Author: Anna Martin
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/anna-martin/page,7,529683-the_lost_boy.html
Stan was sitting at his usual table, with his laptop, working.
“Do you need to be in New York?” Ben asked.
Stan closed the laptop and turned to face him. “Not particularly. Why do you ask?”
“Because you fucking live there?” Ben said, without venom. He went to the fridge and picked out the salad he’d bought earlier. He didn’t want to eat at the table with Stan, so he pulled up one of the barstools at the kitchen island and ate there instead.
“I can work remotely. I’m freelance, Ben.”
“Oh.”
“I have contracts with a few different publications, a mentoring programme, and I’m a guest lecturer at Parsons. But I’m not tied to any particular city or company.”
“Oh.” Ben felt stupid. He stuffed his face with another piece of kale.
“We can be here for as long as you want.”
“What if I don’t want to be here anymore?”
“No one’s holding you,” Stan said mildly.
“I know that,” Ben grumbled. “Do we have to stay right here?”
“No. Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.” He ate another bite of his salad.
“Well, when you decide, let me know,” Stan said. He sounded amused.
Ben chanced a look up. Stan was grinning. “What?”
“Nothing,” Stan said. “You’re so contrary.”
“I am not,” Ben said automatically.
“You are,” Stan laughed. “You don’t know what you want, except you don’t want this.”
Ben opened his mouth to argue… then shut it again. Stan didn’t crow a victory, but it was close.
They hadn’t talked about the other night, when Stan got back from the club with Tone. Like everything else in Ben’s life, he didn’t want to talk about it. Big surprise.
Stan, at least, seemed to have figured that out and wasn’t pushing him.
“Why did you come?” Ben blurted. Then he wished he could pull the words back into his mouth and swallow them.
“To LA?”
“Yeah. Tone called you?”
“Yes.”
Stan rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. He was wearing his hair loose today, falling down his back in a soft, gold waterfall. Laying on top of his white T-shirt, it looked almost transparent.
“Tone said he needed my help,” Stan said. It sounded like he’d picked the words carefully. “I figured, if he was asking me—of all people—for help, then I should go.”
“Really?”
Stan nodded at him. “Really.”
Three, almost four years after they’d broken up, Stan had dropped everything on the back of a phone call from someone he wasn’t even friends with any more. Ben was having a hard time interpreting what that meant.
Would he have done the same for Stan? Sure. But Stan wasn’t the one who’d fucked up.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Stan said. His voice was gentle but serious.
“Not really.” Ben finished his salad and got up to put the container in the bin and stick his fork in the dishwasher.
He went and sat down on the sofa, which was still in sight of the kitchen, and tucked his feet up underneath himself. Stan came over to join him, silently taking a seat at the other end of the sofa and not commenting when Ben turned on the TV.
Once he’d picked something, Ben turned the volume down low and turned to face Stan. Maybe the therapy was making him brave.
“I don’t want to go back to LA,” he said.
Stan nodded seriously. “Okay. Are you going to tell the others?”
“I’m going to have to, I suppose,” Ben mumbled. “I don’t want to stay here, but not in the same way. This is your home, and I want to be somewhere where I don’t feel like I’m imposing.”
“You’re not imposing,” Stan said immediately, which was what Ben had expected him to say.
“I kind of am. Not just in your home, but in your life. You should be able to go back and do what you do, not be forced to babysit your addict ex-boyfriend.”
“I’m going to tell you something now, Ben, and I’m serious.”
His tone made Ben look over. Stan didn’t talk like this very often.
“If you and Tone decided you were going to move out tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t go back to New York.”
Ben frowned at him. “Oh.”
“At some point I need to go back there and pack up my things, figure out what to do for my roommates, all of that stuff. I’d really like some of my clothes back. But being in London has changed something for me too. I’ve lived in a lot of places in the past ten years, but nowhere has felt like home like London does.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, because he understood.
“So, you can stay here for as long as you like. As for babysitting you….”
Ben looked away again, his heart thumping hard in his chest.
“There’s nowhere else I’m going to be, for as long as you need me.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“That’s not what I said.” He got up then, and Ben frowned, watching as Stan went to the small cloakroom by the front door. After a moment of rummaging around, he pulled out a familiar black case and brought it back to the sofa. “Here.”
Ben took the guitar case and immediately set it down. “What’s that for?”
Stan shrugged. “It’s yours. I just realised we put it away when we got back here, and you might not have known where it was.”
Ben hadn’t known, but he hadn’t particularly wondered either.
“Is this, like, some kind of message?”
Stan laughed. “No? I thought you might want it.”
“Oh.” Ben felt stupid. “Okay.”
He got up, took the guitar case to his room, and set it on his bed so he would have to touch it again later. On impulse, he opened the case. It wasn’t just his guitar in there. Someone—likely Tone—had picked up Ben’s notebook too and stashed it in the inside pocket.
Ben wrote music everywhere—in blank emails on his phone, in notebooks or sheets of paper, on the back of receipts, on his arm with a Sharpie if there wasn’t a better option. But he tried to keep most of his big ideas in the notebook. It happened too often—when they were trying to put a new song together, the hook they needed happened to be scrawled in there.
