Page 37 of Lord of the Lock

“No, I can…” but Finn was already gently tucking me away and zipping up the front of my jeans.

“C’mon, Nath.” He took my hand, which I hadn’t realised was still shaking so much, and he grabbed my bag with all of my workout gear in it too. “Let’s get you some place safe.”

“Seriously Finn, if you want it, I can do it.” I was trying to assert myself. Had I failed? All I had to do was enjoy afuckingblowjob but my mind just wasn’t letting me get past some kind of mental block.

“Teenage sex education has a lot to fucking answer for,” said Finn. “When you’re ready, we’re going to go back to my house and have a cup of tea, OK?”

We walked silently, hand in hand except for when Finn had to lock up the training centre. But he held my hand across the field, through the streets of Pontycae, and all the way to his home. Finn sat me down in his living room on a sofa that was feeling increasingly familiar, and went into the kitchen.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked.

“Yes please?” I answered, more of a question than an answer. He’d already told me we would be coming back to his house and we’d be having tea. Why ask again?

After couple of minutes, Finn walked into the living room holding tow big steaming mugs. “Would you still like this cup of tea?” he asked.

“Yes please,” I said. Finn placed the mug down in front of me.

“Just so you know, I’m not the best tea-maker in the world. If you pick up the cup of tea and then put it down, and drink none of it, I won’t be offended. If you drink half and then decide you’ve had too much, I won’t take offence. Even if you drink it down to the very last dregs and decide you’re too full, you shouldn’t feel obligated to finish.” Finn took a particularly loud slurp of his own tea.

“I feel like you’re trying to make a point here that I’m too stupid to understand,” I said. I reached for my cup of tea and took a sip. “Though this is not a bad cup of tea, so if it is just general insecurity over your ability to boil a kettle I think we can settle that.”

“When I was younger, I was what the lads would call atop shagger,” said Finn. “I got with girls pretty openly and lads secretly, and everyone knew I was fucking up for it. If you wanted to fuck, I would pretty much always be up for it. And that was OK. Until it wasn’t. And there were times I was just fucking for the sake of it, long after I’d stopped enjoying it. Or in stupid places.”

Finn’s words sounded familiar. I knew the feeling, that rush of being with Lewis, that excitement that things were going to happen and then the feeling that things weren’t going quite right. That I should have been enjoying things more than I was because I was getting what I’d wanted, so I put up and shut up.

Finn continued. “When I finally joined Cardiff, I was doing the same with a much bigger pool of people. I lost count of the amount of people I’d had sex with because it was there and available and why wouldn’t I just take the opportunity? And then a player up in Leicester got caught up in a sexual assault case and the rugby union made all the teams show their players some stupid video on consent. Or at least I thought it was stupid. Consent is simple, two people want to fuck, they say that’s what they want, then you just go in-out-in-out til it’s over.”

“Right,” I said. “Still no idea where this is going.”

“Well the video was about cups of tea, and how they’re like sex.”

“Better than sex, sometimes,” I muttered, and Finn smiled.

“Well, you know you can put a cup of tea down at any time. Even if you’ve said you’ll drink it. You can stop drinking and come back to it, or you can stop altogether. There is no point where it’s not OK to put the cuppa down. And it’s the same with sex. Just because you’ve said yes at the start isn’t a commitment to keep going until the end.”

“But…” I didn’t know what exactly I was going to say next. It felt like something in my world view had shifted.

“I know, I spent like a week going over it all in my head,” said Finn. “It’s a crazy thought, that actually maybe all those things I was doing out of a sense of obligation weren’t healthy.”

“So…” I said, “there were times when I was having sex with Lewis, and I’d kinda enjoy it early on, but then things would get painful. It always felt like I should…”

“Just grin and bear it? I know,” said Finn. “I looked back and realised the amount of times I’d carried on past the point of caring, or had sex when I was too drunk to really enjoy it…” he trailed off, and I could see that despite how he’d helped me he was now deep in his own thoughts.

“Can I…can I have a hug?” I asked. “ I just think I need to be held.”

Finn put down the mug and held out his arms. I shuffled my butt across the sofa and onto his lap. Warm arms held me, and I leaned onto his chest. I felt safe, warm and…loved. I didn’t know what kind of love, but I felt loved.

“Thank you,” I said, “for teaching me that. I think I knew. I can blame Lewis for lots of things, but I don’t think either of us understood what we were doing when it came to consent.”

“Do you feel sorry for him?” Finn asked.

“I do pity him now,” I said. “I’ve been thinking on it. It’s weird how scared I felt of him when I first moved back. I think he’s suffered the same upbringing we all did here, and his parents weren’t nearly as lovely as mine. I can’t imagine…”

“How did things end?” Finn asked abruptly.

I hesitated. I had never told anyone about this.Thiswas what had scared me about coming back home, and why I’d been so fucking terrified the first day when I’d seen Charlie and Ryan in the pub, before my knight in shining armour had insisted he was my boyfriend.

“So when I went off to uni and Lewis stayed here, it already felt like a little rift, y’know? I was leaving the valley and going to Cardiff and he was staying here. I think he felt a bit at a loss, to have been forced out of the closet the way he was and then to be in a long distance relationship. But we…made it work. He’d come to Cardiff every now and then, and I would come home to see my parents. We weren’t a million miles away but it felt like it sometimes, in terms of where we were mentally. I was studying at university and he was working behind the bar at the rugby club like he had when he was sixteen.

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