Never Too Late

Chapter Twenty

Returning to work provided a contrasting blend of emotions. Sadness and disconnect because the lack of Laurent at his desk every time I glanced that way, even though I knew he was going to be okay, served as a stinging reminder of the events of the past couple of days. And a light feeling in my chest I just couldn’t shake when I recalled that I’d be returning home to a flat with Cillian in.

How long would he be there for? Well, that was anyone’s guess, and in true dig-your-head-in-the-sand-ostrich-style that would have had Laurent rolling his eyes, I hadn’t asked—and Cillian hadn’t volunteered the information.

Tomorrow, though, was Saturday, so I was confident any return to London wouldn’t happen until after the weekend, which gave me three evenings to wallow in the newfound intimacy between us. And the sex wouldn’t be too bad either. Neither of us had pushed for Cillian to keep his word about wringing multiple orgasms from me. As far as I was concerned, quality won over quantity any day, and I had no complaints on that score.

Work done for the day and buffeted by the phone call I’d made mid-afternoon to the hospital where they’d informed me Laurent was awake, I took the stairs up to my flat two at a time. The faint buzz of music coming from behind the door allayed any nagging doubts I might have had about getting home to find Cillian elsewhere. Adeline Girard wouldn’t be happy, though. If I could hear the music from the top of the stairwell, that meant she’d be able to hear it, too.

I had a sneaking suspicion she sat in silence sometimes to listen out for something to complain about. I’d once dropped a pan, and for a woman in her sixties, she’d removed remarkably fast to knock on my door and demand to know what was going on, in what had felt like less than a minute since the pan had hit the ground.

There was a slight tremble to my fingers as I unlocked the door. Nerves or excitement? Probably a bit of both. I forgot to be either as the door swung open and I took in what had become of my living room since I’d left for work a mere nine hours ago.

It was full of things. The most noticeable of which was a giant cat tree in the corner boasting so many levels that it stopped just shy of the ceiling. There were three cat beds of varying sizes and design, a giant cat wheel the likes of which I’d only ever seen in You Tube videos, a scratching post, a tunnel, a radiator bed because apparently three beds weren’t enough, a robot litter tray, and various other toys scattered around on the carpet.

I was still trying to take it all in and make sense of it when Cillian appeared. “Hey!” he said, hooking an arm around my waist and greeting me with a kiss on the cheek that had I not still been transfixed by all the cat stuff, would probably have been domestic enough to make me swoon. There were times during our ill-fated first attempt at a relationship where I would have cut off my arm for something as simple as that kiss. “I hate to be the one to break it to you,” I said. “but I think Quasimodo sneaked on your laptop while you weren’t looking. You might want to check your bank statement.”

There were a couple of seconds of confusion before Cillian got it and smiled. He gave an embarrassed little shrug. “I figured he could do with a few things.”

I finally got around to letting the door close behind me and dropped my work bag on the floor. “This is not a few things. There was a moment when I walked in where I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and walked into a pet shop instead.”

Cillian grimaced. “Too much?” He surveyed the array of cat stuff, as if trying to see it through fresh eyes. “Some of it can probably go back. Not the cat tree because he’s already been on that, and he likes it. And we played with some of the toys, so we probably can’t return them now that he’s bitten and clawed them, even if we wanted to. He likes the tunnel. He spent an hour in there while I had lunch. Maybe the litter tray?”

“It self cleans, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds much easier than me having to do it.”

Cillian nodded. “It automatically weighs him as well. It’s really useful for monitoring their diet and checking they’re not overweight.”

“Has he been in the wheel?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe the wheel can go back. It’s rather big.”

Cillian followed as I wandered into the kitchen to explore the interesting smells coming out of it. “I just thought with him being an indoor cat, he might need the exercise now.”

“Good point. We’ll keep it.” I hastened to correct myself. “I mean, I’ll keep it.” Although the “we” could have been me and Quasimodo rather than Cillian and me. Too late for that realization when I’d already made it into a thing, but if Cillian had picked up on it, he didn’t comment.

The kitchen was where the music was coming from, Cillian’s laptop playing something I didn’t recognize. I waved a hand at it. “You’re going to have to turn that down or we’ll have my next-door neighbor hammering on the door. She is not a fan of any sound above a whisper.”

“Ada?”

I turned slowly to face Cillian. “Who?”

Cillian jerked his head toward the flat that adjoined mine. “Ada from next door. Lovely woman. We had a long chat earlier.”

The struggle to wrap my head around what he was saying took some time. “You call her Ada?”