Having the notebook as well as the guitar was a relief Ben didn’t know he was looking for.
He closed the guitar case and went back out to the living room.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Tone nearly chopped his own cock off with a guitar case?”
Stan looked up from his phone with an expression of horrified fascination.
“No. But please do.”
Ben sat back down on the sofa.
“We were playing Bestival,” he said. “A couple of years back now. It’s a nice festival, good vibes. Anyway, because we were headlining Sunday, we had a nice setup in the backstage area with access to showers and stuff, even though they were in a block rather than in our trailer.”
“Luxurious.”
Ben grinned. “Right. We’d just gotten off stage, and it had chucked it down with rain, and Tone ran for the shower before Summer could get in there. She was so pissed at him, she went and nicked all of his clothes and the towels. So he had fuck all.
“You know Tone—it’s not like he’s exactly afraid of wandering around naked. But one of the DJs from Radio One was around, and he had a thing for her, so when he got out, he grabbed an empty guitar case to cover himself up. It was still raining at this point, so he was going to have to get back in the shower to wash all the mud off his feet so he wasn’t best pleased.”
Stan shook his head, clearly trying to hide his smile. “I can see where this is going.”
“He was yelling at Geordie—for some reason, Geordie got the blame—and at that point the case fell open. Nothing was in it, but Tone was annoyed so he went to snap it shut again and almost got his cock caught in it
. I think he pinched one of his balls, actually.”
“Oh my God,” Stan said. Then he started to laugh.
Stan’s laughter was infectious, and Ben giggled too as he kept telling the story that was part of Ares legend now.
“So there’s Tone, standing bare-ass naked in the middle of a field, up to his shins in mud while it was chucking it down with rain, screaming his head off because he’s hurt his balls. And me and Geordie were sitting in our trailer killing ourselves laughing at him. I wish we had pictures.”
“I wish you did too,” Stan said. He clutched at his stomach. “Poor Tone.”
Ben leaned back and let himself laugh at the memory, spurred on by the memory of Tone’s expletive-ridden rant and how Geordie had gotten hiccups from laughing so hard.
“Oh my God,” Ben gasped. He’d needed that.
Stan was still laughing, pushing tears from the corner of his eye. “So, there’s that.”
Ben looked down at him, at the pure, unrestrained joy written on Stan’s face. Stan tended to settle into a neutral resting bitch face, a remnant of his stern Russian roots. Russians didn’t smile in public. But Stan had broken that habit.
In the blink of an eye, Stan touched his fingertips to Ben’s jaw, leaned in, and kissed him.
Ben’s heart stopped. It took a second for it to come back online, and a second more for him to return the kiss.
Stan went to pull away, but Ben leaned into him and gently coaxed more of those light, sweet kisses from his lips. Something slow and sure uncoiled in Ben’s chest. Nothing had ever been like kissing Stan.
With a smile, Stan brushed his nose against Ben’s and pressed their foreheads together.
“Oh, wow.”
Ben felt himself shaking, just a little, and fought to hide that from Stan.
He couldn’t hide any fucking thing from Stan. They knew each other too well. They’d been here before.
Stan kissed him again, taking away the awkwardness and letting Ben tell him what he was feeling with lips and tongues and the easy, comforting rightness of kissing like this.
“Is this okay?” Stan asked after a while.
“Yeah. More than okay.”
It had been there, fizzing under the surface for days now. To have it finally come to something good was a relief Ben felt all the way down to his bones. He kissed Stan again quickly, because he could, then shuffled away. There wasn’t any point in spoiling it.
“Tone is going to be out for the rest of today and tonight,” Stan said, taking the cue and going over to the kitchen and putting the kettle on. “He’s catching up with some people you guys used to jam with, apparently.”
“Alright.”
“Do you want to get dinner later?”
Ben was still struggling with food. He didn’t pick up on hunger cues very well, and more often than not his craving for a hit took precedence over his body’s insistence that it needed food. But this sounded like a date, or something they could make feel like a date, and he wanted that.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“What do you fancy?”
“Pizza.” The word was out of his mouth before Ben had chance to think about it. “Really good pizza. And a salad.”
Stan grinned. “I think we can manage that.”
Chapter Nine
Stan thought he should probably get his own therapist.
It had been a while since he’d regularly seen one, but being around Ben was stirring up all sorts of feelings that he was having a hard time untangling on his own.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true.
The world was reminding Stan, none too subtlety, that he absolutely still had a lot of feelings for his ex-boyfriend. Romantic, soul-mate type feelings. Because when Ben kissed him?
Stan had seen stars. Galaxies. It was a really good kiss.
Maybe he didn’t need therapy, after all.
Then he remembered he still didn’t know what he was going to do about that, and the therapist option went back on the table.
Ben had a way of being utterly charming, even when he was being a miserable bastard. Stan had always laughed at Ben when he was grumpy. Half of the time that brought him out of his strop with a laugh, the rest of the time it made things worse.
