Chapter Nine Tristan
chapter nine
Tristan
I was on full Sunday catch-up.
Collapsed on the sofa, Bluetooth speaker whispering soft chill tracks, wearing nothing but boxers and an old tee that had seen better centuries, drowning in paperwork and case files.
I’d shoved the front window all the way open because the third floor of the Egyptian House turned into a furnace the second the sun even looked at it and today had been another scorcher.
But the breeze kept ruffling the mounds of files around me, them occasionally trying to fly off towards the scent of Lara making a full Sunday roast downstairs. In this heat? Madness.
Me? I had a poke bowl balanced on my knee and enough paperwork scattered to qualify as structural instability. And somewhere under the mess my phone buzzed.
Six days a week as a pupil barrister wasn’t an exaggeration.
They should carve it into a warning label and stick it on every pupillage application.
It’d be seven if I hadn’t attended my sister’s garden party yesterday, then crawled home to Barons Court and died halfway through a bottle of Rioja.
The other half sat open on the coffee table, breathing its last alongside my Japanese takeaway.
I pushed aside a stack of bundles comprising charging schedules for one of Imogen’s robbery matters, draft submissions for a sentencing hearing, interview notes from a youth possession case I was shadowing this week and finally unearthed the phone.
One new message.
From a number I didn’t know.
I unlocked the screen.
So where’s this window of yours at now?
My stomach hit the floor.
Everything went completely still. Music, heat, paperwork, even the rice I was about to shovel into my mouth.
Razor.
It had to be him.
Only he could send a five-word message capable of hooking fingers behind my ribs and pulling, while my stomach flipped so hard it felt like the raw tuna in my bowl had sprouted fins and made a break for it.
The window.
Our window.
The stupid, creaking, paint-chipped sash window he used to climb through in my old student house that didn’t have a lock. The window he went back to recently. Looking for me. Not finding me.
I stared at the message, pulse tapping hard against my chest as if my body had given its own opinion on the matter. Then I set the poke bowl aside, wiped my palm on my bare legs, and tried to think about what I should do next.
That lasted all of three seconds.
I moved my thumbs across the keypad before rational thought intervened.
Palliser Road, W14. But I don’t recommend the scaling route to the balcony, it faces the street, and the neighbours are quick to judge this far west.
I hit send.
Exhaled.
Then I threw the phone onto the sofa as if distance might soften the consequences. I reached for the wine bottle and poured a glass far too full, bringing it straight to my lips. Halfway through the swallow, the phone buzzed again.
I didn’t breathe while I picked it up.
Razor’s reply lit the screen:
ETA 40 mins.
Then another:
Better open the door then.
I closed my eyes on instinct, heat flooding my chest. Then I knocked back the rest of the wine, feeling the burn all the way down, and tried desperately to will my heart into behaving as if it belonged to a grown adult with a grip on his life.
It thudded anyway.
I couldn’t move. I was stunned into immobility. And about forty minutes later, my phone buzzed again.
Nice gaff.
I shot upright, nearly upended the poke bowl, and bolted for the door.
I rushed down the communal stairs two at a time to the main entrance and flung the front door open to find Razor parked across the street.
The driver’s window was down and there he sat, cigarette burning between his fingers, smoke drifting into the warm night.
He watched me. Slow. Intent. And I desperately tried to stay calm, while my pulse threatened to sprint out of my neck.
He took his time with the last drag, holding my gaze through the window, then flicked the cigarette onto the impossibly clean pavement of W14 and opened the door. When he stepped out, heat punched straight through me.
He was all in black. Shirt, jeans, boots, the lot.
The short sleeves strained around his biceps, fabric damp with sweat and clinging to the solid breadth of his back, tracing every hard line of muscle beneath.
His open collar showed a hint of his tattoo, and those dark jeans did criminal things for his thighs.
And when he shut the car door with a solid thud and swaggered towards me while I stood there barefoot in boxers and a faded tee, hair a scruffy disaster from lying on the sofa too long, my pulse raced.
The contrast was as blatant as our home postcodes.
But when he climbed the three concrete steps up to me, smoke curling around him, around us, locking us in, I couldn’t have cared less. Especially as he leant in, going to kiss me right there on the communal steps.
But my instinct kicked in and I tilted back. “You’ll need a resident permit to park there.”
