FRIDAY
15 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               'My parents said they'd get you expelled if I kept talking to you.'

Isaiah freezes. Fear swallows him. He shakes his head, silently begging me to shut up, to not tell him this, but he's right, I do have to participate in my own life. I've always cared more about him than I do myself, but I won't bend to his comfort this time.

There's no place I belong but him and I can't fathom the torment that awaits if I never get to touch him again. Six years passed like a century in a desert; what will the rest of my life be? I have to tell him everything.

'Well, what she said is they'd revoke your scholarship but even I'm not daft enough to miss what that actually meant. My family are Coeus founders, this town's founders. My dad was best friends with Zelikowitz when they attended. You know all it would take is one word. You only got in because of me, it wouldn't be hard to kick you out.'

His lips form a single plead that leaves him without sound: don't.

Battling the ache in my chest that agrees with him, that implores me to be quiet (because his eyes glisten and I've already hurt him enough, haven't I hurt him enough?), I stand.

'I couldn't be the reason you got stuck here. So I left and I made sure you never wanted to talk to me again.'

Tears clog his lashes but don't fall. Isaiah staggers into the chair I sat on only yesterday to work on my music (was that really only yesterday?), and, throwing a nauseated glance at my notebook of score paper still open on the table, buries his face in his hands.

Every cell in my body wants to break it and I twist my limbs, contort my fingers to fight the urge.

Isaiah puts me out of my misery with a jaded question: 'Why are you telling me this now?'

I'm not sure what he means until explains.

'Why didn't you just tell me this from the start? If your muma ain't want me to talk to you, we could've pretended till graduation.'

My muscles slacken. The stillness is equally unbearable.

Tongue clamped to the roof of my mouth, I turn to the window. We arrive at the true cause of my shame and I'm unable to look at him. Somehow him thinking I'm a coward, my mother's puppet, an all-around arsehole aristocrat was better than him knowing what I really am is an idiot. There's no artistic way to spin that.

'I thought it would be kinder to let you hate me.' It leaves me exactly like it should: a pathetic whimper.

'What the fuck, Dorian?' I don't have to look at Isaiah to know his state is the opposite of my molten one: his voice is taut, spit through a clenched jaw (a migraine is guaranteed, pray that's all he'll get). 'Do you have any idea how badly you fucked me up? On what fucking planet was that kinder?'

The wilting flowers of the common gorse lining the opposite side of the road blur behind my tears. 'Somehow it felt like a good idea at the moment. I regretted it as soon as you left but then I reckoned the damage was already done and I would just be pouring salt in the wound or giving you emotional whiplash if I came after you.

'I kept telling myself to phone you, to tell you, to apologise. But it got harder with each day and then... then six years had gone.'

A new silence settles into the room like dust from a beat rug. The floor is clean at the sacrifice of breathing. I glance at Isaiah as he sits up and peels his hands from his face to massage each bone in his fingers.

'I waited for you.' It leaves a strangled throat, dejected and sharp enough to sever me in half. 'At the bus stop. All night. I made a deal with myself that I'd give you until sunrise and if you ain't change your mind by then, I'd never spare you another thought.'

A sob cleaves through me.

He had more faith than I gave him credit for and I'm the one who beat it out of him. It was all for nothing. I could have gone back to him the moment I was released from Rav Eliraz. Five years of misery that could easily have been avoided with no one to blame but myself.

My tears dry much sooner than I'd like but he's the one who always told me there was no wrong way to express my emotions, so I move to sit opposite him without forcing obvious sorrow.

'I don't have any noble reason for it, I was eighteen and I made a stupid mistake. I just messed up. I messed up, I know that, but... I can't change it now. It's done and I'm so sorry.'

He lifts his face from his hands. His jaw is finally unclenched but there's a tautness in the corners of his eyes that tells me the ache has already set in.

'I love you, Shay. All I want is to be with you.' I exhale. 'But it's your choice: do you want me to go or do you want me to stay?'

'I can't do this–'

'You have to.' Blades hack through my chest, a dozen voices in my head yelling at me to stop, but I shove through it as though I'm trudging against a blizzard. 'I'll respect your decision but it's yours to make this time. What do you want?' He doesn't answer so I repeat myself: 'What do you want?'

