Chapter 7
I’m catching up on group-chat gossip the next morning when the doorbell drowns out the audio on my phone and surprises me into dropping a chocolate Hobnob into my teacup. I can’t be too sad about that when I swing the front door open to find the furniture fairy has paid another visit.
I point at what Dair has arrived with this time. “That’s a drop-leaf table.”
Thank fuck Blake isn’t here. He’d say something like No shit, Sherlock.
Harry might smile oh so gently, the trenches of his smile lines deepening.
Dair just laughs, the sound as bright as today’s winter sunshine, which doesn’t only find fire in his hair.
It also hints that spring is right around the corner.
That’s an unexpected reminder of the patch of land where ferns didn’t just curl tight when I poked them. Tulips grew there, planted by a woman who told me they didn’t need to be smart to know when it was their time to flower.
Like those spring bulbs, something dormant inside me sends out shoots, and all because Dair jokes about me being someone special. “Not only a born leader but a furniture expert too.”
“That’s me.” I lean against the doorframe and cross my arms. His gaze lingers on my biceps, which are the sole real qualification I need in my line of work. “Just don’t ask to see any exam certificates to prove it.”
Dair must have really listened during our conversations. “Because you left them in your cousin’s spare room?” His fingertips skim the surface of the table between us. “Or do you keep your exam certificates in a storage unit?”
“I don’t keep them anywhere. I meant you shouldn’t ask to see them because they don’t exist.” I uncross my arms to pick up the table. “I learned on the job, not at school. Couldn’t wait to leave the place.”
“Oh, me too,” he says with feeling that echoes in my hallway once we’re inside. I carry the table into the living room and set it between the chairs he already gave me. It doesn’t match either of them, and I’m okay with that. Like it, even.
“Very bougie.”
“You think so?” Dair dodges around me to lift each leaf.
“There. Alice called this her tea table, so I thought you could use it for...” There’s a drawer beneath the tabletop.
He slides it open, comes out with a coaster, then scoops my teacup on its fancy saucer from the mantelpiece and sets it down. “Your tea!”
He isn’t done with digging in that drawer. This time he comes out with a familiar tube of aloe vera, and I think he’s about to suggest a repeat of what went down in his bathroom.
That could happen—Blake isn’t here to cockblock me today. We’re all alone, and I almost say yes to us picking up from where we left off the last time we were alone together.
Dair speaks up first.
“I wanted to talk to you about something. And to give you this.” He thrusts the tube at me. “To say sorry.”
“For what?”
“For when I…”
His gaze drops to my chest, then lower, and I think he’s about to apologise for shooting spunk all over my belly.
I don’t need an apology for something I’ve replayed plenty. Dair lifting a finger to his eyes and rubbing underneath one clues me into what he thinks he needs to apologise for.
“I got a bit over…”
“Emotional?”
“I’m a soft sod.”
The tube of aloe vera is warm from his hands. So is whatever has sent out springtime shoots in my chest. “You’re allowed to feel sad.” Sad doesn’t seem a strong enough descriptor. “To feel a lot more than sad. Believe me, I’ve felt the same way.”
He’s instantly sympathetic, gaze casting around a room that is still almost empty. “About your ex leaving.”
“Really, Flynn wasn’t my ex. I meant losing someone you were close to.
I get it. You’re feeling a lot about losing your…
” Like before, I struggle. Client doesn’t seem the right word for someone I’ve seen smiling out of photos beside Dair.
“About losing Alice. We talked about this. About you being surrounded by reminders.”
“Like whenever you hear an ice cream van?” Again, he’s sympathetic, and I don’t only hear it.
His eyes are so full of understanding I have to fix my own gaze on something—anything—other than this evidence that he’s as soft as butter.
It lands on the tube of salve in my hands.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “But I had my cousin.”
“Kev?”
“Yeah, and his missus. You got anyone like that in your corner?”
His lips pressing together feels like an untold story.
Or like a room full of a past he isn’t ready to yank dust sheets from in front of a virtual stranger.
And that’s what I am, I guess, even if I’ve had his cock in my hand and his face on my phone screen all week long.
I’m someone he barely knows, and yet it’s me who Dair keeps gifting his possessions.
