Author: Anna Martin
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/anna-martin/page,4,529683-the_lost_boy.html
“Hello?”
“He’s fine,” Tone said to answer.
“Oh, thank God.” Until that moment Stan hadn’t been prepared to admit how scared he was that Ben might have gone and done something stupid. Like overdose. He didn’t want to be the person who was responsible for Ben dying.
“I’m gonna stay here tonight, keep an eye on him. He should be okay, though.”
“Thanks, Tone.”
“No problem.”
Stan set the phone back down and pressed his trembling fingers to the cool counter.
No matter how strong the desire was to chase after Ben and drag him back to the safety of the flat, Stan knew he couldn’t. What was that saying about loving things and letting them go? He’d already let Ben walk away once in his life, and he’d regretted it every day since. But there was still no point in chasing him down when he so clearly didn’t want to be found.
Stan went back to the sofa, carefully took his shoes off, then curled up in a ball. He was so, so tired.
Tone got back the next morning, as promised, with a paper bag from McDonalds that smelled like grease. Stan had slept on the sofa in his clothes, ready to run out at a moment’s notice if Tone called and said he needed Stan’s help. Or if something went wrong.
“Morning,” Stan said.
“Mornin’. I brought you coffee. Thought you probably wouldn’t want a bacon sandwich.”
“No, thank you.” He still accepted the take-out cup gratefully, though, and scooted over to make room for Tone on the sofa. “He’s okay?” Stan asked.
“Yeah. I guess.” Tone didn’t say anything else, just unwrapped his breakfast sandwich and took a big bite.
Stan sipped his coffee. It was strong and sweet and black, as he liked it. Tone had remembered.
“What happened?” Tone asked with his mouth full.
“He left. He said he was going for a walk.” Stan checked his watch. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him go.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Tone said with a sigh. “You’re not the first person he’s run out on.”
“He makes a habit of it?”
Tone half-shrugged. “He used to. He gets claustrophobic, I suppose. Not by buildings, though, more like by situations. If he feels boxed in, he ends up running away.”
“Stupid,” Stan muttered.
“Yeah. It’s not your fault. It’s only something that started happening the past couple of years.”
“Where was he?”
“He has a flat,” Tone said. He finished his sandwich with a huge final bite and washed it down with his own coffee.
“It sounds like you’ve done this before.”
“More than I like, yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I’m making it worse.”
“You’re not.” Stan took his hand and squeezed it gently. “I promise you, you’re not.”
“I’m sorry.” Tone wrapped his arm around Stan’s shoulder and pulled him into a hug. Stan went with it. He’d missed Tone’s hugs. “This was too much to put on your shoulders. You’re his ex-boyfriend, for fuck’s sake. Asking you to get involved was really unfair.”
Stan rested his cheek against Tone’s shoulder and just appreciated the hug, for a moment. “I thought I could help. Hubris.”
“Nah. Don’t worry about it. I’ll try and figure out what we do with him next. Maybe throw him in a rehab place here. What’s that one all the celebrities go to?”
“The Priory?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I almost went there. They decided to keep me at the eating disorders wing of the hospital instead, though.”
“I remember. That feels like a million years ago.”
Stan nodded. “A lot has changed.”
“A lot has stayed the same.”
“That is true.”
“He never told me why you broke up, by the way. I don’t think he told anyone.”
Stan knew Tone was fishing for details and decided he didn’t mind. He’d lost Tone as a friend when he and Ben broke up. And the others, of course, but he’d always been closest to Tone.
“Where were we? Somewhere in Germany.”
“Lollapalooza,” Tone said immediately. “Berlin.”
“That’s right. You know things weren’t good,” Stan said, tipping his head back and rubbing his hands over his face. He hadn’t thought about this in a long time. Hadn’t allowed himself to think about it—it hurt too much, and dwelling on it didn’t change anything. Moving on with his life had been Stan’s therapy.
“No.”
“That was early on, but even then he didn’t like all the fans and the interviews and the pressure.”
“He wanted to leave,” Tone said. “Leave the band. Back when you were in hospital. I convinced him to stay….”
“You couldn’t have known. Any of it,” Stan said, waving his hands around demonstratively. “No one expected you to get as popular as you did so quickly.”
“I know. I still feel like he would have been better off leaving us and doing his own thing.”
“How would he feel now, though?” Stan said. “If he left a band that went on to be so successful? Anyway. We’d been arguing for a long time, and we weren’t having sex any more, and I spent more time with you and Summer than I did with Ben.”
“He was off with Geordie and the roadies.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know there was drugs involved at that point, but I think it’s likely.”
“Me too.”
“I asked him if he wanted me to come with you to wherever it was you were going next. And he said he didn’t care.” Stan shrugged. “I figured he should probably care, if I was his boyfriend. So when you got on the bus and left, I got a taxi to the airport and came back to London instead. Bought this place.”
“You stayed here for a while?”
“Another six months, yeah. Then I started moving around again. Paris first, then Asia, South Africa, then back to New York.”
