Chapter Text
It had taken the jury six hours to deliberate.
It takes the court six days to arrange a sentencing hearing.
The judge listens for an hour before he puts them all out of their misery.
And that is how, as a cry of relief hits his ears from across the room, Nick Nelson’s life changes forever.
The presiding judge – although the liaison officer who accompanies them through the building is keen to point out that officially the trial is over, the verdict given, and sentencing is just a formality that they don’t need to witness – is a stern-looking man with a deep furrow at his brow. Throughout the hearing, Nick had felt like the judge’s eyes were on him the entire time, boring into the crown of his head as he sat with his chin tucked in close to his chest and waited for the victim impact statements to be read out. It had been painful, hearing his every mistake be combed through by the judge, while she had sat diagonally across from him, her hair falling in a shiny curtain down her back. They haven’t spoken since the night the police led her away, Nick perched on a kerb with his shirt in disarray while an officer tried to prise his name and address out of him. She hadn’t looked back at the time, although he had begged her with silent eyes not to leave him there alone. She hadn’t looked at him throughout the hearing, not once, although her husband had glared at him from his seat on the benches behind them. David had glared back. Nick had tried not to think about it.
It had been worse still to have his Mum’s arm linked so tightly through his own; a constant reminder of how badly he has let her down, how little she trusts him not to bolt, even as the court had made it so abundantly clear that a crime had been committed against him. It hadn’t felt that way, not when he has the memory of I love yous grazing his lips.
Now, he’s flanked on either side by his mum, and a brother that has – until this point – been fairly disinterested. His dad had stayed in France, wanting nothing to do with le cirque – that is, the media frenzy that is still not allowed to identify Nick by name. He suspects – although he has no one to voice this to – that it is actually embarrassment that is keeping Stėphane away.
Still, Nick reasons, if his dad eventually feigns an interest, he can read all the sordid details for himself in the court transcripts. Nick, redacted to Boy A. The last few months of his life are laid out in black and white print that swims behind his eyes, as the judge clears his throat and declares himself ready to sentence.
Twelve months, suspended. Sex offenders register for fifteen years. Banned from teaching for life. Order of protection.
Nick makes a mental note to ask his mum what all of this means when they get home, although when her arm tightens around his waist, he thinks maybe Google is the better way to go.
His statement had been brief. Barely mentionable, except that he felt he had to give it. A court official had read it out for him. David’s had been longer; an amalgamation of everything that Nick hadn’t realised that he and their mum had noticed, these past few weeks. How Nick wakes up crying out in the night. The times he has shamefully piled damp bed sheets and pyjamas into the linen basket, hoping no-one would notice. The knocks on the door from his rugby mates that went unanswered. The drinking, and the smoking, both so out of character for their sensitive little Nicky.
Then there’s the failing of most of his GCSEs. Nick wonders if straight-A David had taken some sort of perverse pleasure in including that in his statement, even though he knows the entire thing had been coached and advised by the prosecution. It’s all relevant, in its way, although it had taken Nick a long time to see it like that.
It works, to an extent; when she finally turns and looks at him, her eyes glazed and red-rimmed, Nick feels the weeks of guilt rise up and threaten to have him expel the bland lunch the liaison officer had provided a few hours previously. She looks every moment of her age – thirty, confirmed by the court documents that he had managed to glimpse – when not even a year ago his mates had been clambering to insist she couldn’t be a day over twenty five. Petite, pretty, employed to get the sporty boys interested in maths; a massive misjudgement by school leadership if there ever was one. Nick doesn’t know a single boy from his class who could have passed that particular GCSE, unless the exam included detailed questions about her measurements. He had had to suffer listening to their horny teenage speculation about that in the changing room for weeks, his first-hand knowledge tucked away tight in his mind while the lads whooped and hollered around him. Now, the sensible outfit she has picked out – one that he can only assume was intended to make her look professional – has the opposite effect. Almost dowdy. She looks as tired as he feels.
The room erupts as soon as she and her husband are led away via a side door. The man manages to shoot one more look towards Nick before they’re both gone – the heavy wooden door slamming behind them – and that guilty feeling is back again. A marriage almost ruined – his fault – and probably changed forever. The counsellor they assigned to him has tried to impress on him how little any of it is his fault, but it’s hard to argue with the niggling voice in the back of his head.
They have to leave via the back door to avoid the media vipers that have staked out the main steps, keen to catch a glimpse, and they’re halfway to the car park when the first text in this after comes through.
I hope you’re happy.
