When he’d given me the address to the place he was staying, I’d started to suspect I’d misjudged his situation a little, and walking down the street in question only solidified that conclusion. See, when I’d first bounded up to him out on those rocks, I’d done a quick sweep of his outfit and pegged him as poor. Takes one to know one, y’know? The shirt and shorts he was wearing probably cost barely ten dollars combined, and his shoes, while actually branded and probably not exactly cheap, looked pretty worn and were the kind of practical affair most teens wouldn’t be caught dead in—unless they were the best thing they could find at a thrift store or they’d been taught young to invest in things that’d serve them well and last.

Turned out I’d been wrong and this dude came from money, or at least enough of it to rent out a nice holiday house instead of staying at one of the many caravan parks that littered the area. He probably just hadn’t wanted to wear nice clothes to the beach, especially since for some reason he’d decided sneakers were the go for that one. To be fair, they had served him well on the rocks other than getting completely waterlogged.

It wasn’t like the house he led us to was a mansion, but it may as well have been compared to the single bedroom apartment I called home. My standards were so low that a regular three bedroom in the suburbs felt like crazy excess. I was ready to bow out, job done, and leave him at the door, but when he waved me inside, I found myself following him.

He whisked me across a tiled living room and into a bedroom down a short hall. It was a holiday rental, so the room was rather generic. Just a bed, a nightstand, a framed print of some gentle abstract art on the wall.

I sat down on the bed and averted my eyes a little too slowly as he pulled off my hoodie, his shirt rising with it. He tossed it to me, then grabbed a moss green throw blanket that clashed badly enough with the peach decor that I could only assume it was his and draped it over my shoulders.

He dug through a duffel bag on the floor and piled things out. Clothes and a collection of snacks, the latter of which he collected up and placed in my lap on top of my hoodie.

“I’m going to go take a quick shower and get changed, but you can finish my car snacks if you want,” Ethan said. 

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” I said to his back as he left the room, suddenly unsure of myself. This had all felt painfully heterosexual after he’d spent ten minutes staring at tits, and even before that, I hadn’t really let myself start thinking otherwise. But being parked on his bed and given snacks and a blankie sure was flooding me with all sorts of confusing feelings.

But maybe that was just me being starved of affection. The closest thing I had in my life to someone showing me care was my boss giving me a cash raise so that I’d have some money to tuck away that my dad wouldn’t know about. And really, that was no small thing, but it didn’t make me feel all soft and needy inside like Ethan wrapping me in his blanket had.

Ethan’s car snacks were more rich people shit. Chocolate covered chickpeas, sesame snaps, and apricot bites. Actually, maybe the concept of snacks in general was just rich people shit in my mind. Really, any food that didn’t feature a heavy base of rice or cheap pasta was a luxury to me these days. Not that things had ever been much better, but they were definitely getting worse now that I was an adult—simultaneously expected to take care of myself, but also to give every dollar I made to my dad.

The chocolate covered chickpeas were pretty good.

I pulled my hoodie on, and fuck, it smelled of him, which really wasn’t helping all the big gay feelings I was having. To make things so much worse, Ethan walked back into the room just as I was lifting the fabric up to get a deeper huff.

“Did I stink it up?” he asked, eyes tracking me. He’d changed into sweatpants and a hoodie of his own. “I got gunk from the rocks on the sleeves. Sorry.”

There was a bit of mud and algae on the ends of the sleeves, not that I cared. I shook my head. “Smells like citrus.”

“Oh!” He dug in his bag for a moment and then handed me the stick of deodorant he’d fished out. “Lime.”

Bergamot and lime, actually, according to the label. The fuck was a bergamot? I took the lid off and gave it a sniff. Not bad.

“I don’t even know what my deodorant is supposed to smell of,” I said as I handed it back. “I’m pretty sure it just says ‘fresh’ or something on the bottle.”

Ethan shrugged. “Yours isn’t bad, actually, but I’m naturally suspicious of anything that won’t just tell me what it’s supposed to smell like.”

