Chapter 11
Galen
I do go home with them—Sab and Esme—and it’s against my better judgement solely because I’m too tired to cope with how watching him be the cutest girl dad ever does a number on me.
And look, he’s not the only girl dad I know. Nash has a daughter, and I’ve watched her run rings around every grown man she comes across. Around Logan, for feck’s sake.
But Sab…he’s different. Maybe because he really does have no clue how good he is.
Esme, though. She knows. And kids can’t fake that. She laughs at him, clinging and singing, while she bosses him to Tipperary and back. And Sab…he beams as if she’s handed him all the gold, frankincense, and myrrh in the world, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.
Holy feck, I’m emotional today. I’m smiling through the decades-old wound on my soul, but watching them wrecks me.
I should’ve gone home after the roughest shift the watch has endured in a while.
I should’ve stayed and fixed my car. But I didn’t.
And by the time Sab sets a plate in front of me, I know I can’t be anywhere else. “Damn, boy. What’s this?”
Sab says something French.
I drink in the fecking feast before me and try to figure it out. Fail and flail enough that he laughs and says it again.
“Poulet r?ti, ratatouille. Roast chicken and vegetables. Mange.”
“What does that mean?”
“Eat.”
Sab rubs my fractious shoulder, zero hesitation in the easy touch, and moves on to help Esme.
I fall into the first home-cooked meal I’ve had in—Lord knows, actually—and clear my plate as if I’m as starved for hot dinners as I am the casual affection he just gifted me without even thinking about it.
It’s so good.
He brings me more and I eat that too. Then it’s a struggle of the ages to keep my eyes open.
I need to go home.
I need to stop eating the French gingerbread he’s left on the arm of a couch that’s so very nearly as bed-shaped as mine.
I need to stop watching him be the warmest, kindest dad in the world and imagining what it would be like to belong here.
Deep thoughts. Bad shifts do that to all of us unless we drink to forget, and I’ve never been one for that.
I’m not one for going home when I’m this comfortable either, though, so I don’t shift myself until it’s time for Esme’s bath.
By then, I’ve come to realise Sab’s not as shy as I thought.
That first night in the pub, outside the homeware shop, and even online on that stupid app, I pegged him as quiet.
Reserved. Guarded, almost. But here, in his own space, in the home he’s clearly building for his kid with his bare hands, he’s different.
Chatty.
Funny.
Harassed as hell as Esme climbs him like a human jungle gym.
Restless fecker, though. He only sits when Esme tells him to.
Otherwise he’s up fetching things, fiddling with the telly, pacing around while he talks, an edge to him as though he’s never learned the art of stillness.
As though he spends all night kicking his bedsheets around unless someone’s there to hold him.
Don’t think about that.
Why would I?
Sab’s lush, but I don’t—
Stop thinking at all.
I try, but as I watch Sab pack leftovers for me to take to work, his hands so fecking busy, it’s easy—too easy—to picture what he might’ve been like when he was using. And the damage it’s left behind.
Still, as he pushes a foil parcel into my grasp and gives me a smile that’s almost too bright to look at, it’s this version of him that undoes me.
That has me spinning on the doorstep and reaching out to wrap a hand around his cheek while he has half an eye on Esme picking a bath bomb from a cute as feck little basket. “I meant what I said the other day.”
Sab takes a breath.
I tap my finger to his lips. “Shh. No pressure. Just come on over when you’re ready.”
I fully expect come on over when you’re ready to stretch out into another week where I don’t know what to do with the person I’ve become since I met Sab.
Somehow, I make it through a dayshift where nothing happens and I’m mostly left alone with my thoughts, my quiet phone, and the ugliest tree in existence to decorate for the station.
Makes me miss Logan, and I almost call him up to tell him so, but in the end, I don’t have to. He FaceTimes to get a proper look at the mess I’ve made of the tree.
“That’s even fucking worse than last year.”
“I still had an iron lung then,” I remind him. “This year, I’m hitting my solo stride, don’t you think?”
I take him around the tree, treating him to every angle of the bent plastic monstrosity.
“Is that fucking bog roll?”
“Yup.” I give the Andrex a flick. “Tinsel’s a fire hazard, don’t you know.”
“Boss is going to make you do it again.”
True story. But I’m hoping to be gone by the time the watch commander comes downstairs and then it’s someone else’s problem. Preferably whatever melt from Green Watch ate my last Pot Noodle. Christ, what I wouldn’t give for another round of Sab’s roast chicken.
