Relief that he feels the same as me. Relief that I don’t have to keep my feelings to myself any more. That it’s all out in the open. That I’m not burdening him with my pestering affections and, in fact, probably haven’t been this entire time.
Next on the emotional menu comes the regret that we didn’t tell each other sooner. We could have been a cosy little unit for awhile now. Maybe not all this time, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had a crush on him since 2019.
Then comes sheer, unbridled hope. And happiness. And I’m crying now, but fuck, it feels so good to be loved and wanted in the same way I love and want him.
Eggo swipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
“I fucking love you,” he whispers.
“I love you too,” I say finally.
There are two beaches in Weymouth. One’s comprised of beautiful holiday-brochure-like golden sand, with Punch and Judy shows, and a helter-skelter, and ice creams galore. The other’s filled with extremely stinky pebbles and rotting clumps of even stinkier seaweed.
Eggo stands barefoot—an amazing feat of endurance in itself—with his hands on his hips, inhaling the salty, sulfuric scent of decay on the pebbly beach.
“That’s the smell of the ozone, that is!” he exclaims.
I’ve got no idea what he means by this, and he offers no explanation other than to just repeat himself until I’m also referring to the stink as “the ozone.”
The rain has let off this morning, but the skies are still overcast, and it feels later in the day and later in the year than it should. We’ve already checked out of our caravan. All our stuff sits in the boot of Eggo’s Land Rover, and we’re now teaching Logan how to skim stones on the definitely too-choppy ocean.
“It’s a rite of passage,” his father says.
But Logan’s terrible at it. He overhand yeets the stone into the sea like he’s pitching a baseball.
“No, like this,” Eggo says, keeping his arm tight to his body as he flicks it from his side. It completes four bounces along the surface before disappearing.
Logan copies his dad, but continues to be shit at it until suddenly he’s not. It’s like something’s clicked in his brain and now the stone bops twice, three times, and drops below the water.
“Yooooo!” he yells, and high fives Eggo, then me. “Bruh, I have a question?” He looks between us both, but we already know what he’s going to say.
Eggo nods at me sagely. “Okay, so yes, we’re boyfriends. Friends who are boys but are also boyfriends.” He sends another pebble shooting off for six bounces. “Noice.”
“Huh?” Logan scrunches up his face. “What?”
“You were going to ask if Uncle Aiden and I are boyfriends?”
“Oh. Nah. I was gonna ask if I could have an ice cream. Can I?”
Eggo simply shrugs. “Sure.” He crouches down to Logan’s eye level. “Listen, you can only have an ice cream if you promise not to tell anyone about me and Aiden yet. It’s alright for Mum and Bran to know, but nobody at school can find out, okay?”
“Why?” Logan asks.
“They just can’t. Maybe one day in the future we’ll make a big announcement, but it’s one of those grown-up things where you have to wait for Aiden and me to tell people when we’re ready.”
“Okay.” Logan looks at me. “Can you eat bin chickens? Do they taste like chicken or bins?”
“It’s an actual disco inside your head, isn’t it?” I say.
“Huh?”
I smile at Eggo. Logan reminds me so much of myself when I was a kid, only his rugby is spiders and wildlife . . . and animal-related mortality rates. I wonder where he’ll go in his life. Where his passions will take him.
“In fact, bin chickens taste like a secret third thing . . . mint choc-chip ice cream.”
Logan’s eyes light up.
“So, we’re not telling anyone about us?” I say as we eat our ice creams on a seaweed-infested concrete jetty. Logan is near the end, lining up pebbles along the edge and then flicking them one by one into the water. “Except, I suppose, Abs and Orlando, and Gadget and Owen.”
