Disclaimer stuff: If you are under the age of eighteen or are in a state where reading this material is illegal, please go away. Thanks. Also, do not post portions of this story or text anywhere without written permission by the author (Max Jensen).
This story is true. And it's currently in progress. I, of course, have changed names and details to protect the innocent, and frankly, the odds of you knowing me are slim. However, if you do, send me an email so we can discuss this and I can be really embarrassed and try to deny it badly.
You know another reason to email me? Comments! Good or bad! Send stuff to mxjnsn09@gmail.com.
Now, onto the story:
"This Is Not a Love Story" - Part One
When I first met Will, I hated him.
Here I was, less than three days off of the plane, in a new country and a new city that I hadn't been to before, and all alone, at that. I had decided to get my master's degree in creative writing and literature in London, a city I'd wanted to go to for years, ever since I was a kid. When all the master's programs back home in the States had rejected me, mostly based on the fact that I'm considered on the young side to get my master's (even at 25, most rejection letters insisted that I was good, but needed a bit more time to be "less green." Less bullshit, I say. But I digress), all the pieces fell together when the program in London accepted me. Student loans came through and through the school's website, I was able to find flatmates that were attending the same school as me (though they were undergrads, but that was fine with me).
My registration was a few days after I landed. I was still slightly affected by the jetlag, though not as much as I had expected, and I was nervous as all hell. I don't do well in social situations, or at least, not in ones where I don't know anybody. I'm naturally shy and quiet in groups where I'm uncomfortable, though I was going to break that habit this year. My program was only a year long, and I didn't have the luxury of waiting two years to really get comfortable with my classmates like I did when I was an undergrad. The only person who I sort of knew was another American student named April, who I'd met through the school's Facebook page, though we hadn't met face to face officially yet.
I was standing in the conference room when the creative writing MAs were having their registration. I looked around at all the other students and wondered how I looked to them. I don't know if I'd call myself good-looking. I mean, I'm not ugly, but I definitely am not what the world would call "hot." I have black hair that is very difficult to tame if it gets past a certain length, but brown eyes the tone of maple syrup that I consider to be my best feature. I have a high bridge on my nose, and a very, very light brown complexion that usually leaves people wondering what my ethnicity is (I'm Hispanic, but with my speech, demeanor, and refusal to adhere to any stupid stereotype, most people assume I'm at least half-white). I'm above-average height, 5'10, and I have a bit of a tummy. While I wouldn't ever consider myself obese or anything, my few experiences in clubs have left me feeling that the gay community would consider me a massive slob. Or a cub. Who knows. I'm not into the scene, I don't know how those things work.
Standing there, nervous, I decided that I needed to speak to someone. There were about fifteen people in my program, all milling about, talking to each other. I looked around to see who wasn't tangled up in a conversation already. There was a guy standing in a corner. He was tall, about 6'1 or 6'2, broad shouldered, slight tummy like myself, with a massive mop of curly dark hair and a sort of scraggly beard. He was wearing a long dark coat and had a surly demeanor on his face. He had striking green eyes.
I walked up to him to introduce myself to him.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Max."
"Will," he responded, clipped British accent with a slight tenor.
"Where are you from?" I asked, as if I knew the entire geography of England at that point.
"Manchester," he responded, his voice lacking the typical Mancunian northern accent (a detail I learned later on). "You?"
"The States."
"So I gathered."
"San Francisco."
"What kind of writing do you do?"
This question always baffled me, and I hated answering it, but I had come up with a ready-all response: "Mostly autobiographical stories, conversational tone, where I make fun of myself a lot. You?"
"I don't feel like telling you. Bye." And with that, he turned to talk to someone else. I felt completely pissed off: this British asshole had made me answer this question that I'm not a fan of answering and refused to do the same, with a slight sneer all the while. I got the feeling that he enjoyed withholding the information, and I'm sure he saw the frustration in my eyes. It may not seem like a big deal to most people, and I have a tendency to take some things out of proportion, but this felt really mean, and I decided right then and there that I hated Will and that I wouldn't be his friend.
Of course, this didn't turn out to be the case.
