Abroad

chapter 4-1

4

Dex was a bit of a mess. After Nick stayed over Saturday night, Dex made the mistake of checking his uni email. Then he began to panic.

Now he was at work, pulling pints and attempting his level best to stop thinking about everything else, such as his tutor’s dire reminders about his data set being due, the pile of reading he needed to do prior to sending it, and Nick.

Sort of constantly Nick.

“Hey, man, can you grab the ones at the end of the bar?” Tosh asked as his fingers flew over the keys on the till.

Dex obeyed almost on autopilot, barely making eye contact with anyone, just doing his level best to remember: rum and coke, Stella, cider.

Rum and coke, Stella, cider.

“Hey, you.” Dex looked up at the familiar voice and nearly dropped the half-filled glass of beer.

“Nat? f*****g hell, hang on.”

He finished the job, grabbed the money, dropped it in the till, then turned back to where Nat was drumming her fingers on the slick surface of the bar, gazing off into the distance.

“Get you anything?” he asked automatically.

“Corona, ta.”

He went through the motions, then leaned on the bar as she took her first sip and waited. When she didn’t speak first, he ventured, “So, what’s going on?”

She leveled him with a look, then sighed. “Avoiding the house.”

He gave her a look of his own. “I’ve noticed.”

“I know. I know. I’ve f****d up.”

“Well, not, like, permanently … but you can’t avoid her forever, you know?”

“Ugh.” Nat took another, longer, sip of her beer. “Can’t I try?”

“Nat…”

She slumped down. “Christ, this sucks. Why did I have to—I dunno, go and tell her? Why did she have to mess with my head like that?”

Dex frowned. “She—”

“Like, I had her all sorted into a category, you know?” Natali interrupted. “Isabel—look, don’t touch. Friend. Done. Sorted. And then she had to go and turn … queer or whatever, and, like…”

Dex waited, wondering where this was leading this time.

“I know it isn’t like that,” she went on, slumping down further. “I just feel daft as hell.”

“Why?”

She gave him another look. “I blew up, then avoided her, then proclaimed my love. Now I’m avoiding her again. What am I, a twelve-year-old boy?”

Dex bit his cheek.

“I will twist your nips right here and now if you laugh at me,” she warned.

He bit down harder, than belatedly wrapped a protective arm around himself. “Okay, but like…”

She threw her hands up in the air. “I know! It’s b****y ridiculous. I’m not even—I just f*****g miss her, you know?”

“So f*****g talk to her.”

“Can’t.”

Dex sighed rather patiently. “Why is that?”

“’Cos I’ve been a f*****g i***t, why d’you think?”

Dex stepped back and took a good, long look at her. “Nat, why’d you come here?”

Her face went through a serious of expressions—annoyed, snarly, then finally resigned. “Wanted a chat. Thought…”

Dex waited, then waited some more. “Thought … what?”

“Ugh. I guess I needed you to shake some sense into me.”

Ah. He did his best to conceal his glee at being considered someone who could shake sense into anyone. “How’s that going?”

“Not terribly well, thank you very much,” she responded. “Sorry.”

He shrugged.

“All right. All right, you’ve talked me into it. I’m gonna text her.” Nat fished out her phone, scrolled through whatever notifications she found there, then heaved the most put-upon sigh Dex had ever heard. Man. He’d missed her. “All right.”

He did his best not to laugh—again—as she began narrating her typing. “Hey … Sorry for being a f*****g nutter. You home? There. Now I wait.”

Dex saw the text go through, then looked up at her. She didn’t look much better than Izzy had the other morning. “Nat. Where’ve you been?” he asked quietly.

She squirmed, looking massively uncomfortable. “At my mum and dad’s, actually.”

“What, seriously?” As far as he knew, she’d been doing her level best to avoid them for weeks now.

“Yeah. Kinda … dunno. It was weirdly nice for once?”

Dex leaned in. “Really?”

“Yeah, like. We just sort of existed, I guess. Told them I needed to concentrate on studies and you guys had been partying.”

Dex bristled. “Hey, thanks a lot, they don’t like us as it is!”

“Oh, hush, they were never gonna like you lot anyway, a bunch of poofs and weirdos.”

Dex snorted.

“Anyway, we barely even fought. Dunno what that’s about, but I’ll take it.”

“But you’re … coming home?”

Her phone buzzed at that moment, and she swiped it open immediately. She read, nodded, then quickly typed out a reply before sliding it back into her pocket. “All right, Iz is home, so I guess that’s my cue, then. Thanks for the chat.” She hopped off the stool and threw down a fiver. “For services rendered.”

Dex snorted and waved her off. Then he looked about himself and tipped his chin at Tosh, throwing him the universal back-in-a-mo gesture. Tosh nodded, and Dex slipped out around the bar and to the back, fishing his phone out as he went.

He ignored Izzy’s text with at least 80 percent exclamation marks and opened up a fresh message.

Hey you, how’s things?

He felt like he kept toeing this imaginary line where as soon as they were apart, he could no longer acknowledge that he and Nick were having a … thing. An intimate, mind-bogglingly lovely thing. Even when Nick was with him, it felt as if he might slip away the second Dex made one wrong move. But, like … they did. They did have a thing going, and if Dex didn’t get an outside sort of validation of it, he was going to lose his mind.

He shoved his phone back in his pocket and returned to his post, pretending like he wasn’t at all waiting for his arse to buzz with a reply.

It came shortly, and he excused himself again. He was testing Tosh’s patience, but he would have been useless, focused on Schroedinger’s Text for the rest of his shift.

Good :) You?

