Chapter Text
It’s not like Charlie’s stupid, you know? It’s not like he’s been holding out hope his whole life that he was gonna meet his soulmate and it was gonna fix all his problems. Some people do do that. Like, his little brother, Olly, years ago swore off dating anybody until his soulmate came along, though it’s going to be a point of pride for Charlie when Olly finally gives it up and agrees to go out with somebody someday who isn’t soulmate-shaped. And that’s assuming Olly even has a soulmate. Most people don’t. Olly will figure that out when his fourteenth birthday comes and goes and no rosemark ever shows up on his skin.
But Charlie? He knows better—or, at least, he thought he did.
He’s not saying he doesn’t believe soulmates are real. It may be rare enough that no one can agree anymore on what the symptoms are or what happens when you realize you’ve found yours, but there are enough documented cases of it—in Britain, in Kent, even here at Truham—that everybody knows it’s a thing that actually happens to people sometimes. He believed the stories even before he got his rosemark last year, you know, the one on his ankle he keeps covered up with crew socks so that nobody else finds out about it.
He’s just saying it’s shit.
If he’s going to spend the rest of his life with someone, Charlie wants to do it because he chooses them—because they’ve, like, gone through shit together and realized that they complement each other and make each other happy. The universe hand-picking a suitable mate for him without him having any say in the matter? No, thanks.
The whole idea is crap, anyway, even setting aside the free will question. Relationships are supposed to be imperfect. There is no such thing as a perfect match for anyone. If you and your partner never fight about anything, then you obviously have underlying shit that you need to be dealing with and aren’t. Everybody Charlie knows jealously talks about how finding your soulmate is the perfect solution to all of your relationship problems, but it’s not. Nothing is without flaws. And in Charlie’s opinion, the fact that more people don’t realize that—well, that’s why most people don’t have a soulmate: they’d take it as some kind of justification to pretend like they can lose themself in another person and it be fine when it’s not fine. It honestly makes him really, really angry.
Did he used to be this jaded? No. Did he used to fantasize about finding his special someone someday, somebody who would whisk Charlie away from all of this shit and clean up after him every time his head made a mess? Sure. But that was before. He’s deep in the thing now, and if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life regretting it, he’s got to commit to it properly.
So soulmates are bullshit. That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
xx
Messing around with Ben used to make some kind of sense to Charlie. He was still furious about getting his rosemark, and Ben was obviously interested, and he wanted to have a choice, you know? He wanted to pick the guy he wanted to pick, not wait for the universe to give him permission or whatever the fuck. So when Ben came onto Charlie, Charlie let it happen. When Ben kissed Charlie, Charlie let that happen. And when Ben started treating Charlie like rubbish on the side of the road, Charlie let that happen, too—or maybe Ben always did treat Charlie like rubbish. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell.
They do meet up before form in the library on the first day back from holidays, and it’s just fucking typical at this point. Ben does a rather dramatic and unnecessary triple-check that they’re alone in the shelves before he dives in for a kiss, but it’s not a very good kiss: it’s bruising and kind of painful, like Ben is trying to devour everything he can get, everything he didn’t get over the break when he was the one refusing to see Charlie outside of school. He pulls on Charlie’s hair hard enough to hurt. A lot.
For a while, Charlie stands there taking it, trying to kiss back, trying to be good, but eventually, he has to break away. He just does. “You’re hurting me,” he mumbles.
“Sorry,” says Ben, not sounding sorry at all. He twists his fingers in Charlie’s hair again until Charlie bites down hard on his own lip and winces. “You should really cut this, you know. You’re starting to look like an overgrown shrub again.”
Hot embarrassment bubbles up in Charlie’s chest, and he rips his eyes away from Ben’s. “Yeah, whatever,” he mutters.
He likes growing his hair out long, for the record. He likes that his hair gets curlier the longer it gets, and he likes looking a little wild, like it’s effortless. And while we’re at it, he’s sick of apologizing for looking how he looks. If he was born with this hair, then he wants to embrace it. Isn’t that Charlie’s whole thing?—embracing who he is and what he wants and fuck everybody who has a problem with it?
