Never Got Over You
So, I had this little idea a while back and was going to make it into a longer fic but I don't think I'll have time, so I've done it as a little three parter whilst I work out some finer details for the rest of Get Away.
The summary says it all really. This chapter is Ste's POV, next will be Brendan's, and third is a mix of the two.
I've never written in this style before so I have no idea if this is any good, or even if this story is interesting in any way. Some parts may be a little OOC, apologies if that's the case.
Please review to let me know what you think :)
1
You wonder if it's all in your head.
You know you were young, and the kind of things you remember – the feelings you remember – they aren't real when you're that young. Are they? They might have felt real at the time, sure, but that's because you were too young to know that there's a whole world out there. You were naïve. Inexperienced. You didn't know what love was back then.
That's what you tell yourself.
You tell yourself it was a teenage crush. Puppy love.
You tell yourself you need to see him though - just once - just to know for sure that you're over him.
You convince yourself that's what would happen. That you would see him, have a polite conversation, realise that fizzing in your stomach and breathlessness in your chest – the rapidity of your heart when it used to explode in your chest – you tell yourself that would all be gone, and you'd feel nothing; and you'd have closure. You're sure that's how it would go.
You're almost sure that's how it would go.
You think back to when you met him, when you were 11. He was in your form group. He was nothing to you to begin with – just a guy who got along with Tom, one of the lads who lived down your street and who you used to walk to the bus stop with. You and Tom had nothing in common other than your shared childhood spent re-enacting Gladiators games in your front garden whilst your parents left you to go off to their mutual drinking haunt, returning hours later when it was well past dusk and the gnats had bitten you both to death. As you grew up you both realised how alcoholism was tearing both of your families apart, and you spotted his bruises from time to time just as he spotted yours. Neither of you mentioned anything, though; but the unspoken knowledge made your friendship strained. You had separate friendship groups at school to alleviate the awkwardness.
Brendan became a well established member of Tom's group. Yours were mainly girls.
You remember when he first spoke to you. Food Tech, aged 13. You were paired together, and he made you laugh when his eyes lit up at the mention of using a blow torch to finish off the crème brulee. He quickly established it as his signature dish, despite you insisting that it had been mainly your hands that had created his so-called masterpiece.
You paired up with him for Food Tech every week from then on. You always suspected he chose to stick by you because he thought you were a good cook. He was always so impatient to eat the food you made. It warmed your insides to think that there was something he liked about you, and you got to know each other over the two years that you were partners in that class. Sometimes he would smile at you with such devotion in his eyes that you would have to look away before your heart stopped beating. Sometimes you would catch each other's eye and you would see him catch his breath in his throat, and you wondered if he was starting to feel that same unfamiliar lurch inside that you felt when you looked at him.
You looked forward to Food Tech every week. You were never ill on a Tuesday; neither was he.
You were 15 before the rumours started. You were never sure why people started to suspect you – or who started the rumours – because you'd never given anything away. Never looked at another guy for too long, other than Brendan. You'd never even admitted it to yourself, let alone tell other people. And you'd had girlfriends – plenty of them. A lot of girls in school fancied you, and there were a couple of house-party-bathroom-fumbles and numerous caught-behind-the-bikeshed moments that should have put paid to the rumours about you being gay. But for some reason, they had stuck.
You know now that it was probably one of the lads from your form group, one of the football team lads - who you now know is gay too because you saw him in the backroom of that gay bar up in Manchester. He had fled as soon as he'd seen you spot him. You're sure he must have picked up on it back then and spread the word to deflect any suspicion away from him, and you're sure he's probably just as closeted now as he was back then.
You don't hate him for it though. You know how it is.
You still hate Tom though, for turning his back on you once the rumours started. And you hate his group of tag-alongs who took it upon themselves to make your life a living hell. Despite your insistence that you'd never look at another man, it was as if they could see through you.
