Chapter 6 #2
I escape before he can argue. The pounding of the water doesn’t help me come up with a solution.
It does mask the sound of the doorbell—I come out of the bathroom to find Blake waiting in the same spot Dair did last week.
At least this time my towel is bigger. I cinch it around my waist as Blake relays a message.
“You’ve had a delivery from the teacup fairy. He said to tell you welcome home. Or maybe furniture fairy fits him better.”
“Furniture fairy? What do you mean?”
I find out for myself in the living room, where a pair of mismatched dining chairs almost surprise me into losing my grip on my new towel.
Blake laughs again then, which is better than that bleakness.
And if me sprinting for the front door means he laughs at me for even longer, I’ll live with it.
My short sprint means I get to yell before Dair can reach the end of the street.
“Oi, oi!”
Dair stops dead. He swings around to face me.
“Come ’ere.”
He does, and so what if my yelling lowers the tone of this high-class district or if I’m half naked on my doorstep. It’s worth freezing my tits off to see his smile for real instead of on a phone screen, even if it flickers the moment I say, “Stop giving me your stuff.”
“The chairs? I can take them back. It’s just… It’s just that I couldn’t stop thinking about…” His soft lips press together. He can’t hold this in. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Vincent.”
I’ve been thinking about him too. Haven’t stopped, if I’m honest, and honest is exactly how I hope this comes out sounding.
“You already gave away a lot.” Fuck it. I go all in.
“Too much, in my opinion, and no, I didn’t go to no law school.
” Unlike some of the other Exes, who I wish to fuck he’d met sooner.
They could have advised him so much better than I try to.
“But I do know right from wrong when I see it. What happened to you in court ain’t it.
Not even a little. I can’t be yet another fucker taking from you. ”
My bare chest is damp. Dair doesn’t seem to care. He hugs me, if only for a moment. For once, he’s the hoarser of us. “Thanks. But you aren’t taking anything. You’d actually be helping me out. I really can’t take it all home with me, and I’m running out of time.”
He follows me into the hallway of a home I’ll have to leave soon as well.
Dair shuts the door behind him and stands in shadows.
“Call it a temporary loan while we’re both still almost-neighbours.
” He’s back to smiling, even if this version is smaller, and he hesitates on the doormat instead of following me further inside.
“I don’t want to interrupt your time with your friend.
I’m going to work, and your place was on the way to the Tube, so I left early to drop the chairs off. ”
“How early?”
“Just a little.” He shrugs. There’s enough light to see his smile turn bashful. “Okay. A lot. I don’t have to be in Holborn until after seven.” He meets my eyes, his chin lifted, the brave bastard. “Hoped I’d get to see you.”
It’s a good thing Blake is still in the living room.
That intense stare of his misses nothing, and there’s no hiding my reaction.
My chest prickles for happier reasons than usual.
I also prickle with nerves, which makes no sense when I’ve spoken to Dair every single evening while I’ve been away from London.
But not about what happened between us in his bathroom.
Some rule-maker I am—all I want to do is pick up from where we left off. And I don’t mean by bending him over his bathroom sink to get my dick inside him. I want to sit on the side of his bath and kiss him for fucking ever. Then talk, like we’ve done each evening, about everything and nothing.
So much for being Mr. One-And-Done. Today, I run a hand through my wet hair, wishing Marilyn had already cut it.
If this is what a second date feels like, I want to look smart instead of shaggy, but that’s okay because Dair does the exact same thing.
He sweeps a hand through his own hair like he wants to look his best for me as well.
And like he needs to keep his hands busy to keep from reaching out to touch me.
He loses that battle. “No hives.” His knuckles brush over a pec, which I swear I don’t twitch on purpose, but he yelps, then laughs, and here we are, grinning at each other like we’re both a sight for sore eyes.
That has to be what Blake sees after flicking on the hallway light switch.
“Fuck sake.”
That’s all he says, but he chuckles, and that I can work with.
As soon as he closes the living room door behind him, I lean closer to Dair and whisper, “Help me?”
Dair doesn’t ask how. Or why. He nods right away.
I glance back at the closed door between us and an Ex. “Keep him talking for me?”
He yelps again. “Me?”
“Yeah, just while I’m getting dressed, because I…” This label still feels like wearing clothes the wrong size for me. “I’m meant to be keeping the group together for a while. Leading it. That means I need to come up with a way to get Blake and one of the other Exes talking again.”
“What’s the plan?”
There isn’t one. Dair looks at me like I got all the answers, so I blurt, “Getting him to Covent Garden. The other Ex is working as a barista there, but Blake’s talking about bailing on us going out this evening.
” I glance away. “Thing is, he helped me out once. Now it’s his turn on the struggle bus.
I want to help him get off it way sooner than I did. ”
Dair does that melting thing I’d almost forgotten.
And I think he does his best to melt Blake too.
I hear him trying once I’m dressed, and I return to a living room that isn’t quite so empty now that Dair sits on one dining chair and Blake sits on the other.
Something in my chest clenches at him trying to make conversation and at how he does his best to help me out by saying, “The only thing that will get me through my care shift tonight is coffee.”
That isn’t the truth. He doesn’t drink it. He told me so in his own hallway. That nose wrinkle of his played on a loop while I was up-county. Now I grasp hold of the lifeline his white lie offers.