He deletes it without thinking, tucks his phone into his back pocket and follows the stoic figures of his mum and brother past the line of cars.
He isn’t happy. And no one seems to have noticed.
“Bitch should have got five years,” David mutters when they’re all bundled in the car a moment later, Nick trying to make himself as small as possible in the back seat. He’d prefer to be sat on the passenger side, able to glance at his mum’s face and gauge her thoughts like he did when he was a kid. But that particular positioning holds memories of fogged-up glass, of police banging on the window, of life as he knew it falling apart. That handprint in the condensation that gave them away. So instead, he must suffer the view of David’s jawline, clenched in unbridled fury, as he waves his arms about.
“Don’t call her a bitch,” Nick glowers back, a hard habit to break. David just rolls his eyes.
“Oh, come off of it, Nicky. She’s a fucking predator. If she were a bloke, they’d have thrown the book at her.”
Nick isn’t sure of the statistics, and he’s fairly sure David is talking out of his arse, but before he can come up with a response, Mum slams her hand on the dashboard.
“David, please don’t swear,” she snaps, her voice wavering as she swipes at her face. Nick hates that he’s made her cry so much recently. There’s a vague lingering hangover niggling at the left side of his head, but the brief sight of her red-rimmed eyes in the rear view mirror hurts even more. He’s pretty sure the bottle of vodka that he managed to swipe from the garage is nearly empty; maybe he’ll find the strength to pour it out when they get home.
David, in his new role as the responsible one, doesn’t seem to notice the mood in the rest of the car.
“Seriously? Call a bitch a bitch, Mum.”
Nick can’t stand it. He curls himself up more on the backseat, head resting on crossed arms. David continues his tirade from the front seat.
“I’m telling you, if that judge had seen a photo of him from a year ago, instead of looking at him now, it would have been an entirely different story. If he’d see what a scrawny fucker he was in the beginning–“
“David!” their mum snaps, her voice an octave higher than before.
Nick knows there’s some truth there, although it doesn’t help the way he feels. It was the defence’s main argument, once it became incredibly apparent that denial was not a feasible plan. He simply seems older than he is – a sensible, sensitive, mature boy whose genes blessed him with height and breadth beyond what you would expect of a regular sixteen year old. Besides, he’s skirting the line between legal in one context and illegal in another. Is it really her fault, your Honour, to have fallen for someone who seemed so on the cusp of adulthood?
The jury didn’t agree. Nick isn’t sure he agrees either, now that he’s had a few months to mull things over. Alone. Mum withdrew him from St John’s the second the news hit, away from prying eyes and gossiping teammates, and he’s vaguely aware of an agreement with the local authority to enrol him at Truham as soon as the new term starts. It’ll be a term late, but seeing as his problems didn’t start until the Christmas break, he figures he’ll be able to pick things up fairly quickly. Once upon a time, he made good choices.
Being with kids a year younger than him – potentially almost two years, given he was the oldest in his cohort at St John’s – will presumably reduce distractions significantly. Nick hopes that there might at least be space on the rugby team. He’ll even take reserve if he has to. Anything to keep his body moving while it feels like he’s hurtling towards entropy.
There’s a lot to do before he gets to that point though, he knows. There’s Christmas and New Year’s, avoiding questions from well-meaning relatives; the counselling that the liaison officer recommended, and his mum is insisting he attends; fighting off offers of victim support groups that would feel like a lie to attend.
Logically, he knows that’s what he is.
Emotionally, that label doesn’t quite fit. Not yet. Not when there’s a part of him that misses the whole thing.
Misses her.
Last time the entire family was together, his uncle had asked him if he had a girlfriend yet. Nick had only hidden his smile behind the single bottle of beer his mum had let him have with dinner, and acted coy. There were giggles, and speculation – most of all from David – as to what his type might be. Where he might have managed to meet a girl, somewhere in between rugby, taking care of Nellie, and all the extra maths tuition the new GCSE teacher was kind enough to give him after school.
They were all so, so proud of how hard he was trying.
Now, in the front seat, David seems to have settled, his arms crossed tight over his chest as he glares out of the window. It’s not a far cry from Nick’s own posture, and he supposes that maybe they’re more similar than he ever thought. It isn’t a happy realisation.
“Mum?” She meets his eyes in the rear view mirror.
“Yes, baby?”
“Do you mind if I go for a run later? I just need to stretch my legs.”
