THE PORCELAIN OF THEIR NEW, shiny bathtub was cold as it painfully dug into the protruding hills of his spine. Daan’s feet were cold as ice, nudging against his bony hip, despite the warm water surrounding them.

There was a cigarette in one of his hands, and in the other a nearly empty, red stained wine glass. The bath was smaller than the one they had owned in Cambridge, so they had to sit with their knees pointed up, out of the water and into the wintery air that streamed in from the open window not far above them. It was supposed to have a key, so it would remain properly closed, but they had moved in a week prior, and had not yet found it anywhere.

Adriaan’s arm was uncomfortably propped up on one of the bathtub’s sides, and he was certain that it would soon slip off and drop back down into the water, as it had done earlier in that night. Still, he was lucky to be sitting on the side of the tub without the tap.

“I forgot how cold it could get out here,” Daan sighed, taking a long drag from his cig and puffing the smoke out into the direction of the window. As if they had ever cared about smoking indoors. “But I think it’s only going to get worse.”

“I’m going to the stad soon,” Adriaan shrugged. How could someone forget the weather of their own country? It hadn’t even been that different in Cambridge. “I’m thinking of finding work there. I could buy some thick blankets and jackets. Maybe some new sweaters.”

For a second, he wondered if they would even be able to afford such things. He never really had to pay for his own clothes before in Nijmegen, for they spent most of their adulthood in Cambridge. He couldn't be certain that the old secondhand store his ma used to buy his clothes from still existed. And even in Cambridge, he barely shopped. His old clothes were baggy and properly made. Adriaan and Daan didn't grow much past the age of eighteen. In a way, they seemed to have shrunk. When they first left home, they were friendly boys with roundish cheeks — though only noticeable up close — and soft stomachs. Somewhere along the way, they turned into messes of collarbone and spine, stray muscles clinging to bones like shy children holding on to their mother’s flowy skirt. Nutritious food was hard to come by without dropping significant amounts of money. They, at the time, had other priorities.

Even so, Daan smiled at his offer. It was hard to tell if he had the same worries, or if he was genuinely expecting Adriaan to leave home soon and come back with all kinds of wintery goods. Daan leaned forward and took a painfully long drag from his cigarette, held it for a bit, and blew all of the smoke right into Adriaan’s face. His morbid way to express love. Or if not love, a gentle kind of gratitude.

Neither of them had anybody else they could rely on so strongly, after all.

And yet he couldn’t bring himself to appreciate the gesture. He quickly found himself spluttering and coughing in an attempt to rid himself of the disgusting taste of nicotine sticking to his tongue. Adriaan was never much of a smoker, except during social occasions — thought many of his “social occasions” only included himself and Daan.

In his desperate attempt to clean up his mouth, Adriaan stopped concentrating on his arm. Causing it to slowly slip from the wet bathtub side. In no time, his elbow struck the porcelain bottom of the tub with a dramatic splash and a harsh pain.

“Godverdomme!” He expelled the word like vomit, it felt exhilarating to finally curse in his native tongue again. The small flame of his cigarette slowly dimmed in the water, and he grieved the fact that he had ruined a perfectly good smoke for the second time that night. In the exact same way. He no longer felt like the bath water was comforting. Instead, it had become his enemy.

In a swift move, he brought the wineglass to his lips and finished off the few milliliters clinging to its sides. Then he placed the wet cigarette into it and placed the glass on the soapy tiles next to the bathtub. He threw Daan, who was letting out slow, sarcastic laughs, a dirty look before he got out of the water and shivered in the cold. The fun was over, and all he could think about was getting his clothes on and laying in their warm bed.

“I love you, Aad,” Daan chuckled. “I’ll be there soon, just let me finish this,” he held up his own wine glass, still half-full, and also his nearly burned away cigarette. He, of course, hadn’t managed to drink as much as Adriaan had. “Then we can snuggle up together.”

TO ADRIAAN, THE BEST FEELING was this: lying down in a freshly changed bed, with Daan by his side, underneath a thin blanket just warm enough to remind him of Summer. It almost felt like Heaven, and he wondered if that feeling was the closest he would ever get to that blessed place. More often than not, it felt like something that Adriaan didn’t really deserve.

They both preferred to bathe before bed, since it brought them a certain freshness. Clean skin pressed against clean sheets, wet hair spread wildly over a soft pillow. During the Winter months, a freezing cold clung to their skin, even when they were dressed in thick sweaters. The best way to combat that chill was to lay hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder together underneath a nice blanket.

“I missed this,” Daan sighed.

“We slept together yesterday,” Adriaan mumbled. “And eergister, and the years before that.”

“I missed home,” the other clarified. “Despite the cold. It’s strange that, years ago, we practically lived down the street from here.”

Adriaan tried to remember if he ever saw this exact apartment complex before, all those years prior. It stood ten minutes from his childhood home. From what he could gather, he hadn’t — but that could have been because he didn’t often venture into this part of Hatert. This quiet part away from the trouble. All the important locations from his youth — the stores, school, Daan’s home, his own place — were in the opposite direction. There was a playground nearby, and he was certain that he had never played there as a kid. There were so many buildings that looked the same, though, and they all might just have turned into an unimportant blur.

It struck him suddenly — the fact that he could run into his family any day. His mother had a friend that lived nearby, who probably hadn’t moved. It was quite a surprise that he hadn’t already seen any of them. A flow of panic in the shape of his sister, Madelief, crashed into his heart. She had been eight when they left, and he wondered if they would even be able to recognize each other. Maybe he had come across her at some point. Maybe she did play on that playground nearby. Surely, she would know of his existence, of her older brother somewhere in the world. But, by now he could have easily turned into an old photograph in a book, a stray picture his mother sometimes admired alone in her bedroom, a story hesitated to be told. If he ever saw her again, how could he explain why he left?

“I’m glad we’re back,” Daan whispered.

Adriaan nodded, his worry not yet gone. Ever since they returned, he had been afraid that a mistake had been made on his part. They had lived a comfortable life in Cambridge, even though their flat there wasn’t much of a looker, despite the fact that work was hard to come by. Both of them had their problems, and yet Cambridge had felt like a certain kind of freedom. They were young, and didn’t yet feel like citizens of the world, their whole life there — which was supposed to be permanent — had felt like a prolonged vacation.

They were outsiders in Cambridge, and nobody really cared when they walked down the street hand-in-hand. And when people did mind, they usually didn’t say anything. All they did was give, easily ignored, disapproving looks. Daan and Adriaan were nothing but tourists to them. Not family, or potential friends.

