Chapter 6
6
JOE
For a third time, Isaac shoves a hand through his hair. And again, all I want to do is unsnarl him. Instead, I finish what started in a hallway outside his brother’s bedroom the last time I made a home visit.
“You made a move. On me, Isaac. I always understood why. You were stressed to the max about what might happen in court the next morning.” I swallow and make myself continue. “I don’t work in the same support role anymore, but back then, that’s what I was—Lenny’s support person. And your liaison with the services to help him. Anyone looking in from the outside at what almost happened?” I shake my head. “They would have seen me taking advantage. Not due to your age. There aren’t that many years between us. I mean it would look like me taking advantage of someone relying on me to stay professional.”
“Only if you’d said yes.”
Isaac looks away, colour rising, and he’s always been a looker but this much pink under gold is a lot. So is him giving me a short, sharp reminder that bravery runs bone-deep through him. He meets my eyes again, his chin lifting, and attraction lands a swift punch to my solar plexus.
He’s so fearless. Forget that solo panic party in a bathroom. Look at how fast he recovered.That resilience gets me right in the gut. I’m as winded now as the first time he looked at me like I was someone he’d willingly choose as a partner instead of as an ugly lifebelt to cling to. This gaze is as fierce as I remember him being about his brother, a growling panther trapped in that shadowed amber. “You didn’t say yes, did you, Joe? You told me no. I dealt with it.”
“You know why I turned you down, yeah? Because you can’t think that I wasn’t—” I stop myself from finishing that sentence with what would have been a career-ending interested or tempted back then. I abandon that to ask a different question. “You know what a power imbalance is?”
He nods, hand still in his hair. Resisting the urge to ease it free is tough, especially when his knuckles whiten, but I have to make sure that he hears me this time. It can’t have sunk in the first time I told him this.
“I had parents on my caseload who couldn’t ever put their kids first. Who wouldn’t. You did that and more to make Lenny’s life continue almost like normal when your own… It ended, Isaac. You’d made a life. Had a future out of Wintergreen. A job in a bookshop. Friends at uni. Did they stick around when you became a de facto dad with zero warning?”
He doesn’t answer and avoids my gaze. I wait until he resumes eye contact, then I shake my head with him watching.
“I knew you were on your own. Saw that almost daily in the run up to the hearing. She should have been bailed way ahead of that, not made to wait for months. That was a long time for stress to build up, and you definitely didn’t want a kiss for luck from me the evening before that long wait should have ended.” I lower my voice but go ahead and vocalise what he’d really put on offer. “Or for me to stay past Lenny’s bedtime to fuck you through your mattress.”
I’ve pictured how that scene could have played out, imagined Isaac sprawled across sheets with me balls deep in him and with my hand over his mouth so as not to wake his brother. My imagination has fucked him against every wall of that shitty emergency accommodation. I’ve done him fast, then slow and careful, in my imagination. Banged him on his knees behind the locked door of his bathroom, and just like each time my brain took me on that wishful-thinking journey all alone in my own bed with my cock hard and aching, this aches even harder.
“Mate, you didn’t want me.”
Isaac looks about to say something. I keep going before he can, because after today, I won’t get a chance to make sure he really hears this from me.
“Take a look at you.” He’s shaded by that willow. I’m lit by bright and brilliant Cornish sunshine, and if that didn’t already spotlight the nightmare a stack of bad decisions toppled over to leave me wearing, I push up my sleeves to add grim punctuation. “Then take a look at me. Believe me, this is barely the tip of an even uglier iceberg.” He has to know that after last night, and I die a little at what the full moon must have shown him. This is as rough as damp beach sand. As gritty. “You didn’t want this, or me.”
This is what he’d really needed.
“You wanted to stop thinking. I don’t blame you for that. I wouldn’t blame anyone in your situation for wanting to fuck reality away for a while. Want to know who I would blame?”
Isaac almost sighs, “I get it. I get it. You’ve said enough.”
I haven’t, so I state it plainly.
“I’d blame the one and only person you had left to lean on. The professional who was meant to help but who actually took advantage of someone in their lowest moment. Me not taking you up on that offer? Easiest decision ever.” It was also the hardest. I tell him what I couldn’t say when I was responsible for his brother’s welfare. “Not because I wasn’t tempted by the offer or interested in you. Strong men have always done it for me.”