Cillian lifted the pan lid to stir the contents inside. “She insisted I did.”

This was beginning to feel like I’d walked into a parallel universe. “Did I bang my head?”

Abandoning the pan, Cillian was in front of me in a flash, probing gently at my scalp. “Did you? I can’t feel anything.” He tugged me closer to the light. “I can’t see any bruising or swelling. Have you been experiencing any dizziness or nausea? What about double vision?”

I pushed him off. “I didn’t bang my head. I’m fine. I just feel like I did.”

“Why?”

I shook my head. “Cat things. Cooking. Ada.” I waved a hand at him. “You’re even wearing an apron.” He was, the black apron emblazoned with I’ll feed all of you fuckers across the front . “I don’t think I saw you in anything except a suit, or naked, the entire six months we were together.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing down at it. “It was this or Mr. Good Looking is Cooking , which seemed a little too arrogant. Ada thought it was funny. Although, I think some of it might have gotten lost in translation.”

“I need to sit down.” True to my word, I went back into the living room and threw myself down on the sofa. A hard lump under my thigh proved to be a fuzzy blue mouse when I extracted it. I stared at it, small beady black eyes staring back at me. “Where is Quasimodo?”

Cillian perched on the arm of the sofa. “In his cat condo in the bedroom.”

“In his what ?” My voice was at least three octaves higher than it should have been.

“His cat condo,” Cillian said with a nod. “I had to get rid of the bed, but I figured you wouldn’t mind. Not when Quasi has had such a hard life.” The three seconds he maintained a straight face before his lips twitched to reveal he was talking crap were three seconds too long. “He’s on the bed,” he said. “I think he wore himself out exploring all the stuff.”

“You’re not funny.”

Cillian slid off the arm to sit next to me on the sofa. “No, maybe not. I should have asked you about all the stuff before I bought it,” he conceded. “I admit I may have gotten a bit carried away. It didn’t seem that much when I had it in the basket.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s sweet.”

“How was work?”

“Weird,” I admitted. “Everyone was really somber because of Laurent, and it was really odd to be there without him. It made me realize how big a part of my life he’s been since I moved to Paris.”

Cillian’s nod was understanding. “I figured we’d have dinner and then head to the hospital for evening visiting hours.”

“That sounds good.”

He smiled and leaned forward to drop a kiss on my lips. When he tried to draw back, I wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and turned it into a proper kiss. One kiss led to two, and then before I knew it, I was lying on the sofa with Cillian on top of me, and we’d been there for some time. “Dinner will burn,” he said. The words might have expressed concern, but him rutting against my thigh said the opposite.

I stole one last kiss before pushing him off, my cock no less hard than his was. “Dinner,” I demanded. “One of us has worked hard today.” Despite my jibe, I was still a little nonplussed. I might have looked forward to coming home and finding Cillian here all day, but I’d honestly expected to find him glued to his laptop, and to have to peel him away from it. If this was a new version of Cillian, though, I’d take it.

Dinner turned out to be chicken stew served with a bean salad and crusty bread, my pleasure in eating it completely genuine. “I rang the hospital earlier,” I informed Cillian when I was halfway through eating. “Laurent is awake. I asked them to pass a message on that I was coming to visit him.”

“That’s a relief,” he said, his words sounding genuine.

“I know you two don’t get on,” I said carefully, “but—”

“I’ve met him once,” Cillian pointed out. “The entire experience lasted two minutes… thirty seconds of which were spent with his tongue down your throat, which, yes, I took exception to. And the other minute and a half was him looking at me like he was fantasizing sticking a knife in my gut and twisting it.”

“He wasn’t that bad,” I argued. At Cillian’s slight eyebrow lift, I gave in. “Okay. Fine… Yes, he was. You weren’t exactly friendly either.”

“He was kissing my boyfriend! What was I supposed to do? Thank him? Give him some tips on what you like?”

“Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected as gently as I could. “We were definitely exes at that point.”

“Yeah…” Cillian admitted, looking about as unhappy as it was possible for a man to look. “Don’t remind me.”

“And now look where we are,” I said. “Back as boyfriends, and everything is…”

My pause went on for too long, Cillian’s brow furrowing. “Everything is what?”

“Nothing.” I returned to eating my stew in earnest, aware of Cillian’s gaze burning into me, but refusing to meet it.

“Both phones are off,” Cillian said. “Just in case you’re waiting for one of them to ring and save you from having to answer.”

“Both?” I questioned.

“Both. So spit it out.”

