Boy

His tie was always tucked into his shirt, between his second and third buttons, and was the colour of his school house. The one that didn't care about scoreboards and competitions. The one that was loud during morning assembly. He was a sloppy teenage boy with undone floppy hair that would get swept from his face in the wind and then stay there all day. His shirt was never tucked into his trousers. It billowed and creased and was smeared with grass stains and mud. He chewed on a biro once and it exploded in his mouth. Black ink pooled down his front like the cards in a psychiatrist office. His face didn't change and his eyes didn't move. He looked straight ahead as if he was waiting for a phone call that never came. He kept looking and looking. The class erupted into a laughter that didn't stop until our teacher told us all to settle down, trying hard to stifle his own snigger. I could tell he liked the attention.
I don't remember when he first held my hand. I can't recall the first time his fingers felt for mine beneath our desk. I don't know when he first said my name under his breath or beckoned for me from behind his hand. Once during class he spelt I love you on the table with his trigonometry set and then mussed his fingers through his inky hair and covered over his eyes until I looked away. It was the first time somebody had told me they loved me and after at lunch break I ate a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and imagined what our children would look like. They would have his eyes and his shoulders and I would teach them to be kind.
When he wasn't saying my name he was calling me them. He would shout across the playground and with his friends would laugh and kick footballs at my chest. He was hiding and all of us were trying to get through something and it was complicated and he was completely and hopelessly lost. I knew that if he looked for long enough he could find himself in me. I would hold him in my arms and wait there and he would realise that the two of us were the lucky ones. Him and me. Us. I was sure the answers to his questions were in my mouth and all he needed to do was search for them with his tongue and then piece it together in his own time. I was fifteen and it didn't seem that complicated; we could be happy if we wanted to be.
I would sneak out to meet him sometimes during class. Pressed up against a toilet cubicle door with inscriptions to teachers in pencil and pen scrawled across them he would hold onto my face and kiss me on the lips. Our bodies would knot together like bark. He bit on my ear one time and I could feel his smile on the side of my cheek and I smiled too. Another time he pulled my hair and said I had been bad. He smelled of tobacco. It was the smell of secrets.
He took me to a field near our school during a Science class and laid our blazers on the grass. There were cows somewhere hidden in the trees and I heard their calls like echoes in a canyon. After, with our shirts undone to our bellies and our feet piled on top of one another, he said my name and it flew into the air and then blew away. It sounded funny coming from his mouth now, in this field that wrote part of our story into its grass. As if it didn't belong to me anymore; as if it described somebody I hadn't yet met. Somebody foreign. We stayed there for an hour or so, talking occasionally and closing our eyes, until his arm became numb under my neck and the sun started to drop lower in the sky. That afternoon I drew hearts onto his palm with the top of my finger, each one getting bigger than the one before, until his hand was full of what I felt for him. He squeezed my finger with his own and rubbed over my skin with his thumb. I was his. All of me.

Anyway, three years later I bumped into him in a bar and he introduced me to his girlfriend. She had dark eyes and patterns on her finger nails and her hair was in plaits down her back.
"Thom, isn't it?" He asked, shouting above the music and stroking on my shoulder.
I nodded and took a sip of my drink, suddenly aware of my arms.
"I never forget a name." He said.

New Year

The wind was loud and sweeping, hoovering up everything from last year and piling it into neat bundles somewhere nobody could see. Yesterday still hovered above us like a cape. The walls shook. My toes curled inside my socks. I had never been less of a child. Each part of me felt older. I thought about us both sitting in chairs but I don’t know why. I saw you sitting on a chair with a wooden back. I imagined the edges of your shoulders against the wood. I imagined the yellowing bone, how it would feel in my mouth; the edge of your shoulder between my top lip and my tongue. Your hands were flat on your thighs like two coasters and your legs and your bare feet made L’s against the floor. I would search your body for every mark that was made before now and by something else. I would forget myself in you. I would disappear behind your skin. I would stop fighting and fall forward. I would be weak but I would be yours and the New Year would belong to us.

I thought I heard the sound of house keys but it was the loud, sweeping wind beginning to whistle, and I followed the noise until I was back beneath a grey, hovering cape, and you were somewhere else, in a chair that grazed your shoulders, getting ready to start again.