Exhale by Sophia Soames
LEO
OMG, my hook-up is a stunner. Wow! And…shit.
I could hardly function when flustered, and right now? I was more than a little bit of a mess. The man in the Grindr profile picture had looked completely different to the man now standing in front of me. The guy in the picture had seemed young and kind, a strong jaw hiding under masses of curls and a reluctant little smile brewing in his cheeks. He’d been trying hard in that picture—a little too hard because in real life, Jamie didn’t even need to try. He was beautiful, from every angle and in every way.
That was something I hadn’t expected, and I couldn’t have made it more obvious, staring like a fool and babbling bullshit at a hundred miles an hour, and dammit, I couldn’t bloody breathe!
“Breathe in, and then exhale slowly,” he said, this Jamie. “You sound like you’re having a panic attack. Please don’t.” Then he smiled, and my poor bleeding heart went into meltdown.
“You’re so damn pretty,” I blurted out, and Jamie, the bastard, smiled that supermodel smile of his…damn, those eyes. Deep pools that were calling me in like a doomed human being lured to my death by a wicked siren. Not that there was anything evil about the guy in front of me. He was almost bashfully tangling his fingers in his curls, and my stomach jolted with fear. Because look, it wasn’t like I could compete with that. I was a stupid kid with nothing to show. I lived on my own in a dingy flat, a mattress on the floor for a bed and a desk that was overflowing with stuff I was ‘working on’. Well, I was working on my degree in French literature, and the overflowing stuff was all the books I was reading, over and over again, my laptop and printouts and endless Post-it notes. Jamie, no doubt had a posh, minimalist flat overlooking the Thames, where he stayed whenever he wasn’t on assignment for Vogue.
“I’m not pretty.” He pouted with his lovely, puffy lips, and a little dimple formed in his chin.
I was done for. I wanted to kiss him. Hug him and climb all over him here on the platform. I hadn’t expected meeting up to go like this. I mean, I’d been the one who’d pushed for it, not him. I’d wanted to see if this Jamie person would finally be the one to fill the black hole of lonely solitude that had been eating me from the inside out for years, stopping me from finding anyone with whom I felt safe.
The fact I liked boys and was totally and irrevocably gay was not the problem. No, the problem was I’d meet men and let them have sex with me while I doubted my every move. Every single time. I’d had a string of bad relationships, the most recent one with a bloke who’d messed me around so much that I didn’t know who the hell I was in the end. I’d suffered through dates and hook-ups, each one worse than the last, until this past year, it had been just me, my hand and my dick. We’d stuck to gay porn. We’d hung out with hot studs with crazy muscles and insane cocks in the safety of online sites and bloody Twitter, but when it came to real life, involving real people? I’d chickened out. I just couldn’t face another disappointment. Another man who would smile at me and use me as I lay there wondering what would go wrong this time.
Finally, after a particularly long dry spell, I’d talked myself into some bravery and had gone to a gay club, then walked straight out again because it just wasn’t my scene. I couldn’t do it anymore. Hated the fake flirting, the pointless words and all the irrational worry that I just couldn’t seem to shift. So here I was, boldly throwing myself into online dating. It was what everyone did, right? A straightforward easy app hook-up would be the pill to solve my little problem. Get myself out there. Try someone else, someone who wouldn’t be an arsehole. See if this stupid phobia of dating that I had developed was an itch I could give a good scratch and get rid of, once and for all.
Jamie was for sure something I wanted to…scratch. Touch. Kiss his handsome face. Run my fingers through his curly hair. Jump and hope he’d catch me.
“Leo?” He waved his hand in front of my face, bringing me back out of my head. “Do you still want to do this?”
“Yes. Of course. Sorry,” I stuttered, my face flaming. I was doomed. I couldn’t even do this right. What happened to charming, flirty Leo? I had no trouble whatsoever flirting with guys at uni, even at parties, like the one a few weeks back, except when it came down to it, I’d blown the poor dude a kiss and swanned off with my jacket over my head. I was apparently a dick when I was drunk on fear.
I should’ve had a drink before meeting up with Jamie. I should’ve smoked that cigarette earlier to calm my shredded nerves. I should’ve done a lot of things.
“Look, mate,” I said, sticking the unlit cigarette between my lips and sucking on it, hoping to get a little light relief from the invisible nicotine. “I need to tell you something.”
Clever. Yeah, because now Jamie looked all bewildered.
“No, no, nothing bad. I just want to set the record straight,” I word-vomited, and the poor man grunted at me. “So…so you kind of know what you’re dealing with.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Bad, bad, bad. Crap. Here I go again.
“You can tell me anything,” he said. “I mean, isn’t it better to clear the air? Then we have no surprises.” He didn’t sound as confident as I’d have liked, but he was offering me a lifeline here, so I took it.
“I really want to go through with this,” I half-whispered. Great. Now my voice was doing a runner, alongside my bravado and cocky alter ego. I hadn’t realised I’d had one until it had buggered off and left me. Now it was just me, and I felt like a terrified kid again.
“Me too,” he replied, and that deep dimple put in another appearance in his chin.
“It’s just…you’re a little intimidating right now. I’ve…I’ve never successfully done this before. You know? My hook-ups tend to be complete dicks, and it never leads to anything but me feeling like an idiot.”
I wanted to sink right through the ground. At least the platform was still empty and nobody else was there to witness my complete and utter self-destruction. I’d had this in the bag. Fifteen minutes ago, I’d been so pumped on adrenaline, I was ready to take the guy by the hand and drag him home and fuck him in my tiny hallway. My jeans had been straining at the sheer thought of it, and I’d had a plan, which had looked nothing like this. If he didn’t speak soon, I’d probably burst into tears. That’s how bad this was. It was bad. Really, gut-crunchingly bad.
