FIRST LINES FRIDAY 56: There’s A Name For This

“Just say a million,” Martin said. “Why do you need to make it sound so fussy?”

Will glared at him. It was high summer and his face was more freckle than not-freckle, his hair hadn’t been trimmed since term ended, and Martin was frankly having a hard time taking him seriously.

“I’m telling you a story,” Will said, with more sniffy impatience than any thirteen-year-old had a right to. “You can do your boring maths lesson later. A thousand thousand years ago,” he said pointedly, “dragons swooped and dove through this very valley. The hills were sharper then, more like mountains, like teeth and claws sticking out of the earth. And where today we see lakes, back then were only the bones of the animals the dragons feasted upon.”

“That seems exceedingly unlik—”

“Hush. In fact, it was getting to be a problem. There were very few small animals left for the dragons to eat. Those who could leave had long since fled, and those who could not had been eaten. The dragon council convened, and for five days and five nights they deliberated.”

This, Martin suspected, was a metaphor, and not a subtle one at that.

Martin’s hand had long since stopped carding through Will’s hair, and when Will sat up he found Martin glaring at him.

“What?” Will asked.

“Don’t you dare,” Martin said. “Don’t you dare act like you’re figuring it out now. Like you just realized there’s a name for this. What did you think it was?”

“I didn’t—”

“Did you think I just wanted to get off with someone and thought, oh, I’ll vanquish all my bizarre sexual inhibitions with my best friend on a lark? That was all fucking difficult.”

“You said you didn’t want to wait anymore,” Will protested, not entirely certain what they were fighting about.

“I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about letting myself love you, you arsehole. Letting myself be loved by you. I thought you understood.”

There it was, the thing he hadn’t wanted to think about. This wasn’t just love: it was being in love, and it made him greedily hungry for things he couldn’t have. “You’re going to get married!” Will said, seizing on the first and most obvious problem. “You told me so.

Will Sedgwick can’t believe that after months of searching for his oldest friend, Martin Easterbrook is found hiding in an attic like a gothic nightmare. Intent on nursing Martin back to health, Will kindly kidnaps him and takes him to the countryside to recover, well away from the world.

Martin doesn’t much care where he is or even how he got there. He’s much more concerned that the man he’s loved his entire life is currently waiting on him hand and foot, feeding him soup and making him tea. Martin knows he’s a lost cause, one he doesn’t want Will to waste his life on.

As a lifetime of love transforms into a tender passion both men always desired but neither expected, can they envision a life free from the restrictions of the past, a life with each other?