“I was just wondering when you were going back to London?” Even saying the words had icy dread settling in my stomach. “I’m guessing Monday.”

“I’m not going back.”

I jerked my gaze to his, expecting to see evidence Cillian was making a joke. But if he was, there were no external signs of amusement, and he wasn’t usually that good at keeping a straight face. I waited an extra few seconds just to make sure. Nothing but earnestness stared back at me. “What do you mean?”

“I’m staying here.”

“That… what… How…? When…? Why…?”

Cillian did smile then, my stumbling over words seeming to amuse him greatly. “The why is easy. You’re here, and you said it yourself. I can’t expect you to just move back to London. That’s not how things work. When? Well… now. I’ll need to bring some more stuff over, obviously, but that’s easily done. How? I don’t really understand that question, so I’m struggling to know how to answer it.”

I stared at him, aware my mouth was hanging open in what was probably an unattractive fashion, but unable to get my jaw to cooperate to do something about it. “What about work?”

“Ah, well…” Cillian held a finger up in a way that said the point he was about to make was an important one. “It came to me on one of those nights on video where we were… Well, you know what we were doing. You were there.”

“What has cybersex got to do with running an advertising corporation?”

“Cybersex…” Cillian said with a snort. “Makes us sound like we’re robots.”

“Focus,” I demanded. “Work?”

He nodded. “I need to attend a lot of meetings to do the job I do. I’ve always assumed that I need to physically attend those meetings, but it’s simply not true. Eighty percent of clients don’t require the personal touch, and would be perfectly happy with my presence in whatever shape or form that happens to be, including over video. Which means, I can work from home.”

Cillian’s expression said he’d come up with quite the loophole and was waiting to be lauded for it. “Well done,” I drawled. “You’ve just reached the same conclusion that millions of people reached during the pandemic, only years later.” Cillian opened his mouth to make a comment, but I got in there first. “You mentioned eighty percent of your clients. What about the other twenty percent? Aren’t you concerned they’ll go to one of your competitors?”

“I hired an assistant,” Cillian said. “It’s early days, but he’s showing a lot of promise.”

The revelations just kept on coming in this conversation. “When did you do that?”

“When I got back to London.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it.”

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” He reached across the table and took hold of my hands, his thumbs rubbing across my knuckles. “I’ve been doing my best to sort out the mess I created.”

“Mess?”

“Us being apart. It’s not ideal.”

“No,” I said weakly. “It isn’t, but…”

“But?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head, still struggling to wrap my head around the conversation.

“You didn’t think I’d move here?”

“I didn’t think you could move here. Or that you’d even want to. I thought the best we’d manage was going back and forth at weekends. I figured I’d eventually end up moving back to London if things worked out between us.”

“ If? ” Cillian looked slightly sick at my word choice.

“Yes. If. It’s not a foregone conclusion. We couldn’t make things work the first time, so what’s to say we won’t cock it up a second time?”

“We won’t.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

Cillian’s brown eyes were unblinking as he stared at me. “What am I missing here?”

“Practicalities,” I lied. “Like”—I swept my arm in a wide arc meant to illustrate the living room—“are you just intending to move in here? Because this is not a big flat. When Jules got it for me, he didn’t take two people living in it into account. Why would he when there was only me? You’re talking about working from home, but working where? I’d say you could get a desk in here somewhere, but that was before you filled it with all the cat stuff. And my internet connection is okay, but it’s not great. I can’t guarantee that it won’t cut out in the middle of one of your important meetings.”

Cillian waited until I’d run out of steam. “Do you want me to move to Paris?” When his question met with silence, he frowned. “Just be honest, Finn. If you don’t want me to, then now’s the time to say it. I never assumed that I’d move in with you. I figured that’s something we’d discuss, that perhaps getting a bigger place together might be on the cards. Somewhere with a spare room that I could turn into an office. And yes, maybe I had that in the back of my mind when I got all the cat stuff. Which, is not cool when I hadn’t even spoken to you, but we both know that communication isn’t my strong point.”

“It’s neither of our strengths,” I conceded.

“We’ll get better at it.”

“Yeah…” Even I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice. I knew what was bothering me, but I just couldn’t be needy enough to lay it on the line like that, even if it was furthering the lack of communication issue. It was already too late, anyway, Cillian leaning back in his chair with defeat written all across his face.

