I Called Him Mine
an excerpt

(From Part 2, Chapter 1)

Ethan woke suddenly, to the slight scraping sound of a key being inserted into his door lock. Struggling to free himself from the sheets that had bunched around him, he barely managed to free his upper body enough so that he had enough mobility to grab the baseball bat that he kept beside his bed – if he needed to. He was drenched, sweat beading around his face, and it didn’t help his attempts to get himself up and decent. It had been an unusually hot night, even for the end of Summer, but he knew that this was related to the anxious dreams he was having, consistently, since the end of the last school year. He kept dreaming that nothing he was doing – at work, at home, with his friends – was going the way he had planned, and these thoughts were starting to spill into his everyday life, making him second-guess all his decisions. His parents weren’t happy with him coming back to school, they wanted him to stay and help his father out so that he didn’t have to hire another farmhand, and although he knew that it was because of the long-standing drought that was just starting to hurt the farm financially, he couldn’t help but feel guilty when he walked out the door. James had beaten him in the final English exam of the year, and had taken out the coveted School Captain position out from under his nose, and although he knew that the first was a fluke and the second was merely a popularity contest – and he, although friendly with many students, was not as sociable as James – he couldn’t help but feel that his marks were slipping, that he was slipping, and that if he didn’t catch himself in time that he would fail to get into Veterinary Science at University, his one and only dream that had persisted throughout his entire life. As for his friendships – Sebastian was as endearing, as honest and as willing to please as he had ever been, Sunny cared for him, always… But then there was Mason…

Mason’s head snaked through his doorway, his voice whispering melodically.
“Ethan, are you awake yet?”
Ethan released his grip on the baseball bat, and rolled over, groaning. “Somewhat.”
“Good,” he said, flicking the light switch and flooding the room in artificial light. Ethan sat up as far as he could, and tried to focus his eyes on the alarm clock on his bedside table – the LED screen displayed the time as 4:55am. He grasped for the bottle of water he kept on the bedside table, and managed to tip its entire contents down his throat without spilling too many drops.
“What are you doing up so early?” he muttered, silently cursing the agreement that he had made with Mason, James and Sebastian that they all would have keys cut to each other’s rooms, so they could come and go as they pleased. After five years of sharing a room with Mason, after five years of enjoying his company but wishing for a little privacy, he had quickly become reaccustomed to sleeping alone. Mason, on the other hand, seemed to be taking his time adjusting; he seemed to feel that he could come and go from Ethan’s room as the whim took him. He had never, yet, entered his room in the middle of the night – this would have to be the first.
“The question is,” Mason slurred cheekily, “What are you still doing in bed when there’s fun to be had?”
He staggered over and lay down next to Ethan on the bed, forcing him to quickly move over to avoid being squashed. Mason, despite remaining a much smaller man than Ethan, in both size and weight, was still quite heavy when he had been drinking. He took a long and deliberate swig from a half-full bottle of cheap bourbon he was waving around, remarkably managing not to spill it down the bedclothes.
Ethan grabbed the bottle and set it deliberately on his bedside table – he was meticulous about the state of his bedroom at the best of times, and the last thing he wanted was to have to explain to the Principal the reason why he urgently needed his doona drycleaned.
“Where did you get that?”
Mason giggled. “Zoe brought it around, we had a bit of a start-of-year party in my bedroom, but I sent her packing a few minutes ago and came straight around to see if you...”
“I don’t want to know anything except whether or not you two had a few drinks of water in between alcoholic drinks.”
“Twas good clean fun, honest,” Mason protested. Somehow, Ethan didn’t believe him.
“Drink this,” he said, crossing the floor to his mini-fridge and grabbing the only liquid still available in the room – a bottle of apple juice that he had been storing for those mornings when he was too busy studying to go to the dining room for breakfast with the rest of his classmates.
Mason drank like he was parched, thankfully put the lid back on the bottle before he dropped it on the ground, and promptly fell deeply asleep in Ethan’s bed.
Ethan stalked over to the bed, and shook his friend’s elbow. “Come on mate, don’t do this to me. Go and annoy James or something.”
Mason didn’t answer – he didn’t even roll over, make a noise, or give any indication that he had indeed heard what Ethan had said.
Sighing, Ethan pulled his blankets up and around Mason’s shoulders, and took a moment to pat Mason’s shaggy, overly long hair away from his eyes. He went out into the hallway and filled up his empty bottle of water from the tap in the kitchenette, placing it in easy reach on his bedside table and his rubbish bin on the floor beside the bed. Cursing Mason, and cursing the beginning of the school semester, he grabbed up his unopened Specialist Mathematics book and a fresh notepad and pen, and headed out of the room and down to the quiet study area on the second floor of the building. There was nothing quite like getting a head start on the year’s schoolwork.