Chapter 10 #2
“Yeah. At the V&A.”
“The museum?” He must know it—he looks in the right direction for its Cromwell Street location.
“Yeah. Thought we might find more style and pattern matches there for your china inventory. I invited the Exes to come help look. But maybe not, if you wearing that jacket means you don’t actually have the day off.”
Dair winces. “I did score another shift, because…” He points up, no need to remind me what still hangs over his head. “But not until later.” He touches the back of the armchair and quickly adds, “I’ve got time to come with you. And to take these back, if you can’t use them.”
He stands outside a home Flynn wanted me to make look impressive for him.
There’s nothing impressive about this armchair and footstool covered in faded roses.
As gifts go, I can’t help thinking they’re perfect.
Can already guess how good it will feel to sink into those puffy cushions and rest my plates of meat on that footstool after a long day of lumping furniture around for other people. “I can use them.”
“Really?” Dair digs a tooth into his lip like he isn’t half as certain.
“You don’t have to. They aren’t worth anything.
And look, the stool is damaged.” He nudges it to show me a frayed patch, threads of fabric dangling.
“No one would ever bid on it at auction.” He speaks even faster, and I smother a smile at him getting flustered.
“I probably couldn’t give either of them away on Marketplace. ”
“Wow. You’re really selling them to me.”
He closes his eyes. Huffs. Opens his eyes and starts over. “What I’m trying to say is that they might not look much, but I know how comfortable this chair is. And how hard you work. What do you think?”
I think I fucking love that he’s spent time thinking about me like I’ve been thinking about him. And that he’s associated me with someone special. Even the footstool being scratched to hell, like Kitty has clawed the sofa at home, doesn’t seem like a downside. “Alice had a cat?”
He blinks. “I already told you. One cat and a dog. Mog and Hector.” He pulls out his phone, this time finding a photo of him holding a green-eyed tabby. “Mog’s giving my foster folks hell at home.”
“Alice left her pets to you?”
“For my sins.” His smile looks helpless.
“Did you think Charles was exaggerating?” Dair meets my eyes, nothing hidden.
“She really did leave me everything. Every single thing, right down to the litter box that Mog is staging a dirty protest over using.” He swallows.
“The poor wee thing is only refusing to use it because his routine’s been disrupted again.
Took him forever to stop looking for Alice.
Now he keeps looking for me. The sooner I get home the better. ”
Part of me likes that he’ll have two furry reminders waiting for him in Scotland.
The rest of me regrets making meet-up plans at a museum of all places.
The hint of a sheen I glimpse before Dair looks away makes me think today might not be the day for any more reminders of what else he’ll soon be leaving.
I don’t mean me.
We both knew this connection was temporary. That it always had a time limit even shorter than February’s twenty-eight days. I’m just narked that I didn’t meet him right at the start of the month. Or even sooner. If he’d found me earlier, we would have had more time together.
Even taking him to one of London’s biggest collections of things Alice valued now seems a dick move. Like I’ll be rubbing his nose in the fact that she collected copies instead of anything with real value.
Dair hefts up a footstool he just described as worthless and almost gets past me with it.
I stop him the same way Kev has stopped me so often, by blocking the doorway.
At least this footstool is smaller than a sofa—I can see all of Dair instead of a sliver, so I hope he can see how much I mean this.
“We don’t have to go look at a load of tea sets. I can cancel the meet-up.”
“Don’t.”
He does the opposite of the tug-of-war I usually get into with my cousin.
Dair goes up on tiptoes, leaning in rather than away from me.
His mouth meets mine, there and gone all too quickly, and I step aside.
My lips tingle like they last did in my childhood bedroom while firefighters watched, but from this close, I can’t ignore that his eyes aren’t just sheened.
They’re well on their way to glossy as he passes me and heads inside, his gaze averted.
I heft up an armchair that isn’t only awkward. It’s fucking heavy, and I follow him with it into the living room and huff, “How did you get this here on your own?”
“I didn’t. I had help.”
Dair faces the window, his back turned to me.
I guess so I won’t see a repeat of a battle a bathroom mirror reflected the first week I knew him.
This window does the same reflecting, showing me his quick blinks.
I move even faster to stand behind him, and man, he fits just right with his back to my chest. We’re so close he has to feel my jealous rumble. “Who helped you carry it?”
I want to be that person.
It’s a hell of a time to come to that realisation—to know for certain that I want more time, not less.
Dair tells me, “Your friend,” and a few weeks back, I wouldn’t have jumped to this conclusion.
“Blake?”
“No, the other one. Adey?”
I wouldn’t exactly call Adey a friend. Me and teachers don’t have the best track record, but he is the Ex who Harry asked me to take special care of. “Really? Adey from the coffee shop?”
“The one with the map tattoos?” Dair sketches lines and swirls on his own forearm, still not looking back at me. “He said he was about to go for a run through Hyde Park, but he helped me carry everything here first. I didn’t know he lived in Kensington.”
“He doesn’t. Not even close. But I was hoping he’d turn up at the V&A today instead of keeping his distance. He hasn’t replied in the group chat, so I guess he isn’t coming like Harry wanted. It matters to him.”
“And Harry matters to you.” Dair must have paid attention to me to know that. Now he pays attention to something else. He cranes his neck, still not making eye contact with me. “You could ask him again to come along. He’s still here. Look.”