It had been Aadriaan’s idea to leave, though he never had a proper reason for it. He had no unfinished business, and he never felt very homesick. Just lonely, and a little lost. When he finally vocalized this to the other man, he suspected that he would have to pack his bags by himself and that that would be the end of things. He would have to leave and allow Daan to remain in their free life. Of course it didn’t play out like that — wherever Adriaan went, Daan followed.

THE WARM BED, IN A way, reminded Adriaan of one of the first lazy Summers he and Daan spent together.

They met in the late winter of 1980, before they were even ten years old. Life back then was simple, so Adriaan never bothered to recall much of it. It was a good kind of boring; the kind people looked back on with regret and jealousy. Those boring days should have been savoured more, but back then Adriaan had not yet realized that things would only get worse.

Their parents easily welcomed the newfound companionship between them, since Daan was new to Hatert and Adriaan never really had any friends in the neighbourhood to begin with. He did spend some time with the kids living in the surrounding area, but only for short bits of time before they got tired of him. Adriaan had never been an interesting child, and he hadn’t been very interested either. He, despite his attempts, had never understood the appeal in endless games of tag and hide-and-seek. The other children — sometimes even their parents — had found him quite dull.

Daan had been similarly reserved. In primary school during recess, they never sat at the desks of classmates to socialize.Instead, they spent most of the time at their own desks, reading books or drawing. When they got to play outside during recess, they would both find the spot farthest away from everybody else. It had been strange for Adriaan to meet someone with a rhythm similar to his own. Even though they hadn’t gone to the same primary school, he found comfort in the fact that, while he was sitting alone at his desk, Daan would be doing the same. It had made him feel less weird.

When they happened to stumble upon each other at the playground, which had been otherwise empty because of the cold weather, they quickly bonded. They enjoyed talking, not playing, and never minded the fact that they never really had much to talk about at all.

The first memory he has of a Summer together with Daan had taken place in the early weeks of a sweltering heat, somewhere in 1982. His Tante always came around to their house during that time, since the sun was shining nicely, but it wasn’t hot enough for sunburn to be almost unpreventable. Tante Lynn didn’t have her own garden, since she lived in a flat, so she always stayed for at least a week. The pool would be set up for her and Adriaan’s parents, but Adriaan himself wouldn’t be able to use it until she got home. Lynn didn’t enjoy sharing a pool with a rambunctious boy. Neither did his parents. He would have the pool entirely for himself after her leave, though.

The memory occurred shortly after Tante Lynn’s departure. The pool had been drained so his mama could clean it properly. It was still wet, causing leaves to stick to its vinyl sides. Dirt caked up around the corners. At the bottom, he and Daan laid together. His parents were only a few metres away, his ma was tending to the bushes while his pa cleaned up their plastic set of garden furniture.

Nothing made that particular memory exciting at all. He had found the furniture to be blocky and an ugly shade of gray, and his mother messing around in the garden was nothing new. Daan barely spoke to him. Yet he decided to remember that day and scratch the details of it into his brain. It couldn’t have spanned more than a few minutes in reality, and yet it had felt like they laid there together for days, years even. They laid there for so long that the other’s body twisted around his own, and became almost as familiar.

Whenever he thought about that day, he could vividly picture the redness of Daan’s skin, the way his light eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks. The boy’s eyes were clenched shut and twitched periodically, his chest was a shade of pink that could have been found in a baby girl’s nursery. A leaf had attached itself to Daan’s calf, but he made no move to remove it.

Was it the sheer proximity that caused him to keep the vivid picture in mind for over a decade? Surely not, they had always laid together like that; shoulder to shoulder, nearly every inch connected. It wasn’t that important, in the grand scheme of things.

The mystic feeling of it all had been broken quickly, though, when his mother shouted his name. The sheer volume of it forced Daan to open his eyes, and when they made eye contact, Adriaan could do nothing but look away in shame.

“I want to start cleaning the pool, boys,” his mam stated. “Go upstairs and wash all that dirt away before dinner time comes.”

Daan stood first, and for a split second Adriaan allowed himself to watch the other’s pale, glistening back. It was a rare sensation, but he had found himself to be undeniably curious at the sight of it.

HIS MAMA USED TO HAVE a habit of staying up hours after everyone else in the house went to bed. Even though she had to wake up at six — way earlier than their father — to get herself and her children ready.

Adriaan knew that whatever she was doing was private. She chose to sit in the living room whilst everyone else was asleep for a reason. His mother did not wish to be disturbed, and to do so anyways would be like committing a major sin. He hadn’t understood her as a child, but he did grow up to somewhat admire her. It must have been difficult, with his father, for her to set a boundary and to catch a moment for herself every day. When her habit began, his pa stood his ground and forced her up the stairs with him — he wanted, after all, to fall asleep with his wife next to him — where there was no television or any form of entertainment. But his ma kept pushing, and pushing until she was given, finally, what she had wanted.

When he was eleven, he found himself stumbling downstairs one night. It was Summer, and to fall asleep back then was almost impossible upstairs. He had gone downstairs for a wet washcloth and one of the cold bottles of water in the freezer. All of this he needed before he could even think about sleeping. He had not gone downstairs to disturb his mother, he did not have the intention of looking into the livingroom to see his mam in her most vulnerable state. These facts meant a great deal to him back then.

Even so, he did end up at the living room door. He hadn’t been able to help himself when he saw that it was slightly open. That night wasn’t, as far as he knew, any different from the other nights that had played out before it. His mother did what she always did while everyone was gone; she sat in front of the television, her favourite reality show playing on an almost silent volume. All the lights had been turned off, except for the small lamp that stood beside the television. It hadn’t been the scene itself that had phased him, of course, it had been his mother’s face.

At first he couldn’t see her properly, so — knowing that he shouldn’t — he pushed the door open further, causing it to let out a low creaking sound. He startled at the noise, but could not bring himself to look away from his mama. He saw her thin eyebrows, her lips that formed a slight smile. His mam looked like she had just finished a satisfying meal. Adriaan had, somehow, never seen his own mama so relaxed before.

For once, she did not look like a mother. If he had seen her like that, walking down the street, he wouldn’t have guessed that she had a moody eleven year old and a baby on her hands at home. She didn’t even look like she had a husband. His mam looked like a happy woman, someone with nothing but a cat and a steady job that she enjoyed more than anything else. Someone who drank wine and ate cheese with her friends and never worried about getting too drunk or too fat.