Tone was quiet for a few moments, clearly lost in his memories. “I wish I could tell you something to make you feel better.”
Stan smiled. “It’s okay. I don’t blame anyone for what happened. It was just… just life, I suppose.”
Stan had sometimes wondered if it would have been easier if they’d broken up in some massive argument; something with screaming and crying and throwing plates at each other. At least then there would have been a definitive ending. As it was, the band’s success had stuck a wedge between them, one that had slowly but surely wrenched them apart, and by the time Stan came to terms with the fact that it really was over, months had passed.
“He was depressed for a while, after you guys split up. Then he seemed to get himself together. We all thought—shit, fucking finally, he’s here. I guess that was around the time he started taking coke.”
“Where was he getting it from?”
“Other bands. Roadies. Wherever. It was all over the place, Stan. We barely had to turn around and someone was offering it to us. We’ve all smoked weed since forever, Christ, but none of the rest of us touched anything stronger. Summer lost a lot of weight, and we thought she was taking shit at one point, but she swears she didn’t.”
“I thought she looked slim.”
“Is it fucked-up for me to be talking to you about this?”
“No,” Stan said easily. “I don’t mind.”
“Oh. Good. Ben got into a screaming match with her once, you know. Your name got thrown around.”
“I should be honoured,” Stan said drily.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. I’m always going to be a recovering anorexic, Tone. Talking about it is good. I’ve talked about it until I was blue in the face, actually, a lot of it in the context of the fashion industry. If we don’t talk about these things, then they stay hidden, which isn’t good.”
“You’re so clever.”
Stan laughed. “I’m not. I’ve just been through shit, same as you guys. Go on.”
“Ben isn’
t a bad person.”
“I know that. He’s an addict.”
“Yeah.”
“He needs to accept that before he can get help. Same as I had to accept that I had an eating disorder before I could do anything to get better. Until he’s ready to accept his issues and seek out help for himself, there’s not much any of us can do for him.”
“So we—what—just try to keep him alive until he’s ready to ask for help?”
God, that was morbid. “We can try.”
“I don’t think I can do this for much longer, Stan.”
It sounded like that confession had been torn from Tone’s gut. For the first time, Stan looked at him properly. There had always been flecks of grey in Tone’s unkempt beard; time had added more. He had tired eyes too. Tone might claim that Ben was the one who had never chased after the glittering jewels of fame that the music industry offered, but Tone hadn’t either.
“He doesn’t deserve you,” Stan murmured.
“He didn’t deserve you either.” Tone grinned.
That made Stan laugh. “I thought we deserved each other. For a while.”
“Yeah.”
They fell into a comfortable silence. Stan thought that maybe, after all this was over, he might get to keep Tone as a friend. If that happened, it would all be worth it.
Chapter Six
Being alone was unnerving.
Silence on all sides.
Except the echoes.
The fridge hummed, and sometimes water rushed through the pipes from another flat in the building.
He didn’t have a TV. When he’d looked around the place, before he’d bought it, there was one mounted on the wall. But it had gone by the time he moved in. Now there were just brackets and holes in the wall where a TV should be.
Ben hadn’t ever liked TV that much.
About a week had passed since they’d all left him. Tone had gone, then Ben had spent four days off his face on drugs, then ran out and spent three days coming down again. Right now, his skin itched and his eyes ached and his tongue felt too big for his mouth. Despite having eaten very, very little, he’d been shitting up a storm.
Ben lay on his back, wearing just his boxers, staring at the beautiful crown moulding around the edge of the ceiling.
“You need to pull yourself together, mate.”
They were wise words, ones he wasn’t used to hearing in his own voice.
It was strangely cathartic, hearing things he needed to say and at the same time, being the one to say them.
“You’re fucked up.”
Very true.
It took a long time to get the next words out.
“I don’t want to die.”
The past five years had been a whirlwind, and the wind had stripped away all the elements of himself that Ben liked best. He imagined it like a tornado, peeling away his compassion and his sense of humour and his sense of charity. His politics were gone, his passion, his drive, his motivation.
And what was left was a guy who liked to divorce himself from reality by taking shitloads of drugs because that was easier than facing the truth.
When he finally decided to move, it took a very long time. Ben struggled to his feet, to the bathroom, and into the shower. He attempted to wash his hair, but it was all matted and gross. For the first time in a long time, he took stock of his body. Too skinny. Bad tattoos—some really bad tattoos. Bad decisions.
No track marks. The thought of injecting himself with anything turned his stomach, which was weird, considering the amount of needles he’d encountered getting the tattoos. Maybe that was one good thing he’d managed.
Ben huffed a humourless laugh. If the only good thing he could say about himself was at least he hadn’t started injecting heroin, then maybe he really had hit rock-bottom.
He dressed in clothes from his chest of drawers—too big for him and several years old, not feeling right on his body. Then he took stock and looked around.
Ben had no phone. No internet connection because he’d never bothered to get it installed. He needed food—decent food. He really didn’t want to go outside but life sucked, so he was going to have to. He dug his wallet out of his dirty jeans and shoved it into the pocket of the sweatpants, and didn’t bother to lock the door.