“Did you fall asleep standing up again?”
“That was one time.” I tune back into Logan. “And your fault for letting me drink three pints of Murphy’s on an empty stomach.”
“You’re a lightweight.”
“I don’t drink,” I protest. “And that’s why. I always nap through the fun part.”
Logan laughs. Well, as close to laughing as he ever gets. But his gaze pins me all the same, and I wonder what Nash told him when he went back. Then stop wondering pretty quick, knowing Nash would never. But that maybe I wish he had, so me and Logan could—
The bells go off. The two-tone alert that wipes my brain clear of just about anything.
I hang up on Logan as the station Tannoy crackles to life. On my feet and in motion as the shout for a lorry fire on the motorway filters out, darting down the appliance bay towards the pump.
It’s the first in a run of calls that keeps me busy well into the evening. I have six hours of overtime under my belt by the time I stagger to my car and remember I still haven’t swapped out the flat tyre.
Fuck it.
Forgoing the cold walk that isn’t going to help me cross paths with a hot Frenchman, I nurse my car home, crawling through the streets slow enough that every man and his dog honk their horn thinking I give a shite.
I really don’t. Though, by the time I roll up outside my house, I feel like I could punch someone’s fecking lights out. Or fuck them silly, a mood that usually has me taking advantage of my looming rest days to cut loose and have some fun.
But I don’t dig out my phone.
Don’t poke around on FlingIt.
I take a shower. Clean my bathroom like a good boy. And I get my reward in the form of a message that flashes up as I’m smashing through six rounds of toast.
LeLionDuBois96: Are you free tonight? xx
I’m beyond fecking free.
I clear the crumbs from my unfinished kitchen and tear around the rest of the house, grateful I spent last week at least pretending to get some of the work done.
Grateful to Nash that my bathroom no longer sounds like a bog monster lives in the pipes every time a tap turns on.
Doors are still crocked, but I can live with that as long as the stench of tile solvent is gone.
Newsflash: it isn’t gone.
I make coffee in place of the scented candles I’ll never have in my house and open the windows, so by the time a quiet knock lights me up, my house is basically a baltic branch of Costa.
Doesn’t stop me answering the door with no shirt on, though. Or getting a kick out of the way Sab drinks me in, the nerves in his dark gaze co-existing with something that looks an awful lot like determination.
“Come in.” I back up and wave him forward. “Let me show you what real fecking mess looks like.”
After a beat of hesitation so brief I can’t be sure it happens, Sab steps into my house.
I shut the door behind him. Loiter there as I watch him take in the wreckage of my befuddled home.
“All right,” he concedes. “Yours is definitely worse than mine.”
“What gave it away? The floors or my shite carpentry?”
Sab shakes his head, turning to face me. Letting me know for sure, without words, that he didn’t come here to talk about DIY. That he doesn’t want to spend an hour pretending he did and risk losing the resolve he walked in here with. “You need a Christmas tree.”
“Noted.” I ease closer. “Remind me another day.”
I’m in his orbit now, barely a bible’s width of space between us. pinewood and vanilla scents the air and I have to consider if it’s even real, or if Sab’s a literal dream come true. “You smell good too, in case I’ve never told you.”
Sab bites his lip, an unconscious tic as his shoulders rise and fall with a soul-deep breath. “Right now, I can’t remember anything anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Where’s Esme?”
“With my brother. She fell asleep after dinner, so I put her to bed there.”
“So she’s safe,” I conclude, voice low, like I’m talking to a spooked animal. “And you can leave any time you want to go back to her.”
Sab nods.
“And your brother knows where you are? So he can find you if she needs you?”
“Tam has no fucking idea where I am. I told Bhodi instead.”
“Bhodi…your brother-in-law?”
“Yeah. You know him. He’s a nurse at the hospital.”
Bhodi.
The name slides home, puzzle pieces scrabbling for purchase in a brain that’s all Sab.
For a moment, I have that mental flail when you know the answer, but it’s out of reach.
But then…I find it. I see blond hair and bright blue eyes, and a compassionate smile that never dimmed, even in the grim shadows of an ICU ward where every patient in the row fecking died.
All but one.
All but me, and I know it was because of him.
Bhodi.
Christ. I’m not prepared for that memory to hit, and instinct has me closing the narrow distance between me and Sab, feeling that same steady warmth Bhodi radiated on the ward, the safety of it that helped me to believe I was going to live, no matter how bad it looked.
Of course Sab would be family to him.