He edged closer, mouth near mine. “Couldn’t give a fuck, Tricky.”
“You might get a clamp.” I absolutely should’ve thought about that earlier. Should’ve grabbed a visitor permit. Should’ve done anything except sit immobilised by the thought of him coming. But this wasn’t a normal visitor on a normal Sunday, popping round for a normal bloody Sunday lunch.
This was a drug dealer.
A gang lieutenant.
A fully fledged cog in organised crime who, by every professional standard, should be nowhere near me.
And yet…
He slid his hands on my hips, fingers heavy and sure, guiding me back through the communal entrance, past the row of post-boxes, kicking the main door shut behind us, I couldn’t think of a single reason he shouldn’t be here.
Not one that mattered.
“How about I clamp you?” He pressed me back against the wall, breath hot on my mouth, and pinned me with an intention stealing the floor out from under me, kissing me as if he’d been starving for it. Or would have if the door on the ground floor hadn’t rattled, and he jerked back.
Lara opened her flat door and stepped out in her recital clothes, all bright colours and earnest energy. I’d never felt more naked in my life. Razor stepped away fast, looking at literally anything that wasn’t me or her.
“Tristan,” she said politely as she squeezed past and left through the main door.
Razor exhaled slowly. “You…got housemates?”
I huffed a laugh. “It’s three flats, not one house.”
“Ah.”
I jerked my chin upward. “Third floor. Door’s open.”
He gave me a narrow-eyed look before planting his boot on the first step. The whole staircase shuddered in protest as he climbed, each step creaking under his weight. I followed, heart climbing into my throat with every groan of the wood.
At the top, Razor pushed open the door and stepped into my flat.
My space. And he looked around with the same sharp, unsettling appraisal he’d used months ago when he’d slipped through the Clerkenwell window, brushing his fingers over surfaces, over the frames on the wall: a few prints I pretended to understand, a photograph of my brother and Eloise at their wedding, a candid of Henry and me at the Oxford formal.
His gaze didn’t linger on any of them, but he catalogued them all the same.
It wasn’t a big flat. Not even close. Two bedrooms, with one really an office I rarely used, a bathroom, and a small living area bleeding into the kitchen.
The balcony off the front room was just big enough for a two-seater bistro set and the potted plants my mother insisted would “bring life into the place,” all of which I’d promptly killed.
But space wasn’t why people lived here.
Not in W14.
Here, the currency was the postcode. Boutiques, arthouses, tree-lined crescents, and the Tube close enough to be in central in under ten minutes.
The flat had been in my family for decades.
My father lived here in his bachelor years; my brother and Eloise used it before graduating to Chelsea.
Now it was my turn to inhabit the Hale-Fitzroy reliquary.
Having Razor in it was… strange.
As if watching someone dangerous step into a memory I wasn’t sure I wanted to share.
Then he turned and met my gaze, breath coming a little too fast for someone who’d only climbed three flights of stairs, and I suddenly realised I wanted him here.
There was something coiled under his skin.
I could sense it as if I’d known him for years instead of this fucked-up nothing amount of time where we’d been…
nothing to each other. But there was something tight about him.
Volatile. Fraying at the seams. It came off him in waves.
My instincts kicked in before sense did, and I opened my mouth to ask if he was okay.
But he crossed the room in three strides, grabbed the front of my tee, and kissed me.
Hard. Bruising. Urgent. No preamble, no warning.
His mouth on mine, hands locking at my hips, whole body crowding me back and around, pushing me, guiding me until the backs of my knees hit the sofa.
The pile of papers spread across it rustling in warning.
“Wait—”
He swallowed the word with another kiss. Rougher. Sharper. And pushed me back into the sofa cushions, straight onto my case notes, tomorrow’s prep work, all of it crumpling under me.
“Can we—” I tried to gesture towards the bedroom, towards literally anywhere that wasn’t my career spread out beneath us, but it was pointless. He was gone, lost in whatever was tearing him open from the inside.
And the truth?
So was I.
Because him over me, over my work, over the carefully built structure of my entire fucking life, was a fight I wouldn’t win tonight. Didn’t want to win. And he didn’t care about the papers. He cared too much about everything else, and this, me, was the only place he could put it.
So I dragged him closer. Kissed him deeper.