They started to push you around. Brendan included. After school, during school, down the park at weekends. Any time you were unfortunate enough to be alone in their company. You lost sight of which bruises were from them and which were from your abusive step-dad, Terry.
Sometimes you saw Brendan hold back when the rest of them laid into you, uncertainty clouding his expression.
Sometimes Brendan was the worst.
And they never stopped. Even when your best friend Amy Barnes gave birth to a baby girl six months later, and told everyone you were the father so as to save her having to tell people it was some random guy she met; they didn't stop. You thought it would prove your heterosexuality; but they didn't stop.
Something did change, though.
Brendan started looking at you differently, when he thought you were a father. He seemed confused.
He'd asked you about it one day – said he wasn't aware that you and Amy had ever been a couple. He found it strange you'd never mentioned her in class.
You weren't sure whether to tell him the truth or not.
You shrugged him off, and you wondered what the hell it mattered to him, but he looked back at you and it was like it used to be, before the rumours started. It almost looked like he cared again.
You noticed him watching you still, his eyes boring into your soul from across the canteen, or from whichever room you both found yourselves in together.
He always looked so conflicted.
A week or so later, you realised why.
It was after hours – you'd both been kept behind for detention – and you realised you were alone with him in the cloakroom, and you'd feared his wrath straight away, all too aware that if it were Tom you'd been left with, he'd already have you pinned to the wall.
But Brendan didn't hit you.
He backed you into the wall; but not like Tom would have done. He pressed his body up against yours, and he looked at you in the same way he used to in Food Tech, and you felt his hardness up against you, and you finally understood it all.
He pushed his lips against yours.
And your world changed in that moment.
You had hesitated, then kissed him back.
And your eyes had been opened to a whole new world.
Within two months you'd slept together – you'd done everything together. You were each others dirty little secret.
You found every excuse to be alone together, and you devoured every second of it when you were.
You kept it a secret, and over the year that followed you became closer to him than you'd ever been to another person. Physically, emotionally – in every way possible.
His friends still beat you from time to time; he still let them. A part of you understood; another part hated him for it.
You'd carried on seeing girls in your class. Maybe you did it to get back at him. Maybe you still wanted to believe you weren't gay.
He hated it, he asked you to stop. He said he couldn't handle anybody else touching you, thinking they could get close to you – even if he knew it was just for show. You told him people would get suspicious if you suddenly didn't have a string of girls on speed dial.
You didn't sleep with any of them anymore, though. That part of you belonged to Brendan. For that year of your life, every part of you was devoted to him.
Until you fucked it all up.
Until he pulled your strings one too many times, refusing to speak to you in front of his friends because they still saw you as the little queer; refusing to acknowledge you as you walked past him in the hallway.
You'd spend all evening fucking each other senseless, desperately searching for somewhere you could be alone together, taking al fresco sex to a whole new level; you'd spend all night in broken sleep as you text each other explicitness and dreamt of a world where the two of you were together in the open; and then you'd spend all day pretending you didn't know each other's last name.
You had enough of it. Amy had a house party, and Brendan was invited, and he ignored you all night, wouldn't even look you in the eye, so you made a point of letting Amy drape herself over you, and you made sure Brendan and all his mates heard you when you took her upstairs and fucked her.
He didn't speak to you for a month after that.
It was at the next house party – at some random lads house from your year group – when you broke your silence. You were horny as hell, and you missed him so much you cried at night, and you couldn't handle it anymore. So you followed him outside when he went for a cigarette, and you begged for him to talk to you, and he couldn't look you in the eye, and you felt the tears fall from your eyes, and he caught them with his thumb, and he looked as broken as you felt, and you knew he wanted to forgive you. You kissed him, out in the open, in the back garden. For a glorious second, he let you kiss him, and he kissed you back. He told you to meet him upstairs, and he went back inside, and you followed him discreetly. It was a massive house, and he found a bedroom that he locked you both into as soon as you walked in. He checked you were alone, and then he fucked you twice in the space of half an hour.
