Rhapsody on a Theme by Matthew J. Metzger Page B

culture section, and the arts blog on the website) but well-meaning. He didn’t feel like he had to hide here, and Darren had once kissed him in the car park and they’d been seen by half the floor on their fag break, but nobody had said anything except for Melinda, a pretty girl with pink hair who worked in advertising, who’d said, “He’s a bit of a looker, your boyfriend,” and nothing else on the subject. Without ever having announced it, he was out. And unlike school and university, nobody cared that he was gay, and nobody took not knowing his boyfriend as a reason to dislike him.
    He’d never thought he’d have been happy here: a local paper, a blog with less than a hundred hits a day, and a little unpaid directing and scriptwriting role in the local am-drams. He kept a notebook in his desk for script ideas and scenes, when work was too slow, and his phone on his desk to text Darren during the day—or rather, receive a semi-steady stream of offensive, public-insulting, police-hating rants from Darren in varying degrees of seriousness and irritation, and…he was happy. Jayden was happy here, so far away from his teenage dreams, and it was taking a little getting used to.
    He settled in—mostly his mornings consisted of filtering through the hundreds of mis-addressed emails that should be going to the editor or the advertising manager instead of him, but were sent to him anyway as the blog owner for the arts—and re-emptied his in-tray onto his desk in his chaotic way of working that Darren called ‘spastic’ because, when you got right down to it, Jayden actually dated a bit of a prick, really.
    “How was your Christmas?” Gina asked over the top of her laptop screen. Gina was the only person in the office close to Jayden’s age (and she was closer to thirty than twenty) and they talked mostly out of a need to discuss TV shows the others didn’t watch or decried as part of that whole ‘young people these days’ thing.
    “Pretty good,” Jayden said. “Yours?”
    She grimaced, as he’d expected. Gina and her fiancé were in the process of trying to adopt. Jayden didn’t know why they didn’t just have their own baby, and he didn’t want to ask in case it was some big horrible reason, but he had decided from Gina’s horror stories of how awful the social workers were and how one at Southampton City Council had basically accused her boyfriend of being racist that he and Darren were never adopting. (Jayden didn’t know how the racism thing even worked, given Gina’s boyfriend was from Bangladesh and Gina’s parents were both from Barbados, but…)
    “Could have been better,” she said, “ but we did get approved to foster, so progress!”
    She held up her crossed fingers; Jayden crossed his own and smiled.
    “So we should be able to get Beth by February,” she said, referring to the baby they were trying to adopt. She was just a year old, and Gina’s desk was littered with pictures of her. “I’m terrified.”
    “Don’t be,” Jayden said. “You’ll be a great mum.”
    “Yeah, but it’s so much harder with adopted kids.”
    “Doesn’t have to be,” Jayden said, shrugging and binning a half-dozen emails at once. “My Dad adopted me.”
    “But that’s in-family, that’s…”
    “Yeah, but he’s not my dad-dad , if you know what I mean,” Jayden pushed. “I mean, it’s like dead obvious, I look nothing like him at all and my little sister does and even my boyfriend commented on it when we first got together.”
    “When did you guys get together?” Gina interrupted. “Stephanie was saying you’ve been together forever and I was like, are you kidding, Jay’s only like twenty!”
    “Twenty-three.”
    “No way .”
    “Ye-eah.” Jayden pulled a face at her. “I was twenty-three in September. And it’s been, like…seven years.” He went red.
    “Oh my God, seven years ?” Gina yelped. “You were—wait—sixteen? Oh my God, you were sixteen , and you’re still