I do, and Dair’s right. Adey is at the far end of the street, looking to the left and then to the right like he isn’t sure of his next direction. That indecision is familiar. A reminder of me hesitating so many times outside restaurants full of Exes.
This glimpse of Adey doing the same gets me moving. I open the window and lower the tone of this posh postcode.
“Oi, oi!”
Adey turns, and I see exactly what Harry mentioned. Lost is right. I get an even closer look after Adey jogs back to my doorstep, where he shows me what closed off looks like on him as well—his arms cross tightly.
I don’t know how to make him uncross them.
All I got is a dumb-as-fuck question.
“You okay, mate?”
Of course he isn’t okay, even if he denies it.
“Me? I’m fine.” Brown eyes a few shades darker than Dair’s flick to one side, avoiding mine for a split second.
“Never been better.” He’s lying. I know because an interrogation expert told me the signs and signals.
Adey gives me more proof by avoiding my gaze again. “Just fancied a run through Hyde Park.”
I believe that about as much as I believe his choice of place to run through is coincidental. He’s picked the one park Blake always visits to check in on his troopers.
He wants to see him.
Coming to the meet-up would let Adey do that. “Did you see my message about meeting today?”
“I saw it, but I can’t come. Have a good time.”
Adey backs off before I can think of how to convince him. Thank fuck Dair thinks faster than me.
“You’re running through Hyde Park?” He looks up at me, his eyes still a little pink around the edges. “Vincent, isn’t that very close to where we’re going?”
It is, even if what I had planned first was a good long session of testing the comfort of my new armchair with Dair on my lap until his eyes lost their dampness.
That will have to wait. Besides, his eyes have dried now that he has someone right in front of him who needs a bit of the TLC he’s so good at giving.
Dair focusses on Adey like he can feel his pain and wants to cure it.
I grab my jacket and let him work his magic on the way to our destination.
The museum is hardly any distance. “Why maps?” Dair asks as we walk together, even though Blake already told us.
I get to hear all over again about Adey’s first vocation before cappuccinos became his new calling.
By the time we’re opposite a building where tourists queue for entry, I’ve heard all about kids other teachers gave up on and all about the journeys they shared back to classrooms together.
Our own journey stops abruptly.
Adey grinds to a halt opposite the museum’s Cromwell Street entrance, and I see what slammed his brakes on. Blake guards a milling herd of Exes, his arms crossed just as tightly as Adey’s had been outside my place.
I do a quick head count. Almost a dozen men have turned up. That finally gets my mouth working. “Now that you’re here, you might as well come inside with us.”
“No.” Adey backs off. “Sorry. I can’t. I, uh… I’ve got things to do.”
He does the exact same kind of backing away bullshit as I used to, about to isolate himself like I did before I sent an SOS to the wrong chat. After that, Harry wouldn’t give up trying to include me. Dair looks up at me like he thinks I won’t give up on Adey either.
If Kev was here, I know what he’d tell me.
He wouldn’t even have to say a single word to do it.
He’d touch a finger to his lips, only Adey keeps backing away, and I can’t keep my silence.
“Don’t go.”
Adey flicks a look across the street, then backs away even faster, and I see why. Blake is on the move, heading our way, a squadron of nosy fuckers quick marching behind him.
“Wait.” I close the distance between us. “I… I, uh… I wanted to ask you something.”
The traffic chooses now to stop, a sudden lull in London’s perpetual movement that means every Ex gets to cross the road in time to hear me virtually bellow, “About your teaching.”
I must sound desperate for Adey to stop in his tracks.
I’m aware of Dair beside me.
Aware too of a circle of Exes forming around us on this busy pavement, and of Adey drifting back in my direction.
“About my teaching? What did you want to ask about it?”
Right up until this moment, I wouldn’t have said he was the same height as me. Maybe I’m shrunk by the thought of sharing what Kev always told me was no one else’s business.
I’m usually the biggest man in this group.
The broadest.
Someone built to carry heavy shit for other people.
Right now?
I’m a weedy kid having a hot and prickling panic the same way I did in so many classrooms as Adey murmurs, “Go ahead, Vincent. I’m listening.”
Heat flares across my chest and my mouth dries so fast I’m croaky. “I-I wanted to ask how you did it.”
Exes circle.
I’m surrounded.
Trapped.
There’s no running from this. No escape, even without leather reins to hold me in place. I’m more exposed than I know how to handle.
I’m also shielded.
Dair steps in front of me, and we’re back where we started, only now he’s the one doing all the supporting by being a barrier between me and a teacher who asks, “How did I do what, mate?”
I got nothing. No oxygen to suck in, no CO2 to exhale, until Dair reaches back. His hand finds mine and I can gasp, “How did you teach those kids?”
It’s wild that just a few minutes ago, I tucked Dair close to my chest. Even wilder that he looked up to me like I was the one and only person who could solve his problems.
Regrets?
I got so many.
Most of them revolve around how much I’ll miss the way Dair sees me, but when Adey asks, “Which kids?” I have to tell him.
I have to, no matter what Kev always told me.
The pen in my pocket anchors me in place. Or maybe it’s the Brave Boy sticker in my wallet gluing me to this spot to tell my truth in public.
Dair’s hand doesn’t just brush mine. It holds tight, and I find the breath to wheeze out, “The kids who could barely read or write until you taught them.”
Dair squeezes my hand, and I keep going.
“Because since my skull got fractured, I can’t do either.”