Page 11 of His Cruelest Moves
“How many? Boys or girls?”
“Ah, three… I mean two real ones, I suppose. Both girls.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never done anything with a guy, Alex?”
“Yeah, sure, just not… I’ve just never had a… I mean I’ve only had girlfriends. Mainly at high school.”
“So what we did, kissing a guy, you’ve never done that?”
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?” He swallowed, and went on in a lower voice. “Yeah, I’ve done that, just never like that. It… blew my mind.”
“Don’t you want to do it again?”
“Totally.”
Alex’s head was in a whirl. He’d gone from feeling that he was the confident one of the two of them to suddenly feeling like Isard had the upper hand, that he was the mature one and Alex the child. He took a sip of his coffee, but it had gone cold.
“So, what… what have you done?” he asked, hoping to turn the tables again.
Isard leaned back, looked up at the roof for a few moments, and then back down, meeting Alex’s eyes.
“I fell in love for the first time when I was seventeen. Álvaro, a kid in my youth theater group. He was gorgeous, like a tall blond angel with a mullet cut. But straight. I fell really hard, thought the world was going to end. For a few weeks I carried an actual physical pain around in my chest. I thought I was going to die, convinced it was a heart attack or something. Mom even took me to the doctor. It was him who told Mom what was wrong with me.”
“The doctor?” Alex hooted. “You actually got diagnosed with a broken heart?”
Alex was laughing hard now, and it was infectious. Isard started chuckling.
“Yeah, I got diagnosed: love-sick. I felt like an idiot afterward. Dad was ribbing me for months.”
“You told him? He knows you’re…”
“Mum told him. Yeah, all my parents know I’m gay. They’re fine with it. That was my coming out.”
Alex found that phrasing, “all my parents”, weird, but all he said was “Wow, that actually sounds cool,”
“Are you not out to your parents?”
“I’m not even out to myself. I mean I don’t know if I’m…”
“Gay. C’mon, say it, Alex.”
“I’m bisexual, I think.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true!”
“OK, I’m not doubting you.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“I’m just wondering if you’re being totally honest with yourself.”
Alex stared at Isard, and was about to answer angrily when the driver appeared before their table.
“Hey, are you guys coming? I’ve been waiting at the car for five minutes already. If we don’t go now, we won’t reach Barcelona before midnight.”
That broke the atmosphere. Isard rushed to pay their bill, and then the two boys followed the driver shamefacedly out to the taxi.
