“What is there to understand?” I asked. “How do you even know—you haven’t even kissed a guy!”
“Actually, I have.”
With those three words, the bottom dropped out of my world.
“What do you mean, you have? Who with? Who is he?” I was going to kill the mystery man, just as soon as I found out who he was.
“It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point, is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
I still remember the pain, the anguish, all my grief seeping into those two little words. Liam was attracted to men, had even kissed one. I hadn’t even done that and I couldn’t help but wonder why it hadn’t been me; why I hadn’t been good enough for him.
Why I would never be his first kiss.
His flinty blue eyes fixed on my too-plump lips, his mouth twisted at the corner. It wasn’t hard to see he was contemplating kissing me, contemplating just what an awful experience that would be. Like I didn’t know he could do a million times better than me; like I didn’t know he was completely out of my league. Even if I wasn’t his best friend, with all the platonic intimacy that includes, he wouldn’t have been interested. Who would?
And he hadn’t kissed me, never mind I was holding my breath in hopeful anticipation. Of course he hadn’t. He’d laughed it off and changed the subject and if I went home afterwards and cried myself to sleep, well, he didn’t know about it because I never told him just how strongly I felt. Friends were easier: if we were friends I got to have him in my life, keep him close in the only way I knew how. And if, one day, he found a boyfriend, a man he wanted to get serious about, I’d smile and be supportive and love him all the more in the privacy of my own breaking heart.
Then, six months after the Big Revelation, it had happened. We’d been to a party, got drunk on a bottle of god-awful White Lightning cider, he’d struck out with his then girlfriend—Hannah Jones, it really is true boys flirt by being mean—and afterwards, in the shadow of my parents’ front porch, he’d kissed me. I can’t pretend it was anything special: my main recollections are of the bittersweet tang of the cider, too much spit, and him, overwhelmingly him, his scent and the strength of his body when I plastered mine against it. It only lasted about ten seconds before he pulled away and, with a cocky grin, left me standing there in the cold and drizzly March night.
We didn’t speak about it, despite my hoping and longing that we would. I wanted to know what it meant, why he’d done it, when we were going to do it again. Instead Liam was all business as usual, and when I saw him cuddling up with Hannah bloody Jones at school Monday morning, I wanted to kill them both.
I didn’t, of course. I’m not a homicidal maniac, no matter how close I sometimes got to feeling that I could be, that I might have turned into some demented bunny boiler and screamed that if I couldn’t have Liam, no one could. I went on being the perfect friend by day while my heart broke over and over at night. The kiss we’d shared had taken on a dreamlike quality, something examined and re-examined from so many angles, over so many hours, that it barely seemed real to me anymore. Kinda like how you write the same word a dozen times and it loses its meaning; a splintered fragment of a once-known language.
Then he did it again.
Another girlfriend, another party, another knock back and another convenient excuse to come to me to get what he knew I was ready and far too willing to give. That time, he was sleeping over at my house and we spent what felt like hours necking on my bed. Just kissing. We were sixteen years old and horny as hell, but I swear all we did was kiss. I don’t know why. Maybe we were afraid of going further.
The next day he acted like it had never happened, and so the pattern began.
Over the years I’ve made a thousand excuses—to myself, to others—for his behaviour. I’ve tried to explain it in a hundred different ways; told myself he was scared to admit his feelings, scared to come out. Except he wasn’t. The bastard came out even before I did. And had a boyfriend first—a real, live, actual boyfriend. His name was Will and I hated his guts. It didn’t last long but he took Liam’s virginity, stole it from me.
I gave Liam my virginity in return, during a dry spell when it seemed any warm body would do. He only wanted a quick leg-over, but to me, it felt like making love.
And so the years passed. College, A Levels, university. We both stayed in Manchester, although we moved out of our parents’ houses to rent a flat together. He went to Manchester University because he’s smart as well as beautiful, and eventually got a job in some trendy little advertising company writing copy for million pound campaigns. I took my more average exam results to Salford and studied journalism, then got lucky enough to land a job with the BBC when they moved their operation up north.
We have our own places now, although we live pretty close. I bought a boxy little new build in Hulme, whereas he lives in The Edge, the swanky plate-glass building located right in the city centre, whose sail-like structure used to dominate the landscape before some developer built the Beetham Tower. I think Liam’s parking space cost more than my entire house.