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People think he comes from some broken home—that he’s got some tragic backstory when the reality is that he’s just too awkward for his face. Mostly, he lets them think it, because it grants him a pass when he doesn’t know what to do or how to act—that he’s tragic and Byronic or some shite.
It hurts him to hear her get up before the whole lot of them and speak like that, because he loves her and he wants her to see herself the way he sees her, but also because he didn’t know any of it. And how could he not know? What kind of selfish sod was he, that he couldn’t see it, when those scars on her thighs had been far too deliberate to be any kind of accident. He hadn’t been able to see past his fingertips and his own discomfiture to realize that she’d been struggling.
And he feels worse, watching her eyes skate over him, telling the whole world that she fantasizes about him, because a part of him burns with a fierce unearned pleasure that shames him. Why would she want anything to do with him now?
So he leaves. He just needs air. He’ll go back, because if she could be so strong, he could certainly face her again. But like the knight in shining armor she really is, she comes after him. And everything wants to come spilling out of him, and like the plodding idiot he is, none of it seems to be able to get past his teeth.
So he pulls her in and notes like he always does that she’s taller than him by a goodly number of centimeters, but he still feels strong, crushing her breasts to his chest, tracing out letters over the smooth pale skin of her back. She makes him feel that way, comfortable in his skin rather than just barely stumbling along as he so often feels he is. He realizes now it’s probably no accident that the two of them met over the common ground of music.
“I have to go back to the wedding,” she says, head bowed after he’s laid it all out for her.
“I know,” he tells her with a smile and he takes her hand and walks her back to the pub. They don’t have to say a word, because even though she never said it back, he knew. And he doesn’t feel so heartsick that he never knew what those scars really meant anymore, because unless he misses his guess entirely, he knows exactly what she’s thinking and it’s about him.
*
Her mum is awkward about them—not in a horrified ‘stay away from my daughter’ sort of way, which he is familiar enough with, but in the opposite way entirely. He decides the second way is worse. She cheerfully dumps condoms on them when he swings by to see Rae after therapy.
“What the hell?” he asks, looking down at the chain of Durex that was just tossed blithely into his lap by his girlfriend’s mother when he hasn’t even had a chance to do more than a bit of kissing.
“It’s revenge,” Rae says cryptically. When he raises his eyebrows at her, she laughs a little hysterically and tells him about how every time she’d needed to buy something embarrassing—condoms, lube, a book on orgasms—she’d claimed it was for her mum.
“Hang on, a book on orgasms?”
“Do you remember the magical orgasm gateway?” she says with a sigh, leaning back against her headboard.
Finn remembers the way Chloe had managed to make sex about as cringe-worthy as it had been when they were first learning about it in primary school and how even though she was Rae’s best friend, she couldn’t seem to resist digging at her about her experience. He wonders if Chloe realizes just how obvious her jealousy of Rachel is to the rest of them. Rae never seems to let it bother her, so the rest of them ignore it, but they’re a group of only six people and they’re not blind—well Izzy maybe.
“You ran off,” he recalls, itching suddenly for a fag and the comforting rush of nicotine in this bizarre uncharted territory their navigating. This all works so much better when there aren’t feelings involved, or his feelings anyway. When it doesn’t mean anything he’s a veritable Casanova, and now that it does he feels about as unmoored as a boat traversing a storm.
“I hadn’t had one yet,” she says, matter-of-fact, but she’s blushing a red just a few shades below the color of the Durex wrapper and he knows there’s more to this story.
“An orgasm?” he repeats stupidly. The condoms are still festooned across his knees. Is she ready for that? He’s older than her and clearly more experienced and it would be mental to think… He tosses them at the pile of books below the window. God, he’s ready. Is he not supposed to be ready? Is there a section in that book about giving orgasms to a girl like Rae?
“Whatever Danny Two-hats told you was a complete fabrication.”
This does not surprise him. He huffs out a laugh, letting his face do the talking for him. “Blokes masturbate when they’re bored. I can’t imagine getting to sixteen without an orgasm.”
“You mean…8 sneezes?”
“It is not like a sneeze!” he says, surprising both himself and her with his vehemence. Probably because even after Chop had bloodied his nose with the paprika he’d continued to insist it was true.
“Well, I know that now,” she tells him, face struggling against a smile. She’s got a secret though. He knows that face. The trick is approaching it sideways so that she’ll tell him without really meaning to.
“So was it all that Chloe promised?” he asks, slouching further back on Rae’s bed. She tucks her knees up under her so that he can roll closer. He pictures it for one short second and it sends a jolt straight to his cock. Perhaps Rae’s mother isn’t totally mad that they’ll do something up here in the bedroom with her and Karim just down the bleeding hallway.
“Well, I don’t feel completely transformed as a person—I just want to do it all the time.”
He laughs, unable to help himself and he thinks so strongly and clearly ‘I love you’ at her that he has to lean over and kiss her before it overwhelms him completely.
She’s good at it, even if she did remind him the first time he’d done it that it’s a bit like him kissing Archie. He pulls back, their lips sliding slickly apart, and she smiles sweetly at him, resting their foreheads together.
He thought he’d been so obvious in his helpless desire for her, but apparently absolutely nobody had known, although a day after the fact Chop claims he did.
‘right now?’ he traces high on her thigh, trusting her to know what he’s talking about. The question mark gets perilously close to the seam of her jeans.
“I always want to do it when you’re around,” she whispers, tip of her nose brushing his, and before he knows it he’s blushing. “God, you even look hot red as a tomato, why can’t I do that?”
He kisses her again, fingers skating through her dark hair and thinking of course she does. That’s her real madness that she doesn’t know that.