Isaac blinks, hand slipping from hair I want to neaten so he can impress the headmaster of this posh school. That’s another challenge he’ll have to face with no one to lean on.
Without me.
This could be the last time I’ll see him.
I need to make sure I’m as clear as today’s sunshine.
“You see the conflict of interest, yeah? The imbalance? Because even if I kidded myself that scars did it for you, what you needed that night couldn’t happen. Not when I had to stay objective.”
He nods, slowly at first, then faster, and I’d cheer at this repeat glimpse of the old softness he used to aim at me if I didn’t need to get the car back to my brother.
I have to settle for ending this long-overdue conversation. “The timing was shit. Me passing Lenny on to another officer was the only course of action open to me. Safeguarding, yeah? I had to log it. Had to withdraw so that someone who wasn’t as conflicted as me could keep Lenny’s best interests at heart.”
“You were conflicted?”
I can’t keep in this dry chuff of laughter. “You’re kidding, right? Of course I fucking was. Kinda hoped we’d get to talk about why once your mum was home and settled. Can’t lie. I wanted to see you.”
Isaac’s eyes are suddenly glossy out of nowhere, and yeah, strong men do it for me, but like earlier, this chink in his armour gets to me so fast that I’m raspy.
“I wanted to see you again, even if just to explain that what you were feeling for me wasn’t real. It was situational, mate. Your stress levels made the idea of not thinking for a while attractive. Made me attractive.” My next chuff of laughter shouldn’t have rough edges. I choke on them, then choke even more on admitting, “The minute it was over, you would have wondered what the hell you’d been thinking.”
I tug at the cuffs of my jacket and shove my hands deep into my pockets.“More to the point, you’d wonder what kind of dickhead let it happen. But I never got to explain, just like I never expected your mum to stay on remand. I thought she’d be bailed. Thought that those bullshit charges would be dropped. That’s why I wrote what I did inside the book I asked Lenny’s new support worker to pass on to him. You read my inscription?”
“Yeah. ‘See you soon.’” Isaac looks away from me again, and I hate that he’s as bruised now as the night I walked away from a sexually charged bomb I couldn’t let detonate when his life was already rubble.
“I only wrote that because I thought I would see him soon. And you. After everything was settled.” I scrub at my face, hiding from this. “Thought I’d pay you a visit later to see if…”
You actually did want me.
I can’t voice that, so I move on. “Then I asked myself what we’d have in common apart from your brother. What did you actually know about me?”
He doesn’t answer.
I do it for him.
“Nothing, Isaac. You didn’t know anything about me because our relationship wasn’t personal. It was professional, yeah?” I chance a smile even though he’s back to the icy of our early meetings. I don’t mean that he’s cold. This is the same caught-in-headlights frozen as the very first time I met him. “I hope you always knew that I truly believed your mum would get released before trial. Everyone involved with the case knew it was a case of cuckooing by whoever brought drugs into her home.”
“How do you know that?”
“Contacts.” I regret breaking that no-talking-shop rule with Josh. He’s been like a dog with a bone ever since. “Call it me having local knowledge.” I tug at my cuffs one more time. “Or call it an educated guess based on experience. The minute the cops had more proof, I was sure she’d be home and you’d be living your best life at uni in Brighton. But when that didn’t happen and everything went tits up, it was too late for me to backtrack.”
A bell rings, break time over, and the playground beyond this car park empties of children.
“The headmaster said you should go upstairs and see him when you’re ready.” I have to add, “I knew Lenny was in safe hands. Yours. But I couldn’t help wondering how you were doing.”
All da Silva men have deep voices. Mine pitches even lower as I get honest.
“I couldn’t stay around to find out. You wanted something I couldn’t give you. Ask me today, and you’d get a completely different answer.”
I don’t know when we drifted together. He’s as close now as the one and only time I almost got unprofessional.Today, I don’t need to make excuses. “Like you asking for a kiss for luck. You still think you need some?”
Maybe he doesn’t. Isaac backing off suggests so, and I’d think he was about to walk away like I once did if all of that pink under gold didn’t deepen on his cheeks.
He backs through a curtain of willow branches.
