Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 10-1

Chapter 10

For the last two years, Jayden had had a life plan. Get the sixth form scholarship to St. John’s. Get straight As in his A-levels. Get into the University of Cambridge. Get a boyfriend. Live. In that exact order.

Somehow, he’d turned it over, and gotten the boyfriend before any of the rest fell into place. And being able to say ‘boyfriend’ in relation to himself was strange and heavy and amazing.

It was maybe a little soon for it. After that first (perfect, amazing, wonderful) date, they still mostly met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes they went for coffee to feed Darren’s addiction. Sometimes he played, but more often he abandoned the violin the minute Jayden showed up. Sometimes they worked on their homework or their revision (they had eight GCSEs in common, and Darren was scarily laid back about them). And always they’d end up kissing. Darren was an amazing kisser, and Jayden wanted to curl his toes just thinking about it, and once on the way back from Costa, Darren had taken his hand, right there in the road, and had held it all the way back to the theatre.

If Jayden got any higher, he was going to float right off the planet.

Darren was…perfect. Well, no, he wasn’t—he was sarcastic and he didn’t really talk about feelings and he had this slightly off air about him some days, like there was something going on inside his head that Jayden wasn’t allowed to know about—but…but he was perfect, all the same.

He kissed like the world was ending and he didn’t care because Jayden was right there. He let Jayden touch his hair and didn’t complain. He would play for him sometimes, especially if Jayden bought the coffee. He had big warm hands that felt so welcoming if he slid one around Jayden’s back, or held his hand. And he’d hold his hand! He held his hand in public, and he hugged him goodbye once when he left for home on Thursday night, right in front of Mum. He didn’t kiss him in public (or in front of Mum, thankfully) but Jayden didn’t want him to either.

And it was all the other stuff too. He liked some of the same music. When he’d finally added him on f*******:, Jayden had spent half an hour sifting through Darren’s timeline and had finally worked out that he could write like a normal, vaguely intelligent person, he just chose not to. He wasn’t into plays or books at all, but he watched a lot of TV. They both agreed that Lost had started off well, and Heroes had held it together for a bit longer, but the entire Star Wars and Star Trek franchises were exercises in time-wasting for nerds. He’d text him in classes and leave cryptic f*******: messages on his wall that nobody understood but them, and ignored Charley’s blatant online bullying attempts to get him to spill all Jayden’s dirty secrets. He didn’t think Jayden was stupid because he was bad at maths, and he wasn’t some stuck-up snob just because he went to private school.

He was gorgeous, and he was Jayden’s, and life was perfect for the whole of November.

All things considered, they didn’t have a lot of date-dates. They saw each other every Tuesday and Thursday—because Jayden wasn’t giddy enough to forget that Darren had agreed to be in the play, and had forced him into staying later and later on Tuesdays to rehearse with Pete—and they usually went out on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings. They went to the cinema a couple of times (and Jayden ignored the films entirely, because Darren held his hand like it was completely normal, and leaned over and kissed him in the middle of a really important part of last Saturday’s venture, and it was amazing) and back to Milzani’s one evening when Jayden’s parents were out and couldn’t grill him too much, and it was…

It was a relationship. Jayden was in a relationship. He had a boyfriend.

He’d never said the b-word to Darren. He didn’t even dare change his f*******: status yet. Darren was so laid back, so casual about everything, even the bullying, Jayden didn’t want to risk having such a serious talk so soon. He thought maybe in December, in time for Christmas. Then it would be a whole month and a bit—a month and a half, even—since they’d kissed for the first time and Darren had asked him out, and that was more sustainable, right? It wasn’t just testing the waters after a month and a half, right? They had to start swimming eventually.

Until they did…until then…part of Jayden liked keeping it a secret. Part of him liked having a secret. Mum didn’t believe in secrets. Charley definitely didn’t. She didn’t even know the concept of secret. To be able to have Darren, and keep him separate from everyone else, to keep him all to himself…

Right now, he liked this secret.