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“You could say that.”
There was a long silence. Alec wanted to ask Ed to elaborate, but this wasn’t the time or the place for a lengthy conversation. He knew from his own experiences at school how ruthless kids could be in making life miserable for anyone they perceived as different. Alec had escaped that himself. He had fit the masculine stereotype, and it was easy to pretend to be fascinated by girls, when in an all-boys boarding school, he naturally had very little contact with the opposite sex. He remembered how it had been for boys who had drawn unwanted attention by being gender non-conforming. The irony was that most of the boys who were teased for being queer at school were probably straight. Outward appearances were frequently deceptive, and half the boys doing the teasing weren’t averse to a bit of mutual masturbation on occasion, whatever their sexuality. All those teenage hormones made for a melting pot of sexual confusion.
“You should get back to your desk.” Alec hadn’t intended for it to come out as a dismissal, but the shutters came down on Ed’s face immediately, and the brief moment of connection they’d shared was over.
“Of course.” Ed straightened up from his position against the sinks and moved towards the door.
When he reached it, Alec called after him. “Ed?” Ed turned. “Thanks.”
Ed nodded in acknowledgement, and then he pulled the door open and was gone.
Alec was sitting at his desk.
The rest of Alec’s team had packed up and gone home. Ed had been among the last to leave, staying until nearly half past eight to finish the filing James had given him to do.
He’d left with a wave and a tentative smile. “See you in the morning.”
Alec had raised a hand and made himself smile back.
He sighed and rubbed his temples, the familiar ache indicating he’d overdone the screen time. He saved and closed the document he was working on, shut down his laptop, and then started to pack away the things he needed to finish this evening from home.
Alec was lonely.
Loneliness was such a fundamental fact of his life that Alec rarely paid attention to it anymore. But ever since the conversation with Ed earlier, in the bathroom, Ed’s words kept replaying in his head on a loop: That sounds lonely.
Alec had good relationships with his colleagues, just as with the friends he had socialised with at university. Yet hiding a significant part of himself meant he inevitably kept people at a distance. It was hard to develop any sort of close friendship while constantly worrying about giving away his secret.
Usually it didn’t bother him that he was so emotionally isolated. He’d had a challenging relationship with both his parents at the best of times. He’d never been particularly close to his younger brother, Caspar, either. Despite being only two years apart in age, they were very different in temperaments and interests. Caspar had been the wild rebel, whereas Alec had always tried to toe the line.
Alec leaned wearily against the wall of the lift as it descended to the ground floor, lost in unhappy memories.
Desperate to please his demanding father, Alec had worked hard at school and achieved what was expected of him. But it had all fallen apart in his final year at school on the day his housemaster had gone on the prowl looking for boys smoking illicit cigarettes in the shrubbery. He got more than he bargained for when he found Alec getting sucked off by Harris, one of the fifth-formers, a pretty boy with long eyelashes and a mouth like a vacuum cleaner.
Unfortunately for Alec and Harris, their public school—one of the top five in England—had been working hard to clean up its reputation after an old boy had published a scandalous memoir the year before. Prior to that unfortunate publicity, they might have got away with a stern warning. But now the game had changed. The headmaster was informed, their parents were called, and both boys were expelled immediately.
The fallout had been ugly. Alec preferred not to remember the hour he’d spent in his father’s study the day his parents brought him home. He still carried the scars from it—on his skin as well as in his psyche—and thinking about it still made him nauseous.
He’d only had a few months to go until his A levels, and he’d already had an unconditional offer from Oxford. Rather than sending him to another school halfway through the year, his father had kept him at home with a tutor. Alec suspected it was so that his parents could keep an eye on him.
Alec’s already difficult relationship with his parents had become intolerable during those few months. His father’s disappointment and obvious disgust was hard for Alec to bear, and his mother had hovered on the edges of their antagonism, trying not to get involved. Eventually, Alec managed to convince his father it meant nothing—it was only a bit of youthful, hormone-driven stupidity.
