Boyfriend in a Dress

‘Are you here for the year?’

This was the most important question – if he was only here for one term, as were some of the other Brits abroad that we had met, I felt my world would crumble. It was already Halloween. He would have to go home soon

‘Yeah, you?’ he smiled, and I resolved to look down at the table instead of directly at him, at least until I could relax.

‘Yep, but I’m looking forward to going home for Christmas. Just not finding the accent appealing. I need to talk to some English men.’

‘What am I, Scotch mist?’ he asked.

‘No, but yours is crooked, remember?’ I practically coughed my answer out. He was having a bizarre effect on me. I just didn’t get like this around men; I was always the one in control. Jake was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, with horror, as if I had morphed into a pigtailed, giggling schoolgirl freak in the space of an evening. I tried to fight it as best I could.

‘It isn’t crooked at all actually, it’s straight as a pool cue – that was just a game.’

‘Oh right, well you would say that, who wants to be crooked?’ I managed.

‘Are you going to make me prove it?’ he asked, trying to catch my eye as I looked sternly at a knot in the wood of our table. I coughed slightly.

‘Maybe later,’ I mustered, and looked up, and into, those eyes. Which is when I saw that they were different colours – one dark brown, the colour of old wood, almost dull, one bright blue, the colour of Greek pottery, a bright summery glistening blue, seeming to reflect sunlight that wasn’t even there.

‘Your eyes are different colours,’ I said, without thinking. I’m sure he hadn’t realized, and was grateful to me for pointing it out.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he replied and looked away. And suddenly I knew I had blown it. It’s not as if it was a disability, but it was very possible that he was sensitive about it, or defensive, and I had just thrown it out there. I may as well have called him ‘freak.’

Except it wasn’t freaky; it wasn’t unattractive at all. Even the smallest defects aren’t tolerated these days. The beauty is in the details, the flaws, the imperfections that make us different, somebody once said, but it isn’t true any more. If you have a problem, in this plastic-coated world, just fix it. Have your teeth straightened, your nose fixed, your ears pinned. The surface should be pretty, almost bland, even if underneath there is a mess of scars and emotional tears. If you had told me previously that I would find somebody with different-coloured eyes attractive, I would have been surprised. But with Charlie, it just seemed right. It stopped his face from being completely perfect, but made it so at the same time. I had to correct my outburst, I had to rectify my massive faux pas.

My cheeks suddenly burned with the blood rushing to my face, and I bit my lip and tried to maintain eye contact without getting embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just, well, you don’t see many like it!’

I was making it worse, he sounded like the bearded lady at the circus, or the smallest man on earth.

‘It’s fine, your eyes are brown, one of mine is blue, one’s brown. It’s nothing.’ He shrugged, but with a serious look on his face. He looked away, and I looked at the table, at the graffiti that had been etched in with penknives over the years, and swore in my head. Charlie adjusted himself in his seat, and I prepared myself for him to get up and leave. He stood up, and stretched his legs. I turned to talk to Jake, to mask my crushing disappointment, and suddenly heard Charlie’s voice in my ear. I moved slightly, to face him, as he leaned in and whispered,

‘So, what halls are you in?’

‘I’m over in Toulouse. You?’

‘Just opposite – Parker Hall.’

‘I’m surprised I haven’t noticed you before … and not because of the eyes or anything.’ Jesus! What was wrong with me? I sounded like a Nazi!

But Charlie ignored it and carried on talking.

‘Shall I walk you home?’ He cut straight to the chase.

‘Okay, I think there’ll be a few of us though, Jake is in Parker as well.’

‘I meant now.’ Charlie stared me straight in the eye.

‘Sure, why not, I’ve had enough.’ I mustered all my confidence, flushed slightly, grabbed my coat and, with my head down, squeezed myself out of the bar, with Charlie breathing down my neck the whole way.