How’d he know what my deodorant smelled like? Oh, right. My hoodie, my arm around him, our bodies pressed close together on the bus seat. Gay, gay, gay.

“Uh, so, um. Do you want my number?” I offered. “You know, just in case you need help again and your dad isn’t picking up.”

“Or I could do the clearly sensible thing and just not leave this house again until we go home.”

I flopped down on the bed, letting my legs dangle off the end. “Yeah, that also works.”

I was ready to take that as a clear rejection, but a moment later something nudged my hand. When I spread my fingers, Ethan pressed his phone into my palm

After entering my number into his contacts, I took the opportunity to have another quick glance through his gallery. I wanted to ask him about the sprouts and flowers and bees, listen to him talk about something that so clearly brought him joy, but he hadn’t seemed all that eager to get drawn into conversation about it earlier. 

I passed his phone back and stayed laying where I was, listening to him move around the room. What if he came over here? What if he, I don’t know, slotted himself between my thighs, pressed his hands down against my chest, blanketed my body with his own…

Then the best two minutes of my life as we rubbed off against one another, coming way too soon because I doubted he was any less of a virgin than I was. Well, at least not much less. I set the bar on the floor with that one.

I pulled his throw blanket over me to hide the effect my thoughts were having on me. I wasn’t usually this much of a hornball, but there was something about Ethan that made me want in ways I didn’t fully understand but were clearly rapidly escalating.

But then the more I tried to distract myself from those thoughts, the more I started to realise that we were just both hanging out here. In silence. Frankly, it felt like a hint to leave, and the only reason I doubted that at all was because he’d invited me in to begin with. But maybe he was just being polite.

I sat up, tossing the blanket off my lap now that I’d calmed down enough to be decent. “Well, I should—”

The sound of the front door opening interrupted me. I heard the murmur of voices from across the house. Ethan slipped out of the bedroom and I followed a few steps behind as he made his way down the hall. 

He stopped at the end, arms folded over his chest and hip leant against the wall as he looked into the living room. “You didn’t turn your phone back on.”

I heard a man say, “Ah,” and then, “Everything okay?”

This seemed as good a time as any for me to make an appearance. If I waited much longer, I was going to start feeling like I was hiding. I stepped around Ethan and gave an awkward wave.

The man standing in the living room had hair a couple of shades closer to ginger than Ethan's and a beard to match—short and thick and flecked through with grey. He was more solidly built than Ethan, but they had the same gentle features. Ethan’s dad, I guessed.

I was less sure about the woman standing next to the man, her black hair in a ponytail and a wide brimmed sunhat in hand, because she was Asian and as far as I could tell, Ethan was not even a little bit. Stepmum, maybe?

“Oh!” the man said when he saw me. “Hello!”

I stepped forward and offered my hand. “Rueban.”

“That’s not what you told me your name was,” Ethan said accusingly, making my handshake with his probably-dad a little awkward. I definitely hadn’t lied to him about my name, but the way he was looking at me was making me feel like I had.

Then it hit me. “Rue’s short for Rueben.”

“Oh,” Ethan said, eyes slightly narrowed like he still found the inconsistency a little suspect.

Fortunately, his dad just laughed. “Nice to meet you, Reuben. I’m Connor, and this is Wendy.”

“Ah, yeah, nice to meet you,” I murmured, not quite knowing how all this was supposed to go.

Ethan held his leg out to show off the bandage. “I slipped on the rocks and Rue took me up to the lifeguard to get patched up, then helped me get home.”

Cutting out the part where we got stuck on the rocks for a couple of hours was probably wise, especially since Ethan seemed to think he’d been in a lot more trouble than he actually had been. There were plenty of places to climb up onto the rocks along that stretch to escape the tide. Ethan would have figured it out on his own once the water got close enough to scare him more than climbing the rocks did.

Connor quickly slipped his phone out of his pocket and guiltily switched it back on right then and there. “Thanks for helping out my son, Reuben. He’s always had a bit of wanderlust in his heart, but it still manages to catch me by surprise.”

