Chapter Eighteen Razor #2
He kissed my shoulder and, Jesus, I wished he’d stop doing that cause I was in danger of dragging him right into the dirt with me and never letting him go.
“But that’s not what I meant.” He kissed my shoulder again, lingering his lips there as if he knew exactly what it did to me.
“I’m trying to understand.” Another kiss, a ghost of one, as if he was trying to speak and soothe me in the same breath.
“Not because of you. I’ve been trying to understand for years.
I know I’m privileged. Believe me, people remind me often enough and how I should be grateful for it.
And I am. Which is why I’m trying to do what I’m doing.
It might not look like it to you, but I’m rebelling in my own way.
Fighting my own cage. So I know, I can’t claim to know it. But I can at least understand it.”
He sounded genuine.
That was the problem.
I sniffed, rubbed my jaw. “Yeah. Alright. You’re right.
I’m trapped.” I shook my head, hating it.
“And you want the truth? If I could earn what I do stacking shelves or laying bricks like Len, I would. But I can’t.
I was brought up in a tower block in shit-hole Hackney to a mum who barely makes it through the day and a dad who fucked off when Keeley came, leaving me to pick up the slack.
School weren’t a place I excelled at. Hard to revise and do homework when you’re making sure your kid sister is clean and has eaten. ”
“Jesus.” Tristan closed his eyes.
I didn’t want his pity. So I told it like it was. “Then at fifteen, I came home one day to find Keeley bruised. Proper bruised. And the bloke who’d done it was over my mum, forcing himself on her, threatening her to take it or he’d move onto Keeley. So I got a cutthroat razor and I cut him.”
Tristan opened his eyes to hear that.
I snorted at the memory. “Turns out I’d done the local gang a favour with that.
So they offered me something in return. They let me in.
And I started peddling their gear on my street corners.
Suddenly, I was able to buy milk instead of nicking it, and it gave me a chance.
To make real money. Something we’d never had. The means to support us.”
I shook my head. “Now I got a mum barely breathing and a sister with her own baby way too young. But I can get buggies. Toys. Warm coats. Feels good. As if I’m finally doing something right.
But once you’re in, you’re in. You don’t just tell the lads, ‘cheers, I’m off to be a roofer now.
’ You try that, they make sure you fall off it.
” I dragged a hand down my face, painkillers taking the edge off everything except the truth. “Cormac’s made that clear.”
Tristan sat up, pressed another kiss to my shoulder. Barely there. Enough to hurt in a different way. “Your friend must understand that.”
“He does.” My voice came out rougher than I meant, as if I was defending my own best mate’s reasons for hating me. “But it’s hard for him. He’s got a family now. Twins on the way. He doesn’t need me turning up and dragging the past through his front room after…”
I stopped myself before I said too much.
“After what?” Tristan kept kissing my shoulder. Soft, rhythmic. It was nothing, really, just lips and breath, but it undid me.
I liked it.
Liked it too much.
It reminded me of all the stolen kisses I’d had before.
“Don’t matter.” I glanced away.
There was a brief moment, a slight recalibration, before Tristan tried again. “Have you ever been in a relationship?”
That one hit harder. I wasn’t used to people asking me personal shit. When they did, it was surface stuff. Girls, fights, money. Things I could lie through easy. But this?
This was too close.
“Depends how you define a relationship.” I tried for casual, but it came out hoarse.
“Someone you sleep with regularly. A recurring partner.” Tristan paused, eyes steady on mine. “Someone you might have been in love with.”
I looked away, locking my jaw tight. My body wanted to move, to shut it down, to walk the fuck out, but the pain held me in place.
The wound. Tristan. Beside me. The way he kept sliding his hand over my skin, grounding me when I didn’t want to be grounded.
I couldn’t tell which scared me more. The question or the fact that I wanted to answer it.
And I don’t know why, maybe because no one’d ever asked and meant it, but I sort of let myself say it.
“There used to be three of us.”
He waited. Patient. Still. As if he knew I was about bleed all over his sheets again.
“Me, Lennon, and Levi.” The name burnt my tongue going out.
Levi. As if saying it might summon him. The air wasn’t meant to hold it anymore.
And my throat closed before I could stop it, eyes stinging.
But I bit down until it hurt just to breathe.
“His little brother. Only by a year. More like twins.
But they were different him ‘n Len. I was friends with Len growing up but Levi was always there, too. He was… quieter. Shy, maybe. Or maybe …Fuck.”