You told him you loved him.
You meant it.
He smiled back at you. You thought he wanted to say it too, but you knew he wasn't one for words. He kissed you, and that was as close to affirmation as you were going to reach.
The next day Amy told you she was pregnant with your son, Lucas.
You told Brendan after school. You went round to his – he was home alone – and you made sure he fucked you senseless before you dropped the bombshell, and you savoured every second of it because you knew everything would change when you told him.
You were right. He kicked you out – threw your clothes out of the front door after you – and told you he didn't want to speak to you ever again.
When he had calmed down a few days later, you found him online at the same time as you. You'd spent hours flirting on chat over the years – your conversations taking a rather more explicit nature recently – but your last ever chat conversation was one you've never forgotten. He told you to be the father you needed to be. He told you you had responsibilities now. And he told you he'd never forgive you for what you did across him with Amy. That he would never get over the sounds he heard as you'd fucked her in the room above him at that party.
You knew you had two months until you left school, and you asked him how you were meant to get through two whole months of seeing him everyday and never talking to him. He said he didn't care. He said he couldn't forgive you.
He stayed true to his word.
You still can't believe it's been over seven years since you last saw him. You know his family moved further away – to the other side of town – but he's still close enough. Close enough for a chance meeting on a night out, or in the shopping mall, or at the local music festival that everyone you know seems to go to. You know he isn't into the same things as you are, but he still has friends from school, he still speaks to people that you've bumped into numerous times over the years. So why never him?
You think about him all the time. You know it's wrong – you're married now, after all – but you can't help yourself. Sometimes you dream of him so vividly that you're worried when you wake up that you might have given something away – that you might have called out his name in your sleep. Your husband woke you up one morning with a blow job and you came so hard you'd almost screamed the house down, and he looked so pleased with himself that he'd done that to you, and you can't ever tell him that you had been thinking of Brendan the whole time. You were in that delicious moment between dreaming and sleeping and you had almost been able to smell the aftershave Brendan used to wear, and all of that orgasm had belonged to Brendan.
You met Doug when you were seventeen. He was at your college, doing a course in business management, and he offered you support when he heard about you coming out down the grapevine. He told you he was gay too, and that he was there for you if you needed someone. You liked him straight away.
It was only a few months after things had turned sour with Brendan, and you were drawn to his openness. He was warm, safe, loving. It was something you weren't used to, at the time. You fell for him quickly.
You still felt as if something was always missing.
You cheated on Doug, to begin with. Cheated on him with strangers, with one night stands from nights out. You cheated on him with Brendan. You were getting out of a taxi after a night out, waving at Doug as he drove off in the taxi, when Brendan stumbled out of a party at Tom's house and he dragged you by the elbow and fucked you in the alleyway that lead down to the park, and he didn't even speak to you, and you didn't use protection, and you'd been screened with Doug by this point and you spent months worrying about whether Brendan had given you anything before you plucked up the courage to get screened again by yourself and got the all clear.
That was the last time you'd seen Brendan. He didn't even speak to that night – just fucked you, kissed you like his whole life depended on it, then walked away.
You hadn't known whether to text him the next day, or call him. In the end you left it so long that the moment had passed. You didn't even know if he had the same number anyway.
Two years later, he added you on Facebook.
You spent four hours scouring every single detail on his profile. There wasn't much on there – you were shell shocked that he had even set one up – but you drank in every minor detail like you had been starved of him. You noticed that he'd got a moustache. It made you laugh, because on anyone else it would look ridiculous. But he totally pulled it off, and you smiled at how much it suited him, and you thought about how differently it would feel to kiss him with it.
The first thing you checked was his relationship status. It's Complicated with some girl called Eileen. You didn't like it. It's Complicated. What does that even mean? You worked out it must mean that it wasn't working but that neither of them wanted to admit it. You hated that it might mean Brendan might love her too much to let her go. You consoled yourself, told yourself Brendan wouldn't give Eileen what she needed – he was gay, after all – and that must have been putting a strain on their relationship. He likes fucking men, that's what would be causing the complication. Only you doubted he'd admitted it to her.
