Eighteen Years
by Edward Kyle Stokes
Chapter 5
I Have A Right To A Life.
The pale, golden light of another Saturday morning crept across the small room, but the atmosphere felt entirely different this time. As they woke, tangled together beneath the duvet, both Harry and Aled felt the immediate, undeniable shift in the air. They had crossed a massive, irreversible threshold. They were no longer just two guys navigating a tentative attraction; they were bound together by an intense, life-altering intimacy.
Aled lay flat on his back, staring up at the white ceiling, his fingers nervously tracing the hem of the sheet. The soft, sleepy warmth of the morning usually brought him peace, but today, the weight of his reality was already pressing down on him. Turning his head slightly on the pillow, Aled looked into Harry's blue eyes and took a deep, centering breath. "Harry," he whispered, his voice cracking slightly with the sheer weight of what he was about to say. "I think... I think I'm going to have to tell them. My family."
Harry sat up slightly, propping himself up on his elbow, his attention instantly focused. "Your dad and brothers?"
Aled nodded, his stomach twisting into familiar knots. "Not just about me being gay. But about... about meeting someone. About meeting you. I can't keep lying about where I'm going every two weeks. The guilt is eating me alive, Harry. And if I'm going to have any kind of future... they need to know."
Harry's heart leaped in his chest, a sudden flare of hope cutting through the morning stillness. "Does that mean... does that mean you'll come travelling with me when I finish uni in June?"
The moment the question left Harry's mouth, the sheer magnitude of what he was proposing hung heavily in the narrow space between them. It wasn't just a holiday. For a boy like Aled, who had never left his valley for more than a few days, this was a monumental, terrifying leap. It was essentially like proposing they live together. Harry was asking him to take three massive, earth-shattering steps all at once: first, he had to tell his traditional, conservative thinking father and brothers that he was gay. Second, he had to confess he had a boyfriend from London. And finally, he had to tell them he was packing his bags and leaving the land behind.
"What about the farm, Harry?" Aled asked, his voice thick with anxiety, his bright eyes searching Harry's face for answers. "You know how they are. They say I'm needed. Every single day."
Harry looked down, his expression becoming deeply reflective. He ran a hand through his messy blond hair, trying to look at the situation logically. "Look, I know absolutely nothing about farming," Harry admitted honestly. "I'm a city boy. But does running a sheep farm absolutely need four grown men? Or even three? Plenty of farms survive with fewer hands. You've got Gwilym and Iwan, and your dad. They can manage for a while, Aled. They managed before you were old enough to help out."
Aled let out a soft, dry laugh, though there was no humour in it. He shifted on the mattress, throwing another massive obstacle into the air. "And what about the money, Harry? You're talking about six months across the world. I don't have a penny to my name that doesn't belong to the family business. You'd be paying for absolutely everything."
"Well," Harry said, a small, reassuring smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he reached out to smooth a stray dark curl from Aled's forehead. "At least that part I've actually worked out. We don't just leave in June."
Aled blinked. "We don't?"
"No," Harry explained, his voice gaining a confident, practical tone. "We both get jobs the second I finish my exams. We stay here in Chester, get a flat together, and work like mad for six months to build up some proper savings. We work six months, we travel for six months, and then when we get back, I start my postgraduate studies."
It sounded so simple when Harry said it. A perfect, neat timeline mapped out by a boy who had always had the freedom to draw his own map.
Aled listened, his heart aching with a mixture of intense love and terrifying uncertainty. He looked at Harry's bright, determined face, and then asked the one question that Harry's neat little timeline had completely left out.
"And what about me?" Aled asked softly, his voice barely a whisper against the pillow. "When we get back from travelling... what do I do then? You go off to your postgrad. You have your career, your degrees, your life here or in London. What do I have? I don't have a trade, Harry. I only know sheep and tractors."
Harry froze, the confident smile fading from his lips. He looked at Aled, the harsh reality of the chasm between their backgrounds staring him right in the face. It was a question Harry didn't have the answer to.
The heavy silence returned to the tiny bedroom, thick with the sudden realisation that love, no matter how intense or beautiful, couldn't automatically solve the brutal practicalities of the world. And as the morning light grew brighter, exposing every corner of the room, both boys knew there weren't just one or two hurdles left to clear—there were a million other questions waiting for them in the dark, and neither of them knew how to begin answering them.
The following day, the true test arrived. Sunday lunch at the farmhouse was a sacred ritual—the one time of the week when the entire family sat down together, the table groaning under the weight of roast meat, potatoes, and the heavy, exhausting silence of men who had been working the land all week from dawn till dusk.
