Chapter 3
Of course, it isn’t until we’re inside that I remember I can’t even tell him to take a seat while he waits. Another removal company took all the chairs I bid on, refurbed, and polished to perfection. Before I can explain, Alasdair comes to his own conclusions.
“Oh. You’re just about to move in here?”
It’s a fair assumption. This place has the same kind of echo as the flat I emptied with Kev today. The real difference is that I don’t have a single stick of furniture to help fill it.
Alasdair takes a second guess while I heel out of boots that are likely contaminated from piss-scented stairwells, and he heels out of his own, still looking around and guessing. “Or you’re a minimalist?” He huffs a sound that is almost but not quite laughter. “That’s the opposite of Alice.”
“She was a...” I strain for a word I heard at a meet-up. “A maximalist?”
“Something like that.” He draws a deep breath, then sighs, “She definitely left me a massive muddle.” He comes with me into the living room, turning in a slow circle under another bare bulb, then follows me into the kitchen where there’s no avoiding that I can’t even offer him a cuppa.
The cupboard I open out of habit to grab mugs is empty.
“No,” he decides. “You’re moving out.”
“Not me.” Might as well bite this bullet. “The guy I shared this place with did.”
“Today?”
“No, before Christmas.”
“But it’s February.” His gaze lands on me, and yeah, he’s got a baby face, but his forehead creasing is more proof Charles wasn’t a cradle snatcher. “And you’ve lived like this ever since?”
“What do you mean, like this?” Christ. I’m as abrasive as my cousin. I must be—Alasdair holds both hands up in a don’t-shoot gesture, but it isn’t his hands that snag my attention. It’s the way his brow creases again, so fucking sympathetic. Even if I couldn’t see that as plain as day, I hear it.
“I mean, it looks like you’ve been robbed, Vincent.” His lips press together like Harry’s did before he described Flynn so perfectly. “Your ex left you with nothing? That’s the worst.”
Given what I heard earlier this morning about a will being contested and him needing a house cleared pronto, I guess Alasdair does know that feeling. Or at least, he soon will, when his own place is empty.
Thank fuck Kev isn’t here to witness me unbuttoning my lip this quickly.
He’d put me in a headlock and walk me all the way back to where I come from.
The problem is, I don’t want to keep my silence.
It feels right to share this with someone about to take a walk in my shoes, if for a different reason.
“He wasn’t my ex. And Flynn didn’t take everything right away. Just his clothes at first, because he was travelling. Everything else got taken a couple of days ago. To be honest, it was a relief. Means I won’t have to see him ever again.”
“A relief?” He blinks under another bare bulb. “I can’t imagine ever feeling relieved about that.”
The kitchen light is bright. So are his eyes. Suspiciously so. I realise he’s teary just before he does his best to hide it by taking a good long look around my kitchen, which is pointless—every surface is bare apart from that solitary whiteboard surrounded by inspo pictures.
He studies that collection, and I join him to see him squinting at Flynn’s drunk-spider handwriting, so I tell him what should never have surprised me.
“He was hardly ever here. And he never intended to stay in England for long. This was always just a temporary staging post, that’s all.
Someplace to wine and dine investors to convince them he came from the kind of background they could trust with their money. ”
“He was a con man?”
I shrug. Flynn certainly conned me. I got no idea what he’s doing with the cash my work scored for him. “All I know is that I helped him by sourcing and restoring the furniture here to make him look like he came from old money. Like Charles.” And like Harry.
Alasdair nods, and I unclip the dry-erase marker pen attached to the whiteboard and check off a final box for Flynn in his absence. I have no idea what that wanker lost and wants to get back, but I can confirm this. “The one thing he was serious about was scoring some cash.”
“He wasn’t serious about you?” He sounds surprised, and I can’t lie, it makes a nice change for my chest to heat for a flattering reason instead of shame.
“It wasn’t like that. We wouldn’t have been compatible.” He blinks at me, doe eyes widening as I get explicit. “I mean in bed. Would have been like trying to push the same ends of two magnets together.”
He flushes, so I think he gets it, but he also smiles a little, so I keep going.
