Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 8-2

Mr. Weber didn’t say a lot that was worth listening to, but even he was right when he pulled Darren out of practice for being distracted. All right, so scales was a punishment (there was nothing more boring on this earth), but at least he was right.

Darren hadn’t been able to shake yesterday out of his head since, well, yesterday. It had been a bad idea. He’d known it, even as he’d asked. The last thing he needed was to let himself imagine that he could make anything work with Jayden, and then have Jayden prove him wrong and run a mile the first time he saw one of Darren’s bad days. And the last thing Jayden needed on top of his issues at school was a boyfriend out of school who was more f****d up than all his tormentors put together.

It was a bad idea.

But the minute Jayden had kissed him, Darren’s sense had left. It hadn’t been the best kiss he’d ever had. It had been sudden, and awkward, and Darren hadn’t been expecting it in the slightest, but…

But it had short-circuited everything in his head, and he’d just thrown out the invite to Milzani’s without really thinking about it. And now he had a date, with a guy who deserved a lot better, and there was both no way of backing out of it without giving Jayden entirely the wrong impression, and no way that Darren wanted to.

It was wholly selfish of him, but when Jayden appeared in the doorway at the end of practice, hovering uncertainly as Mr. Weber swept out and Darren could finally stop with the bloody scales, that selfish part of him just noted how good he looked backlit by the lobby like that.

“Um, hi,” Jayden said, and grinned nervously, hands deep in his pockets, as the others filtered out with a variety of goodbyes called over their shoulders. “Um. So. I don’t…I mean, I don’t really know what…what’s standard after you kiss someone in the street, but, um…”

Darren watched him ramble as he approached the stage and dropped his arm until the violin rested on the seat. His shoulder ached. His lower lip sparked with the memory of that sudden kiss. He hadn’t felt that alive in…months. Months.

“I…” Jayden stopped where the carpet met the stage. “I kind of…” Darren watched the flush work its way up his neck. “I kind of want to kiss you again,” he admitted.

Darren smiled and dropped off the edge of the stage. He deliberately dropped too close, and Jayden didn’t back up. At this distance, Darren could just about make out the wide black of his pupils against the dark brown of the iris. “Okay,” he said, and those pupils expanded slightly.

The first kiss had been sharp and sudden and taken him completely by surprise. In a way, with that forewarning, the second was more awkward. They didn’t quite fit right, and Jayden’s hands didn’t know what to do with themselves, clutching intermittently at Darren’s blazer and letting go again in random bursts, like he wanted to ask permission but didn’t want to break the kiss to do so.

Darren took over. He cupped Jayden’s neck with his left hand, tilting his head until they almost fell into their proper places. Jayden used some kind of lip balm—nobody’s mouth was that smooth without help—and Darren opened his mouth to taste it, pressing forward and resisting the urge to smile when Jayden gave a muted gasp and raised his hands to clutch—hard—at Darren’s hair. Too hard, but Darren didn’t mind.

For a while. After a particularly hard tug, and having determined the spark of leftover flavour at the edges of Jayden’s tongue (some kind of peach, presumably from his lunch), Darren broke the kiss, stroking his fingers across the nape of Jayden’s neck as he let him go, tweaking spray-stiff hairs before sliding his hand over the shirt-covered shoulder and stepping back.

“Um,” Jayden said. His eyes were almost wholly black.

“I have your blazer,” Darren said, finding his voice. His lips were buzzing like he’d kissed an electric fence. His entire face felt too reactive. He felt vaguely like…like there was something humming under his skin, trying to shiver its way out.

He didn’t entirely mind.

“Um…thank you,” Jayden said breathlessly. “I, um…thanks.”

“You seen that kid again? Canner?”

“Canning. No,” Jayden admitted. “I think he skipped today, I don’t know. I don’t actually have many classes with him, because I’m usually in top set and he’s…well, not.”

Darren grinned, tossing him the plastic bag with his cleaned blazer in. Mother hadn’t noticed the addition to her tab. Darren doubted she ever would—and if she did, he could say it was his.

“I…are we still…are you still up for Saturday?” Jayden asked over his shoulder as Darren pulled himself back up onto the stage to pack up his violin.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Um, I mean, that’s good, I just…I wasn’t sure if, you know, you’d rethought it, or…”

“Nope,” Darren said breezily.

Jayden took a breath. “You didn’t tell me you were gay,” he explained.

“I told you yesterday.”

“I mean…earlier. I mean…you…you ought to know, I’ve been, um, interested in you for a little while,” Jayden confessed, and Darren abandoned the violin to sit cross-legged on the edge of the stage and watch the progress of the blush that was inching its way up his neck. “And I told you I was gay, but…”

Darren shrugged.

“You said Mila Kunis is hot.”

Was that what this was about? “You’re not an experiment, if that’s what you mean,” Darren said, and Jayden’s skin went from pink to red in half a second. “I’ll admit, I’m not sure where I stand on girls. Mila Kunis is hot. But I’ve been noticing boys since long before I started noticing girls. And I’ve never noticed a real girl.”

“She is a real girl.”

Darren laughed. “I mean a girl I’ve actually met,” he clarified. “I’ve met boys I like. I’m looking at one right now. But not a girl. So maybe I’m bisexual, but I’m not straight.”

Jayden bit his lip. “Okay,” he said. “I just…you know…I didn’t…I didn’t think there was anyone gay in, like, this whole town, and then you come along and you were…you were flirting with me, but you also said the Mila Kunis thing…”

“Isn’t it a little early to be over-thinking things?” Darren suggested. “You could come with me on Saturday and decide you never want to see me again.”

“I don’t think so,” Jayden blurted out, then clapped a hand over his mouth and went up the colour ramp into purple. Darren laughed aloud, some of the shivery feeling using his throat as an outlet.

“Oh, really?” Darren pushed. Jayden bit his lip and approached the edge of the stage again. The height of it was enough to put their faces level again, and Darren reached to grasp Jayden’s narrow hips in his hands and watch that flush change colour back to a cherry red.

“Really,” Jayden said and began playing with Darren’s hair again. He wasn’t holding eye contact, and his breath caught when Darren very deliberately licked his lips. “Um…can we talk on Saturday, and just…I just want to kiss you.”

“We’ll get stuck if you keep it up.”

“I don’t mind,” Jayden whispered, and then his hands were fists in Darren’s curls, and that was definitely a peach he’d had at lunchtime.

Darren shut up and, for once, went with the flow.

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