That used to be Charlie’s whole thing, anyway. It still sort of is, but it’s harder now that he’s got Ben around all the time trying to mute him.
He doesn’t even know why he loves Ben so much. This would all be so much easier if he didn’t, considering that loving Ben makes Charlie hate himself even more.
Charlie just wants to please him, you know? He just wants the look in Ben’s eye when Charlie’s made him happy. And yeah, he knows he’s trapped, and yeah, he knows it’s all fucked to hell. He can hear himself, you know, and he knows he sounds pathetic, but that just compounds it and makes the whole thing worse.
xx
As if his day didn’t need to get any worse already, Mr. Lange seats Charlie next to Nick Nelson in his new form group a few minutes later. In all fairness, Nick actually seems pretty nice when Charlie sits down next to him and starts to talk to him. But it’s Nick Nelson. Everybody in the whole school has heard the rumors that Nick Nelson has a rosemark. Charlie may not personally have a grudge against every member of the rugby team the way Tao does, but he definitely personally has a grudge against anybody who has a soulmate and, you know, feels happy about it.
Not that Charlie knows who Nick’s soulmate actually is. The two of them are the only two people Charlie knows of in the whole district with rosemarks, but the idea that he’s Nick’s soulmate is just absolutely laughable. Nick’s as straight as they come, for one thing, and for another, he probably doesn’t have any space in his head for people like Charlie living on the bottom rung of the social ladder. Isn’t your soulmate supposed to be somebody you click with? There’s no way in hell that Nick Nelson clicks with a toxic loser like Charlie. His soulmate is probably some fit girl he’s going to meet at university or something.
Still, being seated at a desk next to Nick—it makes Charlie anxious in ways he can’t explain, not consciously, not even to himself. The end of term can’t come fast enough, even though he doesn’t know yet how he’s going to survive a whole summer without Ben.
xx
So it continues like that for a few days. Charlie wakes up, kisses Ben when he gets to school, and says hi and nothing else to Nick in form and when they pass each other in the corridors. On Wednesday morning, Nick maintains eye contact for a second with his mouth gaping open as if he’s trying to think of something else to say, but they have nothing to say to each other, really. What do Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson have in common, anyway?
And then, one afternoon, Charlie bumps (quite literally) into Nick on their way to class.
“Sorry,” says Nick, looking up from what appears to be his maths homework. He’s smiling and blushing and sounds a little embarrassed. It’s the first thing he’s ever said to Charlie other than “hi.”
If Charlie knows what’s good for him, he’ll excuse it and carry on with his day, you know? No good at all can come from being friendly with some popular-ass rugby king who’s walking around with a rosemark somewhere on his body. But it’s the same problem as what happened with Ben: Charlie’s maybe a little starved for kindness, and he’s extra-lonely lately without Elle around Truham anymore, and he’s a sucker for a nice boy who smiles at him.
It’s stupid. Charlie’s stupid.
“It’s okay,” he says in this huge, awkward rush. “Uh, I happen to have it on good authority that it’s not advisable to do your maths homework on the way to maths class.”
What a dumbass. It was a good joke, but he totally fucks up the delivery, and the funniness gets lost in translation somewhere between his head and his mouth. For reasons entirely beyond Charlie’s ability to fathom, however, Nick laughs and smiles and treats Charlie like he’s not a total freak for saying what he just said. “Oh, come on. You’ve never done your homework en route to turning it in?”
“No.”
“Not once?”
“Never.” Against his better judgment, Charlie’s starting to relax a little at the way Nick’s treating him—like he’s not insane, like he’s not broken. Accordingly, he sticks the landing this time when he adds, “I’m not that chaotic.”
Nick raises his eyebrows. “Chaotic? That makes me sound way cooler than I actually am.”