“I thought it was what you wanted,” he said, his voice tight. “I had it all planned out in my head. We’d get a nice place together. You, me, and Quasimodo. Maybe with two spare rooms. One for an office and one for all the cat stuff, so we’re not constantly tripping over it. I’d work during the day while you were at work, and then the evenings and the weekends would be ours. I might have to take a few business trips, but I figured that would be okay as long as I kept them to a minimum, that you’d understand that sometimes they’re unavoidable. Hell, I thought you might even want to come with me on a few, depending on where they were.”

The picture he was painting was lovely, except for one glaring problem. He continued as I got up and started clearing the table. “I was even thinking about how long you’re supposed to be together before you propose, whether it’s different if you’re making a second go of things, like whether that means it should be a shorter or longer time before it happens.” I stilled, my heart beating a furious tattoo in my chest. He gave a little laugh. “I guess there are no rules, or rather you make your own rules. Love always makes everything seem so easy in the films.”

I dropped the plates with a clatter and rounded on him. “Love!”

He looked taken aback by my veracity. “Yeah, love.”

I prodded him in the chest, because it was that or hit him, and a prod seemed the lesser evil of the two. “You start with that,” I said, my voice an octave higher than it should have been. “You don’t slip it in as an aside while you’re doing your woe is me monologue.”

“It wasn’t a…” He gave himself a mental shake. “Not the point, Cillian. You know I love you.”

“Do I?” Two octaves higher. At this rate, I’d be an opera singer before the night was through, which was a career change I hadn’t banked on. “How? I’m not psychic.”

“I said…” I waited while Cillian thought things through. “I must have said.”

“When?” I questioned, annoyed enough not to let it drop. There’d be time later once I’d raked Cillian over the metaphorical coals to let those words sink in and bathe in their magnificence. “Did you say it when you were in Paris last time? Did you turn up at my door and say, Finn, I can’t let you go because I’m hopelessly and madly in love with you?”

“Well, no… That would have been a bit full on.” Cillian grimaced. “And probably extremely humiliating given that you then locked lips with another man a few seconds later.” He held up a hand. “I know it wasn’t your doing, that it was Laurent’s, but it still happened.”

“Changing the subject,” I said tartly. “If you didn’t say it then, maybe you said it in the five days we spent together?”

“No,” Cillian conceded.

“Then it must have been during one of our late-night conversations. Either on the phone or on video. Do you remember saying it then?”

“I think,” he said slowly, “that I might have assumed through my actions that you knew.”

“I didn’t.”

He gestured to the seat I’d vacated. “Can you sit down?” He tipped his head back. “It’s difficult to have this conversation with you towering over me.”

“You could stand,” I suggested obstinately. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto his lap. “Or I could sit here,” I added. “Here’s good.”

Cillian reached up to palm my cheeks. “I love you Finlay Prescott. I think love was such a foregone conclusion ever since the first day we met that I convinced myself we’d work with very little effort on my part.”

I screwed my face up. “That’s a terrible excuse.”

“I know. And I was wrong. Clearly, I was. And I intend to spend every day from now until eternity showing you how sorry I am that I ever took you for granted.”

“Eternity, hey?” I said. “That’s a long time.” I wanted to keep Cillian hanging for longer, but there was such softness in his eyes, such yearning, that I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. “I love you too. I left because I loved you.” Cillian’s frown was understandable. “It was too painful,” I explained, “to be stuck in what I felt was a one-sided relationship. I would have lost all respect for myself if I’d put up with it any longer, and I didn’t trust myself not to give in if I stayed in London.”

“So you came here,” Cillian said.

“So I came here,” I echoed. “And I thought that would be the end of it, that I’d eventually meet someone else.”

“Laurent?” Cillian questioned with an expression too neutral to be real.

“No, not Laurent,” I said with a laugh. “He made it clear very early on that we weren’t going to be anything but friends. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’s got a lot going on. I think the last thing he’s looking for at the moment is a relationship.”

“Good,” Cillian said. “Because I’d almost feel guilty for hating a man who recently got out of surgery and is lying in a hospital bed.”

“Almost?” I questioned with a smirk.

“Almost,” Cillian confirmed. “I’d manage it, but it would take effort.”

“Speaking of Laurent,” I said, with a glance at my watch. “Visiting hours started forty-five minutes ago.”

Cillian brushed his lips over mine with a frustrated growl that made me smile. “When we get home,” I said, “I’m going to take you to bed and get you to say those words repeatedly, and I’m going to say them back.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Cillian said as he tugged me to my feet. “But first, let’s see your annoying friend.”

“He’s not annoying.”

Cillian’s snort said he was yet to be convinced of that.