It was cold as we walked towards the quad, which was the quickest way to get home. We chatted, nowhere near touching each other, and at points he even jogged backwards, trying to expel some of the energy that obviously whizzed around his body at all times. We joked, and made a vague date to see a film together that we both claimed to want to see, but no date was fixed as we passed the library. The cold had really started to set in, and I felt my nose turning red. In the dark I couldn’t make out his smile as readily, but I could hear his laugh, which sounded smaller out here, underneath the huge Illinois sky.

‘I’m surprised I haven’t met you before,’ I said, to fill a sudden silence as we started to walk past the law buildings, towards the flower conservatory.

‘I’ve only met Jon a couple of times,’ Charlie said.

‘Oh, I thought you knew all those guys really well.’

‘No, I only met some of them for the first time tonight.’ He didn’t smile at this, but slapped himself to keep warm. I prayed inside I wasn’t boring him, that he hadn’t expected me to be a much funnier, livelier person than I was.

‘Who have you been hanging out with then?’ I asked, for something to say, boring even myself.

‘Oh, some fraternity boys – my roommate is in Pi Kappa Chi, so I kind of got in with them.’

‘Right, great – been to many parties?’ I sounded far more impressed than I had discussing them with Dale. In truth, I was massively disappointed – he wasn’t part of our gang, not really, our Brits-abroad gang, us against the world, failing to bond quite properly with our hosts.

‘A few, they’re all kind of the same. They aren’t great actually. They all act like they’re your best mate, straight away, just because you can play basketball or whatever.’

‘Maybe they just liked you.’ I don’t know why I was making excuses for the frat boys, something to say again, I suppose, and I couldn’t imagine anybody not loving him. I was actually sticking up for myself, in a twisted way.

‘Maybe,’ and he smiled again.

‘Just loveable, I guess,’ he said quickly, and then looked down, embarrassed at himself, at something he seemed to know about himself, that didn’t sit well with him. And instantly I knew that Charlie wasn’t quite as confident as I had first thought – but the world loved him anyway, and chose to overlook all the flaws he felt in himself, for the good stuff they could see. For the world, that smile was everything. For Charlie, that wasn’t quite right.

‘Well, it takes a while to get to know people, I suppose,’ was all I could say. I felt desperate to let him know that I understood, and not to reveal that I too had instantly fallen victim to his smile as well. I didn’t want him to think of me as shallow as the rest of the world. I wanted him to know that I could go deeper, and that we wouldn’t be shallow together. Somehow, in my silent desperation, he understood.

‘Hold on,’ he said suddenly, and grabbed my arm.

‘What?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Look up,’ he said, and I had a sinking feeling that he was going to make me gaze at the stars. For somebody fighting for his own depths, it was a mistake.

‘What am I looking at?’ I asked, suddenly tired, and aware that maybe this wasn’t going to work out.

‘Whatever you want,’ he shouted, from a little way away, and I turned to see him dash behind a tree.

‘I had to take a … piss,’ he said weakly, walking back moments later. ‘I didn’t want you to see.’

I started to laugh with relief, and chanced my arm.

‘Thank God, I thought you were going to start talking about the stars!’

‘Hell no!’ Charlie laughed too, and then caught me off guard with a kiss. Before I knew it, his tongue was in my mouth, and his arms were around me, and we were kissing each other softly, and fiercely, and he was kissing me exactly the way I wanted to kiss him, and for the first time that evening I regained some control. I realized that something in me had hooked him, the way I had been taken by his smile. I just wasn’t sure exactly what.

We didn’t make it to either of our rooms. We ended up somewhere behind the cactus conservatory, about two hundred feet from our halls. It was a quick, passionate, gorgeous start. Not seedy, despite the building we were leaning on. We went back to his, and stayed there for most of that first term.

But innocence fades, and sexy starts to a relationship are long forgotten six years later. We wouldn’t have sex against that laboratory now – I’d be worried about my heels getting stuck in the grass and mud on suede, and Charlie would have trouble after that much drink. Things aren’t as hard as they used to be.