Chapter 27
Lando
By the time Harry reaches my room, he’s already missing his shoes and is in the process of discarding yet more of his clothing.
“Your dad’s home,” he says, tossing his Bath Cents hoodie onto my bed.
“Yeah.” I get up from my desk and stand beside him in the middle of the rug. “Did he say anything to you?”
“He looked me up and down, really confused, and said, ‘You’re the ex-boyfriend?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘I hope you’ve come to fix him. He’s been self-destructive without you.’”
“Oh.”
I didn’t think he’d noticed. Or cared.
“And then he told me not to make too much noise.”
I shut my bedroom door, and Harry follows my movement, one eyebrow raised so high it’s lost in his hairline.
“The other day you mentioned you hadn’t had sex since we did in August?” I say.
Now both brows are invisible. “So?”
“We broke things off so you could go and find whatever it was you couldn’t get from me. With Lionel . . . or whoever. You were supposed to sow your wild oats and fuck around and fall in love, but . . .” I can’t seem to get my words out. “I set you free and you haven’t done anyth—”
“Wait.” Harry holds up his palm, and I pause my rambling. “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait . . .”
Eventually he might stop repeating that word. Doesn’t look like it’s about to happen anytime soon, though.
“You? You . . . set me free? You. Set. Me. Free?”
“Harry, we’ve been over this a thousand fucking times. We were never going to work—”
“Shut the fuck up, Lando.”
I do.
“Right, okay, this is what’s gonna happen.
You’re going to go downstairs and get me some snacks and wine—good wine not the shit wine, this isn’t a shit wine moment—and we’re going to stay here and thrash this out until we’re both on the same fucking wavelength, because I’ve been arguing with you in my head for almost a year now and I have a lot to say. ”
“Take a seat, then.” I point to the bed, where his faded-green hoodie hangs half off. For some reason, that makes me smile.
I’ve missed finding random items of his clothing in unexpected places.
I pop down to the kitchen and load up a tray with Harry-coded snacks.
Charcuterie meats and the leftover chicken carcass from yesterday’s Sunday roast, and high-fat, high-sugar products, namely chocolate Rice Krispie Squares and Jaffa Cakes, because I may have stopped by Waitrose on the way back from work today for .
. . emergency reasons, and definitely not because I’ve been thinking about Harry all weekend.
Dad came home this afternoon. His flight from Zurich landed in Bristol at four o’clock, and he’s been holed up in his office since ten to five. The door is wide open, and he glances up from his paperwork as I pass on my way to the wine cellar.
“Don’t worry, I know to only take bottles from the right shelf,” I say out of habit, despite it rarely being the case. Tonight I definitely won’t be choosing a bottle from his value range.
“Orlando?” he calls out, and my innards both panic at being addressed, and prickle with something akin to excitement.
Why? Every time he speaks to me my body simultaneously prepares for the best and the worst, like this could be the moment he tells me he’s proud of me. More than likely, he’s going to scream at me for wasting money on essential Diptyque candles again.
Please sir, may I have a crumb of affection . . .
Wait a minute.
Oh, shit. I think I need to write this down for my therapy session with Lisa next week.
There is a remote possibility, a teeny weeny outside chance my reckless spending, my philandering, my general everything in life is a . . .
A cry for help?
Urgh, I hate this newfound self-awareness.
“Dad?”
He moves out of his office and comes to stand beside me in the grand entrance of Hooke Manor. I instinctively hunch my shoulders, holding the tray between us like a shield.
My father assesses the food, his brow curving into an S shape. “He’s a curious young lad, isn’t he?”
“Harry?”
“Are you fellas working it out, then?” His eyes linger on the exposed chicken bones.
I shrug. Dad hums to himself.
“How’s the job going? Has Vicky given you a title yet?” he asks.
“Vicky? Do you mean Amy?” How does he not remember their names?
“Ah, yes. That’s the one. How are you settling in?”
“Uh . . .” I hate it.
“You realise why I had to do it, don’t you?”
“Well . . .”
“When you’re my age, and in my position, you’ll be grateful you started your career this early. You’ll have built up a nice pension, have a lovely wife, or . . . husband, have a little place in Polzeath, one in Cannes. It’ll all be worth it in the end.”
