry, narrow-eyed and mean—with both guts and brains. He knew he was worthless without power, and power included a hold over the criminally stupid and criminally thuggish Ollie Stapleton. As long as Stapleton was on his side, Canning was untouchable, and he knew it.

Jayden knew it too.

“Oh, wait,” Canning continued, teeth yellow and gleaming wetly around the soggy stub of a cigarette. “Let me try that again. Who was it, your boyfriend?”

Jayden said nothing and kept his hands in his pockets to stop Canning seeing them curling into fists. When the campaign had started, back in Year Nine, Jayden had tried insulting back, and he’d tried talking his way out of it, and he’d tried fighting back. Stapleton had beaten him up every single time. He’d once been locked in the boy’s bathroom in the drama block overnight after calling Canning retarded, and another time cracked three ribs after trying (stupidly) to take Stapleton on.

He knew better now.

The smokers generally were hostile, but they mostly shouted names at him, or broke into his locker and destroyed his stuff. Canning, and by extension Stapleton, were the main problem. And Jayden spent five days a week reminding himself that as long as he passed the scholarship exam, he only had to put up with them for another six months.

“Show me.” Canning snapped his fingers.

A long six months.

“It’s nothing,” Jayden tried.

“Show me your f*****g phone, fag.”

When Jayden didn’t move, Canning flicked his cigarette away, stalked across the cold tarmac, and ripped his bag off his shoulder, nearly taking the blazer sleeve with it. “Don’t!” Jayden yelled, grabbing for the strap, and Canning shoved him away so hard he nearly fell.

“You don’t tell me what to f*****g do,” he snarled, tugging on the zip as he stalked back to the bins. “If I want to look, I’ll f*****g look—and you can f**k off, too.”

Jayden scrambled to his feet as Darren materialised in the gateway, dressed in his uniform with a dark leather jacket zipped over the top of the blazer. Perhaps it was just as well; private school uniform to Ben Canning was like fresh meat to a starving dog. And Jayden doubted Canning remembered Darren properly from the shop window, but he unfortunately wasn’t stupid enough to miss the uniform.

“Charming,” Darren drawled, almost stalking across the tarmac. “Why don’t you just give him the bag back?”

Canning sneered. “You the boyfriend, then?”

Darren shrugged. “It’s okay to be jealous.”

Jayden shook his head frantically at him; Darren completely ignored him, and smirked with full-bodied arrogance when Canning went red. “What the f**k did you say to me?”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear,” Darren admitted, shrugged again. “I implied you’re a jealous, lonely little fairy wanting desperately to be a man and so you’re envious of everyone who can pull what you could spend a lifetime trying and failing to get. You with me?”

Stapleton’s lack of brains made itself evidence in the “uh?” that escaped him. His ‘friend’ (boss) was being insulted, he could grasp, but the rest of Darren’s clear-cut speech was lost on him. It was not, however, lost on Canning.

“You f*****g calling me a faggot?” Canning seethed, dropping Jayden’s bag. His focus zeroed in on Darren.

“Yes,” Darren said flatly. “A faggot, a queer, a catcher to the pitcher, a flaming homosexual. You’re so f*****g gay, five bars of the first song in Hairspray gives you a hard-on. And the best part is, you’re so f*****g pathetic about it, you need to get your jarhead boyfriend over there to beat your crushes up for you. Am I close, darling?”

Jayden suddenly and violently regretted telling Darren anything about the bullying at all. And yet…and yet, some part of his brain that wasn’t bracing itself for a fight was admiring Darren’s skills in manipulation. He’d met Canning once, for all of a minute, and yet he’d effectively removed Stapleton from the equation by insulting Canning’s pride. He was good.

And he was about to get slugged. Jayden started forward as Canning squared off against Darren, but Darren shook his head sharply, not breaking eye contact.

“Stay out of it, Jayden,” he snapped.

“You think you can take me?” Canning snarled, and Darren’s expression twisted until he coughed in an exaggerated fashion.

“You, sure, but your breath might be a bit of a challenge.”

Canning snapped. He swung a fist with a roar—and Darren caught him around the wrist, twisting them both and forcing Canning’s arm up his own back until Canning shrieked and stiffened, arching into the hold in a contorted fashion, Darren’s chest pressed to his back and his trapped, twisted right arm. And it was a completely inappropriate thing to notice, and something Jayden would have to talk to his brain about at some point, but Darren wearing that look of icy contempt was hot.

“Tell your boyfriend to back the f**k off, or I’ll break it,” he threatened.

“You f*****g…!”

“Tell him!” Darren roared, so loudly that Jayden stepped back on pure instinct, and then there was an alarming creak, and Canning shrieked again.

“Ollie, f**k off out of it!” he yelled finally, and Stapleton backed up and away from the bins, looking dully confused. Darren had moved too quickly for his brain to process, and then being told to go by Canning…he couldn’t cope with it. He had no idea what on earth was happening.

“Good,” Darren praised in a low, breathy voice. “Now you listen up, dickhead, ‘cause I won’t say this twice. I am sick to f*****g death of whiny little cunts like you who think you’re better than everyone and pushing other people around. I’ve heard a lot about you, and if you don’t just disappear and stop your little hate campaigns, then I will come right back and I will break every limb you have. And believe you me, it’ll go down really good with all your cronies that you got the s**t kicked out of you by a faggot.”

Canning made a long, low hissing noise through his teeth, but said nothing.

“You gonna leave him alone?” Darren asked, jerking his head at Jayden even though it was unlikely Canning could turn his head enough to look.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna call him a fag again?”

