WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
by Sebastian Wallace

===

Author: sebastian_wallace@yahoo.co.uk
Find me on Facebook!

===

A few years ago, I spent Christmas with the family of my then-girlfriend, Kaz. She and I had only been dating for a few months, so I was a little nervous at the prospect of being holed up with her folks at what can be quite a tense time, but I must say that her parents went out of their way to be welcoming and seemed genuinely pleased to have me stay. I guess I was, though, in their eyes, the perfect boyfriend for their darling daughter: a traditional boy-next-door type; conventional, inoffensive and respectable. Or that's how I seemed.

It's a good thing they didn't find out about what happened between Michael and I. They might not have been quite so eager to have me sharing their Christmas pudding if they'd known what I'd been getting up to with their son after lights out.

Knowing (while, of course, pretending not to know) that the guy staying in your house is screwing your daughter at Uni is one thing. Turning a blind eye to the fact he's also buggering your son when the opportunity arises is quite another.

But maybe I'm presenting myself in too dim a light here. Michael was, after all, a more than willing conspirator.

It started one evening a couple of days before Christmas Eve, after I'd been out for a meal with Kaz, her parents and Michael, along with her uncle and aunt.

It had been quite a pleasant evening, though perhaps a little too formal for my tastes, and we'd eaten in a very salubrious restaurant. I'd been warned beforehand by Kaz to pack a decent suit with me, and it had turned out that this was what it was for.

The conversation had flowed steadily during the meal and Kaz's uncle and aunt had been just as welcoming and apparently interested in me as Kaz's parents had. Ironically, my only source of irritation was Kaz. Every time I looked at her she seemed to be nodding and grinning encouragingly at me. At first it was kind of comforting to know that she wanted things to go well, but after a while I started to feel uncomfortable. She'd whisper over at me, "You're doing great, Seb," and I'd feel like I was being monitored; as if I had a history of being disruptive in polite company or something. I'd mutter, "Yeah, alright Kaz..." and feel my face flushing slightly while the others glanced over at us.

But I suppose Kaz was feeling nervous about the evening and wanting everything to go well. Her aunt had, she said, a strong influence over her dad, and so if opinions went the wrong way during the meal it would almost certainly make things more difficult between us afterward.

Everything did go well, though, as it happened.

Especially afterward.

I'd been sharing a room with Kaz's brother Michael for a couple of nights before the evening of the meal. He was a year or so younger than her, eighteen or nineteen, and had just finished his first term at Sheffield University. The two of us didn't have a lot in common – he was a very quiet and insular guy, as though he hadn't quite fully emerged from a