His mother had, of course, heard the door. It had hurt him a bit, to be faced with the fact that she might have been happier if she had never married his papa and birthed him and his sister. When she turned around and saw him, her lips returned to their natural scowl. She looked like a lioness, focusing on her prey. Adriaan could do nothing but stand there, ashamed that he had been caught breaking one of the most important rules in their home.

She just looked at him for a moment before she turned back around, as if bored by his simple presence. Then she spoke: “Get back upstairs.”

He had never before noticed the dissatisfaction his mother must have managed to hide all his life. But he knew that she must have felt it whenever she saw him, or his pa, perhaps even Madelief.

Years later, shortly after he moved away to Arnhem at eighteen, he realized that his mother could finally start pretending that he had never existed at all. Finally, she could have only one child — one burden less — when people asked. Luckily, the one that remained was the one she had always liked more. In Arnhem he wondered if she would even do such a thing, but then he finished school and moved to Cambridge. There he came to his senses; his mother was brought one step closer to the freedom she could, for years, only feel at night. Why would she not pretend?

THE FIRST FEW MONTHS AFTER they moved to Cambridge, they lived with an old college friend of Daan’s. She had been in the same class, though she switched schools during their first year and eventually dropped out altogether when she decided she did not need a degree to become a musician. Adriaan had never gotten the chance to meet her because of this.

Cleo was originally from Cambridge, and her father had funded her return. Even though they stopped going to school together, she and Daan continued their friendship. Daan had always loved music, more so than Adriaan, and particularly enjoyed playing the guitar. Adriaan never really had friends outside of Daan, but he never really felt jealous whenever the other did find someone. He knew that what they had couldn’t compare to anything else.

When she moved away, they mainly communicated through letters and the occasional phone calls. Adriaan could never understand how that was enough to form such a strong bond.

Cleo had been glad to hear about their planned move to Cambridge, and offered up her guest bedroom for a bit until they found steady work and a nice place for themselves. Adriaan was able to call her once, shortly before he and Daan left for England. She seemed nice enough, but he got the sense that she was quite lonely — living in a big flat, working a boring job even though her pa had enough money to secure her for most of her life. He hadn’t liked the idea of living with a stranger, especially a rich stranger, and yet he ended up agreeing. It would do Daan good to be with someone he knew, and it would benefit them both in the long run. Because of her financial situation, he and Daan were expected to pay less rent. Nowhere else could they find the low price she had offered.

When he first met Cleo, three weeks after their conversation, he had been quite surprised. He caught glimpses of her with long, ginger hair and hazel eyes in photos that Daan showed him — images of trips to the city centre that Adriaan hadn’t even known about. When she opened her door for them, the large tattoo on her forearm stood out to him first. It was a long dagger, and the ink was still a stark black and showed no sign of ageing yet. Her hair was short, cut close to her ears — Daan had longer hair than her — and she had dyed it a dark brown. Adriaan could immediately tell that she was, if not a good musician, a good performer. She carried herself with a certain confidence; shoulders high, back straight, her voice loud and clear. He almost felt inferior to her, jealous that he would probably never love himself as much as she seemed to love herself.

She smiled kindly when she showed them the guest bedroom, decorated with a one-person bed and a small dresser. There were papers hanging on the walls, pencil sketches of both the male and female form. Their first night there, Daan told him that she was like them.

“Like what?” Adriaan had wanted to ask. Not because he had no idea, but because he wanted to make the other, for once, say the word gay or homosexual. Which Daan often avoided doing, as if he still thought that the concept was dirty.

Still, it intrigued him. He had never met a lesbian before, or any other gay person outside of Daan. And he wasn’t even sure if Daan was truly a homosexual — he never came out like Adriaan had, and they never made their relationship official. For all he could know, the other was just waiting for someone better to come along. Maybe Daan was just lonely, and Adriaan the closest thing to love he could get. He never really minded this, but in their short time in Cleo’s flat he began thinking it over more, and slowly he began to feel like, for the first time, someone had finally managed to slip in between him and his friend.

“IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE we’ve been together,” Adriaan sighed.

“What do you mean?” Daan scoffed. “I see you every single day, we sleep in the same bed, you’re with me right now.”

“I mean — are you into Cleo or something?” he asked frantically, having thought about it too much the past few weeks. “You spend most of your time with her, playing music, even when you’re with me you constantly talk about her. I don’t mind it, really, but when we’re kissing I think I have the right to know.”

“She’s my best friend, Aad, and I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“So I’m not your best friend? We’ve known each other for years.”

It had been an exhausting day of work for Adriaan — again, he was a server and had not yet managed to find use for his education in IT —, and when he came home he couldn’t wait for a hot bath. Daan, for some reason, joined him in the bathroom without getting into the water himself.

The other looked at Adriaan as if he had just been reminded that they had truly managed to remain friends for so long. He put the guitar that had been carefully balanced on his legs the whole night on the floor, not caring that the tiles were slightly wet.

Daan hadn’t found work yet, and it made Adriaan wonder if he wanted to follow Cleo and become a musician.

Just the other night they had embraced in bed together and shared a short moment of tenderness. They never went farther than kissing, and they only tried actual sex once to no avail. Adriaan got aroused often, just like Daan and others their age, but the second that sex became involved he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He, in theory, enjoyed the idea of being so close to Daan, of kissing his chest and using his hands, but in practice it disgusted him. As they came of age, they both encountered porn, but he never actually managed to find the images appealing. He hated penises and vaginas, and preferred not to see or feel either of them. He, unlike Daan, had never been able to touch his own body in any explicit manner.

Their moment together ended as soon as it began once Cleo got home and Daan felt inclined to speak about her. About the songs they made together and the concerts they wanted to see in April. Blur, in Amsterdam, though Cleo would only be going because Slowdive would be there as well. It seemed like whenever they got intimate together, it couldn’t last. Daan was doing all kinds of exciting things with Cleo — things he would usually do with Adriaan.

He never minded it too much, the other was seemingly falling in love with someone for once in his life, but he hated that it was a lesbian. Cleo wouldn’t — couldn’t — ever give Daan any of the things Adriaan was giving. He didn’t want his friend to get hurt, and he certainly didn’t want him to turn into the kind of man to fall so in love with lesbian a woman that it would border on harassment. A fag hag, almost, but more dangerous.

“She’s gay,” Adriaan asserted. “If you’re in love with her, you best leave it alone. Imagine how strange it would be if a girl tried to get with me.”

To that, Daan let out a short chuckle. “No self respecting woman would get with you, whether she knew you were gay or not,” his brows furrowed. “Also, aren’t we like a thing already? Please don’t say you consider me a cheater.”

