Nic Speaks
Hello there! I am Nic. The same guy who Thomas says is his only friend. How I wish he would have said 'his best friend'.
When Thomas came to me with the peculiar request to write something about him, I denied. A clear no it was. He emphasised that he wanted to write a true story. That was when I decided to write for him. After all, I am his only friend.
I teach English in Scipione Maffei High school, and worked with Thomas for a while. I had been at the school for three years when Thomas joined as the maths teacher.
The first thing that made me pay attention to him was his looks. I might sound cheesy, but that's how it was! Since I am not what you normally call good-looking, Thomas's exceptionally charismatic looks were an eye-catcher. His fair complexion, sparkling dark brown eyes, soft yet masculine full lips, the brownish smooth hair, his square shoulders, the long legs, lean muscled arms, give him a seductive personality. You get to see manly specimen of beauty like him only in erotic movies.
We had a couple of interactions as colleagues, but our friendship progressed beyond a certain level when we exchanged downloaded movies.
'Do you have any adult quality stuff?' I had asked. He counter-questioned, 'What is your type?'
Type! Never had I given it that much thought. Could there be so many variations?
Reading the ignorance written on my face, Thomas rattled off the classifications, 'Amateur, oral, big breasts, threesomes, anal, gay... You don't have to be a sex-expert to know there is porn for pretty much any taste.' Thomas pursed his full lips and shrugged casually.
This was new! Was I so behind my generation, I wondered? I acted smart. 'I think amateur would be my type,' I said the first word I remembered from his list.
Thomas looked at me blankly, 'What in amateur?'
I did not react, and he vomited a list again.
'I mean, what is your taste? Monster porn, play acting, cat costume porn...' I lost my interest in porn right there and then. Sex delayed is sex denied.
His laptop's D-Drive was full of those lists, and the dry sponge that I was in this area, I sucked up the information greedily. And since bad habits always gave good friends, we started sharing thoughts on everything. He had amazing skills of narrating a story. We started discussing girls. Let me confess, as I have committed to only writing the truth, I too was interested in girls. And why not!
We shared experiences and fantasies with each other, for the lack of any of us having a girlfriend. Sometime on, I realized that Thomas was a pervert. My liking for girls emanated from a deep human desire, his was all that he thought about. Plus, he liked teens. I do not know why? Wonder what in them fanaticizes him?
He always talked about beautiful girls. I have lost count of the evenings we have spent in mall just to watch naked legs. We've spent hours watching girls in skirts and shorts. But we never crossed our boundaries. That was always an unsaid rule.
When he started indulging Mia, I raised my concern. Even warned him. That girl has ruined a whole lot of boys in her batch, and Thomas is a self-confessed slave to his body. As he went deeper into the stint with Mia, I figured, he was killing his own future.
My fear for my friend turned into reality soon after. He realised his mistake of leading her on, and stopped her from coming to his place, but it was too late. Someone complained about his relationship with Mia. He was asked to leave the campus. And then Lexi landed out of the blue. To this date, I cannot make out why that girl supported him and asked him to move into her house.
I had taught Lexi English in class tenth. She was an irregular student, and I remember clearly because I had even complained to her mother, who had given some medical excuse.
I surmised Lexi was another Thomas. What kind of a girl would have a crush on her teacher who was eleven years older to her?
In a bid to know more and ensure that Thomas wasn't landing himself into more trouble, I launched into an investigation about her. Lexi's father had passed away around five years back, but I could not discover the cause of his death. When I found out about her loss, for the first time I felt some sympathy for Lexi.
What made my sympathy vanish was the way Lexi looked at Thomas and tried to dominate over him. It was not right! I mean, a girl her age could get easily infatuated, and Thomas had to put his foot down. But then again, the inevitable happened and my friend Thomas applied his brain. He started going after Lexi's mother. What a complex situation! Student fishing her teacher and the teacher looking to lure the student's mother.
Anyway, it was when he lost the job and any hope of immediate financial help that he showed me a fat gold chain that he had purloined from his sister-in-law some time ago. He had done it to have a backup in case of emergency for money. He asked me a few hundred Euros in exchange for that chain. From the circumstances he described, I realised, he had brutally murdered a pure relationship. That was the first time I disliked him. He had cheated on his own brother! A brother who had always helped him.
I concluded thereafter that Thomas was actually a bad man. He never cared for anyone. I always thought I was his valued friend, but he was far from such emotions. He was surely a person without emotions, just a human figure crafted out of stone.
You might wonder if I had realised he was so bad, then why am I still his friend? That's because I know, he may be bad and emotionless, but he had a few good bones in his body too. He never forced anyone for intimacy. He always prayed for other people. He was far from jealously and hatred. He could be bad in one case, but still, there was some humanity left in him. I know, he always tried to help everyone, but he could not express his emotions.
I am certain, life will teach him a lesson, and I pray for it to happen soon. He was not a good man, not a good brother, a good son, and yes, I regret to say, not a good friend too.
But I am sure, one day, he will change. I have seen a good heart in a bad soul.