“…No.”

“Good boy,” Darren said in his most patronising tone—and jerked both arms forward, slamming Canning face-first against the bins with a loud boom and a crunching noise. Canning didn’t so much fall over as peel his bloodied nose off the metal, sway drunkenly, and finish the entire debacle by crumpling to sit on the tarmac in a messy heap.

Darren turned to eye Stapleton, shrugged, and stooped to pick up Jayden’s bag.

“You’re a f*****g lunatic,” Jayden said, taking it and dragging Darren out of the gates by the sleeve. “Canning’s a nutter. I mean…what did you…seriously, he’ll be out for you now.”

“Canning’s a small fish in a big pond,” Darren muttered and rolled his eyes. “I mean, come on. There’s harder kids at my school, and that’s saying something.”

Jayden let go of his jacket once they were on the public safety net of the main road. “I didn’t think you’d be the fighting type.”

“I have an older brother,” Darren reminded him. Jayden stared. “A sadistic older brother,” Darren clarified.

“Who teaches you moves like that?”

“Last time I lost a fight with Scott, he shaved my head,” Darren grumbled and ran a hand through his hair. “Comes in handy with mouthy fuckers like that one.”

Jayden watched Darren’s hair reclaim its messy perch as he let it go, and swallowed against his dry throat. As they turned onto Churchill Avenue, he struggled to keep the question back, and failed. “Why did he piss you off so much?”

Darren shrugged a shoulder. “He’s a cunt.”

That wasn’t helpful. “He’s just homophobic. I mean, Ollie’s the dangerous one, really. He can…”

“They’re both retards,” Darren said flatly. “And funnily enough, I don’t like homophobic people. I’m gay, it’s kind of in the special glittery contract they make you sign when you go to get your first pair of skinny jeans.”

Jayden’s hearing shorted out for a second. I’m gay. Darren was gay. Darren was gay. Darren was gay. His brain recited it in every possible formulation and with every possible stress pattern, and it boiled down to the same thing. Darren was gay.

The street was suddenly too bright, like a TV with the colour saturation way too high. Jayden’s heart was beating too hard in his chest, so loud that even when his hearing cleared from that simple remark, that confession-that-wasn’t, he could barely hear. It was like the world had sharpened for a moment, like going from being asleep to being awake in half a second.

Darren was gay.

“Do they make you sign it in pink?” Jayden managed to fumble out through numb lips, and Darren laughed at his shoulder, apparently unaware of that shaking in the middle of Jayden’s chest.

Just f*****g ask him, you have no excuse now! screamed the voice in his head, the one that constantly argued with him about the best course of action, the one that had always been wrong before. The one that had told him to stand up to Canning before and had got his arse kicked for him. The one that had given him a crush on the terminally straight Jason Ackerman in Year Eight.

The one that had decided Darren’s elegance and sarcasm through a violin was a sure sign of batting for Jayden’s team. And had, apparently, been bang on the money.

“Um, Darren…?”

“Yeah?”

Jayden stopped. He just stopped, in the middle of Churchill Avenue, with the last dregs of teenagers still bleeding away from Woodbourne, and the sun sinking down over the rooftops in a cold October sky. Darren took four steps without him before turning and pausing, windswept and flushed, hands deep in the pockets of that battered jacket, eyes like chips of ice from a greener sea in his face.

He was f*****g beautiful, and Jayden lost the ability to talk. He lost the ability to think, and then his hands were on Darren’s shoulders, curling into the chilly leather, rough with age and vaguely wet from the damp air—and Darren’s lips were cold at the edges and warm where they met, the faintest tang of apples on the seams. There was the faintest scrape of stubble under Jayden’s palm when one hand reached for Darren’s cheek of its own accord, and Darren’s fingers were strong where they gripped his elbow, and when Jayden drew back, there was a fraction of a second where it felt like Darren followed.

And from only an inch away, Darren’s eyes weren’t just pale green anymore. They were streaked with the thinnest strands of blue, like lightning bolts.

“I…” Jayden stepped back, dropped his hands, and stuffed them in his pockets, feeling the heat rushing to his face. His mouth wasn’t numb anymore. It flickered and sparked, like a buzz on the surface. “I’ve…um…been wanting to do that for a while.”

Darren nodded slowly. “Okay…”

“Sorry,” Jayden breathed, and turned to brush past him, hunching his shoulders against the cold and the embarrassment. Who did that? Who just grabbed a guy and planted one on him the minute he said he was gay? It was just so…so stupid!

“Hey!” Darren yelled, and Jayden paused. He could feel the shakes in his hands again. He was sweating unpleasantly despite the cold. To hell with it, he was bloody scared. “There’s an indie coffee shop on the corner of Market Square that does live music on Saturday evenings. Want to come with me?”

Jayden’s breath left him in a rush, and he half-turned, hot despite the cold, to watch Darren’s hair tangling itself in knots in the wind. And that steady, intense stare. “You…” he stuttered, swallowed, tried again. “You’re asking me out?”

Darren shrugged. “That depends if you agree to come with me or not.”

Jayden could feel himself smiling—grinning—and he knew he had to look like a complete ‘tard, but he couldn’t control it. Maybe it didn’t matter, because there was a suspicious tugging at the corner of Darren’s mouth, like he couldn’t quite manage a straight face either.

“Okay,” he said.

“Good,” Darren returned and hunched his shoulders. “Now come on, Jesus. I need to get the new sheets for tomorrow’s suicide-inducing boredom, and the shop shuts in like an hour. Let’s get moving.”

Jayden’s smile lasted all the way into town.