“Are you serious? You’re not even gay,” Adriaan laughed, though it sounded exceptionally idiotic. Of course Daan was serious — they had never been taught the proper words for it, but he had to be something similar to a homosexual. He moved countries with Adriaan, though this action had felt like a friendly given, not like some greater profession of love. When they were growing up, Adriaan found himself suspecting that Daan had crushes on a few girls, something he himself had never experienced. But the other boy never told him about them — perhaps, they never even existed.

Adriaan knew that there had to be something in between his own sexuality and the sexuality of, for example, his papa, but he never thought of finding Daan there. “I was, of course, aware that there’s something with you, but I would have never called it —”

“We’ve kissed, I've seen you naked,” the other chuckled. “I remember when you told me about yourself, and I could never quite forgive myself for forcing you into telling it to your family as well. Homosexuality, it’s a beautiful thing. And you introduced me to it.”

“You never told me.”

“I thought it would be obvious, especially for you. When you told me, it was like a clarity, a realization that there’s more for me than some girl. I think that when I was younger — before we even met — I already knew that I was searching for something else.”

“I’m an oblivious fool, aren’t I?”

Adriaan spoke as he pulled the plug out of the bathtub, and for a second — just so he could continue to gather his thoughts — he watched the soapy water swirl away and seep into the drain, out of sight. He remembered when Daan told him that he should speak to his mama and papa, about himself, about his desire to stay with the boy. Maybe not for their whole life, but at least for a little while. He truly was oblivious. To him, that ‘little while’ would end after the other found a nice woman. Adriaan never thought he would be more than a person to be left behind one day.

How could he have possibly believed that Daan would ever turn away from him?

“A beautiful fool. It was such a clarity, I just needed to tell my mom,” Daan stopped speaking and glanced at Adriaan for a split second, who began to find himself feeling more and more exposed by the second, before returning his gaze to the tiled wall in front of him. “I knew she would tell your pap, so I thought that it would be better if you spoke as well. And I’m sorry for that — it was obvious that they would never accept it. And I’m sorry that I never managed to tell my mam, and you, too. But you have to understand that she wasn’t much better than your mama.”

Adriaan grabbed the man’s bony hand, his mind repeating the confession, and began rubbing circles into dry skin. It felt like a truck of knowledge had crashed into him. Now that he had the knowledge, he couldn’t remember ever not having it. It had all been so obvious, even to him. He had just assumed that Daan would have told him, never once realizing that they were both in various ways told to never speak up about the love in their heart. Adriaan had learned to do so anyway, but the other hadn’t. He no longer wanted to discuss the topic — in fact, he felt quite silly about it — he just wanted to leave the cold bedroom and return to their warm bed.

“I have a lot of things that I need to work on,” Daan mumbled. “Not everyone will accept me, and that’s difficult to grasp. But, we’re somewhere new, and we should make the most of it! We’ve already found someone like us, and together — no matter what we are — we can find others.”

Cleo, he’d just gotten way too far into his own head about her. “I think I have things to work on, as well,” Adriaan admitted. “I think it’s the environment, it’s all too new, and I’m not very used to you having friends.”

“Shut up, man,” Daan pushed against his shoulder. “Get dressed, you’re ugly naked.”

“I love you,” he said. “As whatever we are, and as whatever we will become.”

“As whatever we are,” Daan repeated. “See, it’s not that difficult.”

THEY STAYED WITH CLEO FOR nearly a year. Adriaan had finally managed to find administration work in a small IT company, whilst Daan became a server at a low end restaurant not far from the flat they ended up moving into. Outside of that, he also occasionally performed with Cleo’s band.

By the time that they left Cleo’s flat, he and Daan had set a routine for themselves. On the days that they were both free, they would sit out on the balcony — the weather was starting to get warmer — to drink and smoke the day away. The walls of their new flat were already incredibly yellowed from years of nicotine exposure, so they never really had to go out on the balcony. Even so, it was a nice thing to do.

They would sit there for hours, from the early morning to dinner time at six, and sometimes they would return later at night as well to smoke a little more and to polish off the cheap bottle of wine they bought in preparation for the day.

On the days that Adriaan was free, he would lay in bed with an old book he bought at the secondhand shop half an hour’s walk away from their place. He would usually finish the book that same day, unless it was a bad one. In that case, he would walk back to the secondhand shop and return it for a little less than the price he paid. On those days, he would only get up to use the toilet or to have a smoke on the balcony. Usually, he would have a can or two of beer before bed. He never ate much when he didn’t have Daan to hold him accountable. Somehow, his diet was better when he was at his busiest.

He wasn’t sure what Daan did while alone, but he knew that alcohol and cigarettes must be very involved. Adriaan wasn’t free often, and when he was Daan usually wasn’t. Their schedules no longer complimented each other, so they didn’t have many full days together. Cleo joined them sometimes, before they left, but she had started a band with her London friends — who she barely saw — and had been contemplating if she should just move away as well — which she eventually did.

They would bathe together quite often, sometimes they would both sit in the tub, sometimes only one of them actually washed. The memories he had of Cambridge, much like those of his childhood, were a blur. He was tipsy most of the time, except at work, and always managed to sneak too many cigarettes into his day. They stayed in England for a total of four years, and most of it had been spent in one dreary flat. Nothing interesting ever happened.

They had a shared two week vacation only once, during the Summer of 1996, and Cleo happened to be visiting family in Cambridge during that period. So all of them gathered together at Adriaan and Daan’s place, along with Bridgette — also called Birdy, a new girlfriend of Cleo’s.

They went to a little gay bar quite far away, the name of it had escaped Adriaan pretty much the second that they left the place, but it must have been something stupid like Seduction or Lust. It wasn’t a fitting name, from what he could recall, since most people only went there for friendships within the community, and most of the patrons were couples.

One night at Seduction stuck to his mind, mainly because of the things that would occur later that night, when he and Daan had already returned to their flat. They went to Seduction shortly after a shared dinner with Cleo and Birdy. Cleo’s girl looked more like a Texan than a Londoner, with her big gray truck that looked like something Adriaan would have been afraid of as a child. He and Daan had once known a boy, a year or two older, who told them that there was a pedophile driving around Hatert in a gray truck, and the rumour spread around the neighbourhood like wild fire. It hadn’t been true, of course, but Adriaan couldn’t help but remember the story whenever he saw any type of gray vehicle.

The bar had a very relaxed atmosphere, anyone could join in on other people’s conversation whenever they wanted, but it had been exceptionally quiet that night. Birdy and Cleo couldn’t stay long, since they needed to return to London early. Despite its silence, it had been a beautiful night of music. Some couples danced — which was advised against, because of the bar’s small size — and there had been new cocktails on the menu.