The little things were affecting Stan worse than he’d first realised. Like Ben’s rare, quiet smiles, his wide open vulnerability, his overwhelming capacity for love. Now more than ever, when he smiled at Stan, it set off an electric reaction all over his body. Stan really, really wanted to kiss him again.
Tone was gone more than he was around, either catching up with friends in London or taking the train back to Bristol to hang out with his mum, which Stan found ridiculously endearing. It meant that Stan was left alone with Ben more often than not, though, and they were both still figuring out how they felt about that.
While London was still enjoying a pleasantly warm summer, Stan tried to get Ben out of the flat and into the real world as often as he could. In practice that meant maybe one day in three he managed it. Ben hadn’t been recognised yet, and Stan was hoping that this run of good luck continued. It hadn’t been long since Ben stumbled back to his flat after his drug binge, and Stan was afraid of what had the potential to tip him over the edge.
The flat overlooked Camden Lock, meaning they could go outside and sit on the concrete bank of the river and still be close enough to the flat to get back inside if Ben got twitchy. Stan thought he was starting to learn Ben’s tells. They avoided the area at lunchtime and after work, preferring to go outside mid-morning when there were fewer people around.
Stan still insisted they sat on the sunny side of the river, though, two cups of takeaway coffee between them. Caffeine as a barrier.
Dropping back to rest on his forearms, Stan closed his eyes and tried to soak it all in.
“Can I ask you something?” Ben said.
They’d been quiet for a while—Stan wasn’t surprised Ben’s mind had come up with something to talk about.
“Sure.”
“Why did you stop dressing nice? Like you used to?”
Stan sighed. He’d guessed this question was coming. Ben had alluded to it a few times now.
“It’s more well received in some places than others.” That was the easy answer.
“You never gave a shit about what anyone thought before.”
“I still don’t.” Stan reached for his coffee and sipped it; it had cooled to the perfect drinking temperature. Ben had already finished his. “The sad thing is, Ben, some people—some companies—look at me and see a great tick-box exercise. I found out after I started my first job in Paris that the hiring manager had told everyone to use female pronouns for me. It took me months to get them to stop.”
“What, because they wanted to have a trans writer on the team? That’s fucking stupid.”
“I don’t know if it was as premeditated as that,” Stan said. “Maybe it was. I’ve always been a man, you know that. But there are a few trans models working in the industry now, and a few more gender fluid models. I guess they saw having a trans writer on the team as being part of that ‘movement.’”
“Okay. So you decided to go in the other direction to what—spite them?”
“It was a lot easier to convince people to use male pronouns for me when I wasn’t wearing a dress,” Stan said drily. “The Paris fashion scene is very different to London. In London, the indie scene butts right up against the couture scene, and the couture designers often borrow or even steal from the indie designers. It’s how they stay relevant. There’s more of a divide in Paris. And I was working for a couture department.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “I don’t understand, but okay.”
“I wanted to be taken seriously,” Stan said with a sigh. “I think we all do. I had to fit in, and the way I decided to do that was to overhaul my look.”
“Did it work?”
“In what way?”
“Did they take you more seriously after?”
“I suppose they did,” Stan said, leaning back again. “I still like to poke the beast, though. One of my lectures I give at Parsons is about how the fashion industry is more welcoming of trans models than they are of plus-sized models. There’s even an attitude starting to form now among some designers that if they can’t find female models with narrow enough waists and hips, they’ll just get a male model in instead.”
“Well, that fucking sucks.”
“Yes. Hiring trans or gender fluid or even male models who are willing to model womenswear is seen as ‘edgy’. You know, part of the zeitgeist. The designers and their publicists get to talk to the press about how forward-thinking and liberal they are, while discarding any model bigger than a size two.”
“So, wouldn’t you want to be part of that? Ride the wave while it’s there.”
Stan shook his head. “I’m a really good fashion journalist, Ben. I want to be recognised for my talent, not because I’m fulfilling a diversity quota.”
“Oh.” Ben considered that for a moment. “I guess I get that.”
“How would you feel if you got a solo billboard or a magazine cover, but the only reason why they picked you and not any other member of Ares was because half your family are Maori?”
His face darkened. “That’s bullshit.”
“It is. And it’s hard to argue against, because yes, these companies should be hiring more people from backgrounds that aren’t white middle- and upper-class. But I’m going to stand my ground and fight for diversity based on talent, because there’s so much talent out there.” Stan sighed heavily. “Sorry. I get frustrated.”
“No, I get it. You are good. I’m sorry people aren’t recognising that.”
“They are,” Stan said mildly. “But changing my look helped me push for the recognition I wanted. I stopped being the boy in the dress and started being a journalist that people had to take seriously. They quickly realised that I wasn’t just a diversity hire that could be easily dismissed.”
“Why did you stay in Paris if that’s the attitude there?”
“Because the fashion scene in Paris is incredible,” Stan said with a shrug. “I love it. But I’ve also loved watching careers develop in New York. It’s still the only place to be during fashion week, and I broke through several times with reporting on different shows.”