The car goes quiet, two adults sharing a silent moment of telepathy that the child in the back seat isn’t privy to. Nick waits for the inevitable, refusing to be distracted by the flushed, drawn look of his own face in the rear view mirror.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Nicky…”
“Please–“
David whips round in the front seat, face red.
“Nick, would you shut the fuck up whining? Don’t you think you’ve put Mum through enough recently?”
“David, that's enough!”
They’re turning into their road now, the memory of the journey receding back to some recess of Nick’s brain where most of his thoughts go nowadays. He can see their drive, looming, the entryway to his house arrest, and it feels suffocating. As soon as the car is parked, David is skulking towards the front door. Nick hangs back, eyes locked on the window of his bedroom above them.
“Please, Mum,” he whispers, when he’s finished watching David’s retreating back disappear into the gloom. “I just need to get outside for a bit. I’ll take Nellie with me. You can track my phone. Please.”
Trust is hard to earn, and easily broken, but he knows that there’s still some left there, lingering. Some faint memory of how close they were before all of this happened; how he was willing to tell her everything, no matter the consequences. Until he wasn’t, anymore. He hopes that the memory is strong enough to win him some favour. The perfect son, until that label didn’t fit anymore. He’ll do anything to claw that back.
“Please, Mum,” he pleads again, although her eyes have gone glassy enough that he thinks she might not be listening. “I promise I’ll be good.”
“Okay,” she murmurs eventually, hand reaching out to squeeze his bicep. The shirt he’s worn is too tight – he’s had nothing to do except lift weights, stare at the ceiling and occasionally wank, these past few weeks – and there’s a synthetic squeaking noise as her fingertips grip the polyester. “An hour, that’s it. Then I send David out looking for you.”
He’s hurtling up the stairs as soon as she lets go, slamming his bedroom door behind him. It’s the current rule, technically, to leave the door open at all times, but he seems to have some leeway when someone knows he’s changing. Mum has never explicitly enforced it, either, simply sighing and knocking gently whenever she goes past, waiting for him to grunt that he’s decent before letting her tired eyes peer round the doorframe, and making up some mild excuse for coming in.
She has a newfound love of doing the washing these days, it seems.
Mum had bought him a new suit before the trial started. A depressing replacement for the suit he had never had the chance to wear at prom; his time at St John’s long over before they decorated the hall and invited a bunch of rowdy teenagers to have chaperoned fun. It’s grey, and light. The kind of suit you might wear in summer, not the dead of winter. Found in the sales. It’s slightly staticky when he peels off the shirt and trousers. Despite the cold, it’s made him sweat.
Or, maybe, it was the nerves.
The liaison officer had raised her eyebrow as soon as he walked through the big wooden doors, back on the day he was due to give evidence. Suggested he take off the jacket and tie, and try not to look older than he is. It wasn’t a criticism, although he felt the eyes of everyone in the room on him.
That’s what got you into trouble in the first place, isn’t it?
No, it had all been strategy. He’d aged out of his uniform – St John’s doesn’t have an official sixth form blazer, and he’s not going back there in any case – and the prosecution had enough photos of him in his blazer and his rugby kit to make their point, regardless. But him turning up looking old enough to maybe trick the corner shop bloke into selling him a bottle of vodka (a knack he has perfected recently) would hardly help them.
It’s not for him, in any case, this stuffy, tight costume. He gladly lets it fall to the floor in a crumpled heap – no point throwing it in the linen basket if he never intends to wear it again – before digging around in his drawers for a pair of joggers and a shirt. It’s been ages since he’s been for a run – willingly, in any case – and he’s pretty sure that the trainers he still owns aren’t exactly made for jogging. But they’ll do, if it gets him out of this room.
The walk to the park is quiet enough, familiar enough, that Nick can let his mind wander, even as Nellie tugs on the lead. The last few months are always simmering under the surface, ready to rear up and bite him, but it takes a moment alone like this to really set them free.
The wait for the trial had been long and bleak. But when it came to it, the trial itself was probably no more than a week. A mere formality, when he considers that they were caught in the act. Nick wasn’t allowed in the room for most of it, although David attended every day, and Nick’s evidence was given via video link in some white, bland room off to the side of the court. He was old enough to give it in person, he’d argued, but the family liaison had simply raised an eyebrow and muttered something about protocol. It wasn’t – he had looked it up – but the way his mum agreed so readily had him thinking that there was some sort of conspiracy to keep him out of the room for as long as possible.
