Chapter 20
TWENTY
Aidan
Ludo stays over. We eat dinner, unfold the sofa bed, and persuade Bella to abandon her stare-down with the cat who’s not my cat and join us.
“She left a nose print on the glass,” Ludo says, voice heavy.
He’s almost asleep, curled against me, naked except for his underwear. I run a hand through his messy hair. “So? I haven’t cleaned those windows, like, ever. One nose print isn’t going to make much difference.”
“Your cat needs a name.”
I can’t see how my dirty windows are connected to the nameless cat that doesn’t belong to me, but Ludo fades out before he can tell me.
Damn.
I spend the next two hours staring at him, missing him, but terrified of waking him up.
And of . . . other things. I’ve never been a good sleeper, but since the accident, I’m lucky if I get more than a few hours at a time.
Dreams, if you can call them that. Somehow, I seem to think more when I’m asleep than awake, and I hate it, especially when I wake up shouting, and I don’t want to do that when Ludo’s here.
Lucky for me, passing the time is easy with him pressed against me.
I relive the shower scene a hundred times and then the replay in the bedroom before we had a chance to get our clothes back on.
Ludo is . . . fuck, I don’t have the words.
I’ve been attracted to him from day one, but I didn’t realise how much until today, when his electric mouth blasted every emotion from me but want.
For those blissful minutes, I wasn’t worried about his state of mind, my leg, or where the fuck my life is going.
I wasn’t worried about anything except how I’d feel when his lips were no longer fused around my cock.
And it wasn’t weird after, either. We cooked and ate like we always do, and it felt as if we’d hooked up in the bathroom a thousand times already.
Goddamn.
Heat rattles through me at the mere thought of it. My body cries out for me to roll Ludo over and wake him up, but I don’t move. It’s been a perfect day, I don’t need nothing else.
Ludo
I’ve woken in enough strange beds to not be unduly alarmed when I open my eyes to Aidan’s living room ceiling. The fact that Bella is close by—standing over me, actually, jowls dripping with water from the bowl Aidan put out for her—helps.
It’s still dark. I suck in a breath and sit up, searching out Aidan. He’s next to me, but he doesn’t look as peaceful as I feel. His jaw is tight, his brow scrunched. Wherever his dreams have taken him, he’s not enjoying it.
I’m familiar with nightmares, drug-induced and real, and I can recall every time a well-meaning nurse has roused me from one.
It doesn’t help. Dreams visit you for a reason.
Checking out early only prolongs the disquiet.
The what ifs. So I don’t wake Aidan. I leave him alone and slip from the bed to take Bella out for a wee.
Aidan’s cat—and it’s definitely his cat—is waiting on the doorstep. He slinks past me and I let him. I’ll feed him when I get back.
A quick turn around the block sorts Bella out. We slip back through the door I’ve left on the latch and I shut it with a quiet click.
But I’m not quiet enough. I turn around and Aidan is awake, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide, shoulders moving a fraction too fast. Despite my best intentions, I’ve woken him from wherever it was he didn’t want to be.
Bella chases the cat into the kitchen, determined to lick him from nose to tail. The cat is fast, though, and more agile than Bella with her clumsy retriever paws. He makes it to the counter in seconds, leaving me to focus on Aidan.
I toe my shoes off and crawl onto the sofa bed. Straddling Aidan is easy. Facing the uncertainty in his eyes is harder, so I don’t. I kiss him instead, absorbing his surprised inhale. Then I hug him tight because I don’t like it when he’s upset.
Aidan hugs me back, his arms vice-like around me. Then he pulls back with a tired half-grin. “I thought you’d left me.”
“Never. I took Bella out so she didn’t take a leak on your carpet. Maurice came in when we left.”
“Who?”
“Maurice. Your cat. And don’t look at me like that. I gave you every opportunity to give him an Aidan name.”
“The fuck is an Aidan name?”
“Like, Butch or something. I heard you calling him Tyson the other day when he was trying to kill you.”
“We were boxing. And I won.”
“You never win with cats.”
Aidan blinks as though the sharp banter has distracted him from being awake and he’s only just noticed. “I can’t call him Maurice.”
“Why not?”
“That was my dad’s name.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“No.”
“I don’t like mine either.” I climb off Aidan and flop onto my back.
He follows me, rolling, so he’s leaning over me. “Do you speak to him?”
“I don’t speak to anyone except you.”
“What about before me? We haven’t known each other very long.”
Doesn’t feel that way, but I think he knows that already. Perhaps I’ve told him—I can’t remember. “I haven’t spoken to my parents for years. They don’t understand my bipolar. It embarrasses them. They wish I was like my cousin.”
“You’ve talked about your cousin before.”
“Angelo?”
“Yeah. Don’t you speak to him either?”
“No.” A dark cloud I’m usually adept at dodging threatens the glow I woke up with. “My parents fell out with his parents when we were kids and I never saw him again.”
“You never tracked him down? It’s not hard to find people these days.”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Why not?”
I draw blood from my bottom lip. “By the time social media took over the world, I was knee-deep in a crisis I’ve never escaped from.
There’s never been a right time to rock up in his life, and I’m not sure I want to.
He’s probably living the high life in New York or Paris, and here I am freaking out that there’s an odd number of cushions on your couch. ”
Aidan sighs, deep and long. “There’s more to you than bipolar. And there’s another cushion over there by the window. I put it there for the cat.”
“For Nigel?”
Aidan groans. “I’m not calling the cat Nigel. Why can’t you give him a normal name?”
“Define normal.”
“I thought you already had by isolating yourself from your cousin.”
Touché. “Okay, how about . . . Marcus?”
Aidan shrugs. “I can live with that. Little fucker still ain’t my cat, though.”
Whatever. Aidan can think what he wants, and I’m grateful that he lets me balance tough conversations with banter. It makes them last longer, which means I learn more about him. “So . . . both your parents are dead, right?”
“Yup.”
“No siblings?”
“Nope.”
“How old were you when your mum died?”
“Six.”
Aidan’s hair is hanging over his face. I tuck it behind his ears. “So you remember her?”
“‘Course I do.” He starts to move away but seems to catch himself, as if running from this conversation is a constant bad habit.
Maybe it is.
He starts over. “I do remember her, but not as much as I want to, and it gets harder over time.”
I glance around his utilitarian bedsit. “Do you have any photos of her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My dad left them in the garage and it got flooded. We lost them all, and pretty much anything else that mattered, but that was my dad all over, useless fucker.”
“What was so bad about him?”
Aidan shrugs. “He was a raging pisshead who didn’t give a fuck about me or anyone else. I spent my whole life hating him, not realising I was well on my way to becoming him.”
He’s wrong, of course, because Aidan does care about people and lots of other things.
He cares about me, about trees and saving the planet, and about the old man upstairs who can’t get to the shops.
Not to mention Marcus the cat. But Aidan isn’t a man who can be told who he is, so I kiss him again and let it go.