One Last Story

I walked in to find him sat on the foot of my bed. He looked up, our gazes met, and I could see in his eyes the long years he’d spent as a half-remembered dream in the back of my head. My prodigal son had returned.

‘Long time, no see,’ Duke murmured, voice hovering awkwardly between nostalgic friend and victim of an old, but still red raw, betrayal. His appearance hadn’t changed from the last time I’d seen him: the same tall, perhaps to the point of gangly, dark and handsome man I’d loved. ‘How you been keeping?’

I didn’t say anything. It had been a long day, full of drab textbooks and fluorescent lighting. I’d popped two painkillers a few hours ago and my brain was still feeling wrapped in needle-laced wool. This was the last thing I needed. I prayed it wasn’t real. My shoulders slouched, relieving themselves both of the workload I had slogged through and the straps of my backpack, the old and tattering thing clattering with the sound of laptops and books really too valuable to be allowed to clatter as it hit the floor. I crossed the room in a few shuffled steps, dropped myself into my desk-chair and let it carry me on its groaning wheels a few inches further.

When my eyes slid halfway open once more, Duke was still there. I told him so.

‘Making up for lost appearances,’ he replied, digging into his coat pocket and producing a bruised, crumpled packet of cigarettes. Well, packet of cigarette really, since as he pulled one out with his teeth he crumpled the paper carton into a ball and stuffed it back into his pocket without a second thought. In no hurry, he drew out a Zippo and, after a few tries, managed to light up. I couldn’t help but notice, through the cheap green plastic, that there were only a few droplets of fuel left. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that to be bitter.’ He’d taken too long for the apology to even come across as remotely sincere. That brought a tired, low smirk to one side of his face. ‘Can you blame me? It’s been three years since you last wrote me. Pushing six since we spent any proper time together.’ He rose to his feet and tried to start pacing, but the room was too small to let him really get more than two or three strides. So instead he rounded on me and tore the cigarette from the side of his mouth. Those long years in his eyes had deepened, darkened, and were slowly spilling over and running down his cheeks. ‘You know what? I am bitter. Why the fuck shouldn’t I be? After all the changes I made for you, everything I risked, the life I gave up because you wanted me to. And for what? So you could run off with someone smarter, or someone more attractive? Without even a goddamn word of goodbye?’

He was panting, softly, but I could hear the catch in his voice. That little strangled choke of a sob suppressed. I commented on his smoking habit, and his swearing. When I knew him he hadn’t done either. It wasn’t an attempt to derail him. I was morbidly curious.

‘Yeah, well, you didn’t expect me to just stay still, did you?’ Actually, I did. I thought that was how the relationship worked. Duke snorted at that. ‘Hate to break it to you, but after you left I kinda fell apart. Just ask Izzy, he’s well on his way now that you’ve moved on to Mr. Tall, Green and Handsome.’

I sighed and pressed down on my temples. The headache was returning. I told him that it wasn’t personal, that it was the way things happened, that… It was complicated. I thought we had agreed, at the beginning, that it was never going to last: I would stay with him until things began to sour and stagnate, then I’d move on to the next relationship. Duke slumped back down onto the bed and ran a hand through his hair. I knew he did that whenever he was subtly trying to dry his eyes; I’d made him pull that trick more times than I was comfortable with.

‘But you never said goodbye.’

I got up and moved over to the bed, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and resting my forehead against his. It had been so long, I’d forgotten the feel of wind-battered skin and wildly curling hair. He felt alive. He felt real.

My voice was little more than an errant breath. I had become that shy, awkward boy again, starting a relationship with no idea where it would go or what to expect along the way. And I was sorry. It wouldn’t make things better, or wash away the years Duke had spent as a dim and distant memory buried beneath his successors and fantasised what-ifs. But it was all I could really offer him: a full stop to a story that had gone on too long.

Duke took me by my free hand, brought me back up onto my feet and guided me into my desk-chair. He knelt, produced my laptop from my bag and set it open before me. His hands moved to my shoulders, gripped them with a gentle firmness and slowly began to massage the day’s stress from them. I let out a sigh and permitted the warm glow of relaxation to spread down my spine. My fingers moved over the keyboard, dancing with a carefree grace they had forgotten amidst the e-mails and essays. No dull plod from one letter to another, no vitriolic red lines beneath misspelt words as my absent mind failed to process some jargon. It came as naturally as water flowing down a leaf, sliding effortlessly around obstacles to find the best route to the end. And when my words reached the tip of the leaf, they hung there, a crystal mirror in which I saw myself and Duke suspended for a moment.

I saved the story and with a click of the mouse closed the file. My droplet fell from its leaf and disappeared into the growing lake below. I looked up from my chair. Duke smiled down at me, and then he was gone.

‘Goodbye.’

Duke got his goodbye from me. He got one last story.