My Prince by Anna Martin Page A

and I know you did too. He needs to be okay with himself before I have a chance in hell of him being okay with me, and sure, this is partly selfish, but if we don’t end up together, then he still deserves to have someone who’s got his back.”
    Doug gave Alex a bemused look. “You really like this one.”
    “Yeah,” Alex said with a sigh. “I really do.”
    “Okay. Give me his number.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “You put me through all of that, then you ask me if I’m sure? Yes, I’m sure. Give me his bloody number.”
    Alex threw his arms around Doug’s shoulders and hugged him hard. “Love you.”
    “I know you do.”
     
     
    “I S THIS weird?” George asked. “I think this is a bit weird.”
    He sipped at his beer, carefully surveying the man on the opposite side of the table. If anyone from back home could see him right now, could see him with Doug right now, he wasn’t sure he’d ever hear the last of it.
    Doug was the sort of man George would never normally associate with. He looked, George decided, a bit like David Beckham without the tattoos, and had a bonus sexy accent. He was drinking gin and tonic with a wedge of lime and raised his eyebrow in response to George’s question.
    “Is it?”
    “I don’t think I’ve ever been set up with the best friend of a guy I’m seeing before.”
    Doug chuckled softly at that. “Alex likes you a lot. Did he tell you that already?”
    “No,” George mumbled. He used his fingertip to gather up the condensation on the side of his pint glass.
    “He’s decided you need a mentor,” Doug said with the sort of blunt honesty that always took George aback.
    “Oh, really,” he said slowly.
    “Don’t get upset, darling,” Doug said. “I see where he’s coming from.”
    “You do?”
    “We have this great tradition in this community, the gay community, of taking care of one another. A new kid shows up, says he’s gay, we take him under our wing. We show him the ropes. Give him the space to explore his sexuality in a safe environment.”
    “Yeah, well, I never had that.”
    “I’d guessed,” Doug drawled. “You’re from Manchester?”
    “Yeah,” George said. “But I’ve never been to Canal Street in my life, so don’t go thinking I was dancing it up at Manto every weekend.”
    “You grew up on the doorstep of one of the biggest gay communities in the country,” Doug said.
    “Yeah, but Chorlton might as well be farther away from Canal Street than the moon. There was no way a kid like me could have gone over there.”
    “How do you mean?”
    George chuckled and shook his head, knowing exactly what was happening. He didn’t mind, not really, so he played along.
    “I never went gay-bashing,” he said. “But I could have. I knew people who did. I’m not proud of that…. They’re the same people who used to go into the corner shops run by the Asians and trash the place. Or made monkey noises at black people at football games. I never got involved. My older brother, he was hard as fucking nails, so I never had to worry about joining those kids or worry about being their next target.”
    “But if you’d come out….”
    “Yeah, if I’d come out, even Maggie couldn’t have protected me.”
    “So, do you think you knew even back then, and repressed your sexuality until you were in a place in your life where it was safe to come out, or did you really not figure it out until your midtwenties?”
    “I dunno.” George shrugged.
    “I knew when I was about eleven,” Doug said conversationally. “I tried to hide it for most of my teen years, got the shit beat out of me regularly. It is what it is,” he said when George tried to offer some measure of sympathy. “I can’t blame anyone for it, not really. It was the seventies. I moved to London when I was eighteen, determined to be out and proud, and within weeks of me moving, the rumbles through the bars started. Gay cancer, they called it.”
    “Shit,” George muttered.
    “I hadn’t