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Maybe he was meant to have dropped it. Maybe it was a message from Henry’s mum. Maybe she wanted them to meet again?
Maybe both their mums were in on it together. Maybe they were the ones whispering in his ear that Cameron had to make it happen.
Sighing, he pushed the box back under the bed.
The corner bumped another box. He squirmed closer on his belly, grabbed hold of the wicker edge, and pulled it out.
His lips wobbled. Dozens of pictures of Alicia stared back at him.
Alicia was beautiful, and silly, and smiled at Henry in every photo strip.
Henry was always smiling back.
Cameron pushed away the memories he could never be a part of and climbed onto Henry’s bed. He mimicked his pose, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling tiles, foot rubbing over the ribbing of the post. The pressure felt good rolling over the balls of his feet, shot an erotic charge through him, sending him back to last night.
He bit his lip and rolled himself tight in the blankets. His phone vibrated against his stomach through the pouch of the hoodie.
He scrambled into a sitting position and clicked open the email.
To: Cameron17Morland @gmail.com
From: Henrybatilney @gmail.com
Dear Cameron,
Did you know you sleep with your mouth parted? You mumble adorably senseless things that have a suspiciously quote-like quality.
It’s early, just past five. I leave in two hours and I still have to pack for camp, but I needed this hour to schedule emails for you. I’ve set them to ten at night, so I imagine you’re heading to bed.
I enjoyed our last emails, and I wanted to share a part of me too. We’ve danced around discussing it a few times, but watching you read The Charioteer touches me in a way I’m still grappling with.
It changed my life.
Or, it was supposed to.
I’ve never felt a book so much as when I found this in our library. I was nineteen, on a holiday visit from boarding school, and restless. I was off with Alicia, and none of the stories I tried to escape into satisfied me.
During a wild summer storm, I decided I’d try my hand at baking and found a cake cookbook in the library. I was surprised when I opened it. Wrong dust cover. It felt like uncovering a secret. Reading the opening chapters thrilled me, there on my knees behind mum’s armchair.
The moment I read Laurie’s first exchange with Lanyon, I was gone. My imagination was not let off the hook and never would be. I became a part of its pages. I took my hopes, assumptions, and understanding to the narrative so that Laurie became me.
It wasn’t only that I wanted to finish reading, it was that I had to.
At the same time, I was terrified someone would discover me and judge me. I kept the dust cover on the entire ten hours so I could say I was looking for recipes. My knees locked, my bum fell asleep. Still, I carried on.
I stopped only to look for a copy of Phaedrus. I couldn’t find one and I remember slamming my hands against the armchair. The armchair you tossed your gloves on when we danced. (More on that tomorrow. We all love a cliffhanger, eh?).
When I finished, I was thoroughly wrecked. I spent the remainder of my holidays stewing in thoughts, barely leaving the bed.
The book lingered in my mind, but life has ways of distracting us. On my return flight to London, I met Mike. Immediately aware of the strong physical attraction between us, neither of us was shy.
We exchanged numbers and for a couple of months explored what “we” might look like, and while we synchronized on one level, we never did on the other.
At twenty-one, I finished my undergraduate with honors, and carried on to my masters.
I knew on an instinctive level what I wanted my dissertation to be about. I felt it out with Dad one night over a game of Scrabble. He paled and cut off the conversation.
Confused and hurt, I wrote it anyway.
I told myself bravery was publishing this book in the fifties. Bravery was fighting a war. Bravery was following the call of the soul.
The least I could do was pick up a pen in the relative safety of the twenty-first century.
Writing became a necessity. I couldn’t rest until I’d formed conclusions into words on a page (or fifty, in this case).
It should have changed me. I should have used the lessons I felt to the bone and told Dad my truth.
I didn’t.
Some days, when I’m staring up at my tiled ceiling, I wonder which character I turned out to be, and what the future holds for someone like that.
Right now, I imagine you pausing with thoughts of your own. Maybe also sharing them with the tiles. Maybe drifting off into questioning what the nature of love is.
