Chapter Seventeen #2
had so upset Mrs Alvarez with the implied insult to her powers that
he'd had to back out, apologising. She was a nice woman but she had
no time to talk, and Sasha had only succeeded in embarrassing her
with his efforts at conversational Spanish. That was okay. He had
enough to fill his days, if he paced himself carefully. Soon he
would overcome his street-dweller's horror at the thought of
blowing nearly eighty dollars on cab fare—Laurie had left five
times that amount in his wallet, warning him jokingly that Devlin
Steele's other half had better not be seen on the bus—and give
himself a day in Los Angeles. Normally he couldn't wait to unpack
the treasures of a new city, would drag Laurie round from museum to
cultural attraction until he begged for mercy. It ought to be
easier, more fun, if he was on his own.
It
wouldn't. It would be flat, meaningless, boring. Sasha completed
his quota of lengths and scrambled out of the pool. He towelled
himself down vigorously, trying to blot the unwanted thoughts away
too. He had no right to them. Laurie had come home exactly on
schedule every night since that first one, stone-cold sober and
sweetly attentive. He blamed himself for Libby Palermo's sacking
and was having a tough time of it on set, between boredom and his
hostile co-stars. When Sasha suggested he pack it all in, he
recoiled nervily: no, he wouldn't leave. This was it, his
lifetime's chance, and he had to ride it as far as it would
go.
Sasha's
flesh was still reverberant with their collisions of the night
before. Whatever fervour was possessing him, Laurie was taking it
into to the bedroom with him. Last night he had driven himself and
Sasha to exhaustion's brink before he'd been able to come and
deliver them both: once more, Sasha had no complaints, but it was
strange to him. Laurie was a courteous lover, an increasingly
controlled one with the passage of time. Still, he seldom held off
a second longer than manners demanded, his buoyant natural energies
throwing him hard and fast to the peak...
The jacaranda rustled. Just for a second, Sasha didn't look
up. He knew that when he did, Mateo would be standing there, in
almost exactly the same spot where Sasha had first seen him. At
least this time Sasha was wearing his trunks—although these were
the ones Laurie had bought him, and reflecting that he might be
better off frankly naked, he gathered up his towel and tucked it
round his waist. “Buenos dias.”
“Buenos dias.”
“You took a chance in coming back here. Why?”
“Because I never was wrong before, about a man and his
face.”
Now
Sasha did look. Mateo was only a few feet away from him, so much a
part of the sunlight and shadows that he might have been there all
the time. That was part of his talent, Sasha supposed, the reason
he'd stayed under the radar as long as he had. Today he was wearing
a khaki T-shirt as well as his cut-off jeans. In all his time with
Laurie, not only had Sasha never glanced at another boy, he had
never permitted one to glance at him. Not in that way, anyway. He
was off the market. “Thank you. But you ought to take more
care.”
“It wasn't just your face, if I speak truly. I laid low. Four
days passed, and no-one came from immigration to drag me home.” He
beamed, cracking the moment's solemnity. “So, you see. I am
practical. How is your head? You have a bruise.”
Did he?
It must be right in the hairline, or Laurie would have noticed.
Probing with his fingers, Sasha found the tender place. “It's fine.
So, have you come back to pick leaves out of the pool,
or...”
“No. To let you finish what you were saying, about where you
work and what you do. And... to ask you something too.”
Sasha swallowed nervously. The boy was taking him in with
warm-eyed appreciation. “You'd better do the asking first, if
that's okay.” Then I can say no and get it
out of the way. “It's just
that...”
“Are you all right here? You're not being held against your
will?”
Sasha
lost a breath. Then he burst out laughing—at himself, his ego, at
the Hollywood atmosphere that could possibly have induced such a
fear. “What? Of course I'm not. My boyfriend's working in LA,
that's all, and I don't have a job yet, so I'm at home.”
“All right. Good.”
“What on earth made you think that?”
Mateo
hesitated. “I will show you. Are you good at climbing?”
Sasha
was very good. He'd climbed over detainment-centre walls, up the
sides of container ships, into and out of rubbish skips. He didn't
want to think about any of that. Nevertheless the skills were
there, and when Mateo held back the foliage from a low branch of
the jacaranda, he took hold of it.
“That will catch.”
“What will?”
“Your towel. Better leave it behind.” Before Sasha could react,
Mateo had reached out and tugged the knot undone. “There. Now,
apart from the colour of your Speedos, you can blend in too. Your
skin is like mine, only... as if someone threw a handful of dust
over your brown. Look.”
