Hide the Truth From My Eyes

"Mike!" I whimpered. 

I walked to him and took his hand. His dark, round eyes opened tiredly. He was still pale as a ghost. I put my other hand on his cheek.

"It's going to be okay cariad. It's going to be okay."

I saw him smile behind the plastic of the gas mask. I smirked back, trying to calm my fastening heartbeat. He was weak. He closed his eyes again and the sound of his ragged breathing through the machine was the only sound in the room for a minute.
It seemed clear. Mike was infected by that virus. I squeezed his hand tighter, panicking. And what if it is mortal?

I rubbed his cheek with my thumb and saw another weak smile crawl along his pale face, under the mask. I bent to kiss his forehead. Fuck it if I ended up infected. I knew he needed this and if I wasn't here to comfort him I was a bad boyfriend. 
Damn he was boiling. The fever was still there under his unbelievably greyish skin. Beads of sweat rolled slowly in his hairline. 
My poor baby. 
A nurse shuffled in and saw me. 

"Sir! Step away from him! He's infected!"

"No, I'm staying here." I said calmly.

"You can't! If you're infected you're going to infect more people!"

"I won't move from here."

"We don't care if it's your brother or your son! Move over and get tested before it's too late! We don't need no people to make more difficult this epidemic!"

"He's my boyfriend, I can't leave him!"

I felt Mike's hand squeeze back ever so lightly. 

"Sir, don't force me to call the vigils on you!"

"I won't leave!" I spat. 

A beeper beeped again. My right hand tightened around Mike's, the other pushed into his dark hair to massage his scalp in a way I hoped was reassuring. I knew I would be taken away from him.

"I swear Mike I won't let anything happen to you. You're going to get out of here, okay? And you'll be fine. And we'll go back to Ponty and we'll go for a walk in Ynysangharad. And then we'll go to my old house like when we were teens and we'll watch a film. And then I'll cook you something, and we'll go to bed and we'll make love like when we were teens and we had to make sure my mother didn't catch us. You remember? I love you. I love you so much." my voice started to get strangled in my throat as I pressed his hand against my chest. "I love you too much to let you slip away." 

His eyes opened and he acknowledged my words with a faint nod and a squeeze of the hand. I felt the hot tears run all along my face.

"Please don't give up. Don't leave me" I hiccuped.

Another slight squeeze. A sob escaped my lips and I kissed his fingers. I heard someone pace in. I put Mike's hand on my cheek and managed to crack a smile through my crying. 

"I love you." I said again.

Two strong hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me away. I was at least as strong as them, but I didn't feel like resisting. It wouldn't help Mike and I was devastated by what had happened. 

I let them carry me away from my Mike, my boyfriend, without doing anything. 
Me, Stuart Richardson, abandoned my boyfriend. 
Well, it was the first time I didn't act like a Richardson then. 

--

I remember perfectly when I met Mike.
It was in secondary. I was 16, he was 14.
I came from a working class family. My father was a miner, my mother an on and off worker at the local butcher shop. And let's say I was almost a delinquent. 
I sold cigarettes, I got paid to protect some upper-class midgets. Even then I was pretty full built. Okay I was tank. Beating up people was an everyday thing and I never lost. I barely ever got a scratch. 

I was a Richardson. I fought hard for my life. In the family we were all like that. We never rose, we had to battle to live up. 
I wasn't happy though. I was never happy. I had no one to talk to. No one to tell about my secrets, my questions, my closet doors. 
All my relationships fell apart automatically. I was romantically awkward with girls. I just didn't know what to do, and I didn't want to do it. 

It terrified me. You'd think nothing could scare Stuart Richardson, ever. You never saw one inch of my feelings. I was a champion at holding an inexpressive mask on my face. Inside... If I wasn't a fighter by the blood, I think the suicidal thoughts hovering over me would have gotten to me. But I never gave up. I knew I was going to have a shit life. But I never, never gave up. I bottled up all those feelings and pushed them behind my closet door. 

When I first saw him, it was like someone threw an axe into said closet door. 
What was so exceptional about him, I don't know. The way he walked? His eyes? His hair? His voice? 

What had made me fall in love immediately? I don't know. Maybe the fact he was perfection incarnated. 

That day I saw him and he caught my eye and smiled, I didn't understand anything. Why was just a smile doing so much to me? Why was HE, the thought of him putting my insides upside down? Why was the person suddenly sending me on an emotional rollercoaster a fucking guy? 
I didn't understand. All my emotions, all the fears and all the questions with no answers, all that I was wondering about myself, all the thoughts and all those moments late at night and those dreams I tried to hide away from my conscience, all those little doubts about what and who I was were finally released and it overflowed me. 

I came home and cried my eyes out for the first time in five years. It lasted long hours. I still remember the lost feeling and the dizzy head and the tightening chest.
My mother came home late at night, before my father, caught me sobbing on my bed and asked me what was wrong. I just said her that nothing was wrong and I just needed to be alone.
I fell asleep on the child cot, exhausted by all my crying, and didn't go anywhere the day after. I just lay there wondering.

I went back to school then. I tried to not pay attention to the fact my brain was focused on searching for the guy. My feet led me to where he was without I had the conscience of them moving. 
And without I even knew I voluntarily bumped into him, making him fall to the ground. 

The worst thing happened.
He fell on his back, and when I looked down.
He was laying there, legs opened, knees slightly up, inches of skin showing up between his uniform shirt and his pants, propped up on his elbows to try sitting up, his eyes that looked like fucking black velvet watching me, lips apart. 
And what I did, I got a fucking boner. 
What? He was on the ground, his fucking legs apart! It was like he was begging me to do... Things to him. 

As terrifying it was for me, a side of my mind wanted to pin him down and fuck him into oblivion. 
And now there was an annoying tent in my school trousers, which I hoped no one would notice. 
I just ran away. Towards the toilets. Without saying sorry.
I burst into a cubicle and closed behind me. 
I was highly perturbed. I shouldn't be feeling this way. Guys were not meant to get excited over other guys. I was not meant to get a boner over just this guy lying on the ground.
As sexy as he could be. Oh no, couldn't be thinking that. Homosexuality was a mental disease, back then. Why was I feeling like that? 

But the image of him lying there...
I felt the need of touching myself, omnipresent and demanding. Making flow back in my memory images of similar situations in the past. Soon overwhelmed by him. 
His uniform clad body, I imagined it bare of any clothes, all mine. The image sent waves of sexual excitement up my body as I unbuttoned clumsily my pants and sunk a hand in my boxers. I needed release. I imagined the hand wrapping around me was his, teasing me, pleasuring me. A very faint moan escaped my chapped lips. 
There I was, masturbating in the school toilets over a guy I didn't know. And that surely found me weird.