This is Not a Love Story (7 page)

With that thought circling desperately round my head, I finish his drawing and tear it out. I get up after I hand it to him and just about run away down the hall, praying the bathroom is empty so I don’t have to see what he thinks about it.

Maybe ten minutes later I walk back and see Julian is still just staring at his picture.

The lights are dim now and, even though it’s early, all around the room everyone is settling down.

How fucking easy we are
, I think hopelessly.

Without looking up, Julian reaches out and pulls me down. He doesn’t say a word. He just holds me. I’m grateful. I don’t think I could look at him anyway.

We must just fall asleep like that. I have to admit, for me it’s strange. I don’t sleep easily. It takes me a while to relax, and even then I feel I am half-awake most nights, listening out for trouble.

But this time the sleep is deep, and I am dreaming. A nice dream—a really nice dream. One of those dreams that makes you feel good for hours after. I’m with someone. I can’t see their body or their face, but I can feel them all around me, skin against skin, and I know who it is. Who else is there? He tells me I’m beautiful without saying a word, because we have this connection, because he’s inside me and his tongue is in my mouth and all I can hear is this one long note of sound….

I blink my eyes against the dark. The sound is still all I can hear. Warm breath humming against my ear. Julian.

And I’m still sort of out of it, but that nice feeling? It’s even fucking nicer now.

I don’t know how we ended wrapped up in one another on the floor, considering I went to sleep straddling his lap, but now we’re spooned on our sides, Julian’s front against my back. One of his arms is beneath my T-shirt, locked around my chest and pulling me tight back against him, the other—I’m stroking my hand lightly up and down the other as his palm presses against the fly of my jeans and agonizingly slowly rubs up and down over my aching erection.

Oh God, I must be fucking dreaming still
, I think as I gasp.

It feels so good it’s almost painful. His fingers brush against my cloth-covered hips, and I can’t help but tilt them up and push back into his open hand. The friction is unbearable.

He’s still humming against my ear as I choke back gasp after gasp.

Does he even
know
what he’s doing?

Each stroke is so unbearably slow I think it might kill me. But I want it to. I want to die like this over and over. I want more. I want skin against skin. I want his hand to reach down inside my pants. I want to be wrapped in his fist. I don’t want to last long. I want to come. Oh God, I want to come.
Make me come
.

And then he’s not humming. He’s whispering and licking my ear.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,” he says over and over, and I press my hands down over his, all of it so tight, and my whole body convulses as I come.

I
DON
’
T
remember anything after that. I blink out of existence into a fathomless sleepy dark and am touched by nothing, no dreams, no movement.

A
N
ICY
draft wakes me. I shift backward, searching. But there are no warm arms around me, no warm body next to mine. I am alone. In fact, as I open my eyes and look around the room, I see it’s mostly empty. Blankets strewn everywhere. The edge of everything feels… cloudy. Something is wrong.

Phillippe blinks groggily awake a few feet away.

He glances around, looking as puzzled as I am.

Julian must be in the bathroom.

The front door is banging listlessly open and shut in the wind. I can see it’s light outside, that blue morning light you get sometimes in winter, but I’ve no idea what time it is.

There are only two others in the room with us. Last night we were twelve. They both look around, perplexed.

Something is wrong.

I stumble to my feet, feeling sick and shaky before I even get to the bathroom. The door is open, and I know it’s going to be empty. I know that Julian isn’t there, but I can’t believe it. I can’t accept it. I don’t even recognize the familiar grip of panic locked around my chest, stealing my breath; everything just goes violently black.

“R
OMEO
…?”

My head hurts. I don’t want to open my eyes.

“
Is he okay
?”

“
What happened
?”

The bathroom floor reeks of piss. The smell disgusts me but not enough to make me move. If I move, I have to accept this is reality. And it’s not. It can’t be.

Voices fade in and out of the room. Someone closes the front door to stop it banging.

“They’ve all gone. Even Malik and the dog. All their stuff, everything….”

“Look… the rooms are empty….”

“Is there anything to eat?”

“I think we should get out of here…. Maybe it was a gang thing….”

“I don’t feel so good….”

“You feel fuzzy, right? Don’t you get it? We were drugged….”

“Last night… that drink….”

I roll painfully onto my back. Oh. That bitter drink…. I didn’t feel right…. I don’t feel right.

But why? Why would they drug us?

Phillippe steps into the room and crouches down next to me.

“Are you okay?”

I stare up at the yellow stains covering the bloated ceiling. He
must
know I’m not. That I can’t be….

Where’s Julian?
I sign desperately, before I can get ahold of myself.

“I don’t understand you,” he says quietly, helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

Please. Where’s Julian?

I know if I work myself up, I’m going to have another panic attack. I squeeze my eyes shut. If I think about not seeing him again, about something bad happening to him, about not knowing if something bad has happened to him or just not knowing… not knowing where he is, if he’s hurt, what am I going to do? Oh God, what am I going to do?

“Is he okay?”

“Move out of the way. He’s hyperventilating. I know what to do. My mum used to have panic attacks like that sometimes.”

I feel a pressure like a hand in the middle of my chest. Like a fist.

I can’t breathe.

“It’s going to be okay….” Someone takes my hand, holds it between both of theirs. “You know why it’s going to be okay? Because whatever you feel right now, it’s going to pass.” The voice pauses as I take in a shuddery breath of stale air, then carries on. “It’s not going to last, nothing lasts, one moment always follows another… the good, the bad, the fucking awful. I take it this is one of those fucking awful moments, right?”

I nod. There are tears streaming down my face.

“Well, it’s not always so fucking awful, is it? Probably it’s mostly just bad with a few bits of good and the occasional fantastic—I mean that’s how I see it anyway. And if it’s mostly just bad, it makes the fantastic bits better, right? So what if that means the good bits are probably just mediocre really, I don’t care….”