He held
out an arm. Reluctantly Sasha extended his own. Yes, it was like
honey beside sandstone, a New World sunshine tan beside the shade
of old Europe. They were both well-camouflaged animals. Sasha
withdrew. He had no business comparing skin tones with the pool
boy, let alone climbing up trees in his own yard. “You know, I do
live here. We can go around the front for you to show me whatever
this is.”
“This way is easier. Go on.”
The bark
was smooth and slightly damp from the overnight dew. Sasha slipped,
and caught himself with a catlike movement that made Mateo laugh.
Swathes of blossom swung into Sasha's face. Their perfume was
heady, and by the time he reached the top he was laughing too, a
childish chuckle of pleasure at the game. He stopped himself
sternly. “Well? What am I meant to be looking at?”
“Can you see over the wall now?”
“Yes.”
“Wait. I will come up and join you.”
Sasha
wasn't sure the branches would hold both of them, but Mateo
scrambled up quickly as a lynx, for all his solid muscle. He took a
cautious look around, then leaned his shoulder close to Sasha's.
“How does it feel to be up here?”
“I feel like an idiot. God help me if
the gardener turns up early.”
“But look at the view.”
Sasha
hung on tight to the tiles. From here, the canyon opened out onto
miles of rolling sage-scrub hills, green and ochre in the sun.
Beyond their furthest reach there was a sapphire haze. “Wow. Is
that the Pacific?”
“Yes. Finish telling me your job. You work in immigration,
but...”
“With it, not in it. I'm an interpreter, an advocate. I help
refugees enter Britain—legally, although...” Although I didn't get there myself that way.
Sasha bit the confession back. It didn't matter
any more. With Laurie's help and kindly John Kucharski's, he'd
found his path to the right side. “Anyway. I'm not border
patrol.”
“Good. As well as the view, you can see down through all the
gardens from here, and right into the street. This corner here is
where I come into yours, and if you look down there to the
right...”
“No. Don't tell me.” An old excitement stirred in Sasha's gut.
Yes, he'd been prey in an alien land. He'd also had the freedom of
it—all its empty warehouses, derelict flats. Back streets and
allotments where he had worked out a trail for himself, back and
forth, unseen. “I bet it's that gap there, where the neighbour's
wall makes that tight angle with the one leading down from that
roof. And then... Beyond that, you come in through those bushes,
across the top of the garage.”
Mateo shifted uneasily. Then he gave a rich cackle of delight.
“Dios mío! You
are un mojado.”
“A wet... Oh, a wetback? I'm bloody not, you know. You should
have seen the paperwork I had to fill in to get here. And that was
with all the help I got from Laurie's job.”
“Is that his name? Laurie?”
“Yes.”
“It is very beautiful.”
It was.
To Sasha it was the most beautiful name in the world, and he was
instantly sorry he'd revealed it. He didn't understand Laurie's
fears, the nature of that shark in the pool, but he owed him
discretion. “None of this explains why you thought I was locked up
here like Rapunzel in her tower.”
“Look at the street. You see that car, the silver Camry? It's
always there—that, or one other, a black Altima.”
“Well, they live here, probably.”
“There's always somebody behind the wheel.”
Sasha
narrowed his eyes against the sun. Yes—he could see a faint outline
in the driver's seat. “Private detectives?” he suggested
uncertainly. “I might have been watching too much daytime TV, but
don't they stake out people's houses in divorce cases?”
“You notice a lot when you don't want to be noticed. I thought
they were after me, but these ones always park so they can watch
the front door of your house.”
Insane
possibilities danced through Sasha's mind. Laurie, in the grip of
his Hollywood fever, had somehow witnessed—hidden camera?—Sasha's
first encounter with Mateo, and was filing for divorce. Sasha
grinned at his own stupidity. “Okay. That's weird, I admit. But
whatever they're here for, it can't be me. Laurie's the superstar,
not...”
He shut up. What was the matter with him today? Tiredness,
maybe, a hangover from a broken night—even after Laurie's long,
sweet ploughing of his flesh, Sasha had known he would dream, and
one advantage of this massive house was a basement bedroom to which
he could decamp and wake up howling in peace. Oh, it half-killed
him to put himself beyond Laurie's reach, but he'd seen the
helpless worry in his lover's eyes, the questions, the fear that
five thousand miles and no more London
rain had not been enough...
“Your boyfriend is Laurie Fitzroy. Devlin in the new
Blood Moon movie.”
Shit. “Yes, but he doesn't like
people to know. I shouldn't have said—”
“Calm down. I have picked leaves out of pools for many
superstars. Besides, I am in a tree talking to you, not Devlin
from Blood Moon.”