After my two failed attempts to get with Mike the previous day, I kind of expected him to be a little less comfortable around me knowing that I wanted him. However, I was woken the next day by a gentle knocking on my room door. Fearing the worst – lateness, fire drill, etc. – I jumped out of bed, threw on a tee-shirt and shorts and quickly opened my door. I needn’t have bothered – there stood the most beautiful wake-up call a man could wish to have.

“Why you all dressed?” asked Mike with a cute puzzled expression.
I breathed a sigh of relief – I really did think I had overslept – to me there’s nothing worse than being late for something…the way you have to walk into the room all flustered and embarrassed, with everyone staring at you. It would have been even worse seeing as I’d beaten a guy unconscious in front of them the night before. I should have taken an alarm clock really.

“You could’ve been anyone – I wasn’t gonna open the door half naked”
“Didn’t stop you yesterday” he grinned the cutest fucking grin I’ve ever seen – God I loved him so much. He was half naked himself – just a towel around his waist – the same as it was yesterday morning (except no boner).

“You coming for a shower?” I couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t the best thing for a closet gay to ask another bloke if he was trying to conceal his sexuality. But, I wasn’t about to complain.
“Sure, just a sec” I closed the door, got arse naked and half opened it again – before remembering to put on a towel first.
“Cmon”
“Alright, lets go”

As we walked down to the showers, I couldn’t help but sympathise with Mike’s problem. We were chatting away happily just like two straight blokes, there was the same testosterone fuelled boisterousness, loud talk of cars and films and sports. He was the type of friend I had always wanted, someone I could be myself around, I didn’t have to act macho like I did with my male friends in Manchester, nor did I have to be camp and effeminate like the world expects all gay blokes to be. It was so refreshing to find someone exactly the same as myself – gay but masculine and normal. I was pretty sure he felt the same way about me, it was easy to understand why he didn’t want to fall in love – easy to understand, but hard to accept.
We went through the same shower routine again, but it was less awkward this time – we actually talked whilst lathering our bodies in cheap university-provided soap. He was a really funny guy to be honest – it was a nice change for me as I’m the ‘comedian’ for my group of friends, but Mike was really witty and clever, he’d come up with some great one-liners which would have me gasping for breath. The great thing was that he never laughed at any of his own jokes; he’d crack an absolute beauty and just stand there with a mock seriousness expression on his face while I laughed. It was one of the most endearing things about him – that look – the slight frown and closed mouth with corners twitching slightly in betrayal of his real amusement. His eyes were laughing though.
I had a new strategy for getting off with him which I’d devised the night before. I knew (from talking to him) that Mike had never really been drunk before. From what I could tell, it wasn’t because he was some sort of social reject, he was just shy and didn’t get out much as a result. I reckoned he was pretty desperate to see what getting pissed was like, so that lunchtime, I snuck out of the Law faculty while everyone else in my class was eating – I knew no one would miss me, everyone was just ignoring me since I’d acted like a deranged psycho the other night. I walked down to Heslington village right next to the university and found an off licence there, half an hour later there were 12 cans of beer and a bottle of gin hidden under the bed in my room. It was risky – after all, Nick – the head RA – had said any more rule breaking would get me sent home and alcohol consumption was definitely against the rules. However, I’d done this kind of thing before on school trips and I’d never been caught; I once met my grammar school headteacher whilst pissed on a skiing trip in Austria – I managed to act sober for a while but slapped his ass as he walked away. He never mentioned it since. Weird. Anyway, I made it through the rest of the day – although it was a struggle – Law is one hell of a boring subject – I eventually got to see Mike again in the JCR at dinnertime. I was sitting at a table on my own when he walked in with his biology classmates, I flagged him over with a quick salute – he raised his eyebrows, smiled and – breaking away from the rest of his class – walked over and sat down across the table.

“good day?” I asked.
“Boring as fuck”
“I thought you loved biology?”
“Not any more – its sposed to be about cutting up organs and eradicating diseases – all we ever do is fucking enzyme experiments.”