Adriaan had loved Cleo and Birdy, they had almost the same haircut — short, with longer strands curling around their ears — and they wore matching rings that were orange and clunky. When they left, he had been disappointed to remain and told Daan that they probably shouldn’t stick around much longer either. Without Cleo’s confident stride and Birdy’s masculine voice the bar had felt empty. His time with Daan had never felt so dull before, and it infuriated him.

Cambridge, once so free, began to feel like a cage. Birdy and Cleo had been loud and out of hiding. Adriaan and Daan were closer than ever, but cowards nonetheless, not even loud in a gay bar — a place where they should have been shouting with love.

AFTER DRINKING ANOTHER TWO BEERS each — along with a few shots — he and Daan left Seduction.

Adriaan walked ahead, focusing on his own quiet footsteps as they thudded against the pavement. His head throbbed along with the rhythm of his feet. A bath, all he wanted was a bath. He didn’t care if Daan had one before Cleo and Birdy turned up, he could very well do it on his own for once.

He had a fiery personality, and according to his mam it was a trait that haunted him ever since he was a little boy. What set him off that night was unclear. All he was aware of was the shock of suddenly being all alone with Daan after a nice day out with their friends. Sometimes he forgot that other people were needed in his life, too. Looking back, he was always surprised that there was once a time in which he had relied on even his father’s acceptance. It had been years, and he hadn’t managed to make any other friends in Cambridge, not even at work was he able to properly socialize. All he could think about was Daan, and his family back home, who he would never see again.

He only spoke to his colleagues if they spoke first, and most of the time he only parroted greetings and goodbyes. Daan wasn’t quite liked at work, either, he was too slow and inattentive to make a proper server. Soon, he would probably be fired, which would only cause more stress for Adriaan. But Daan did have friends, mainly because of Cleo, in London who he often called and wrote to.

They were drunk and clunky and it took multiple tries for them to unlock their apartment door. The door was normally not very heavy, but when inebriated it felt like having to push a boulder. Adriaan disliked their home, he realized that night — the yellow walls, the constant stench that came from seemingly nowhere, the bathtub which was smaller than the one in Cleo’s apartment. He missed his home, his sister, his crummy childhood bedroom and his one person bed, the garden, the pool, the smells in their kitchen and his mama’s endless cooking. He missed basically everything. Tulips, cheese, Heineken, football, things they had in England but didn’t feel the same as they had done across the ocean.

His shoes found their place in the shoerack and his jacket was slung across the back of a chair in the living room as they entered. He began undressing while he made his way to the bathroom, and shivered in the cold. Daan didn’t show much care, too busy lighting up a thick cigar he got from some random bloke outside of the bar. Home, his need for a bath was going to be fulfilled and all he could think about was home. His mind slipped from him as he tried to recall how old he even was, when his next birthday would be. Twenty-three in September. He hadn’t been home in ages.

“What are you doing?”

Thick smoke flowing from a mouth. Daan. What was he doing? He looked down at his own shirtless chest, his ribs poked out more than they did the previous years, he’s got near constant stomach pain, his fingers — along with Daan’s — were tinged a sickly yellow, they’re both exhausted every single hour of the day. He wondered if this was really the future they had betrayed their country, their families, for.

He got in the bathroom, turned the cold water on as much as he could before slipping underneath the water. An overwhelming numbness washed over him. There, underneath the freezing water, he was still back with his parents, still in the time before he came out and ruined his own life. Flashes came before him: a little baby girl, copying Vincent van Gogh’s starry night at school and getting praised for it, the loud iron toed shoes that his farmer classmates wore. He remained under the water, even though his chest threatened to burst open, and ignored the sting in his eyes, which he had neglected to close.

“What are you doing?”

The voice came again, with a gentle hand cupping the back of Adriaan’s neck. Rings tugged at his hair, water pressed harshly against his face for a split second, and again he was warm. Everything was intense. Stiff, smoky air filled his lungs, time sped up, and once he stopped heaving for air the words came:

“I want to go home.”

His eyes unblurred, Daan’s God-like face returned to him — he looked so much like the saviours painted on church walls.

Those five words came out repeatedly and sounded embarrassingly pathetic. Daan began to pat down Adriaan’s face with a towel, while also trying to pull him out of the bath. Adriaan doesn’t think he’d ever seen the other so worried before. Words quickly began to fail him, and I want to go home no longer made sense. He’d never been home, had he? Not in the place where he couldn’t simply be himself, where he couldn’t be honest. His mam always had a way of making him feel embarrassed. He was strangely afraid that she could somehow see that, ever since he reached puberty, he no longer felt at place within his body of wiry limbs and never ending love for the wrong person. Adriaan tried to remember the last time he had felt at home: sixteen, a cigarette between slippery fingers, wet shoulders, cold porcelain, and of course, Daan.

It took ages for things to calm down. Once the freezing bathwater began to hurt, he climbed out of the tub. Daan sat on the closed toilet lid, looking as if he had just witnessed a death. He had wanted things to work out so badly. Not a word passed between them as Adriaan draped a towel over himself and began to make way to their bedroom. He was vaguely aware of the water dripping from his hair and onto their carpeted floor, and of the silent way that the other followed him. It was strangely quiet outdoors; no children yelling, no cars or scooters, the birds were there — he could see them out the window, sitting on a balcony railing — but they didn’t make a single sound. It was another thing he missed from home. The part of Cambridge in which they resided was too quiet, Adriaan hadn’t seen a single child playing on the streets, or any wild-haired, strong-legged school boys or girls on their way to the shops. All Cambridge had in store for him was a silence that made him forget himself.

THE WINTER OF 1999 LEFT Adriaan with a small postcard laying in their letterbox. He knew that it couldn’t have been from Cleo, or Birdy, since they had already sent him cards — two weeks early, even, since they were afraid that something would go wrong with the delivery.

The card was definitely not cheap. It was a deep navy colour with silverleaf snowflakes on the front. No letters were on the outside, except for the company’s name on the back along with the measurements. It came in a yellowed, slightly creased envelope with nothing on it either. It was such a big envelope, not glued or taped shut, that when Adriaan picked it up the card immediately slipped out onto the pavement. It sparked a hint of nostalgia within him, the envelope looked like one of a set that had been left in the back of a drawer for ages.

He found it initially while checking their letterbox after a grocery run. He expected a letter from work — containing the details of the company Christmas dinner he had been invited to — but he only found the card. It couldn’t have been for him, work would have labeled the envelope and he had no one outside Cleo, Birdy and Daan who would want to wish him a merry Christmas.

