Chapter 15: Part 15 - Rafa's Fingers

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Part 15 — Rafa’s Fingers

Rafael Couzins had the smoothest fingers I’ve ever known on anyone. Boy or girl. There were testers at moisturizer factories with rougher hands than he had. For the next three weeks, the 12-year-old me came to Pride Club just to get a face massage from Rafa’s fingers. We lined up. All the girls and me (and a couple of the boys by week three, too). But he’d always do my face first. And spend much longer on it. That’s how it felt anyway.

If you’ve never had a face massage, I can really recommend them. The face has so many muscles and they all get tense from shouting and frowning and crying. Rafa had a way of just squeezing that tension out of you. Like a great big hug for your face. But, if there was one thing I was learning, it was that hugs sometimes lead to something else.

It was the day of our Communities Evening. It was one of the biggest events in the calendar at Hillman’s Middle School. We were such a diverse, progressive place, with strong ties to African and Jewish and Greek heritage, as well as Irish and Italian. A real hotchpotch

of a melting pot, as my grampa would say. Communities Evening was all about celebrating our diversity, and students — and teachers, like Mr Jenkins — put a whole lot of prep into the event.

Mr Jenkin’s teaching room had this little office at the side of it. It was where he stored all the Pride Club stuff, including our button maker. He’d fought really hard for Pride Club to get a stall at communities evening and had asked for volunteers to stay behind after school and make, like, a million rainbow buttons. Rafa and I volunteered.

We worked really well together, and we had our system down pat. I laid out the thin disks of paper and passed Rafa the clear plastic for the front together with the metal button. He grabbed the paper from where I laid it and took the plastic backings, before putting them in the machine and pressing them down. We got good. We got fast. And that was when it turned into a game.

“How many do you reckon we can do in a minute?” Rafa asked, pressing another top in before sliding the holder to the left and pressing in the plastic backing.

I thought about the question for a second.

“Ten?” I replied, hesitantly.

“Aww, come on,” he replied. “We can do more than that. We can do at least 12. Were the legendary Rafa and Errol!”

I giggled at his invocation of my name.

“Okay,” I replied, placing down what we’d need and getting the timer set up on my phone. “Let’s go!”

Rafa worked so quickly that I almost couldn’t see his hands move. As fast as I could pass him the plastic covers and metal fronts, he’d slammed them in with the paper design and pressed them down. It got so fast that I was frantically reaching for the big bag of supplies. By the end, I was practically forcing the pieces into his hands, his expert fingers taking them from me and putting them to work. And every time his fingers brushed up against mine, I felt it. In the pit of my stomach. Like little bursts of electricity. Or tiny butterflies that gently kissed the inside of my stomach with their wings.

Once we’d finished, and the clock counted into its beeper, we had 13 proud (if slightly misshapen) rainbow buttons.

“Yaaaaayyyyy!!” Rafa cheered, throwing his hands into the air.

I did the same with such vigor that a rocked over sideways and nearly fell off my chair.

It was Rafa who caught me. Cupping those gentle fingers around my side and holding my forearm firmly.

“Thirteen?” he cried, looking deep into my eyes.

“Unlucky for some,” I replied, not daring to look away.

He let go of my forearm and let his fingers dance lightly up toward the back of my hand. He let the forefinger and middle finger trace around in a figure of eight shape.

“Is it?” he asked, his lips dangerously close to my own now. “Is it unlucky for me?” he whispered, his lips mere milimeters from my own.

I let the kiss take me bodily. The soft pressure of his lips, the way he let his tongue gently flick out of his mouth, like he was testing to see how far we dared take it. His fingers closed into the spaces between my own and I could feel the butterflies in my stomach sparking and sending pleasant little shocks through my body, past the heart, and towards my head. The sudden, surging rush of desire, as I parted my own lips and kissed him back with all the passion I could muster.

When we broke for air it was like I was waking into another world. A world where Errol Stevenson knew who he was and what he wanted. I was sure of it. I was gay and I wanted boys. And not just any boys. I wanted boys who could kiss like Rafa Couzins. No! I wanted Rafa Couzins. And I was having him. And nobody else could have him instead. And it was in this flush, this rush of lusty desire, that I followed up his kiss with another. Even better than the first, as I took ahold of his other hand with mine and squeezed it with my fingers like it was life itself.

And it was into that blissful embrace, when we broke for the second time, that I thrust the first words that came to me — the first words that this hidden (and forbidden?) tryst stirred in me.

“We can’t tell anyone, okay?!”

Submitted: January 13, 2025

Young Adult teen drama ya lgbtq trans