Dex thumbed out a reply before he could second-guess himself. Would be better with you around

It took Nick a bit longer to reply this time. Same :)

Dex flushed. Why was that so f*****g adorable? He felt like a giddy schoolboy, which was maybe the reason for his reckless stupidity the next moment.

Want to come over tomorrow? I know it’s a school night…

The three dots of anticipation appeared and stuck around long enough that he felt his stomach drop out a bit. But then, Are you sure? You’re not too busy?

Nope. 10000% certain. Come over after 11 my shift will be done. Stay over. Before he could change his mind, he sent a smirky emoji face, then closed his phone so he wouldn’t be tempted to watch those three shifting dots again.

A moment later, his phone lit up. If you say so. The smirky emoji face stared at him after the sentence. “Get in,” he mumbled with a grin, and went back to the bar before he got sacked.

+

The following night, Tosh took one look at him as they got the last drinkers out the door and shooed him out to close up by himself, a kindness Dex was pathetically grateful for. He had time to run home, shower, put on clean pants along with clean pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, and straighten his room as best he could. That was when his phone lit up.

A text, of course, because he couldn’t really imagine Nick phoning him. Not his style. And he probably hadn’t rung the doorbell for fear of waking people. Or maybe he just … didn’t want them to know?

Dex took a deep breath and ran a hand over his hair wrap, tugging it down over his forehead a bit. He knew he was being a tad ridiculous, but it felt strange, letting Nick see him the way he normally looked before bed. He hadn’t done this in front of him before, and his hair was letting him know it. There was only so much damage you could do to your locs in the name of vanity before they began breaking on you.

Nick was chewing on his lip when Dex opened the door, looking a bit lost. That definitely didn’t help Dex’s nerves, but he felt himself smiling at him anyway, because up until that moment he had genuinely expected Nick to bolt.

But here he was, and Dex pulled him inside by the hand, shut the door with a swift kick, and kissed him.

God, the way Nick melted against him the first moment their lips touched—would he ever get used to it? It was always ephemeral, because the next instant, Nick’s brain would kick in and force every muscle in his body to tense. But Dex savoured that first moment, because in it, Nick showed him what he wanted deep down.

Dex would just have to work at extending those moments until they were both of them nothing but willing want, and satisfied.

He gently pulled away. Nick’s hand was still gripping his own. “Hey.”

A sweep of lashes, a tiny smile. “Hey.”

They went up the stairs silently. Lucky for them both, the housemates who were present were ensconced in their own rooms, but Dex still felt a bit of relief closing his door behind them. They didn’t need witnesses tonight.

Nick stood in the middle of the room surrounded by Dex’s things—his desk, the chair he’d just cleared of sweaty clothes, the bed, freshly made because he’d wanted things to be nice for Nick. Dex remembered that the last time they’d walked in here, it had been dark and everything dreamy.

He ran a hand over his wrap and indicated the bed with the other. “Uh … wanna sit?”

Nick dropped his bag and toed off his shoes before clambering up on the bed, back to the wall. Something about the position made Dex smile, and he hopped on after him, positioning himself just across from Nick. He’d have to take the reins if they were to dispel this awkwardness, because it was difficult to imagine Nick doing it on his own.

“Hi,” he said, and leaned in for a quick peck on the lips. “I’m happy you came.”

Nick’s eyes fluttered closed for just a moment, but by the time Dex pulled away they were open and trained on him, the grooves at the edges of his smile deepening. “Me, too.”

Dex watched as Nick’s eyes travelled up, then dropped back down like he hadn’t meant to look. Dex’s heart thudded hard in his chest.

He’d been entirely n***d with Nick a bunch of times by now, but it wasn’t until this moment that he’d felt stripped to the core. It was bizarre how such a simple thing in his own life could suddenly disrupt some veneer of sameness. It was just a hair wrap, but how many white boys knew about them outside of, like, music videos or whatever?

It was stupid. It was so stupid, but Dex felt his mouth opening to explain before Nick could say anything. “It’s to protect the hair from breaking, it’s … it can be brittle, you know?” He cleared his throat, poised on the edge of a gulf that threatened to widen. “I hadn’t done it before now because—” I hadn’t been prepared in any way. Which was stupid. It was something he did every night, but now he remembered how he’d taken his wrap off the morning after Nick slept in Nat’s room. Jonny had given him a weird look at the time, but Dex had chosen to ignore it. “Dunno why, actually.”

This was his hair. He loved his hair, loved his locs, loved them as much as Mum turned her nose up at them, and suddenly he was reduced to a nervous wreck by the curious gaze of a white boy.

“Oh!” Nick smiled wider, looking shy, and Dex watched helplessly as his cheeks reddened. “I didn’t know…”

Dex relaxed, heartbeat slowing back down. He leaned back on his hands in an effort to return to some semblance of normalcy and shrugged. “No reason why you would, I s’pose.”

Except, of course, that somehow Black hair was this great big mystery to white people. He remembered his mum sighing and shaking her head at a picture of Angelina Jolie’s daughter, years ago. “That woman has no idea what to do with that little girl’s hair, and it’s a shame. Look at how dry it is!”

“I guess.” Nick shrugged his usual shrug of awkwardness, and Dex shook off his thoughts. Except it was difficult to do now that they’d entered his head like a slew of uninvited guests. Which was bizarre, it wasn’t like they hadn’t talked about his Blackness—they had. Hell, he’d told Nick things he hadn’t spoken of in years. But maybe that was why these thoughts intruded now, as if cracking open a window meant the door was unlocked to any f*****g thing.

With Michael, this part had been easy. This part had been filled with knowing. And Nick—Nick didn’t know.