'I don't know.'

'Who is supposed to?'

'I don't know.'

Isaiah thaws into his chair, so stagnant I could think time has frozen if it wasn't for the slow stream of tears down his cheeks. They collect in his beard and fall into his lap. His eyes are listless on the composition I've written.

I wonder whether he can read it. I wonder whether I want him to.

After what feels like hours, he looks up. He's still crying. 'I thought we had everyting. You know you're the only person I ever let into my life and then you just left... It don't matter what you do or say, you can't take it back.'

Dragging in a rattling breath, he swallows.

'We can't go back to what we had.'

'I don't want to go back. I want to go forward.'

A second stretches on for infinity. Isaiah stares at me in unadulterated horror. Then he breaks. Spine splintered in half, he crashes onto the table where he shakes with violet sobs. He weeps exactly as people in old stories would.

I rush around the table, don't make it all the way before my arms drape his shoulders, and though the angle of the hug leaves space between our torsos and only presses his face into my chest, he clings to me.

A nauseating whirlpool is already brewing in my chest. To surrender entirely to another is much more terrifying than I believed. Why wasn't all the world's art an adequate warning? Because that's what all art, I now understand, is about: surrender. Not body, not mind, not soul — all of which are ever-evolving and therefore can't be owned by me any more than by you — but my future, and isn't the future the thread that crocheted together the body, the mind, and the soul, along with the very essence of life?

Every thought I'll have, every surface I'll touch, the music I'll listen to, the music I'll write, how, where, why — it's all in his hands. Fear arrives with a fever, pain with paralysis. Now I understand why I couldn't give him a choice six years ago.

What if he says no?

Once he stops sobbing and the dry tension in my throat has released enough for me to trust I can speak, I press a kiss to the top of his head and pull away.

'Okay. I'll go back to Oxford and you can come find me when you've thought about it. Take however long you need.' I caress his cheek. My heart swells as he leans into my touch. 'Though maybe less than six years.'

I've never been funny and the joke is so tactless, delivered far too bland and far too soon, that Isaiah struggles not to laugh.

'Okay.'

Sitting up, he scrubs his eyes and fills his lungs to the brim with a shaky breath he exhales sharply. It resets him so effectively that if a stranger walked in, Isaiah would smile and they'd have no idea how much he's cried in the past twenty-four hours. Even I want to be convinced, his beaconing towards the belief that he's perfectly fine as inviting as the scent of freshly baked cinnamon babka on a chilly day.

'Okay. Yeah. I'll drive you to the train.'

'No need. I need to see my parents.'

His smile vanishes. Using the table for leverage, he climbs to his feet. 'No. Dorian, I thought we agreed you definitely shouldn't go.'

'It's just dinner.' I've never been any good at lying (just as I've never been good at making jokes whilst you're good at both) and Isaiah isn't fooled for a second (maybe it's not my poor deception skills and more your ability to see through everyone), so I drop the pretence. 'I want you to give me a second chance. Doesn't it make me a hypocrite if I don't give them one?'

'It ain't remotely the same ting. You didn't abuse me for eighteen years.'

'My parents have never touched me...' The words leave me with unnatural jerks, each syllable yanked from my stomach with pauses between them, like driving a car before one learns to shift gears. 'Not even in a good way. I didn't know what a hug was until I met you.'

'Don't that alone sound abusive to you–?' He flattens his lips.

A war rages behind his eyes. It's obvious he wants to keep arguing, to declare all the reasons I shouldn't go, which I'm sure he has thousands of, but the other half of him knows it's not fair, that he has no right for such passionate defences for my wellbeing before he makes his decision. Besides, it's the same as what he said to me about visiting his mother's house: I'll regret it if I don't.

I smile, and though I know it must look like a grimace, I don't drop it. 'It's just dinner.'

With a sigh, Isaiah reels in his fervour. 'I really don't think you should go.' He builds a demeanour of polite nonchalance in one sideways nod of the head. 'But let me at least drive you.'