LGBT Oneshots ✅

The Beach House

The first time I meet you, you are four and I am seven.

You have long blond hair and sparkling blue eyes and I think you're the most precious thing I've ever seen. You laugh and you smile easily and, though you cry, I can dry your tears with toys and games. That summer I spend at your family's beach house, I finally understand what it feels like to be a big brother and you follow me round the house and down the beach like a faithful dog after his master. The days after we return home, I pester my parents for a sibling because I miss you so much.

But, for all I beg, I stay an only child. And I have friends at home, with younger siblings, but they don't look at me with the same reverence that you do. I miss it. So I look forward to the summers and Christmases our families spend together and, every six months, I see you grow with me. And, each time we meet, you grow more shy and more quiet, for reasons I don't understand, and our mothers try to coax us into our earlier, easier friendship. They do not succeed.

The summer I turn thirteen, that same year when I get a mobile phone and learn what a girl's mouth tastes like, is the first year we don't go to the beach house. My father's working towards a promotion, and I'm too caught up in my friends and the novelty of being popular in high school, so I enjoy a summer without you. It feels odd not to see you, reticent as you've become, but I forget about it when we go to America, a work bonus when my father finally gets that promotion at the end of August. I see a lot of sights, like the centre of New York and the glorious sand beaches, and each day is packed so full I have no time to think of anything else.

And then another six months go by and I'm fourteen, in year nine, and sitting the first of my GCSE exams. It's not all of them but I sit my official French exams and so many mocks that I stress myself out just looking at my January exam timetable. My mother thinks I need to go on vacation to relax but I need to stay for study groups and revision sessions and she won't take me away from that. It's a lot of work but it's also a lot of fun, eating sweets and downing espressos till we don't know what we're reading, and I pass my French exams with an A and exceptional marks in my oral exam. It's a good year.

At fourteen, I feel grown. I feel too old for family holidays and I want to spend the time with my friends, whiling away the hours down in the park or in the arcade, and it suits my father, too, since summer is a hard time to book time off work. We don't go.

Before I know it, I'm eighteen and leaving for university and I haven't seen you in five years. Sometimes, I think about you. The little boy I used to share chocolate and laughs with but I've outgrown you and I have other interests and other people to share things with. There's a girl, all swaying hips and bubblegum lips, who I share my first time with. It's awkward, both of us virgins, but we're eager and it's a safe place to try new things and we don't work out but we have an amazing few months together. There's another girl, though she's more of a woman with her confident words and direct demands, who takes control and doesn't shame me for giving it up. I learn things with her, things they never taught in school. Which is when I start to experiment more, working out what I like, and it comes in the form of a sweet Italian boy who's stuttering and quiet when I first meet him but so vocal in the bedroom. He speaks his native tongue then, when he's close to losing it, and I can never hear Italian again without feeling something.

Coming out to my parents is both terrifying and a relief. I know I can't keep being two different people at uni and at home and, regardless of how this goes, I'm glad to have the weight off my chest. As it is, my parents don't care, not in the slightest. All they've ever wanted is for me to be happy and they make it clear that afternoon, my mother holding me in my arms as I cry. My father watches fondly, ruffling my hair and making sure I look him in the eyes and understand when he says he loves me, no matter what. It's everything I want.

Later, once I've shown them pictures of my boyfriend and agreed to let them meet, they mention you in passing. You're gay, which isn't quite bi but close enough, and I take notice. So fresh to this LGBT thing, I can't stop paying a little extra attention when I hear about other people like me but, at the same time, we haven't spoken in years. I don't know how to start the conversation again, anyway, and I don't think you'll appreciate me popping up out of the blue just because of your sexuality. So we don't talk.

Three months later, you're dead.

I hear the news over the phone, just like my parents do, and it hits me sharp. I've never lost someone before, not someone I'm close to, and certainly not someone as young as you were at seventeen. It's jarring and it reminds me all too well of my own mortality. It's that sense of shock and numbness that takes me through the following weeks, takes me to a dreary day with the rain pelting down as we watch your coffin being lowered into the ground. I see your mother speak of you, shaking voice but no tears coming through, and there's your father sharing memories after her, too.

It feels all too short of a goodbye but maybe that's the way with all funerals. I wonder, like I have over the past month, if anything would've changed if I got in contact with you. What would happen if we'd grown up together, if you were less shy and I was more determined, and those thoughts keep me up at night. Because then you'd have a friend who had the same struggles you had and maybe whatever pressures you faced in college wouldn't be so bad with someone by your side. Maybe you wouldn't have taken your life then.

But, more than those dark thoughts, I think of the earlier years, when we were kids in your beach house, carefree and happy.

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