And that comment is enough to throw Charlie back off his keel. Since when does Nick not think he’s cool? Doesn’t he realize how popular he is? Doesn’t he know the way all the little people in this school talk about him?
He gulps and attempts to recalibrate. Looking down at Nick’s work on the page—and noticing errors—he says, “Do you want the answers?”
“What?”
“I can tell you the answers, if you want. I know how to do it.”
That smile leaks back onto Nick’s face again. “You know how to do maths a year above your level?”
Unable to figure out whether Nick is teasing him or complimenting him, Charlie mutters, “Just give it here,” and reaches for Nick’s paper, intending to unobtrusively correct Nick’s mistakes for him—but that’s not what happens. Instead, what happens is that Nick hangs on tight to the page and pulls in the other direction. They engage in a brief tug-of-war as Charlie wonders why he’s even bothering, what’s wrong with him, why he suddenly cares so much about Nick getting the right answers on homework that’s due in, like, less than five minutes anyway, that Nick’s not even going to have time to finish, let alone correct, at this point.
And then Charlie loses his balance. The next thing he knows, he’s wound up with a great blue fountain pen mark on the back of his hand.
“Hey!” he scowls.
Nick’s face falls. Finally, it appears that Charlie’s not the only one feeling bad for some reason or another about the way this conversation is going.
But Nick recovers quickly, at least. “It’s fine,” he says breezily. “I’ll fix it.”
He reaches for Charlie’s hand. For some goddamn mystery reason, Charlie feels like his heart stops beating for a second.
And then—Charlie notices that it happens after his heart skips a beat or two—Nick puts his pen tip back on Charlie’s skin and starts to draw. Charlie’s not sure what he’s expecting—maybe for Nick to add a couple of dots to turn the curved line into the mouth of a smiley face—but that’s not what happens, either. It takes Nick a second to draw whatever he’s drawing, but when he pulls back, he hasn’t made a smiley face.
He’s made the line into the stem of a rose—a rosemark.
Charlie thinks he might faint. His eyes lock onto Nick’s for a long, long second—or it feels long to Charlie, anyway. In reality, it’s probably less than a second before Nick covers his mouth with his hand, looking absolutely mortified.
“Shit. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I—”
And then a familiar voice drawls, “You’re friends with this fag, Nick?”
Startled, Charlie tears his eyes away from Nick and allows them to land, like magnets, on Ben across from them. And the worst part is, Nick doesn’t even answer, not to tell Ben that his language is out of line and not even to distract Ben from looking down at Charlie’s hand where the faux rosemark is plainly visible.
He has to get out of here. He has to go.
“Excuse me,” he mutters, and he flees.
The nearest loo is unoccupied, thank heavens, and Charlie locks the door before crossing to the sink and staring at his blotchy reflection, feeling for god knows what reason like he’s going to cry. Nick drew a rosemark on him. Nick drew a rosemark on him. And Ben saw it. Does that mean rumors are starting to leak out—have reached Nick, who’s basically a perfect stranger—that Charlie has a rosemark: a real one? If rumors weren’t already going around, they sure as hell will be now that Ben’s seen what Nick just drew on Charlie’s hand. God, after how hard Charlie’s tried to keep it hidden from everybody, even his best friends, even his family—
Maybe Ben didn’t notice. Maybe Charlie can still fix this. So he splashes some bracing water on his face, and he gets out his own fountain pen, and he scribbles over Nick’s entire drawing until the rose shape is no longer visible.
He’s shaking hard enough that it’s difficult to do, and he tries to ignore the way it felt to see what Nick had drawn. He tries to ignore the way it felt for Nick to touch his hand.
But no—that didn’t make him feel anything out of the ordinary. It was a little weird, sure, but Charlie didn’t realize the significance of it until he saw what Nick had drawn. His heart skipped a couple of beats, maybe, but that didn’t happen until he saw the rose, only because it was weird and personal and inappropriate. Nick touching Charlie didn’t make Charlie feel anything at all.
Did it?