Chapter 2
Galen
You handsome fecker.
Stop the lights, I outdo myself sometimes. Or maybe the oxygen my brain was deprived of two Christmases ago is still having a laugh at my expense.
Either way, I’m cringing hard enough to pull a muscle as I make my escape from the soulful-eyed white-van man. The soulful-eyed swinger if his phone entertainment is an accurate snapshot of his idea of fun.
Doesn’t seem the type.
Can’t say why I’m so certain, but as I approach the next vehicle in the long line tailing back from the chip shop fire, I’m struggling to picture this dude banging his way through the clientele of the Penthouse up the road. And trust me, I try. Van Man is beautiful.
Close-cropped dark hair, big dark eyes.
Stone-warmed skin and muscles wrapped up in working men’s clothes that would look better on my bedroom floor if I ever took hookups past the couch in my living room.
Join your floor-drobe, eh?
Ouch. Like I need my subconscious to remind me that my house is still a half-renovated tip after eighteen months of weak lungs and shaky legs.
It’s clean. Habitable. Who cares if it’s only just come together enough to live in?
If my clothes are on the floor and I haven’t got round to installing the kitchen worktops?
It’s safe.
It’s not on fire.
Not like the unfortunate terraced properties next door to the delinquent chip shop.
Poor souls who live there have lost their roofs and most of their attic space to a messy, oily blaze that’s going to take months to clean up.
And that should be what I’m thinking about as I tramp up and down both sides of the street, moving vehicles on where there’s space and checking in with drivers who’ll be stuck until we lose a couple of engines.
But these fecking light duties. They’re important, whoever’s doing ‘em, but they don’t half give me a lot of time for my mind to wander, and Van Man…
I don’t need to see him again. His side of the road is clear. Traffic’ll be moving soon, taking him safely on his way. But the thing is, I’ve seen this dude before.
We’re neighbours.
Kind of.
My garden backs on to his and I’d be the biggest liar who ever lived if I said I’d never noticed the hot single dad who’s sat on his back deck and stared into space every night I’ve been home since I moved in three months ago.
That I hadn’t noticed his van caught up in the snarl of traffic tonight and felt a little bit better about being benched for the night.
Every cloud.
His van, an old Crafter with a child seat in the front, still isn’t moving. I can see it from the other end of the street where I should be paying attention to the young-ish girl trying to get my attention, waving her phone around to catch me on video.
She’s faking a panic attack, her mate egging her on.
I’m usually good at diffusing nonsense like this, but I’m not in the mood tonight.
Haven’t been since I made it back on rotation after eighteen months out.
Seems like I left my patience on the scorched ground of that warehouse fire way back when and I haven’t tried that hard to find it.
I walk on by the women hanging out of their snazzy Mini Cooper.
Follow the grotty stink of smoke even though it sparks a phantom burn in my chest. I don’t have PTSD.
I’ve checked a hundred times. My brain is fine.
But this thrum behind my ribs…it’s always fecking there, and I don’t know how to shift it.
Focus on something else.
Easy enough. The white van is fifty feet from me.
I can’t see the driver’s side window, but I pretend I can.
Then shift gears and imagine the fella inside as I last saw him a few weeks back, sitting in the rain like a sad poppa bear, and how it was the first time, like, ever, I didn’t think about fucking him.
I’m not thinking about fucking him now, either.
I’m thinking about the fresh-cut pinewood and vanilla scent that hit me from his open window, and the tired hurt in his big brown eyes.
And blow me if it doesn’t make the knot in my sternum thrum harder.
My scarred lung isn’t far off full capacity, but apparently I’m not ready for a big fat dose of wounded-heart lumber-swoon.
Who the feck knew?
Mulling it over takes me most of the way back to the white van.
I’m three vehicles back when the rumble of a couple dozen engines restarting cracks the night air.
When his van starts to roll forward and my heart does a weird flip, disappointment sinking my mood into my boots.
This is the first time I’ve seen this lad in the wild and fate is already taking him away from me?
Feels uncalled for as he drives off, his rear lights disappearing to the other end of the street where he lives.
Beneath it all, I’m glad—I’m relieved—the rogue chip shop blaze hasn’t reached his house and turned his life upside down.
But watching him leave with no guarantee I’ll get to hear his deep Brummie voice again?
With nothing but memories of how he looked behind that wheel, lit up by something he’s clearly trying to hide?
Nope. It sits wrong in my chest, and that blasted thrum shifts to a low pull in my gut, one that almost slows my steps.
Almost. I keep walking because I have to. Because the scene is still hot and I have a job to do—a job I’ve fought till I’m bloody and raw to find my way back to.
But I don’t stop thinking about Van Man, and as curiosity melds with the kind of uncertainty I hate, I don’t know what unsettles me more.
That I want to encounter him again.
Or how easy it would be to make it happen.
