Loveless(41)

Jason, on the other hand, was wearing his teddy-bear jacket and black jeans, which was his look pretty much all year round.

‘I was thinking,’ he said as we walked inside the building, ‘the cinema was probably a terrible idea for a – for, like, a meet-up.’

He’d been about to say ‘for a date’. He knew it was a date too, then.

It was on.

I chuckled. ‘Yeah. Let’s meet up and ignore each other for two hours.’

‘Basically. I mean, it sounds pretty relaxing, to be honest.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I think the perfect marriage would be made up of two people who can sit in comfortable silence with each other for extended periods of time.’

‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘We’re not married yet.’

This made him let out a spluttery, somewhat scandalised laugh. Nice. I could flirt. I was acing this.

We were half an hour into the movie when the fire alarm went off.

Until that point, things were going rather well. Jason had not attempted to hold my hand, put his arm round me, or, thank God, kiss me. We were simply two friends watching a movie at the cinema.

Obviously I didn’t want him to do any of those things because they would have been terribly cliché and almost kind of sleazy.

‘So, now what?’ he asked as we stood in the cold outside the cinema. Nobody else seemed to know whether the fire was real, but it didn’t seem like we’d be getting back inside any time soon. A staff member had just come outside and was giving out cinema vouchers.

I pulled my coat a little tighter round me. This was not how I’d hoped this afternoon would go. I had hoped we would sit next to each other in silence for two hours, watch a nice movie and then go home.

But we couldn’t end the date now. That would be awkward. That would not be date-like behaviour.

‘Erm … I guess we could just go back to college and have tea, or something?’ I said. That seemed to be the thing people did to socialise at uni. Tea in our bedrooms.

Oh wait. Bedroom. Was going to a bedroom a good idea? Or would that mean – ‘Yeah!’ Jason smiled, slotting his hands into his pockets. ‘Yeah, that sounds good. D’you wanna come to mine? We could watch a movie in my room, or something?’

I nodded too. ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’

OK.

It was OK.

I could do this.

I could be normal.

I could go back to a boy’s room on a date and do whatever was usually involved in that. Talking. Flirting. Kissing. Sex, maybe.

I was brave. I didn’t have to listen to my own thoughts. I could do all of it.

I actually don’t like tea, which obviously Jason knew, and he automatically made me a hot chocolate instead.

He had his own room, like Pip and most students at Durham, which meant it was small. It was probably a third of the size of mine and Rooney’s, with one single bed. The décor was much the same though – a crusty old carpet, yellow breeze-block walls, and IKEA furniture. His sheets were plain blue. He had a laptop and some books on his bedside table, and a few pairs of shoes were tidily lined up underneath the radiator.

But it wasn’t any of this that I noticed first. It was the wall that I noticed first.

The wall was entirely blank apart from a framed photograph of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

I looked at it.

Jason looked at me looking at it.

‘I have questions,’ I said.

‘Understandable,’ he said, nodding and sitting down on his bed. ‘Er, d’you remember Edward? From my old school? He gave it to me.’

He finished his sentence, as if this was the end of the story.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘So … OK, you’re gonna have to come sit down if I’m gonna explain this.’ He patted the space next to him on the bed.

This made me a little nervous. But it wasn’t like there was anywhere else to sit in the room, and he didn’t do it in a particularly flirty way, so I guessed it was fine.

I sat down next to him on the edge of the bed, holding my hot chocolate.

‘So, we all know I’m a Scooby-Doo stan.’

‘Obviously.’

‘And also a Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Junior stan.’

‘I mean … OK, sure.’

‘OK. So, at my old school, like, before I moved to ours for sixth form, I was kind of known as the guy who’d never kissed anyone.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘You never told me that.’

‘Well, you know I left that school, because, like …’ He made a face. ‘A lot of the guys there … I mean, it was an all-boys school and people would just rip the shit out of each other for every tiny thing.’

‘Yeah.’

Jason had told us a little bit about that before. How people at his old school were kind of nasty, generally, and he didn’t want to be in that sort of environment any more.

‘So they all picked on me for having never been kissed. And I guess I got teased about it a lot. Nothing serious, but, yeah, it was a thing. Everyone thought it was pretty weird.’

‘But you’ve kissed people now,’ I said. ‘Like … you’ve had a girlfriend before.’