Aled sat in his usual chair, his hands gripping his thighs beneath the table to stop them from shaking. His heart was hammering so violently he was certain his brothers could hear it over the clinking of cutlery. His throat was bone-dry. He looked across at his dad, then at Gwilym and Iwan, who were already piling their plates high, completely oblivious to the bomb that was about to detonate in their kitchen.
Taking a deep, a trembling breath, Aled forced the words out.
"I have to tell you something, Da," he said.
His voice was thin, but in the calm of the kitchen, it cut through the room like a knife. The clinking of forks stopped. The table went deathly quiet. His dad paused, a carving knife hovering over the roast lamb, his weathered face turning slowly toward his youngest son.
"I knew it!" Gwilym interrupted suddenly, a massive, knowing grin breaking across his face as he pointed a fork at Aled. "He's got a girl! That's why he's been sneaking off to Chester. Who is she then, lad?"
"Shut up!" Aled snapped back. The sudden burst of anger surprised even him, his voice cracking as he almost lost his grip on his rising panic. He couldn't let them turn this into a joke. He couldn't let them build a fantasy around a girl who didn't exist. He gripped the edge of the wooden table until it hurt, looking directly at his father.
"I don't have a girl," Aled said, the words echoing off the stone walls of the kitchen, clear and final. "I'm not into girls. Never have been."
He swallowed hard, the final, terrifying leap looming right in front of him. He thought of Harry's warm student room, the safety of Harry's arms, and the promise of a life where he didn't have to suffocate in secret. He found his courage.
"It's a boy I've got," Aled announced, his voice steadying just enough to carry the weight of his truth. "And his name is Harry."
The reaction was instantaneous, yet completely unmoving. It was as if the entire room had been plunged into a vacuum, stripping away all air and sound. Nobody blinked. Nobody breathed. If anyone had moved even a fraction of an inch, the sheer friction of the tension in that kitchen would have made a spark that ignited a catastrophic explosion.
The silence that followed was absolute, heavy, and earth-shattering.
The knife in his dad's hand remained frozen in mid-air, a thin trickle of juice dripping from the blade onto the wooden carving board. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway suddenly sounded like a countdown to an eruption. Gwilym's grin vanished instantly, his fork clattering against his plate with a sharp, piercing clink. He stared at Aled, his brow furrowed in utter confusion, as if his younger brother had just spoken a completely alien language. Next to him, Iwan's face slowly darkened, his jaw hardening into a rigid line.
It was their father who broke the silence, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that Aled had only ever heard when an animal had to be put down. "What kind of a joke is this, Aled?" his dad asked, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "Because it isn't funny."
"It's not a joke, Da," Aled said, his voice trembling but completely unyielding. He refused to look down at his plate. He had to look them in the eye, for Harry's sake, and for his own. "I'm gay. Harry is my boyfriend. He's a student in Chester."
"Don't talk soft!" Iwan burst out, slamming his heavy fist onto the table, making the glasses rattle. "You're a lad from the valleys! You don't do that rubbish. You've let some city pervert fill your head with nonsense!"
"Nobody filled my head!" Aled yelled back, the years of suppressed shame and isolation suddenly boiling over into raw defiance. "I've felt this way my whole life! I just never told you because I knew you'd look at me exactly like you're doing right now!"
Gwilym let out a harsh, bitter scoff, shaking his head. "A boyfriend? Are you mental? What about the farm, Aled? What about your share? You think you can just bring some lad from England here to work the sheep?"
Aled took a deep, shuddering breath, delivering the final blow. "I'm not bringing him here. In June, when he finishes university, I'm leaving. We're getting a place together in Chester, and then we're going travelling."
The kitchen erupted.
His dad stood up so violently his chair scraped harshly against the stone floor. "You're leaving?" the old man roared, his face flushed deep purple with a mixture of rage and betrayal. "In the middle of the season? We reared you on this land, Aled! Your brothers and I break our backs every day, and you're going to bugger off to God-knows-where with a bloke you barely know?"
"I have a right to a life, Da!" Aled cried out, tears finally blurring his vision, though his anger kept him upright. "A real life! Where I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not!"
"You have a duty to this family!" Iwan shouted, standing up to tower over his younger brother.
"Enough!" his dad barked, the single word cutting through the shouting like a gunshot. The room went silent again, panting and tense. The old man looked at Aled, his eyes hollowed out by a deep, bitter disappointment that hurt worse than any shout. "If you walk out on this farm, Aled... if you choose this path, you don't come back. You don't get a penny of the land, and you don't get a place at this table. You choose him, you're on your own."
Aled looked at his father, then at the furious, disgusted faces of his brothers. The ties that had bound him to the valley his entire life were snapping one by one, the pain agonising but strangely liberating.