I sniffed, trying to sort myself out. Told myself to get a grip. I weren’t Richie anymore. I was Razor. And Razor don’t fucking cry.
I knew I was though.
“When I was about nineteen, him eighteen we were… yeah, I guess you’d call it a thing. Back then it didn’t feel like that. We were kids. Mucking about. Pretending it was nothing.” I wiped the treacherous tear I’d tell myself hadn’t been there. “But it wasn’t nothing, though. Not to me.”
Tristan didn’t say a word. He watched. And somehow that made it worse.
“Len didn’t know. Or maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t want to see it.” My voice cracked. I coughed it back down. “And to be honest, I’m glad about that cause….”
Tristan’s hand froze where it rested. “Cause why? What happened?”
I swallowed, throat raw. “He died.” The words dropped like lead. “Twenty years old.” I forced it all out. “And I’m the one who got him the gear that did it. Bad batch. Cut with something it shouldn’t’ve been.”
I let out a laugh. A breath. A sob. I don’t even know.
“So yeah. Lennon can’t stand the sight of me.
Don’t blame him. Don’t matter that I don’t push that shit now.
Or that I keep my line clean. It’s too late for that.
Too late for him. Too late for me.” My chest felt tight, every breath scraping.
“Day of the funeral, Cormac gave me the Hackney line. Said I’d earned it.
‘Highlighting the dodgy batch,’ he called it.
Bonus cash, too. Gave me the car. Promotion for killing the only person I ever—” I stopped.
Swallowed it down. “Didn’t have a choice but to take it.
What else was I supposed to do? Go clean?
There’s no clean way out once you’re that far under. ”
I stared past Tristan, at the blank wall, voice barely more than a rasp.
“Lennon built a life. Beautiful girl, kids on the way. I built this. A career putting poison in people’s veins.
” Didn’t matter if I refused to push heroin.
Poison was poison. I still made the world worse just by breathing in it.
And I took Tristan’s hand, pressed it flat over the tattoo on my chest to hammer home the point.
“That’s what it means. Poisoned heart. That’s what I’ve got.
What I earned. And it’s the only thing I’m good for. ”
Tristan held my gaze, then I let his hand go and he traced the ink again, as if realising it for the first time. “I’m so sorry.”
I lifted his hand again, brought it to my mouth and kissed his knuckles. A small, stupid thing meaning way too much. I didn’t want the apology. Or the sympathy. I didn’t deserve it. Yet my stupid held back grief grabbed hold of it.
“My life, innit?” I shrugged. “Don’t go thinking too much about me, yeah? I ain’t the kind that sticks.”
He shifted onto his knees beside me and peeled back the bandage. I hissed as air hit the wound, but he ignored it, focused, hands steady, then reached for the antiseptic wipes, the smell sharp in the air, and went to work cleaning me up.
“Though now…” I watched him work me over. “I’ve fucked up the only thing I am good at.”
Tristan looked up at me. “What would you be if you weren’t…what you are?”
“What do you mean?” I hissed as my ribs stung under his touch.
“If you had a choice. What would you be? What would you do instead?”
He wanted me to say ‘better’. I could feel it, practically see him forming those words with his lips as he cleaned me up. He wanted to believe people didn’t have to be the sum of what they’d survived. But some people didn’t have a choice.
“I don’t have a choice if I want to keep my family safe.”
Tristan fell back on his knees. Held my gaze. “But if you did.”
I shrugged. “I dunno. What do people like me get to do? Lennon builds houses. Maybe I’d do that. Good at grafting. Fixing shit.”
“So…run a business?”
I snorted. “Sure. Underneath all this shit I’m Alan Sugar.”
“You could be.”
“Cormac wouldn’t let me peddle anything he didn’t own. And will go fucking ballistic when he finds out how badly I’ve fucked this up.”
“Seems to me then, it’s more dangerous being in it, than out of it.”
I hissed again as Tristan wrapped fresh gauze around my ribs. “You think I don’t know this life ends one of two ways?”
I could admit the truth in my head: prison or a grave.
No one asked boys like me what they wanted to be.
And no one ever would unless I tore the whole bloody system apart first. Wanting was a luxury.
Sure, I saved where I could. There were the envelopes hidden in Keeley’s wardrobe.
Money I’d been squirrelling away for if there ever was a time I could run clean.
But they were temporary, those thoughts of fleeing.
As if I was trying to build a future out of a matchbox.
Tristan sighed. “Looks like you survived what plenty other people wouldn’t. I’d say that puts you squarely in the ‘still doing alright’ category.”