“Flynn having everything taken away did me a favour. Knocked me out of a holding pattern. I was hanging on here. Waiting. Expecting him to keep his side of our bargain, I guess, about selling up everything I found and fixed and splitting the cash. Might as well get back to my real life.” That’s what Kev wants, I know.
It’s still tough to say, “This place finally being empty means I can draw a line under what I wanted to do with that cash.” I do that under Flynn’s list—I draw an actual line in thick black ink—and I tell the whole truth about the man who filled this vision board with his goals for the future.
“He never intended to keep his side of our deal.”
As if summoned, my phone pings.
It won’t be Flynn.
No grey ticks have turned blue on messages I sweated over before sending, trying to get the tone right. It’s too late to care about his opinion. I’m busy telling Alasdair another truth, and this one is about me.
“The only serious relationship I was ever in was with his furniture.”
Alasdair snorts, but he smiles a little.
It’s watery. No doubt because I stomped my size twelves through what must be real and recent grief to make him teary.
No one from my neck of the woods would ever well up in public like he did.
I don’t know why seeing that and hearing him sniff makes my fist curl around the whiteboard pen.
I have to unclench to draw another line in thick black ink.
“That was then. This is now. It happened. He left, and I felt...”
So fucking stupid not to see it coming.
I don’t want to dwell on the bad, not when someone suffering real loss is right here in my empty kitchen.
“It’s actually a blank page, innit? So what if I won’t get the cash I expected or get to pivot in a different direction.
It’s still a fresh start for me. And you’ll have a fresh start soon as well. ”
Don’t ask me why I add the single good thing Flynn did for me before leaving.
“The bright side is that the rent is paid and the lease has another two months to run. If the cost of living would calm the fuck down, I might actually save enough cash to rent somewhere else, which will beat sleeping in my cousin’s spare room.”
“You don’t get along?”
“We get along fine.” It isn’t Kev’s fault that I want what I can’t have.
“Him and his missus are all I got. And the only reason I don’t want to move in with them is that they’ve been looking into fostering.
Can’t do that if I’m hogging their spare room, can they?
” I draw a final thick line. “I’m over it. ”
I’ve got to be.
“The one thing I’m not over is losing my desk.”
Alasdair almost makes eye contact. His still bright gaze flicks away just as quickly. “Your desk?”
“A restoration project. It wasn’t really mine.
Just felt that way because I found it. The money I bid for it at auction didn’t belong to me.
It was paid for out of this budget.” I tap the item on Flynn’s checklist that Harry had translated as stage the flat.
“It was pretty.” I come way too close to snagging an even prettier strand of hair the same colour as that desk’s fire-filled wood.
“All I’m really saying is that I get it, yeah? ”
“Get what?”
I’ve already talked more in this kitchen during the last ten minutes than I have in the last two months. Him finally meeting my eyes encourages me to keep yapping.
“I mean that I get it.” I steal Harry’s words and repurpose them for someone truly hurting.
“You’re on a struggle bus right now. Not for the same reason as me.
But I have cleared a fuckton of houses. Seen plenty of people struggle with that process in all kinds of ways.
Lately, I can’t help thinking that the hardest part isn’t letting go of the stuff.
It’s letting go of someone who was part of your life, yeah?
Especially if they made you feel needed.
” I get a brief flashback of Flynn’s praise at each new piece I found and polished.
I cough around the lump in my throat that praise left.
“Especially if you thought they might be around for longer.”
He nods, and his glance locks with mine for another brief and fragile moment.
His eyes are still bright and shiny, and I’ve never come closer to giving a virtual stranger a good long cuddle. That’s the actual opposite of how Kev told me to treat my next client, so I slot the dry-erase pen away and back off.
“We’ll do it together, yeah? Go take a look at”—I reuse his own descriptor—“your massive muddle. See if that other company were right about it not being worth anyone’s time. Just give me a few minutes to shower off the worst of Tower Hamlets.”
And that’s what I do.
I shower super fast, and I don’t know what he does while I’m washing off the stench of all those stairwell urinals. All I do know is that the only towel left is small. It doesn’t cover much once I’m done and need to dart from the bathroom to my bedroom. At least I try to dart across to my bedroom.
Alasdair is in the hallway between me and it.