So he assumed that it must have been for Daan. Maybe, despite his slowness, he had managed to make a friend at work. It was strange that he never mentioned it to Adriaan, but possible. They’ve been back home in the Netherlands for over a year, and found jobs similar to the ones they had in England. Their lives, he realized, could be easily summed up into crappy flats, small IT offices and low end restaurants. Once he entered the flat, he left the card in the kitchen and forgot about it.

Daan opened it after their shared dinner of broccoli, cheese sauce and undercooked kipschnitzel near its expiry date. Adriaan abandoned their dishes in the sink and ran hot water over them before he joined the blond in their living room. The second he entered, it became evident that something was horribly wrong.

The card laid on the table, faced down, and Daan sat all the way back on their sink hole of a couch. His posture was slouched, he held his eyes on Adriaan. Only after a moment, when he realized that the other wouldn’t ask questions, Daan spoke.

“It’s for you.”

“Cleo and Birdy already sent a card, though.”

“Your mam sent you one as well, apparently,” Daan stood up, his shoulders straightened into sturdy mounts as he approached Adriaan.

It was easy for him to accept the blond’s arms as they slipped around him. His mam. She must have seen him, or heard of him from someone — God knows who — and managed to figure out his address. The thought of people talking about him, about where he lived, felt like an invasion of privacy. He had no idea how he could have thought that moving back to his childhood neighbourhood would be a good idea.

A card was something his mama would do in order to avoid face-to-face rejection. An ignored piece of cardstock — albeit expensive cardstock — would hurt less than the downturn of a son’s eyes, the loss of a smile. He should have seen it coming, Hatert was only so big, and yet shame bubbled up in his chest. He couldn’t possibly begin to imagine the look on her face, the look on his father’s face, when she found out about his return. The peace his mama and papa must have created after he left was destroyed in a matter of minutes.

“What did it say?” he was terrified to ask, and even more terrified to actually read the card. His mother’s curled letters, the way her i’s were always too large — he couldn’t face it. “Was it bad?”

What would he do if it was? He didn’t need another piece of confirmation that his parents no longer cared — he couldn’t picture what that would do to him. It would surely reopen old wounds, ones caused by the grief of being left behind prematurely. A grieving for himself. The thought that he, to his parents, might as well have been buried six feet underground was too much to handle. He envisioned receiving a card every year, all of them relaying the same message of We Don’t Want You Here!

“It wasn’t,” Daan assured, his hands wandered to Adriaan’s shoulders. “I don’t think so.”

He slipped away from the embrace and picked up the card. A comedic, wet kiss was placed on the side of his lips before he was left alone in the room. Privacy wasn’t really something he wanted at that moment, but it would have been pathetic to ask Daan to stay. A real man wouldn’t need a buddy by his side to open a letter from his mam.

Her handwriting hadn’t changed a bit since he last saw it years prior.

“I EXPECT YOU TO LEAVE this house as soon as possible,” his father asserted. “You understand?”

Adriaan’s fists clenched and he stared at his pa with wide eyes. A hedgehog, hidden somewhere in the bushes, was causing a ruckus as it moved around. He tries to focus on that instead of the thoughts racing through his head. His jaw popped under the pressure of his teeth and he glanced at the house. His mama was still inside, probably watching them through the window from the couch. Daan surely must have left already, shortly after Adriaan was dragged from the dinner table by his pap.

“Madelief,” he allowed her name to slip out. His family could be the only thing to help him get out of this terrible situation. Perhaps, his father would be kinder to him just for their sake. “And mama, do they want me gone, or is it just you?”

“Listen, Aad,” the man said, his hand clutching at the loose fabric of Adriaan’s jacket that bunched around his elbow. A warning. “I already asked you, then I told you: either, you’re not serious about Daan and you’re going to end it, or you are and you can get the fuck out of here. Such people, and your mama agrees, are not welcome within this family.”

This family — a pact between multiple people, a cult he never chose to enter but does not yet wish to leave. At least, not in this way, for this reason. There’s a heaviness sitting on his chest, an annoyance at his father for avoiding his questions and only giving one single answer to everything. Madelief might want him to stay in her own child-like ways, but his mother? He needed to find out, he needed to make his father face him for once.

“I don’t understand how this affects you in any way,” he mumbled, trying to catch a glimpse of his mother, surely sitting behind the curtain, peeking out occasionally to ensure that no true conflict was occurring.

“Sorry, is this your house?”

The words were accompanied with a sharp tug at Adriaan’s jacket, the swift upturn of an adult hand. It wasn’t a question, but a clear threat. If he were to retaliate in any way with a poorly thought out argument, his pa wouldn’t hesitate to strike him. What could he say, really, to a man who was partially right in theory? He grew up in this house, but it would never be his, and in a few months his father would be free to throw him onto the streets whenever he wanted. It was a blessing, in a way, that he hadn’t done so already. Adriaan wondered how much his mother had played a role in this miracle.

There would be no one around to help him if he were kicked out. His mam would contact the little family they had in the area, tell them about his secret affairs, and nobody would ever care enough to save a homosexual. After all, he could have stayed quiet, he could have decided to never sin at all. Everyone, in the end, would blame him. Even Daan would be unable to help.

“That boy —” his father let go of him, pushed him a bit to create further distance between them. “Does his family know what he’s done to you?”

“He never once did anything to me,” Adriaan snapped. “Why can’t you listen to me? Whenever I try to say anything against you, you don’t care, so why should I even try? I’ll leave, if that’s what you want, just leave Daan out of it!”

“You’re lucky, Jongen, that I raised you better than most parents raise their sons these days. I tried my best to turn you into an upstanding young man; someone reliable and strong. If we were in another continent, I could have killed you for this mistake! So show me some gratitude for once. All that work, just for you to throw it away to end up like that boy and the many other disturbed people like him!”

Moments before the initial pain hit him, Adriaan knew that it would come. His father was never much of a talker, whenever he spoke so many words at once, it was likely that his rant would finish with a harsher mode of aggression. His father wasn’t a complicated man — he was an overplayed game of boter-kaas-en-eieren.

When he had been a little boy, the man had been harder to understand. But once he familiarized himself with all of the possible outcomes of his father’s anger, he could barely be bothered to listen to the man. Silence could do nothing to save him, and neither could compliance — if his father wanted to hit him, there was little that could change his mind.