The last thing I see before that curtain closes is his nod, and I do what I wanted to last time.
I push willow branches aside and follow.
We’re both shadowed in this sheltered spot hidden from the school and car park. Isaac is splintered by sunshine passing through thin leaves, fractured somehow, even with his chin lifted and his eyes narrowed. Slivers of light show him nodding again, so I give him what he once asked for.
I always regretted not getting to do this. Today, I brush a kiss to his cheek, to his jaw, and my mouth grazes his ear. “Sure?” I slide my mouth slightly lower. Beneath my lips, a pulse hammers so fast I can’t help pausing.
Isaac doesn’t.
He shifts, turning so our mouths meet, and it’s everything I wondered. Everything I wanted.
His lips are soft but closed, and thank fuck he backed into this spot hidden from view—his mouth opens, and I wouldn’t have cared if the whole world watched us.
Our tongues touch, and I know a countdown has only paused on him opening a storybook to score his spot here, but this slick slide feels like finally getting to turn a last few pages of my own.
Isaac lets out a small, soul-deep sound suggesting he’s also wondered how we’d fit together.
Fucking perfectly is the answer. For me, at least.
For him too, I guess when that sound rumbles through him again and he tugs me closer.
I don’t fight this unprofessional pull, this chest-to-chest contact that I wouldn’t let happen if his brother were still mine to shield and shelter. Right now, I don’t do much thinking at all, apart from wishing we had time for more than kissing. I’d be on my knees in a heartbeat for him.
I’ve never wanted to get my mouth on anyone more,to know if this is getting him as hard as me. I’d help him get there and then get him off if there weren’t only leaves between us and a school building.
This doesn’t feel like settling for less.
We kiss, and Isaac’s tongue in my mouth is one intense connection, but getting to run a hand through his hair and finally smooth that wildness scratches a caretaking itch I didn’t know I had until him. Today my combing fingers snag, which should hurt, and I had thought he already let out a couple of soul-deep sounds in the shelter of this willow.
I was wrong.
Isaac’s next groan pulls from someplace deeper. Don’t ask me why that is a heavy finger on a trigger, or which switch gets flipped on a connection I’d convinced myself was one-sided. All I know is that Isaac curls a hand around the one I have in his hair, and that tightening hold tells me that my grip does something for him. Just like that, our kiss is rougher—wetter—a full round in a ring that leaves both of us panting. We cling like evenly matched fighters who need each other to stay upright.
If I ever spent nights alone in bed wondering what it would have been like to fuck him, this is a clue that he’d go all in. So is the way his hands lower to grasp my arse only to let go abruptly.
It takes me longer than him to register that a second bell rings. Or that his mouth is damp and reddened when he rasps, “I gotta go.”
I rasp too. “Let them help you. Accept a bed for the night. Tell your story tomorrow or whenever they say. Pretty sure it doesn’t matter what story you pick to read out. I bet you could even read out whatever Lenny scribbled in that scrapbook, and they’d say yes.”
He’s silent.
Gorgeous.
Still too fucking worried.
“You’ve got this.” I smooth my own hair while making a promise I hope to fuck Luke Lawson keeps for me. “He wants you.” So do I, but I part willow branches for Isaac to pass through, then I crunch across gravel towards my vehicle.
I almost reach it.
“Joe?”
Isaac is still beside that tree, still as tense as the night I left him. “You used to wonder about what happened to us? About how we were doing?” His touch to his lips looks involuntary. “About how I was doing?”
I’ve been asked plenty of tough questions. These are so easy to answer.
“Never stopped, mate.”
His gaze flicks up to a now-empty upstairs window, but his voice lowers. “You’re in Cornwall until tomorrow?”
I should head home right now like Josh wanted, but I can’t help nodding. “I could be.” There is room at the pub for me.
My heart breaks at Isaac sounding this disbelieving. “And you… you really vouched for me? Told them I was a safe pair of hands?”
I nod again.
There are cars between us now. Shadows cast by more trees. I can still see Isaac clearly enough to watch his shoulders bow the same way as when I told him he was his brother’s one and only option to stay out of the care system. And I get to see them straighten when he comes to a second quick decision about keeping someone.
Me.
“If you really want to know what happened to us, you could come back and listen.”