Helping Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Thanks.”
    Jez sighed. This had been really hot, but it would ruin it if Mac bolted
    and spent the next week ignoring him again.
    “You okay ?” he asked when they ’d both cleaned up a little and
    rearranged their clothes.
    “I guess.” Mac’s brow furrowed. He shrugged. “This is a bit…. I
    dunno. It’s freaking m e out a little.”
    “It’s fun, though, right?” Jez needed to hear Mac adm it it. “There’s no
    harm in it.”
    “Yeah. But I’m not gay.”
    “I know.” Mac was popular with girls. With his height, his broad
    shoulders, and his sweet sm ile, they fell over them selves to talk to him .
    Jez had seen Mac with the ladies, and Mac didn’t strike him as som eone
    who was faking it. But it was the sam e for Jez. Just because he could
    enj oy getting off with a guy didn’t m ean he didn’t enj oy sleeping with
    wom en too. Jez wasn’t a big believer in labels. He m ight be bisexual—not
    that he’d had m uch chance to find out—but he didn’t want to adm it that to
    Mac in case it freaked him out. “So y ou’ve never done any thing like this
    before?”
    Mac shook his head. “Nope.”
    “But y ou liked it.” It wasn’t a question, and Mac didn’t answer. He
    didn’t need to—it had been obvious. That Mac wasn’t com fortable with
    liking it was also evident.
    “Yeah.” Mac sm iled at last, the slow spread of his grin chasing the
    worry away from his features. “Yeah, I did.”

    Chapter Four

    Life went on as usual for a couple of weeks. Nothing else happened
    between them , and neither of them brought it up. But Jez thought about it
    a lot—when he was wanking, of course, but at other tim es too.
    The day s rolled by filled with lectures and tutorials, study ing, Jez’s
    occasional shifts at the café, downtim e in the evenings, and sleep.
    Jez and Mac spent a lot of tim e hanging out together when they were
    in the house, even m ore than they ’d done before. He supposed it was
    because they were the ones who spent the m ost tim e at hom e, and they
    enj oy ed each other’s com pany. Jez preferred chilling out with Mac—
    play ing video gam es or watching TV—to sitting alone in his room .
    Stay ing in rather than going out in the evenings felt norm al now, and Jez
    didn’t m iss the party ing. His overdraft was slowly shrinking, and that was
    a good feeling too—especially because his dad kept em ailing him to ask
    about his finances. Jez was glad to be able to report that things were
    heading in the right direction. The lecture about responsibility and
    entitlem ent that his dad had given Jez back at the end of the sum m er term
    still m ade Jez asham ed when he thought about it.
    Jez and Mac started study ing together regularly. Mac was struggling
    to m eet deadlines and worry ing about his grades, and Jez was happy to
    help him . It wasn’t that Mac was stupid or not putting the hours in. He did
    all the required reading and then som e, and he had a lot of knowledge, but
    he alway s found their written assignm ents a challenge.
    “You m ake it look so easy,” Mac said one night. They were sitting
    side-by -side on the double bed in Jez’s room with their laptops on their
    knees and a ton of books and papers spread out between them . Mac
    huffed in frustration. “I’ve alway s hated writing essay s. I should have
    picked a subj ect that doesn’t involve putting so m any words onto paper.”
    “What’s the problem ?”
    “I don’t know. I feel like I have plenty to say, but I don’t know how to
    get it across coherently.”
    Jez rem em bered feeling the sam e at the start of sixth form at school,
    but he’d been lucky enough to have a teacher that y ear who’d helped him
    a lot with planning and organising his written work.
    “Want m e to take a look at what y ou’ve got so far?”
    Mac passed his laptop across and then gave Jez his written notes too.
    Jez set his nearly finished essay aside and spent the next hour going over
    Mac’s, while Mac