Way too easy, as it turns out. Even though I tune Van Man out for the rest of the night, leaning into the busy winter night shift until it finally calms down in the early hours of the morning.
I take a nap on a recliner without looking at my phone. Drive home with it burning a hole in my pocket.
I’ve showered at work.
Pilfered breakfast from Green Watch and I’m all tea-ed out.
I need my bed—the mattress on the new carpet in the half-decorated room at the top of the stairs.
There’s no reason for me to be loitering in the carnage of my kitchen, nursing a lukewarm brew while horrible Christmas songs filter from the radio I pinched from my best friend before he moved down south.
No reason at all save the lone figure sitting on his back porch with his phone clutched in his hand, that same earnest concentration on his face, and it’s the fight of my life—the most recent one, anyway—not to pick up my own phone and see if he’s perusing the app I downloaded for him.
A fight I know I’m going to lose, but hey, at least I’m trying.
Wham! comes on the radio.
Instant irritation grips me.
It’s barely November, and I itch to turn it off.
There’s a reason I choose to work Christmas every fecking year, and thinking about that reason dulls any yuletide spirit I have to negative levels.
But just when I feel like booting the radio to feck, my handsome neighbour glances up from his phone to crack his neck and scrub a hand through his short hair, and I’m lost in every minute movement.
The arch of his throat.
The flex of his muscles.
He’s not big, like my AWOL BFF. But he’s strong, I can tell. A gym rat once, even if he’s not now, and his broad shoulders do things to me they have no business doing when he doesn’t know I’m peeping on him.
Go to bed.
I really should. Though my brain won’t shut the hell up, my body is tired, and I know I need to listen to it if I have any hope of ditching light duties for good.
But, Christ, this fella.
He’s so hard to look away from, and now I know how he smells. How he sounds. And the fleeting preoccupation he’s gifted me over the past few months has expanded to low-key obsession.
It’ll pass.
Everything does. But I’m enjoying the view too much to give it up. It’s down to him to break the spell, and he does a few minutes later, stretching that killer bod before he slopes inside and shuts his back door.
It’s my final cue to shift my arse and traipse upstairs. Ditch my clothes in the worn pile on the floor and check the clean stack has everything I need for when I wake up.
It does.
I’m not a fecking animal. But as I stretch out on my mattress and give in to the urge to reach for my phone, it’s hard to not feel like one.
It’s getting light outside, the heavy winter air fading to a damp morning.
Rain patters on my roof, the one part of the house I know for sure is sound, and I like it better than the silence that’s clung to me since I turned off the radio downstairs.
I like noise and colour and chaos. It suits me.
Lonely downtime eats at my soul and has me doing stupid shit like opening FlingIt and seeing who’s online—seeing who’s online near me—and feck if the first profile I see isn’t a brand new one fifty feet from where I sleep.
The photo is blank. Username…actually, I don’t know what that is, beyond the subtle code that he was born the year before I was.
LeLionDuBois96.
French, maybe? I don’t know that either and curiosity gets the better of me. My thumb hovers for less than a split second before I click the link and find myself instantly frustrated by a profile that’s vaguer than vague…if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
He’s left his bio blank, along with his specific interests. But this app has mandatory requirements: age, sexuality, what you’re looking for. Yeah, you can lie, but why bother? I scan LeLionDuBois96’s stats, confirming he’s twenty-nine. No shocker there. He’s bi-curious—I can work with that—and…
Feck—fuck.
He has his “would like to meet” set to MF couples, but in the notes…
Only looking for men.
I take a beat, letting that sink in. My thumb hovers over the message icon even as my conscience tries to reel me in.
The mixed messages in his profile tell me he’s a newbie, and I knew it anyway, without spending another hot second in his company.
Closeted for life reasons or maybe just himself.
Either way, I didn’t hang around last night to see if my clumsy flirting hit home.
I don’t know if he liked it or cringed his way into next Christmas, and if it’s the latter…
Don’t do it.
Don’t you fecking do it.
Sound advice. Logical advice, if I do say so myself. But being my own moral compass makes it too easy to tilt the map, too easy to make the world look how I want it to look.
And right now, I want to message him.
To say hi.
Help him settle in.
Let him know I’m right here, to see if he’ll bite.
Even if I don’t know for sure that it’s him.
Plenty of lads have blank profiles and intriguing usernames.
Hell, I did way back when I didn’t know one end of a man’s cock from the other, and that messy period in my life would’ve been over a lot quicker if I’d had someone—a friend—to guide me through it.
He’s not on FlingIt looking for friends.
Maybe not. But the thing about needing a pal is you don’t know it until you really need one, and I tell myself that’s what has me tapping that icon and thumbing out a message.
Typing.
Deleting.
Typing again.
Before I find the balls to hit send.
HotCraic97: Like it better here? xox