Over the year, I warmed up to him. At first, he seemed to be the asshole I thought he was: he would make controversial statements in class just to make people upset (such as "The only thing that is worth writing is bad crime fiction, since that's the only thing people read" or "I've never read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens because they're dead, so what's the point?"). I got the sense that he viewed most other people as experiments and would make outlandish statements just to see their reactions. It was incredibly manipulative and cynical of him, but I also learned that he had a razor-sharp wit and a really fun fashion sense (he would go through phases of clothing - for a month, he was in a cardigan phase, where he would wear cardigans of every color and texture imaginable; for another month, it was shirts with very loud colors, which contrasted with his dry personality; another month was ghetto-boy jeans, etc.). He also had a very lovely smile, which he showed a lot since he was constantly making jokes, or rather, making fun of Allistair, the pretentious jack-ass of the group, who really enjoyed all of us teasing him.
He was also very generous. He came from a wealthy family, and so his parents owned a lovely huge flat in London. Will always offered to host our course soirees there - class meetings, Christmas parties, Burns night, birthday dinners, even Thanksgiving when us Americans got really homesick. He never made a big deal out of it, even when other people carelessly volunteered his house for such events.
He and I became particularly close when we worked on a research project together. We got along and discovered a shared taste in music. Because Will has this obsession with getting to know everything about a particular person he's interested in, he began calling me in the middle of the night, just to talk and get to know each other. Apparently, he had done this with the people in our course that intrigued him, and it was now my turn. We spoke every night for two weeks for at least an hour each night, getting to know each other and finding out that we had a similar sense of humor and knowledge of the pop culture spectrum.
By the time April rolled around, Will was my best friend in London, and slowly becoming my best friend, period. I was distancing from my best friend back in States, Adam, and we were speaking less and less. But where Adam was fun and we got along splendidly, he could be judgmental about certain aspects of myself - he didn't approve of my smoking and, most importantly, we never ever spoke of my bisexuality. Talking about girls I liked was fine, but anything having to do with guys was strictly taboo. I think there were two reasons for this: 1) Adam came from a fairly conservative religious background, and while he had renounced his religion, it's difficult to rid yourself of something you've been raised with. I always felt guilty around him for being myself, and really, that's not the best thing. I mean, that's what my parents are for, right?
But Will wasn't judgmental about anything, really. And especially not about me.
I still have a LiveJournal, and somehow in his insanity, Will found it. To this day, I'm not even sure how he found it, and he won't tell me. But since I had become fairly iffy with it, he told me that I should write an entry, something revealing. I'm not sure when the moment came when I began enjoying Will's approval, but by that point, it was there. So, I decided to write about my being bi, which was something that I didn't write about often. I then waited for his response.
He called me later that night.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't know that about you."
A big part of the entry made reference to the fact that Adam and I had fooled around a few times when we were in college. Ironic, really, since we couldn't really talk about that side of me, but you know how it is - straight guy is totally up for blow jobs and fucks, but when it's over, it's like it never happened.
"Yeah. It's true."
"Huh. Why don't you tell people about it?"
"I don't... I don't like advertising it. I kinda feel embarrassed about it."
"Why? You shouldn't be. It's really no big deal."
He kept telling me to tell people, even saying which coursemates I should. I didn't. I figured that if I wanted to, I would on my own time. He respected that, even though his suggestions were half out of concern for me, and half joking.
I don't know when my crush on him started, either. But I do know that by the time another American student at our university, Becca, who I had a minor crush on (and had been drunkenly rejected by), started hanging out with us, I would feel a sting of jealousy when she would give him massages at the pub after class. At first, I thought that I was jealous because she was showing him more attention. But then...
We were all sitting in a booth in the pub, with me sitting on the outside in a chair, and Will against the curve in the booth. Becca sat on the cushion itself, so that her legs were on either side of Will, who's back was to her, and she was massaging him. Will was a notorious massage-fiend, casually asking anyone to massage his shoulders at any given moment. Her fingers were inside his shirt, massaging his neck and shoulders. And I stared at them, and I thought to myself that I wanted to be doing that, I wanted to feel the warmth of his skin, the muscle underneath. I wanted to make him feel good and give him the goofy smile that he had.
Then it hit me. And I knew I was screwed.
That's it for now, guys. I know no sex here. But there will be in the next chapter! Any feedback is welcome, as long as you're not a jerk about it. Thanks!