Page 3 of The Fly-Half

“I told you,” I said with a swallow, sitting back in my seat and trying to get myself back on an even keel. Jonny nodded and stole another piece of chorizo off my plate.

I didn’t even have the strength to tell him no.

It’d been fourteen years and no amount of distance, hook-ups, and other boyfriends had ever managed to burn down the forest of feelings inside my heart. I doubted anything ever would.

All I could do was keep hoping.

Or resign myself to never having the one thing I’d always wanted.

CHAPTER TWO

Jonny

I looked downat the rough notes I’d made from our last game ofDungeons & Dragonswith a raised eyebrow, racking my brains as I tried to figure out what the fuck “Flint hates the angry rabbit” referred to. We didn’t have any rabbits in the party and I didn’t remember encountering any. But there must have beensomethingrabbit related in the last session. Otherwise why would I have left the note?

I’d have to ask one of the others and hope their memory was better than mine, even though none of them kept any sort of decent notes.

Ryan would probably know, but he was our Dungeon Master, so it was part of his job to keep track of all the ridiculous shit we did even though I was sure it pained him to do so. If he’d been hoping this would turn out to be a serious campaign, the antics of our group had put that notion to bed within about three sessions.

We tried to do good but the results were… varied. Mostly because we were a bunch of fucking liabilities with no self-preservation and even less common sense.

“Does anyone know why I hate the angry rabbit?” I asked, glancing around the table where everyone else was setting up. Rory, who was a drag queen, West’s partner, and our bubbly elven warlock, looked up from the small stack of glittering dice he’d been sorting through and frowned.

“Is that the rabbit from the forest? The one that Basil picked a fight with?”

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” West said with a nod. He was not only a very good hooker with the Knights but also our party’s paladin, who had averyobvious crush on Rory’s character but had so far not managed to get any further than “Thanks for killing that guy” and “Do you like flowers?” in terms of flirting. It was cute but Mason’s and my characters had started getting to the point where we were actively trying to set them up simply because the tension was unbearable to watch. Next time we got to an inn, I was paying for them to share a room. With only one bed.

Although if their characters got together, I was sure they’d then spend all the time shooting fuck-me eyes at each other rather than half the time. At least Mason and Ryan mostly managed to keep it in their pants, apart from all the times Ryan had made hot NPCs for Mason to flirt with. Playing D&D with two couples definitely made things interesting. And that was the polite way to put it.

I still loved them, though. And despite their antics, they always made me feel welcome and included, and I got the idea that if I ever thought about leaving, I’d be tackled to the floor and chained to the table.

It was like I’d taken a secret blood oath, only without the shedding of blood. Unless they counted what happened on the rugby pitch.

“Yeah, didn’t Basil pick on that rabbit we saw because the rabbit was eating something Basil wanted?” Mason asked as he put a cup of tea on the table by his laptop. Despite the evening chill, he was still only wearing joggers and a skintight T-shirt that had “Sorry for having great tits and correct opinions” plastered across his chest.

I wasn’t going to point out he was completely wrong about the correct opinions part.

“Basil didn’t pick on anyone,” I said, slightly miffed that they would accuse the goose my character had adopted of anything less than angelic behaviour. Even if Ryan and I did play Basil as a very angry little goose who’d stolen and wielded a knife at least once. “That rabbit stole his sweetcorn and strawberries! Basil was just defending himself.”

“And that’s why Flint hates the angry rabbit,” Rory said with a laugh as he rolled another D20 into his dice tray and nodded. “This dice is playing nicely, so I’m going to use this one. The rest can go to dice jail.”

“How many dice sets do you have now?” Mason asked.

“Too many,” West muttered fondly, and I chuckled under my breath at Rory’s outraged expression.

“Excuse me but there is nothing wrong with having multiple dice sets! Especially when they’re all so pretty.”

“He has a point,” I said as I made a note about the thieving rabbit. If we saw it again, it would be rabbit stew for dinner. Flint was a rogue and therefore a sneaky bastard, so hunting down the rabbit should be easy. Emphasis onshould. “Besides, we’ll need multiple dice when we start doing a lot more attacks and damage. Paladins can eventually do five D8s’ worth of divinesmite damage, so it’d be easier to have loads of D8s instead of rolling the same one over and over.”

“Thank you!” Rory said with a grin, shooting me a little wink and a kiss. “See, Jonny gets it.”

“You just want the opportunity to buy more dice,” West said as he leant over to kiss Rory.

“Do you mind?”

“No, because it makes you happy. And that’s all I want.” He kissed Rory again, the pair of them smiling. They’d been together for about a year now and every time I saw them it made me believe that maybe there was such a thing as true love. The pair of them were so different in many ways, but at their core they were fundamentally the same. One just came wrapped in glitter and the other in mud.

“As adorable as you two are, this is too sweet for me,” Ryan said as he strolled over to the dining table with a stack of notebooks and reference books on top of his laptop and a large bag of dice balanced somewhat precariously on top. He was wearing a lime green leopard print sweater and acid pink jogging bottoms with a pair of large fluffy slippers. He leant in to kiss Mason on the way past and Mason put his hand on Ryan’s waist to pull him in for a deeper one.

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