1. Head Boy


    Date: 3/10/2024, Categories: Gay Male, Author: bysjreardon

    ... and snorted and said 'whatever', but he was smiling and glowing and happy. Like I said, perfect...
    
    "So, when's your sister get here?" I asked, hopping on one leg as I put my jeans back on.
    
    He sighed. "A week today."
    
    It really only hit me then. One week. Which for us was four days. Four days, followed by eleven non-fucking days, followed by three more weeks, which was twelve days - maybe one or two overhang days depending on exact dates? And then that was it. Summer break over, and we were headed in totally separate directions.
    
    I looked down at him lying there next to his balled-up t-shirt, long, pale and contented, and something in me seized. But I'm not done here! I thought. I amso far from finished with any of this...
    
    Realistically, though, I knew that once we went our separate ways, wewere done. Even if we did both come back here for summers - and with a sister in Melbourne, he might very well not - even if we did, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be this.
    
    I was in bed by half past one, but I never slept at all. I lay there stunned, disjointedly thinking and trying-not-to-think through the night and the tuis getting going chortling to one another shortly before a freightie roared through at about ten past four - the dawn, other birds joining in, starlings, thrushes...then the rapid schick-schick, schick-schick of the first commuter train shortly after six, an hour later than usual because it was Sunday...
    
    Then...I must have dozed a bit, because ...
    ... the next sounds I noticed were a door slamming and a car starting up. Right, yeah. Mum and Dad liked to go for a bit of a crawl around the markets on a Sunday morning.
    
    I forced myself up and made a coffee, parking my arse on the weathered back porch to drink it. Sipping at the hot liquid, I stared blearily out at the lawn - which I also only had to mow probably five more times, ever - and thought about how cruelly fucking ironic it was that for at least the last two years the main thing I'd wanted from life was to get the hell out ofhere, and now that it was in reach, close enough to touch, actually happening - I was totally dreading it...
    
    They kept coming, the reminders that we were running out of time. On December 29, six days into the eleven non-fucking ones, Symon called me. Like, actuallycalled instead of messaging.
    
    "Are you free?" he hissed, by way of greeting.
    
    Well, yeah. I had gotten up not long before, and didn't start work for five hours. I was very much free.
    
    "Then come down to Shed C," he told me. "I've escaped - but only until two o'clock."
    
    It wasn't clear what I was letting myself in for, bu-ut...it'd been six days. I went, despite having absolutely no plans to suck him between a rail shed and some bushes, not ten metres from the main trunk line. He wasin the shed, though. Somehow.
    
    "How thefuck did you swing this?" Was the first thing I said, a second after he grabbed me and pulled me in through the sliver that he had the door open.
    
    "Eh, I ...
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