“What about kids?”
“Exactly. Work hard and you’ll be able to afford the best nannies in the business.” He says it without any trace of irony. Child rearing is a commodity to him.
I guess I should already have known he views me as an investment rather than a living, breathing, needing, feeling human. I force a smile for him. He’s never managed to distinguish between the real and fake ones. Why bother switching things up now?
“You can take a bottle from the middle shelves if you like.” Dad places a hand on my shoulder. “Now, I’ve got an early flight tomorrow morning, so I need to catch up on a few tasks.”
I say nothing to him as he walks away from me, back to his office. This time he shuts the door. I choose two bottles of wine—red for Harry, white for me—and head upstairs again.
Harry’s eyes are like saucers when he catches sight of my offerings. I set the tray down on my desk, and he immediately tears a leg off the chicken.
“So . . .” I say.
“So . . .” he replies.
“What’s this shit you so desperately need to talk to me about?” I pull my chair out from under the desk and sit down.
He deflects the question with another question. “Why did you text me to come over?”
So I do the same. “Why did you like my photo from last year? Why were you looking through them?”
“Why did you unblock me?”
I open my mouth. Close it again. Damn it.
Harry smirks. Smug fucking prick.
“Why haven’t you fucked Lionel? Or anyone else for that matter?
Why have you spent the entire year not doing what you’re supposed to be doing?
You’re twenty-three years old, Harry. You should be out there fucking your way through your legions of adoring fans.
You should be sowing oats and falling in love with dickheads and wasting your youth. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. I realise he’s chewing chicken. “I fell in love with a dickhead once.”
I roll my eyes.
“Okay, do you actually want to hear why I never went on that date with Lionel, and why I haven’t fucked anyone since you?”
I hold my arms open as an invitation for honesty.
“I mean, you already know.”
“Come on. If I already knew, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
Harry tosses the bone onto the plate and tears the other leg off. “You know what’s ironic?”
I can take a pretty good guess at what he’s going to say, so I don’t bother answering.
“That you’re ace and you’ve slept with about twenty thousand people since we broke up, but me, a non-ace person who loves fucking and sex and basically never stops thinking about it, has slept with exactly zero people.”
I’m standing up again. “But why, Harry? I practically handed Lionel to you. I spent weeks chatting to him, drip feeding him ideas about you until he was begging me for your number. You’ve been in love with him since you were sixteen.”
“Maybe,” Harry says, shaking his head. “But people change their minds.” He looks at me pointedly.
I have no clue what point he’s trying to make.
“Fucking hell, Lando! How? How have you made it this far without figuring it out? I didn’t sleep with Lionel or anyone else because they’re not you!
” He’s shouting at me now. “I’m in love with you! Not him! And I know you know that too.”
I did know. I always knew. Still, it doesn’t take me any less by surprise. I stagger over to the bed and drop to the mattress. I miss, and end up sliding onto the floor at the foot.
“You are such a fucking drama queen,” Harry says, taking another bite of chicken.
I guess I deserved that one. “You spent a whole year pissing about with my emotions, making me fall in love with you and pushing me away, and then doing it over and over until I finally had enough. I thought I could quit you once and for all.”
“We would never have worked as a couple, though,” I say, still in my crumpled heap on the rug.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you keep saying, but you never once explained the real reason. You never gave me a chance to prove that I’m not the person you’re frightened I’ll become. I’m different, Lando.”
“But you’re not different!” I yell. “You’re all the same. You only care about one thing.”
He tosses the second bone onto the dish, scrubs his hands on the front of his jean shorts, and grabs both bottles of wine before coming to sit next to me on the carpet.
“I’m not saying I’m different from other guys; I’m saying I’m not the person you’ve convinced yourself I am .
. . or that I’ll become. And I’m not talking about sex either.
Yes, okay, sex is fucking great, but that’s not the real reason you’ve been pushing me away, is it? ”
It takes me a few moments to gather an eloquent enough response. “I beg your finest fuck?”
Despite how pissed off with me he is, he still smiles. Harry opens both bottles with a corkscrew he’d tucked into his back pocket and passes me the white without a glass. I swig it straight from the neck.