He first felt the soft grass smash underneath his body. When he looked up, he could see his father’s palm, red from the collision, his wedding ring halfway slipped off from his finger. Adriaan didn’t want to look further to see the man’s face. The hedgehog scurried out from the bushes and quickly crossed the yard to hide underneath a pile of dead leaves near their shed, farther away from all the commotion. Adriaan could barely hear anything over the ringing in his ears, nor did he properly register his father as the man pushed against his chest, driving him straight into the wet grass. Pain was the last thing to come.

“Thijs!” his mother’s voice came from the window, her auburn hair messy around her face, her cheeks red. Adriaan felt a sudden anger for her lateness — she could have done something before his papa became physical. She could have tried. He wondered if his mam was sitting on the couch to finish dinner, or just to satisfy her curiosity. “We’re done with this!”

His father threw one last glance at Adriaan before approaching the window. “He’s serious.”

His mam’s face twisted in disbelief, and as the seconds passed it morphed into something much closer to distaste. “Then so be it.”

AFTER HE NEARLY DROWNED HIMSELF in Cambridge, Adriaan was supposed to be sober. But Daan did nothing to stop him when he went out to the store to buy himself the shittiest — and also the cheapest — beer. He wasn’t about to waste more money just because his parents had disowned him years prior.

The couch became his refuge that night. The other man left him mostly to himself, and went to bed early whilst Adriaan finished all of the beer and smoked three cigarettes from their secret “emergency stash”. They wanted to cut back on smoking, after Daan began having terrible coughs and Adriaan himself began snoring louder than ever, and their emergency stash was only to be used after a hard day at work, or when an appliance broke and they had to pay an exorbitant amount to fix it, and apparently also after a sudden christmas card from his mam.

Aadtje is what she still called him. A childhood nickname he had always hated. It was too childish, a reminder that, to her, he would never be more than her son. On the bottom of the card his sister’s name had been written in a messy scrawl. It didn’t look like the handwriting of a teenager, it seemed similar to his own script from when he was ten or so. Madelief had always been a smart child, and he couldn’t imagine the possibility of her being unable to write properly. The card must have been written years prior, perhaps during the first Christmas after his leave, but for some reason remained unsent until his unexpected return.

His mam probably never found out that he first went to Arnhem, despite still going to school in Nijmegen. And when they left for Cambridge there was no way for her to figure out their new address. They had no family or any other connections in England. When they left, they were wiped away from her world map, and she never had the opportunity to find them again — until he made the stupid decision to come back.

At first, he thought that his mother would have preferred it that way. Though the card gave him a different perspective:

If it weren’t for your papa, I would have never allowed you to leave the house in the manner that you did, Aadtje. I wish that you could understand what a marriage of over twenty years does to a woman, to a mother. Your father will never allow you back into our family, so neither will I. Every day, I pray for time to turn back, I dream of you — a little boy — sleeping beside me, and I hope for your mind to change. Many days, I wonder what Daan has that we don’t. I know, deep down, that you won’t change your ways. If you ever return, I will not be able to hug you. I still want you to have a good future, though, with or without us. As your mama, I will always love you, I will always look out of the window and wonder where you are, but I cannot always accept you, nor can I risk my marriage. Madelief is grateful for your father’s affection, unlike you were, and I will never take that from her.

Merry Christmas, for ever and always.

After the last can of beer, he returned to their bedroom full and heavy. Daan was lying in bed already, his eyes were closed, though Adriaan had known the boy for years and could tell, just by his breathing, that he was not yet asleep.

He swiftly peeled off his t-shirt and shivered at the cold biting at his skin. The flat wasn’t properly insulated, and the temperatures often went from extremely hot to extremely cold as the seasons shifted. He paid no mind to the blond as he dropped his shirt to the floor and stepped over to their bathroom. It was silent in their flat, and all that could be heard was the sound of a couple upstairs arguing. Such a thing occurred every few weeks, when the time to pay bills came near. Adriaan couldn’t tell if the person doing the yelling was a man or a woman, and he could never hear the other person’s response. He stood still at the bathroom door for a moment, waiting for the voices to pass. He was grateful for the rather peaceful life he and Daan shared together.

It reminded him of the constant arguing that took place within his own home. Often it was his father yelling, about money, and the lack of discipline his mother enforced on him — meaning that she didn’t take every opportunity to beat him. Sometimes, his mam started it, and those times were ultimately the worst ones. She screeched at his father for most of the day, out of nowhere, accusing him of all kinds of things; he was skipping church to have an affair, he stole from the shops, she even accused him of homosexuality, of all things. In his father’s eyes, his mother was nothing but a soft cheapskate. In his mother’s eyes, his father was nothing but a brute.

“Aad, please come to bed,” Daan’s voice was rough, the words were messily strung together. “I don’t want you in the bath like this.”

“Like what?” Adriaan scoffed, stripping down to his boxers and throwing one of his shoes against a wall. It was dark, and he could barely see, but it didn’t seem like Daan gave further reaction outside of a short sigh.

“Just lie down,” Daan mumbled. “You have work soon.”

“I’m calling in sick,” he said, sitting down on their soft bed.

His stomach twisted with every movement as he climbed underneath the sheets and tried to find a comfortable sleeping position. There was nothing that he could say, no way for him to explain to Daan how it felt to be utterly abandoned. The other still received cards and letters, and even the occasional phone call, from his mother. Despite the fact that he always tried to convince himself that he did not need the validation of his parents, it still hurt to know that his mam cared more about his father than she did about him. Sure, they knew each other for longer, but his mama carried him in her own body for months, she met him when he was just a little baby who couldn’t defend himself. He thought that parents were supposed to gravitate towards their children in such situations, and not to the people who alienated those who used to be the same little babies they carried within their arms.

“You know,” the other shifted on his back and used one thin arm to pull Adriaan closer. “I could barely understand what you just said.”

He rolled his eyes, it was hard to remember when he drank for the last time, or why he decided to go to the store that day in the first place. His mother’s words had upset him, but they weren’t life changing. She still loved him, missed him even, and he had never received those facts prior. In a few hours, he would awaken to a new day, and he would still be stuck in the same world with the same people, he would stay home but in a matter of time he would return for work. In a few hours, his parents wouldn’t suddenly decide to contact him again. Daan’s arms were warm, and it felt like, for the first time again, he was feeling bare skin unite and tingle.

In a few hours, he would still have Daan.

“How’s your mom?” he asked. “Haven’t heard from her in a while, have we?”

Daan groaned, tugged away and palmed the back of the other’s head. He never liked the attention on him. Even in the darkness, Adriaan could see the blond’s eyes, staring right into his own.

“It’s so complicated, isn’t it?”