“You’re heading for Holborn, right? We can find somewhere on the way.” All three of us have to know there are thousands of coffee shops in this city, but as soon as I say, “Covent Garden is the stop right before it,” Blake is combat-ready.
“I know a place.” He launches into action, hustling me into my coat, grabbing his own, and setting off in a hurry.
Dair’s legs aren’t as long as either of ours. He works hard to keep up, then works even harder to keep Blake talking. Each question he asks prompts Blake to spill more intel about someone he misses.
“Adey shouldn’t be working there.”
“Because?”
“Because he got a second chance, but he won’t take it.”
“A second chance to do what?” Dair stops in the way of commuters streaming out of the station exit. He’s at risk of getting trampled until I shield him, and I stay close once we head inside together.
“A second chance to teach.” Blake marches even faster. “He scored a spot on a gateway course.”
“A gateway to what?”
“To get him back into classrooms.”
I can’t imagine anything worse, but Blake describes school as if it’s the best place on the planet.
“That’s where he should be, but he’s walking away from the chance.
And if I ask him why, he won’t tell me. Can’t look me in the eye either, and I know what that means.
Had enough interrogation training to know he’s lying about teaching not being for him anymore.
That fucker won awards. Turned lives around. Saved so many kids.”
Once we’re crowded together in a Tube carriage, Blake scrubs at the back of his neck.
“But will he accept that second-chance spot to do what he’s really good at?
” Bleak eyes meet mine over Dair’s head between us.
“No, he fucking will not. Shuts me down whenever I ask about it. Stopped talking to me, full stop.” This almost gets lost in the bustle as we switch Tube lines.
“It would be good for him to take it.” Blake saves his reasoning for the next train we board together.
“Someone like him shouldn’t be working for minimum wage. ”
Dair straightens. “Because minimum-wage work doesn’t matter?
” He’s the shorter of us. It’s hard to see him that way when he raises a hand to a heart-shaped logo on his jacket.
“I don’t agree.” He shifts, getting between me and Blake as if I’m in need of shielding, and his chin rises.
“Caring matters. So does lifting and carrying. Or serving coffee.”
Blake’s mouth opens. Snaps closed. He grasps hold of a handrail, fingers curling around it the same way Dair’s fingers do around mine.
No one in this crowded carriage can see him reach back to do it.
I guess this quick squeeze is him saying sorry for silencing Blake when I’d asked for his help to keep him talking.
I can’t be sorry about Dair standing up for himself.
And for me. But Dair’s quick glance my way telegraphs real worry until Blake says, “Sorry, sorry. That came out all wrong. And yeah, I agree. Just ask any new trooper about their pay scale. Doesn’t exactly reflect being prepared to lay down your life for King and Country. ”
Once we’re above ground again and all three of us stand across the street from a coffee shop that could pass for Elizabethan, right down to diamond pane windows, he picks up from where he left off.
“I just meant that Adey could be stopping more kids from ending up in prison. That’s gotta be worth more than what he’s doing right now. ”
We cross the street, and I have to speak up over the rumble of passing traffic. “Prison?”
“Yeah.” Blake peers through one of those diamond panes. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t notice what is second nature for me—I instantly count the chairs and tables inside as if I’m gonna have to shift them from one high-rise to another.
This place really is bougie—none of the chairs or tables match each other. Blake describes kids who weren’t standard-issue either.
“Adey worked with youth offenders at a pupil referral unit.” I’ve got so many questions.
I’m silenced by him adding, “Some of those kids could barely read or write when he got them. Thought they had no future. He told them they could go places and made them believe it. Took them out in the wilds and helped them find their way back.” He snorts, although it doesn’t sound too happy. “You’ve seen his maps, right?”
The windowpanes reflect Dair shaking his head, but I can guess which maps Blake means. I’ve seen them snaking up Adey’s forearms. “You mean his tattoos?”
“Yeah. They’re topographic. Show the highs and lows of each journey he made with a tough nut to crack before he got them back to a real classroom. Believe me, I know the type of kids who didn’t. Taught too many of them how to saddle a horse and hold a sword only for them to end up as cannon fod—”
He stops speaking, and I see why.
Adey drifts close to the window, absorbed in collecting empty cups and glasses from those mismatched tables until he looks up to find all three of us watching.
No.
He just sees Blake, and these two magnets don’t repel each other.
They attract.
Strongly, I’d say, given how quickly Blake reacts when I suggest, “How about you go in and order for us? We’ll wait out here.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that right now.” He faces Dair. “What do you want?”
“Me?” Dair looks panicked, his white lie come home to roost. “Uh…” He peers through the window at a hand-chalked menu above the counter.
It’s covered in so many options. I don’t need to read any of them—my usual order is plain and simple.
“I’ll have an Americano. No sugar,” and Dair jumps on that suggestion.
“Same.”
I pull out my wallet, which Blake waves off, already heading inside.
Dair waits for the door to close before murmuring a teasing, “Thought you said you weren’t cut out for leading.”
“I’m not.”
“And yet, look who just got a soldier to follow his orders.” His teasing tone drops. “You’re so smart, Vincent.”
I’m not that person either.
Not even a little. Just ask any of my teachers.
This evening, Dair sounds so convinced I could almost believe him.