For a fleeting moment, you let yourself believe that he couldn't commit to anyone because he still loved you.
You gathered he was at University – Sheffield by the looks – and that he didn't use Facebook much. That didn't surprise you. He started his profile in September, and you guessed it was pressure from Uni friends. He had only ever updated his status twice in 2 months. He'd been tagged in a few pictures, sat in the corner of a packed room with a tumbler of whiskey; vacant expression. He was tagged in a club, looking bored to his teeth. He was tagged necking some girl that wasn't Eileen in a club, and you guessed that's why things were complicated between them.
You saw that he'd been tagged in a picture with Eileen too – a holiday photo of the two of them. You were curious, so you clicked on her photo's, and you grinned to yourself when you saw her profile wasn't set to private. You regretted it instantly. You found all her pictures, and Brendan was in so many of them. Turned out she was a friend of the family. Turned out they did everything together. You saw a picture of the two of them together on New Years Eve 2005 – you could see it all on the banners behind their smiling faces. You realised that you were fucking him around the time that picture was taken. You wondered if he cheated on you with Eileen; it left your blood running cold.
You had shut down the laptop and rejected Doug's call when it came through to you that night. You cried yourself to sleep with one man on your mind, and it wasn't your boyfriend.
You were living in London at that point. You were at Cookery School down there – a one year course Doug had agreed to pay for so that the pair of you could open your own restaurant up in Chester – and you did the whole long distance relationship thing with him for a while. It worked – the distance did you good, if anything – and when you returned, he had set up the business plan and found some premises that you both loved. You were half way through decorating the place when he proposed, and you'd said yes without hesitation. Within a year you were married and running your own restaurant business together. Another year and the business started turning a profit. Now you're downright successful – three booming restaurants, detached house in the Cheshire countryside and a holiday home in the south of France. You drive an Audi TT convertible. It reminds you of the day you and Brendan had been hanging around one summer's day and you'd walked past one parked on the kerb, with it's hood down, and he'd jumped in and let you take a picture of him on your phone with his shades on and he looked like a movie star.
You printed that picture out at the local Boots store on an instant photo machine, and you still had it at the bottom of a box in your wardrobe. Sometimes you take it out and look at it, and you remember him. Sometimes the tears prick the insides of your eyes when you let yourself think about him; when you see his smile beaming back at you.
You've never told Doug the real reason you chose to buy that particular car.
You always wonder why you've never bumped into him. You thought fate was meant to bring people together if they were made to be with each other.
You tell yourself it must be because you were just young. It was just puppy love, wasn't it? Not like you were part of some grand design of life, or anything.
You checked his profile from time to time, to see what had changed. One night, when you were drunk, you logged in and typed out a whole message to him. You never sent it, but you told him you were sorry. You knew it was you that fucked up – it was you that left him – and you wrote that you weren't sure if it was all in your head, and you weren't sure if you'd ever mattered to him the way that he mattered to you, and that you weren't sure if it would ever mean anything to him, but you told him you were sorry anyway, and that you hoped that he was happy, and that you would always love him.
You didn't send it.
You sobered up just in time to delete it.
After a few months – just after you announced your engagement – you went to check his profile as had become part of your routine, and you noticed that it had been deleted. You weren't surprised – you didn't think it would be his thing after all.
You missed him more than you expected.
When you're living back in Chester and opening up your restaurant, you meet up with some school friends and his name is mentioned in passing – something about him being arrested for a drug deal – and your heart physically aches for him. You yearn to know that he's alright.
When you see Tom on a night out a few weeks later, he nods to you across the bar as if he hadn't spent a year of his life making yours hell, and you nod back because you can't be arsed to hate him, and because he looks at you like he's sorry. And because you want to ask him what's happened to Brendan. But the moment passes again, and you lose sight of him, and you're left in the dark.