DAAN WAS THE FIRST PERSON Adriaan ever kissed. When it happened, they sat together in a small bathroom stall at school. It smelled of urine, nicotine and ham sandwiches with too much butter.

His mother had always told him he had one leg firmly planted in reality, meanwhile the other half of him floated away into fantastical situations. Back when he was a little boy, he and his mam visited his oma in Daarlerveen twice a month. They went by train, and it usually took over an hour to get there. Adriaan used to zone out by the window, watching city buildings come and go and merge into beautiful nature scenes. It had felt obscene to go from farm land and little houses closely built together to graffiti’d walls and gray concrete flats as they got closer to the stops at central stations. During those train rides, he almost always thought about Daan. About the places they would go together, the journeys they would share and the inappropriate graffiti quotes they would laugh at.

He first began thinking about kissing Daan shortly after he saw his mother watching television late at night. After that moment, he began creeping downstairs way past his bedtime, just to see his mama calm and satisfied. She never caught him again, or at least she didn’t make it obvious if she knew what he was doing. There was no harm in it — he wasn’t disturbing his mother, and he didn’t lose much sleep because of it, so why not satiate his curiosity? He never got to see the kinds of shows she watched; romances, adult comedies, movies about addiction and depression. Such things only showed on the television late at night. He got to witness things he had never seen before.

One night, she was watching yet another adult comedy. It must have been the dozenth time that he sneaked downstairs, and it was finally beginning to get boring. And yet he stayed for a bit longer, just to see what the movie would lead to. It seemed to be close to the ending. Adriaan concluded that his mam must have been getting bored as well — she no longer had the same smile on her face. There was a hint of disappointment in the curve of her shoulders, as if she were carrying something heavy.

If he had turned away any sooner, he would have missed it: two men, one with a stubble beard, the other with a bare face except for the large freckles that could be seen from a distance away. Blue eyes, green eyes, straight blond hair, a messy unidentifiable darkness. Their two faces came together, and they shared a passionate kiss for the world to see. Before he could register what he saw, the television turned off. His ma turned around slowly to look at him, and she only nodded towards the stairs before she returned to the TV.

As the daydreamer he supposedly was, he could not forget the look of those men. At that time, he had already begun to wonder about his own sexuality. It felt much too early, and yet the boys in his class were already talking about other girls. Whether or not he was just too young to understand it, or if he was just generally disinterested was difficult to figure out. His mam always told him that he was a “little later” than most boys, but that it was okay, because she had her first kiss at seventeen — with his pa, of course — while the other girls in her class had them at as young as thirteen. Children were growing up too fast, turning away from God too soon, and she was ever so grateful that Adriaan was not one of them.

Never before, though, had he heard boys talk about boys. That topic seemed much more interesting to him than girls or gods.

HHe imagined being the dark-haired man and wondered how it would feel to have someone else’s stubble pressed against his face. After a week or so he even began thinking about it nearly every hour of the day. The idea of those two men utterly consumed him. He didn’t want to wait any longer; he had to do something with his own curiosity. Classes were difficult to follow, so were conversations, and he was left ashamed and flustered around his mama whenever she caught him stuck in thought. He decided that Daan was the only person he could trust with his new interest. He, after all, was the only other boy not talking about girls or love.

They always sat in the second floor bathroom during lunch, since the other places in the school were overwhelmingly busy. Adriaan didn’t enjoy being surrounded by a bunch of boisterous boys who chewed with their mouths open and cursed like sailors. Which was why he gravitated so much to Daan — who was soft, compassionate and clean compared to all of the other kids their age. Students were technically banned from the second floor during break, because most of the classrooms resided there, and the janitors always kept an eye on the stairs so not a single student could get up there. Even if someone forgot something in the classroom, or if they needed the upstairs toilet — because the downstairs ones were always overcrowded with smoking teenagers — they wouldn’t be allowed to go.

And yet it was still easy to stay in the bathroom there, since neither teachers nor janitors actually checked whether or not students truly went downstairs after the bells rang. All Adriaan and Daan had to do was simply go to the bathroom when class finished. Most of the time, they were the only ones doing so, since the bathroom was small with only two stalls and a space to wash one’s hands. Despite the smell, that bathroom was the cleanest one.

It wasn’t difficult to get Daan to agree to the kiss. The boy, even though he was older, looked up to Adriaan for some reason. Maybe because he was the more confident one, the one who defended himself when insulted once again by a classmate, or maybe it was normal for a boy to look up to his friend despite there being reasons not to. He certainly looked up to Daan as well, since he had actually managed to tell his parents about the bullying after one of his favourite jackets had been burned after a gym class. One Wednesday, Adriaan came home with ‘flikker’ written all over his forehead. He had to convince his parents that it had been a joke between him and some friends. The thought of his father knowing that he was bullied, especially about such a sensitive thing, was humiliating.

“It was just a thing I saw my mam watching,” he had said to his friend. “It got me curious, you know? How it would feel and all.”

“We could try it. We’re friends,” Daan had assured. “It doesn’t mean much, Lina and Jade kissed once, in the middle of class, mind you!”

“They’re girls, it’s different.”

“How? They clearly aren’t in love, and neither are we, so why should it even matter? If you’re so curious, I could just help you get over it.”

Adriaan glanced at his shaking hands. All too suddenly, his offer felt much too real. What had he been thinking? Kissing Daan would be a terrible mistake to make.

“What makes it different?” the other asked again.

“Well, I might be…I might be like those men.”

It would feel wrong, despite Daan’s willingness, to just kiss him. It would be a betrayal. His ma told him that homosexuals were often deceptive, that they acted like heterosexuals just to lure vulnerable people in. That’s why it had to be illegal — just like fraud. Adriaan didn’t want to be like those people. And yet, he wanted to stop wondering. He had to get on with his life. Perhaps, after the kiss, he would be reminded of how girls were marginally better for boys. Maybe it would awaken him for the first time, make him into the other boys who talked about Patricia and Kathleen and their sudden physical development. He didn’t want to be a strange, unromantic creature forever. Adriaan wanted to catch up to his classmates and yearn.

“We’re still friends,” Daan shrugged. “I don’t see the problem.”

Adriaan had not been the one to make the first move. The kiss itself had been quick, a connection between inexperienced lips for just a few seconds. There was no real emotion behind it, so short that it could have been missed. He remembered how kisses had been described in the few books he had read: explosive, life-changing things that were too much to handle. None of those were ways he would describe his first kiss with Daan. It hadn’t felt too good to be true, nor had it felt bad. Just natural. A thing he could do over and over again without a problem.