The Devil's Trill Sonata

Chapter 1-3

Darren believed in love.

He’d never admit it, not even to Jayden. It didn’t fit with what everyone thought about him, and it definitely wasn’t immune to his bad days, but he believed in it all the same. He just didn’t believe most people were in love when they said they were, and that was the problem with other people’s scepticism. They thought he was eighteen and in lust.

And yeah, he was; he’d seen what Jayden hid in those skinny jeans. The lust was definitely still kicking about, and quite healthily, thanks. But he was also in love. And Darren Peace believed in love.

His parents weren’t in love. They were in a business relationship, and it had begun to buckle in the last year. Mother had divorced Scott’s father when she’d learned that Jeffrey Peace had a bigger salary and a nicer car; she was bound to do the same the moment she found someone to replace him, too. Darren was only surprised it had taken eighteen years for the cracks to show.

Scott wasn’t in love. He went through girls like a hot poker through butter. Butter that hadn’t even been left in the fridge. If there was such a thing as being one hundred percent straight, Scott was it, but he never loved. He f****d, he fumbled, he f****d it up, and then he fled. In the morning, he’d start over. And so his ‘relationships’ lasted all of a week. He’d never loved.

Jayden’s parents were in love. It was kind of weird because they were like forty or something, but it was a fact. (A fact Darren liked, because it meant every Saturday night for three years, he and Jayden had had a house to themselves.) Mr. Phillips was like ten years older and a whole lot uglier than his wife, and with her red hair and heart-shaped face she could have anyone on the block, but they still went out on dates and put their savings in a jar in one of the kitchen cupboards towards a holiday in Majorca. It was a lot less glamorous than Mother and Father. It was a lot poorer and a lot more tacky furniture that you had to assemble yourself, but they were still there, and the atmosphere in Jayden’s house was just that much warmer for it. They were in love.

They’d been in love almost as long as Jayden—or Darren—had been alive, and that was the kind of love Darren believed in.

It was the kind of love he had.

He’d fallen in love at fifteen. He knew it sounded stupid, and he would probably scoff at the idea himself if someone else told him they’d done it—only he had. And it hadn’t been right away. Even after he’d gone and done it, he’d spent a long time convincing himself he was just then-sixteen and being stupid and once his shoulder recovered and Jayden switched schools, they’d begin to crack up and drift apart. Only they hadn’t. Jayden had gone to physio with him, watched him get rid of that bloody violin, been there the first time he’d played the piano, eight months after the park, and Jayden had hugged him without a word when he’d teared up in the middle of the music. He’d been there for the bad days, every one of them, and he hadn’t so much as twitched when the physiotherapist had turned around when Darren was seventeen and said that this was as good as it was going to get.

That phrase didn’t just apply to his shoulder.

Against all his doubts, they’d weathered the depression and the attack and the ongoing refusal of his parents to even entertain the idea of Jayden existing or Darren being ‘one of those homosexual types’ (Father did have some interesting turns of phrase), and the teasing at St. John’s that Jayden had been understandably twitchy about, just waiting for it to turn into the outright bullying that it had been at Woodbourne. But they’d weathered the storm.

It had been three years, and Darren believed in love. Believed in a love that had him driving nearly a hundred miles home on his own, pretending he was as cheerful as the music on the radio, pretending this separation wasn’t going to be just as difficult for him as it was for Jayden. If not worse. Darren had forgotten how to cope on his own, and part of him knew—just knew—that the next bad day was going to be more than bad, and weathering the next depression storm was going to be hard on his own, when they’d always weathered the storms together. And yet he did it anyway, because he loved Jayden, and he believed in that love.

Believed in them, in him and Jayden, no matter the distance.

They would weather this, too.