The boy babbles on, and I open my eyes, breathing a little easier. He smiles. He has short brown hair and very pale blue eyes. He looks a bit older than me.

“I’m Peter. I saw you come in the other night with your friend. Have you been on the street long?”

I shrug. What’s long? A week, a night, an hour?

“He can’t talk, he’s mute.”

Peter glances back at Phillippe.

I mime scribbling in the air, and Phillippe goes to get my pad and pen while I drag myself upright and lean listlessly against the bath.

A horrible cold numbness seeps through me, leaving my limbs uncoordinated and heavy. I just don’t want to move.

Peter introduces the other boy hanging around the bathroom door as Nathaniel.

Nathaniel looks nervous and paces backward and forward, in and out of the room. Maybe it should be annoying, but I find I don’t really care.

Phillippe hands me the pad, and I write.
I need to find my friend, Julian. What happened? Where did they go?

I’m not stupid. I
know
Peter doesn’t know any more about what happened than me, but there is some bizarre, hollow comfort in asking stupid questions, in talking about Julian—it makes him exist beyond my feelings.

“He didn’t tell you he was leaving?”

I shake my head. I can feel my eyes filling up again. Fuck, I’m pathetic.

“I don’t know what happened. I came here four nights ago. Malik said I’d have to earn my keep like everyone else, and I’ve been having my picture taken at that house and then coming back here, like you. I didn’t really know any of the other boys, apart from Nathaniel. Different people seemed to come and go. But I’ve taken enough sleeping tablets to know they drugged us last night. It was probably in the drink—easy enough to crush up a bottle of tablets and mix it in. If I had to guess, I’d say they did it so there was no trouble. I don’t know whether everyone went willingly, but there’s no sign of any struggling anywhere, I don’t think.”

Julian wouldn’t have just left me
, I write shakily. I have to hold on to that.

Peter smiles tiredly and nods before unfolding his legs and standing up.

“We should leave. I doubt this place is going to be empty for long, and I’d rather not be here under anyone else’s terms.”

I don’t want to leave. If Julian comes back, how will he find me? But I don’t want to stay either. I hate the filthy flat with its warren of dark rooms and bricked-up windows.

I hover by the front door, so undecided, so unsure. Every decision feels like it’s the wrong decision. Every choice left to me doesn’t really feel like a choice at all. What do I do?

As Peter collects all the blankets and Nathaniel agitatedly roams the room, Phillippe walks over to me and almost reluctantly hands me a piece of paper—I know it’s the drawing I did of Julian. I know it was probably left on the floor in the corner we slept in. I know it’s not some sort of sign, but I can’t look at it.

Panic flutters through me, but the exhaustion I feel is now so profound, so complete, it’s all too much.

The door bangs against the wall as I stumble outside. Somehow I can’t believe the fucking sun is shining. The glare of light on the puddles on the walkway is painful.

“I’ll stay with you,” Phillippe says from the doorway behind me. “You won’t have to be alone.”

I can’t even nod. Something vital has been ripped out from inside me. I’m just an empty husk.

Down below us everything looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, but it’s not. It’s fucking not.

I want to go to the white house.
I pull out my pad and write quickly.

I want to see Vidal. I will do anything to see Vidal, for him to tell me where Julian has been taken. Because that’s what they’ve done, they’ve taken him. That is the only explanation that fits.

Oh God.

It’s like being punched.

Phillippe glances quickly at my scrawl before looking away embarrassed.

“I can’t read,” he says, shaking his head.

Fuck.
I write
fuck fuck fuck
until I have wasted a whole page with obscenities, and I rip it out and throw it over the railing, watching it hover on the wind before spiraling hopelessly to the ground.

P
ETER
STEPS
out the front door and hands me three blankets. I take them, but they’re heavy, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them. I know Phillippe finds it difficult to carry stuff. It’s not his fault, but I can’t carry all these on my own.

Julian and I used to hide our covers in the daytime, mostly at Cassey’s, but where am
I
supposed to hide this? I don’t know this area at all. I don’t want to.

I force myself to ignore the vision—and all the feelings attached to it—that appears when I think of him. It hurts like hell.

“We’re probably going to go up to the heath. We’ve stayed around there before. Do you want to stick with us for a while?” Peter asks, looking at me more than Phillippe.

I must seem truly pitiful. But I like Peter. He has this understated confidence that makes him seem strong. He’s the sort of person who knows what to do when things go wrong, the sort of person I want to trust.

I pull out my pad.
Phillippe can’t understand me. He can’t read or sign. I need someone to help me speak to Vidal. Come to the white house with us? Please?

Peter glances at Nathaniel, who’s listlessly kicking the doorframe.

“Vidal’s not going to help you. I know you want to find your friend, but they’re not the sort of people to help anyone.”

I have to try
, I write, desperately.

Peter solemnly shakes his head. “I want to help you, but I don’t want to go back there and get dragged into anything. For all we know, Malik could have been supposed to take all of us.”

I stare at him disbelievingly.
So you do think they were taken? Please come with me, Peter. I have to find him. Please.

I’m not above begging and allowing myself to look as helpless as I feel. I’m not above using him or anyone to find Julian. Although that thought leaves me cold. But it’s the truth. I don’t care about them, not really. I don’t care about anyone, myself included, like I care about Julian. And I feel horrible for thinking like that; I feel like a horrible despicable person. But nothing else matters.

Peter, however, is resolute.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he does look sorry as he and Nathaniel share their blankets out between themselves and then head down the walkway to the stairs.

I’m sorry too as I watch them leave the building and walk slowly across the squares of mud and concrete until they round the corner of the block and vanish.