He wages a silent war for the right words like I’ve done twice already. For once, it’s as easy as pie to find the right ones for him.
“You don’t have to tell me nothing. I’m just saying I know what it’s like to lose with fuck all warning.
” Twice, if I’m honest, although in hindsight, what Flynn did was nothing compared to losing Stacey.
But it had set off the same reaction. “So I know what it’s like to need a bit of human contact.
” I’ll never forget waking up wedged between two muppets.
“Which is all that happened in your bathroom, mate. A little bit of human contact.” I finally get to say what’s been on my mind since it happened. “If anyone should be sorry, it’s me.”
Admitting this feels messy. And needed.
“I told you I don’t want to be another taker, but that’s kinda what I did, yeah?” I eye his latest gifts and regret the promise I made my cousin about taking everything I could from my next client.
I’m gonna have to break it.
“That means you gotta let me give you something for this table.”
Dair is quick to disagree with part of my statement. “You aren’t a taker.”
I’m just as quick to set him straight. “You can’t know that for sure. Not about me or about anybody else you just met.” I say a mental goodbye to something pretty.
Not to Dair.
I’d like to keep him around until he has to hand over his keys, which means I have to do this.
I slide open that drawer and set the tube of salve inside it.
“You keep it and your table. I’ll bring everything else back to your place later.
Your chairs and cups and towels as well.
” It’s way too late for the Hobnobs, plus I’m not an actual angel, even if he looks at me like I’ve sprouted wings and wear a shiny halo.
“Why?”
“Because I’d be taking from someone who might not be in the right place to make decisions. I’m not talking about…” I tap a finger against my noggin, and he fills in my blanks.
“Mental capacity.”
“Yeah.” That legal tactic already crushed him.
There’s no way I’m adding to those bruises.
“Because that’s what a real friend would do instead of”—wanting to finish what we started—“accepting gifts from you. Want to know what that real friend would do?” He nods, and I channel my cousin.
“A real friend would warn you to button your lip instead of making hasty offers. He’d tell you to raise your guard even higher. ”
Does Dair do that?
No, he fucking doesn’t.
He’s in my space before I know it, and I give Kev another reason to put me in a headlock, because when Dair’s head tilts up, mine tilts down.
We kiss, and yeah, it’s over way too fast. I’ll add that regret to my ever-growing tally. But I have to accept that’s a problem all of my own making. I’m the twat who just told Dair not to trust anybody, and he backs off, nodding again as if he finally believes me.
Immediately, he comes back.
He’s up on tiptoes, only this time to deliver a tight hug, and he really is a lot stronger than he looks. I’m breathless when he backs off for a second time.
“You’re not taking, Vincent,” he tells me firmly. “I’m choosing to give.” He heads for the door and slips his shoes on. “So you keep those chairs. And the table, plus everything else. I don’t need them.”
That’s the opposite of him keeping his guard raised. It’s also annoying that by the time I stamp into my own shoes and grab my jacket, he’s outside already.
“Stop.”
That’s another order he doesn’t follow, although he does turn around. Dair walks backwards, his eyebrows raised all while adding distance that I can’t help thinking I’ve created.
That gets me moving faster. I jog to catch up. “Where are you going?”
“Back to work.”
“Another care shift?” He can’t have slept much since his last one ended.
“No. I meant back to work inventorying everything. There’s still so much china to list.” He takes a deep breath, then smiles.
It’s nowhere nearly as bright as the first one he showed me this morning.
“I won’t ask your firm to take it all away for me.
Not when there’s so little money in it.” He reminds me of a weekend plan I don’t remember mentioning but must have.
“Enjoy your haircut.” He sweeps a hand through his own hair, and I speak without thinking.
“Come with me.”
That hand in his hair stills. “To?”
“My cousin’s place. Marilyn could give you a trim too.”
His smile winks out like Blake’s did yesterday evening. “Because I look a mess? I know I’m overdue. I haven’t had time.”
I must have been listening just as hard during our long-distance calls.
He mentioned that big bill hanging over his head enough times to guess it’s the reason why he takes every care shift going.
I meet him on the pavement, close enough to him that no one else hears a hard man like me make a soft confession.
“You look good to me. All I meant was that I don’t want you to walk away yet. ”
This smile?
Abso-fucking-lutely worth it.