Three months. That’s how long they had lasted, officially. Nick isn’t sure he can pinpoint the start precisely enough to correct the record. He knows it was probably after he turned sixteen, despite the tingling feeling on his skin when he thinks about the term before. Those quiet moments after school, when she would direct his attention to some maths concept that he was on the cusp of getting, with a hand on his shoulder.
It’s hard, really, to cling to any of it now.
Instead, he picks up the pace. More energy expended before he has to go back home.
Nellie can keep up just fine, especially now that Nick hasn’t had a chance to exercise for a while. Years of rugby training have been blitzed in a few weeks of being cooped up; his muscles ache within minutes, and he’s pushing through the burn, when Nellie whines at his heels. He’s panting, winded already, and she’s clearly concerned.
“It’s okay, girl, I’m fine.”
They manage a couple of laps of the park, slow and steady, before Nick has to admit defeat and tumble onto a nearby bench. The effect is instantly cooling – it’s too cold to be out here for long – and the sweat on his brow turns painful in the breeze as he stares out at the people milling about on the grass. There aren’t many – not in this weather – and Nick distracts himself from his chattering teeth by making up vague backstories for the people going past.
The couple who are on their way home from therapy, their grievances aired enough for the week that maybe they’ll be able to get through dinner without arguing.
The young dog walker with no less than five leads, taking out the pets of the elderly to try and earn some extra cash.
The girl, about his age, with the blonde streaks framing her face, whose phone argument with her boyfriend has reached new heights.
The jogger with the curly black hair who is escaping something as he launches himself in wide loops around the park. Just like Nick.
There isn’t anyone else to watch, so Nick lets his gaze follow the boy as he sprints through the park. His thick black eyebrows are drawn into a frown, and his running gear puts Nick’s to shame. Layers, that’s what he needs to bring next time. Skintight Lycra under running shorts and a hoodie that has those holes for hooking the thumbs through.
Then the boy is gone, and Nick has nothing left to distract him, except to fish around in his pocket for the packet of cigarettes and the lighter he stashed there before he left. He has three left of the pack she bought him last. He has, so far, managed to ration himself to one a week, in those brief moments where he is left alone, or when the house is quiet enough to hang out of the window and watch the clouds swirl above. For a moment he flicks the lighter and watches the flame flutter in the breeze. He has become so used to the flare of fire in the dark that it seems strange to watch the lighter ignite in the daylight – what’s left of it, in any case – and he watches the flame for a few seconds, before it flickers and is gone. The hoodie has to come off before he can light up; he’ll just have to manage in only a shirt for the foreseeable. A necessary agony, if he’s going to have any chance of Mum not noticing the smell as soon as he walks through the door. Then he raises the lighter to the cigarette poised between his lips. The relief hits his lungs almost instantly, a phantom pain extinguished, and he leans back against the back of the bench and tugs his arms around himself.
He knows that if he takes his phone from his pocket there will be nothing from any of his old mates. They all dropped away weeks ago, when he refused to offer any explanation as to why he was leaving school. He knows, even though he hasn’t dared check, that the Instagram profile that has been the very foundation of him for months now will have gone dark. Either at the advice of some solicitor, or because she’s done with him.
Now, Nick can safely ignore the world until the alarm he set before he left – the one that tells him he has exactly fifteen minutes to sprint home with Nellie in tow – can blare and pull him back to reality.
The cigarette smoulders, largely ignored, between his fingers. Scarcity has almost made him break the habit; it’s more of a security thing than a need nowadays, but regardless, he takes another drag, just to feel something. Nellie whines next to him, so he pats the bench to get her to hop up, and drapes his hoodie over her back to keep her warm. When she snuggles in closer, he feels the warmth hurt his bones.
That boy is back again, circling round in one more cool-down loop on the path. He looks at Nick strangely as he approaches – although Nick reasons that’s a fairly understandable response, given that he’s sat in a T-shirt in four degree weather – and he thinks the boy may be holding his breath as he passes. Nick tries to hold in his lungful of smoke while the boy walks by. Except he’s walking slowly, watching Nick carefully, and when he finally gets close enough for Nick to make out the details of his face, the boy gives him a smile.
Dimples.
It’s the only thing he really notices. Dimples that pucker his cheeks in one of those awkward eye-contact-with-a-stranger smiles. There’s a vague whisper of blue eyes, kind-looking, that he brushes off as soon as the boy has passed and he can breathe out. He lets the smoke curl around in the air, before he stubs the cigarette out on the metal arm of the bench and tugs his hoodie back over his head.
“Come on, girl,” he whispers as he fluffs the fur on Nellie’s head. “Let’s go home.”