“Dad, can you give Rue a ride home?” Ethan asked, blessedly freeing me from having to respond to his dad’s thanks.

“Nah, it’s alright,” I said, waving them off. “My place is only a half hour walk from here. I’ll be fine.”

More like forty five minutes, but whatever.

“I’ll drive you,” Connor said, already grabbing his keys, his tone leaving no room for argument.

“Pick up some Betadine and bandages on your way home,” Wendy added. “I’ll rebandage that for you later. Okay, Ethan?”

“Wendy’s a nurse,” Connor explained as Ethan nodded. “I’ll grab a first aid kit. We should have one in the car, just in case.”

The whole lot of this was so fucking foreign to me that it was blowing my mind a little. If I hurt myself, that was my problem, and it had been for as long as I could remember. I’d wash off in the shower, maybe tape some toilet paper to it if it was really bad, and call it a day. Hadn’t failed me yet. My dad could win a billion gajillion dollars in the lottery tomorrow and I still couldn’t imagine him going out of his way like that to patch up my boo boos.

And there was a voice in my head that said that was the way things should be, that you should be a man and suck it up. But there was another part of me, a part that was no voice and all feeling, that was just jealous. Nobody had ever cared about me like that. Soon enough I’d be grown, fully a man, and it would be more than just my weird, neglectful dad who didn’t think I needed any taking care of. The whole world would agree, because men took care of themselves.

Except maybe, sometimes, a man draped a blanket over another man’s shoulders and gave him snacks. That kind of thing had to happen in gay relationships, right? It couldn’t all be stoicism and rugged, uncaring individualism. A relationship had to have at least a little bit of softness some of the time.

Or maybe that only happened in movies and relationships were just disappointing sex and shared finances. How would I know?

Connor struck up conversation as soon as we were in the car, him in the driver’s seat and me and Ethan in the back.

“So, Reuben,” he said. “Are you in school?”

“No,” I murmured. “I work at a petrol station.”

“Taking a gap year?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “We just really need the money right now, so I can’t…”

Connor rubbed the short bristles of his beard. “I’ve been there. At one point, right after we started the nursery, I was taking a business course, working another job part time, and helping at the nursery in any free time I had—the nursery, that was Ethan’s mother’s baby, really. And of course Ethan was a baby at the time, so forget about sleep.” He chuckled. “No, he wasn’t too bad. He hated being a baby, but he also hated the sound of his own crying. Miserable first few months, but once he figured himself out, he didn’t fuss too much.”

I did my best to suppress a grimace, feeling suddenly inadequate. I knew I should be doing more, working harder to get out of this rut I lived in, but it was kind of fucking hard when you were eighteen and all the people who should have been helping you figure life out had abandoned you. “I’ve been trying to get a second job so I can help out more, but there aren’t a lot of places hiring.”

That was a fucking lie. Well, not the part about applying for other jobs, or them not hiring—that was true. But if I did get a second job, I was keeping it a secret and hoarding every dollar I made for myself.

Connor shook his head, his eyes catching mine in the rearview mirror. “You’re a bit young to have to worry about all that.”

“It is what it is,” I said. “Uh, just here is fine.”

‘Just here’ was down the other end of the street from the apartment block I lived in, outside of a random house. You’d think I could swallow the shame of letting them see the shithole I lived in after I’d already made it pretty clear I was poor, but I guess not.

I thanked Connor for the ride, said a quick goodbye to Ethan, then got out of the car. It stayed exactly where it fucking was. After an awkward couple of seconds of waiting for them to leave, I realised Connor was waiting to make sure I got home safely—or maybe just calling me the fuck out, because even if the houses here weren’t the nicest, they were too nice for the likes of me. 

I tried not to be too obvious as I glanced around and quickly spotted a house that had its front door round the side, out of view of the road. Doing my best to look natural, I made my way around until they couldn’t see me, then I shoved my hands in my pockets and waited until I heard the car pull away.

How’d I manage to end the best day I’d had in years feeling so miserable?