I smirked. Mike continued:

“Tell you what, if they force me to go to class during the champions league final I’m just gonna leave”

He was talking about the biggest sports game in the world (bar the world cup final) – the champions league (as I’m sure you all know) is a competition entered by all the best football teams in Europe. Our team – Liverpool – had reached the final this year – having beaten Juventus, Chelsea and Leverkusen on the way. We were due to face Milan on May 25th at the Ataturk stadium in Istanbul – it would be on TV of course – billions of people were expected to watch it worldwide. Including me and Mike, the only problem was, it was on in the middle of the day and we were supposed to be in class. This was one of those problems that I hadn’t anticipated when I agreed to go to summer school back last November. Needless to say, we’d both spent time trying to persuade the RAs to let us watch the match next Wednesday but as of yet we’d had no success. It wasn’t likely that they’d listen to me after what I’d done yesterday so it was all up to Mike to persuade them.

“You had any luck with Jon?”

Jon was one of the RAs in our ‘cell’ block – he was a reds supporter and wanted to watch the game himself so we were hoping he would bring our case to Nick.

“I reckon we might have a chance there, he said something about faking illness – then he could stay in the dorms as well to ‘look after us’”
“Sounds good…look, Mike lets go back to my room, I’ve got something to show you.”
He looked apprehensive, “What is it?”
“A ton of booze”
“Seriously?!?”
“Yeh, cmon, we’ve got free time this evening. Lets just get pissed and listen to music.”
“Alrite, lets go” – he looked pretty excited. Then, without bothering to get any dinner we shot off towards my room.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t that simple. Literally ten paces from my door we ran into Lav who was wearing a slightly dykish Chelsea football strip and her usual Cheshire-cat smile. I was vaguely wondering why she was dressed that way when she piped up,

“Hello Will, Mike. All the lads in the block are heading down to Derwent for a five-a-side competition. You wanna come?”

As much as I really wanted to get pissed and seduce Mike, its really very hard for me to turn down an invitation to play football, especially from someone wearing a Chelsea shirt. One look at Mike told me he felt the same way.

“Yeh, sure, just give me a sec to change” I replied.
“Great! See you in Derwent in five” She skipped off down the corridor looking pretty ridiculous.

I turned to Mike: “We’ll do it after”

He nodded and stepped into his room to change. I did the same (except I stepped into my room, not his). I pulled on my favourite top in the world: a deep red Liverpool shirt with the liver-bird crest on the front and, GERRARD 8 emblazoned across the back. Then, stepping out into the corridor, I met Mike wearing exactly the same thing – except his said OWEN 10. I laughed,

“Nice strip”
“Its out of date now – he’s moved to Madrid”
“Ah, he’ll be back” (I’m still waiting).

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Five minutes later we were standing on the green outside Derwent college – it was quite cold, but that never bothers a hardcore footballer. There were forty-one of us all-together including 9 RAs, some looked pretty serious about playing, others were clearly just there because their friends were there. Lav had chosen eight guys to pick teams of five, as usual the popular kids were picked first. Unsurprisingly me and Mike weren’t a member of that group as we’d hardly talked to anyone but each other since arriving, however, I saw that Jon had already been picked (there was a compulsory RA on each team). I managed to catch his eye and pointed appealingly to the Liverpool crest on my shirt, then to myself and Mike. Jon grinned and had a word with his captain – a guy called Joe – who nodded indifferently and then shouted,

“We’ll take Mike and Will”

We jogged over to Jon and gave him our thanks. Our team consisted of Me, Jon, Mike, Joe and a guy called Chris. I knew Joe and Chris were good friends because they knew each other from home. They also had the strongest scouse accents I had ever heard.

“Alright lads, I think we’re all Reds supporters here” Said Joe – it was true, Chris had a white Hypiia kit on from three seasons back and Joe himself was wearing a black tee-shirt with the Liverpool crest on it.
“Hows about we call ourselves, Benitez’s Barmy Army” offered Chris.
“Sounds good to me” I said. Joe and Chris immediately looked at me,
“That’s a Mancunian accent” said Joe
“I know – I live in Oldham”
“Why don’t you support Manchester United then?”
“My family used to live in the Wirral, so I followed them”
“You support Liverpool and you live in Manchester?” asked Chris incredulously.
“Yeh”
“That takes balls man, real balls”