Outside, everything was too loud, too busy, and Ben realised he was definitely not done with coming down from the epic high he’d been on.
Thankfully, this was central London, so he could get what he needed without having to go more than five minutes from the flat.
His stomach growled threateningly as he passed a KFC, but that was such a bad idea right now he couldn’t even begin to contemplate it. Grease on his empty stomach was a recipe for disaster. A few doors down was an Itsu. Much better.
Ben wasn’t sure what the time was, but it wasn’t very busy inside. He walked up to the counter, no doubt looking like strung-out druggie scum.
“I need something vegan,” he croaked at the girl.
“Vegan?”
“Yeah. Fucking vegan.”
“Well, we have—”
“Just… give me one of everything.”
“One of everything what?”
Ben fought the urge to press his hands to his face in frustration. “One of every vegan thing you have. Please.”
She glared at him. Ben was ridiculously grateful for the glare. She was a sassy, young black Londoner who probably thought Ares were shit, if she’d ever heard of them. Her bad attitude was a blessing he’d count.
Before collecting anything, she rang it all through the till and made him pay, clearly not expecting him to have the cash to cover it all. He didn’t. Have cash. He had a contactless debit card, and that was just as good.
“Eat in or take away?”
“I’ll eat some of it here and take the rest away.”
“Okay.”
He watched with growing agitation as she assembled everything in a bag for him.
“Cutlery’s over there.”
“Thanks,” he muttered, then almost tripped over his own feet on his way to pick up a fucking fork.
Ben didn’t want to sit in a window seat, and instead found a tiny booth that was out of the way and hardly overlooked. Then he picked through the bag, trying to figure out what he wanted to eat.
The vegan thing was an idea he’d had, remembering how Stan used to eat vegan during one of his episodes because there were far fewer things that were likely to upset his stomach. While anything greasy would definitely make him sick, Ben also had a good idea that too much meat or dairy would also have adverse effects on his digestive system. And since that system was currently royally fucked up, he wanted to treat it nicely.
He picked his way through a salad, then ate two pieces of sushi before rubbing his hand over his stomach, almost awe-struck at how such a small amount of food had made him bloat. It had revived his energy, though, and suddenly his anxieties all rushed back in. Being seen like this, looking like this, and being recognised, filled him with the sort of dread that made him ache for another hit.
Ben looked down at his hands, scarred and calloused.
“I don’t want to die,” he murmured softly.
So he wouldn’t.
He gathered his bag and ducked his head so he wouldn’t have to make eye contact with the sassy girl behind the counter. Outside, his breathing picked up, close to panic, and he glanced around for a safe place to hide.
His eyes fell on a barber shop.
Two birds, one stone.
He scuttled across the road, weaving in and out of traffic, and almost slammed the door behind himself.
Two guys were working, though one was just finishing up with a client and the other was taking a payment. No one else was in the small, one-room shop, and Ben had an idea.
He kept his hood up and his head down as the first guy got done paying.
“I’m ready when you are, mate.”
Ben startled. “Can I use your loo really quick?”
&n
bsp; “Course. Right back there.”
He didn’t really need to go, but took the opportunity anyway. When he was done, both of the customers had left.
Ben leaned against the counter.
“I’ll pay you whatever you like to close until I’m done.”
The guy who he’d spoken to first looked slightly taken aback. Apparently no one in fucking Marylebone expected the druggie tramp to be a vegan who had cash to splash.
The second barber, younger, came over.
“I need to go to the bank anyway.”
The first guy nodded. “Take an hour, if you like.”
He didn’t argue, just grabbed his phone from behind the counter and walked out, clearly happy to be given an extended lunch break.
The barber walked over to the door and flipped the sign to Closed.
“Come take a seat.”
The thought of having to sit in a chair and stare at his own face for however long this took almost sent Ben into another panic attack. When the barber wrapped a cloak around his shoulders, he could barely fight back the tremors.
“Hey.”
Ben forced himself to meet his eyes as the guy took a seat in the chair next to him. He was maybe in his early fifties and looked good. He had a short, neat beard and very well-styled hair. This was one of those retro barbers, where they did wet shaves and everyone wore white shirts and braces or bow ties.
“I’m Dominic. This is my place. The kid we just chucked out is my nephew Corey. You don’t have to tell me anything, but I’ve seen a lot working here. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ben muttered.
“What do we need to do today?”
“It’s all fucking….” Ben grouched to himself. “Matted.”
“Do you want to work it out or cut it off? Fair warning, it’s probably going to hurt like a bitch if I try to comb it out.”
“Shave it all off if you have to. I don’t care.”
“I don’t think we need to go that far. Can I take a look? See what we’re working with here?”
“Okay.”
Dominic got up and swung Ben’s chair around so it wasn’t facing the mirror or the street. He was looking back at a dark grey wall with some nice art on it in fancy gold frames. Better. That was better.