"Fine," Aled whispered, the tears spilling over his cheeks.
He didn't wait for them to answer. He pushed his chair back, turned his back on his family, and walked out of the kitchen. He took the stairs two at a time, threw a few clothes into a duffel bag, and grabbed his motorbike helmet. Within five minutes, the roar of his bike shattered the heavy silence of the courtyard as he tore down the lane, leaving the farm behind in a cloud of dust, heading straight for the only safe place left in the world: Harry's room.
The roar of the motorbike engine finally cut out, leaving a ringing silence in Aled's ears as he pulled up outside the brick halls of residence in Chester. His hands were shaking so violently he could barely unbuckle his helmet. He left the bike carelessly parked on the pavement, grabbed his duffel bag, and practically bolted toward the main glass doors of the building.
Locating the intercom panel, his fingers scrambled to find the button labeled for Harry's room on the first floor. He pressed it hard. Nothing. Only a dull, electronic silence echoed back through the speaker.
Aled pressed it again, holding it down this time, his heart hammering wildly, his mouth dry. "Please, Harry. Please be there," he prayed under his breath. Still, there was no reply.
A wave of blind panic crashed over him. The finality of what he had done at the farmhouse roared back into his mind—he had burned his bridges, abandoned his family, and now he was standing on a street corner in England with nowhere to go. Tears of pure terror blurred his vision as he pulled his phone from his jacket pocket with trembling fingers, searching for Harry's number under the fake name he had saved it as. He hit dial and pressed the phone to his ear, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
The phone rang once. Twice. Then, a click.
"Hey, Aled? Everything alright?" Harry's deep, familiar voice came through the line, instantly cutting through the noise in Aled's head.
"Harry—Harry, I'm downstairs," Aled choked out, his voice cracking completely, a sob escaping his throat. "I'm outside your building. You weren't answering the buzzer... I didn't know what to do."
"Woah, Aled, breathe. Just breathe, mate, I've got you," Harry's voice shifted instantly, losing its casual weekend tone and turning fierce and protective. "I was just over at the campus shop getting some milk. I'm literally thirty seconds away. Look up."
Aled raised his head, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. Sure enough, he saw Harry sprinting around the corner of the building, a plastic bag swinging wildly in his hand. The moment Harry saw Aled standing there, pale and trembling with a duffel bag at his feet, he dropped the bag entirely and ran the remaining distance. He threw his powerful arms around Aled, pulling the smaller boy hard against his chest right there on the pavement. "I'm here. I've got you," Harry murmured into his dark hair, his massive frame shielding Aled from the world. "Let's get you inside."
Harry picked up the discarded bag, used his key fob to open the glass doors and guided Aled up the stairs, keeping a firm, grounding hand on the small of his back the entire way down the corridor. Once they were inside the safety of the tiny bedroom, Harry shut the door and locked it, instantly shutting out the rest of the universe.
He led Aled to the edge of the single bed, gently taking the duffel bag from his hands and setting it on the floor. Aled sat down, his shoulders slumped, looking incredibly small and exhausted. Harry sat right next to him, taking Aled's cold, thin hands into his own large, warm ones.
"Tell me what happened," Harry said softly.
The dam broke. The words tumbled out of Aled in a breathless, weeping rush—the Sunday lunch, his dad freezing with the carving knife, Iwan slamming his fist on the table, the shouting, the accusations of letting a city pervert fill his head, and finally, his father's brutal ultimatum. "He told me if I walked out, I couldn't ever come back," Aled whispered, the tears streaming down his face. "I've got no family now, Harry. I've got nowhere to go."
Harry listened to every word, his jaw tightening with a mixture of intense anger at Aled's family and a profound, overwhelming wave of love for the boy sitting there with him. Aled had sacrificed everything—his home, his livelihood, his inheritance—just to be true to himself, and to be with Harry.
Harry didn't hesitate. He shifted closer, pulling Aled into his lap and wrapping him in a fierce, unyielding embrace, letting the younger boy bury his face in his neck and cry out all the trauma of the afternoon.
"Listen to me, Aled," Harry said, his voice a steady, unbreachable harbour in the storm. "You are not on your own. Do you hear me? You stay here tonight. This is your home now, for as long as you need it. We have a roof over our heads, we have each other, and tomorrow we will start figuring out the rest. We'll look for jobs, we'll look for a flat, we'll do exactly what we planned. Together."
He kissed the top of Aled's head, holding him tight as the afternoon light began to fade, proving to the young farm boy that even though he had lost the valley, he had found something entirely unbreakable in the corner of a tiny student room.
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