You kick yourself when you get home that night, and you search for his Facebook profile again on your phone as you're lying in bed. It's still deleted, and you try twitter just incase he's on there now. He isn't. You google his name but nothing comes up other than an old newspaper article about the time he chased down and caught a guy that had stolen his sister's handbag. He was fucking you around the time that photo was taken too, and it makes you smile.
You realise that you miss him.
Doug asks you what you're looking at when he joins you in bed. You tell him you heard an old school friend had been arrested, and you were looking for gossip but couldn't find any. You don't tell him that school friend was the love of your life. You don't tell him hardly a day goes by when you don't think about him.
You married Doug in a beautiful ceremony, surrounded by the people you love, and you mean it every time you tell him that you love him. You do love him. He's everything you could want in a guy, and your life together couldn't be more perfect. He's your best friend, you run a successful business together, and your kids adore him. Amy approves. He gets on with your friends, although you don't have many. He's attractive enough, and he makes you smile. And he's from New York, so he's already allowed you to travel further than you ever thought a scally like you would be able to.
He's everything you could ever want, and you really can see yourself spending the rest of your life with him. You love him.
But you know something is missing.
You still think of Brendan. You still wonder what if. You're still aware that you've never felt that gut-wrenching breathlessness with anyone other than him. And you know Doug will never be a match for him when it comes to sex. Brendan was out of this world.
You're watching TV with Doug one night, some American drama series that he loves, and there's a romantic moment where two characters finally end up together, and fireworks go off in the background. Doug laughs and passes comment about how nothing like 'the fireworks' exists in real life, and you laugh back, and you think of Brendan, and you realise you don't agree with your husband.
But you tell yourself it was just because you were young. You thought you loved him, and you thought he was incredible, and your body made you feel strange things because you were young. Because you hadn't been with anyone before. Because he was your first love.
You never forget your first love, they always say. But that doesn't mean you should end up with them, does it? And those feelings he used to give you – they don't last do they? You remember someone telling you that all those feelings you get, the fireworks, they're just chemical reactions in the brain, and they're scientifically proven to only last around a year. And you think to yourself – what have Brendan and I got when all of that fizzles away? You doubt he can give you what you know Doug can give you for the rest of your life – comfort, and security – so you tell yourself you're better off without him.
You try to be silently thankful that you haven't bumped into him in all those years.
But it feels like you're lying to yourself.
You're busy with Doug and the business and with Leah and Lucas, and the years tick by and you're happy. Everything is set up for you. Friends are jealous of your life – the perfect husband, perfect career, perfect children. They don't know about the aching inside of you. Nobody does.
You've never told anybody about you and Brendan. When you first came out to Amy, she asked if you'd ever fancied anyone at school, and you told her you fancied him. She laughed at you, and told you to keep dreaming, and asked if you were going to be one of those gays who only ever went after straight men. She had no idea, so you laughed it off.
You had no inclination to tell anyone else about you and Brendan. You didn't think anybody would understand. Most of your friends went to school with you, and you questioned whether they would actually believe you. You could prove it to them – you could produce the transcript of one of your online conversations that you'd printed off to keep for sentimental reasons at the time because he'd sent you a link to the song 'Angel' by Massive Attack and said it was one of his favourites, before he told you it reminded him of you, and that was the closest you ever came to a declaration of love. But you didn't want anyone else to see that. It felt too private – too personal.
And you didn't want to betray his trust, either. You weren't sure he would want anyone to know about you – if he was ready to tell the world who he was. So you kept it to yourself.
You carry it around with you. You carry around the memories, and you carry around the fact that you miss him, and you carry around the constant doubt about whether you actually ever meant anything to him.
You think about the memories of the two of you together, and you play over them time and time again, and you wonder if you elaborated any of it for you own satisfaction.
You wonder if it's all in your head.
