Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Hollyoaks or any of its characters, they belong to Lime Pictures and Brian Kirkwood.
John-Paul watched Craig walk away into the night, angry tears shining in his bright, blue eyes, before he turned and headed for home. He walked with his head bowed low, concentrating hard on the ground trying anything to stop him going over those evenings' events and trying still harder to push Craig as far as possible from his mind. Try as he might though his thoughts constantly lingered back to the disastrous engagement party, to the hurt and upset he had caused and most exasperatingly of all, to Craig.
His plan to split up Craig and Sarah once and for all hadn't been ideal he had to admit but for a split-second notice it had certainly been effective. Craig's constant lies and misleading promises had finally brought John-Paul to the end of his tether. He had reached complete desperation and desperate people do desperate things in the heat of the moment.
He didn't regret sending the text to Sarah, alerting her to the fact that whilst she was partying downstairs with her guests, her boyfriend was upstairs passionately kissing and ripping the clothes off of his best mate. John-Paul acknowledged that she had to know the truth before it caused even more pain further down the line and it didn't seem as if Craig would ever be the one to break the news of their affair.
So he had taken matters into his own hands, for once he was the one in control, he had the power to end Craig and Sarah's sorry excuse for a relationship, a relationship built on lies and deceit. Craig didn't love Sarah not really; he was just listening to what everyone else was telling him instead of heeding his own heart. Craig was prepared to sacrifice his own happiness just to play along and keep everyone else around him happy by doing what was expected of him.
John-Paul wondered, if he hadn't intervened, how much longer Craig would have kept on lying to himself, furiously denying the possibility that he might be gay. How many years before Craig finally stopped kidding himself? Would he have carried on until after he was married and broken Sarah's heart then? Or would he have taken his secret with him to the grave?
An opportunity to stop the facade had presented itself a few weeks previous to tonight but he had once again acted out of love for Craig and covered for him again. John-Paul had then learned earlier from Craig that was the very same day that he had proposed marriage to Sarah. John-Paul was enraged when Craig told him that he had proposed to keep Sarah happy and prevent her from learning the truth about his other relationship with him.
Up until today, John-Paul had known nothing of the engagement and this was the final straw for him, he snapped. Reckless with emotion and pure frustration, he no longer cared who knew about him and Craig, in fact he wanted the whole world to know that he was in love with Craig Dean and Craig Dean was in love with him.
He arrived at his front door and paused, not yet wanting to go inside and face the barrage of questions that his mum and sisters would hurl at him. Or worse, Carmel and his mum would rally round with a cup of tea and a sympathetic ear, Tina would try her best to offer advice and support and Jacqs and Mercy would go off on one, venting their anger at Craig and slagging off his family. Michaela would be the only one not to get involved, she was still somewhat envious of the constant attention that her older brother had been receiving lately since his 'coming out'.
John-Paul didn't want to have to deal with all this attention being heaped on him again. All he wanted to do was run up the stairs to his room, jam his headphones down over his ears, fall back onto his bed and just switch off for a couple of hours whilst he let his music carry him to another place. Though since he lived at the McQueen's there was zero chance of that, they'd probably pounce on him the moment he set foot inside the house. It wasn't easy being the only male in a household of over-protective women; in fact it was quite often an absolute nightmare.
It was getting chillier the longer he stood there waiting. John-Paul closed his eyes and hoped when he opened them that he'd be standing anywhere other than outside his front door. Slowly he blinked his eyes open; the same paint-chipped front door stared back at him. Finally he took his house key from his pocket, held it up to the lock and turned it slowly taking a deep breath before he pushed the door open.
Craig had been walking in circles around the village for about twenty minutes when he sank down onto a bench, cradling his head in his hands. He felt intense revulsion at himself for everything he had put the two most important people in his life through. He despised what he had become, he disgusted himself. The hurt he had caused to Sarah by his lies and deceitfulness was unforgivable.
He had genuinely loved her at one time but as his friendship with John-Paul had gained in strength so had his attraction to the other boy until he found himself experiencing phenomenally strong feelings that he couldn't explain. Those feelings had consequently turned his whole world upside down and now Sarah hated him and John-Paul, well John-Paul had every reason to hate him yet didn't seem capable of hate.
He had seen the burning anger in his eyes but even that could not disguise the love that shone just the same as always. Craig also saw pain there as a stray tear slid silently down his cheek. He longed to go to him and kiss away the tear, to try and undo all the wrong that he had wrought but he doubted that John-Paul would let him. They both needed time to think, about whether what they had could survive now everything was out in the open.
Craig reminisced back to a year ago, when John-Paul had walked into his life. At first he thought he looked to him as a brother and what he felt was no more than brotherly love but as the months wore on, even though he tried to deny it to himself, his feelings for his best friend ran deeper than that and so followed months of confusion.
The real turning point in their friendship had come shortly after John-Paul's tearful confession of love to Craig at Hannah's eighteenth. The night of the school dance-off had been eventful in more ways than one. Hannah, John-Paul's then girlfriend had caught him and Craig sharing a drunken kiss in the gymnasium and then proceeded to spread the news to the whole school. Craig had tried to talk his way out of it and had laid the blame solely with John-Paul, even going so far as to give him a good kicking, something he would always regret.
In truth Craig had for a few seconds meant for that kiss to happen. He was the one who instigated it, declaring first that he loved John-Paul before gazing into his beautiful blue eyes and losing himself in their brightness. Their faces had moved closer together and Craig was drawn to the perfect, soft mouth.
He had pressed his lips to John-Paul's, loving the taste of them and forgetting that what he was doing was wrong. Then as John-Paul had begun to kiss him back, Craig had jolted back to his senses with the feeling of being sick to the pit of his stomach. He wasn't gay, so what had he been doing kissing another bloke?
Craig allowed a sigh to escape him, if only John-Paul had never moved to the village, life would be so much simpler and he'd be free to marry Sarah without any complications. She was a great girl, beautiful and sexy, not especially intelligent but he could let that go. Most guys would give their right arm to have a hot, model girlfriend like her. So why was it that he had found himself lying in the arms of John-Paul, wishing he could lie there with him in his bed forever?
Thinking so much was making Craig's head pound and as he glanced at his watch, illuminated by the light of a street lamp, he realised it was getting late. Reluctantly he stood up and slouched off back to the Dog, feeling no better for having got some fresh air. Tomorrow he would have to make a big decision and he felt certain he'd find it easier to make that decision after a good nights' sleep.