At the point where I’d convinced myself he was going to leave, get on the next train and laugh all the way home at the confused, messy kid who thought he could get lucky, he said, “You’ll have to spell this out a little for me.” He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him. “Am I your first hook-up?”
“No, no, I’m not a virgin.” I dug my hands into my pockets. “I mean, I’ve hooked up with people before. I’ve had sex. It’s just, it never leads anywhere…”
And I was off again, jabbering so fast the cigarette flew from my lips and almost rolled off the platform. I didn’t know where to look as my mouth kept blurting more nonsense. I couldn’t look at him. Fuck. Talk about embarrassing. How did people do this? How did they get over themselves? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
“…either they never call again, or they leave before we even get our clothes off. I’m just…hopeless at everything, apparently.” I rounded up my little Ted Talk, picked up the cigarette, then stood there not knowing what to do with it. I didn’t want to put the damn thing back in my mouth. There was no bin. Fuck my life.
Why the hell had I told him all that? Really, Leo?
Leo, Leo mon enfant terrible.I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, scolding me for my stupidity, although she’d probably have been laughing too much to tell me off. She’d moved back to France a few years ago, taken a lover, and then another. She was the queen of hook-ups. I had no idea where she met these men, but they were a new constant in her life—something she didn’t have when I was growing up. It had been just her and me back then, and we’d lived well. Stable. I’d had a good childhood, I honestly couldn’t complain. But there had been no one in my mother’s life and she’d obviously been lonely. Now she wasn’t. She was happily shagging around like a teenager, and secretly, I loved that she did. I loved that she was having fun. At least one of us was.
“Why am I intimidating?” he asked, shuffling his feet. “I don’t mean to be. We don’t have to do anything. We can just go for a coffee if you want?”
“I don’t like coffee,” I muttered like a petulant child. “Look, I’m French, and obviously wired wrong because I’m both lactose and gluten intolerant and I don’t like coffee. So, all that bread and cheese shit is out—”
“You don’t sound French.”
“Grew up here, didn’t I?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. That’s why I have a crap name. Leo Jacques Leblond.”
“I think your name’s great.”
“Try spelling it every time you give it to someone on the phone. It’s annoying.”
“Hmm.” He was staring at me again, like he had the world at his booted feet. Doc Martens, for fuck’s sake. All polished up and fully visible below his too-short, chequered trousers. He had some ripped, multicoloured rock band T-shirt showing underneath a knitted cardigan, the look completed by a super-cool, vintage long coat. Like some emo. Or not. He wasn’t wearing black but a mixture of beiges and reds. And a bright-blue rucksack. Nothing matched, yet… Yeah. Vogue called. They want their cover model back. The pretty one with the weird clothes.
He was talking again, and I’d totally zoned out.
“…and I said to myself, life is too short. So, I want to do this if you’re still up for it. But maybe do it right, kind of just hang out and get to know each other.”
“I want to have sex,” I stated. Why couldn’t I ever control my mouth?
“I’m totally up for that.” He grinned from under his curls. “That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it? But we’ve been standing here talking for a bit, and it’s nice, and you’re nice, and I’m sure Costa Coffee over there do gluten-free biscuits, and I’ll buy you a bottle of water or whatever your poison is. I just need to sit down and get my head in gear because this is kind of freaky. I’ve never done anything like this before. To be honest, I’m a little weirded out, and now here I am—”
“On some dodgy council estate, meeting up with a dude who’s probably a drug dealer and will have you beaten up in a minute.”
“I hope not!” He laughed, and the world became a little brighter. “Are you a drug dealer?”
“No,” I giggled back. “I promise you. I’m a dull uni student, and I live in a tiny student flat. I haven’t got much to show for myself, but perhaps one day, I’ll have a nice job and a better place to live. That’s my plan. I want to teach French. Or perhaps move to Paris for a while, find my roots.”
“Don’t move to Paris. I’ll never see you again.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious, so I joked, “You might not want to once you’ve seen me naked.”
He blushed, and it was the cutest thing ever.
“You’re desperate for this coffee thing, huh?”
“Just to clear my head,” he said again. He sounded a little defeated, but I was grateful for a plan that didn’t involve taking him home. I wasn’t sure I could deal with that right now, however much I liked the idea of seeing him naked.
“Come on. Let’s go get you a large coffee—”
“I prefer espresso.”
“You sound like one of those posh kids,” I teased. I couldn’t help myself.
“Maybe once upon a time, I was posh. Not anymore. I still live at home with my siblings in a rundown council terrace in Thorpeton Green, and not the posh part. Like, backstreet-dump Thorpeton, near the industrial estate under the M4.”
“Working-class posh,” I blabbed on. “You look posh, you talk posh, and you look like you just stepped out of a fashion shoot.”
I regretted it even before I finished speaking because now he really looked freaked out, my beautiful, gorgeous man. I wondered how people survived having a partner who looked like him. I mean, he would be with someone amazing one day. Probably some big, rich, muscle bear of a man who would love him and spoil him, while I would be stuck alone in my dingy flat, dreaming of him. I was already jealous of the imaginary rich boyfriend, the one he would love forever.
“You’re deranged,” he said, smirking at me. I sighed, fiddling with my fingers. I’d heard that one before. Then he reached out and grabbed my sleeve. Tugged at me. Smiled as he led me down the steps towards the road. I followed him, thinking at that moment, I would have followed him anywhere. Blindly, desperately and, I think, a little bit in love.