Chapter Seven Marching Orders
Chapter seven
Marching Orders
So… yeah.
The whole tampering-with-his-own-car thing?
Massive fail.
Not only had Nathan been guarded as hell, but Reece had shown up like the universe’s idea of a cruel joke. Leather-clad, smug, and far too handsy and Freddie left feeling exactly how Nathan had always made him feel: as if the ground could vanish at any second.
He’d driven home in silence, the Peugeot purring like a dream now. Ironic, considering how broken he felt behind the wheel.
The rest of the day was a write-off. He slumped on the sofa, filled the room with the background noise of some god-awful daytime telly, and stuffed himself with crisps and half a leftover pizza he probably should’ve thrown out two days ago. Anything to avoid thinking too hard. Or feeling too much.
The call from Piper came around three.
“Can you grab Tilly from school? Ryan’s screaming again, and I’ve aged seven years since breakfast.”
He’d considered saying no. For the drama of it.
But in the end, he grumbled a yeah fine and got back behind the wheel.
At least the school run gave him something resembling purpose.
And as he drove past the secondary school, he noticed a couple of teenage lads loitering by the gates, hoodies up, throwing side-eyes at a teacher on duty.
One of them he recognised immediately. Tall, wiry, lip pierced and cocky.
Kye something. He was on the Radley case radar.
Hanging out near the school violated his informal bail.
And the other? He was ninety percent sure it was the same boy Alfie Carter had laid out during the skatepark incident.
Different hoodie, same strut. Same bruised ego in the shape of a fading black eye.
Freddie pulled over to clock it. Didn’t approach.
No grounds for it. But he noted the time, took a sneaky snap on his phone through the wing mirror, and filed it away for later.
The case was going to explode at some point, and when he then saw Alfie Carter meander out of the gates and approached by them, Freddie had a bad feeling Alfie was already tangled in it or well on his way.
But he filed it for later, then drove on to get Tilly from the juniors and took her home without incident.
There, he let her style his hair with unicorn clips while Piper took a nap and Ryan screamed bloody murder in the next room.
He stayed long enough to calm the baby and help his sister pretend she wasn’t hanging on by a thread, then slunk back to his own place before he could feel too useful.
That night? Two beers. Half a six-pack of mini rolls.
Netflix turned up too loud on some comedy series he’d watched way too many times that it couldn’t even bring a smile.
His phone buzzed a few times on the arm of the sofa.
Jude’s name lighting up the screen. But Freddie didn’t have the energy. Or the nerve.
They hadn’t labelled anything, not really.
No expectations, no claims. Which technically meant he wasn’t ghosting him.
Still… it felt off. Wrong. Not him . Freddie wasn’t the type to vanish when things got murky.
He was honest to a fault. Sometimes to the point of pushing people away.
And yet here he was, dodging messages and pretending he had nothing to explain.
Maybe because what really got under his skin that afternoon wasn’t Nathan.
It was Reece .
Reece had known what they were from the start.
Sex. No strings. And for a while, it worked.
Easy, physical, uncomplicated. They even tried nudging it into something more once, after too many cocktails and an all-day shag-a-thon that blurred the lines.
That was when Freddie, wrecked and a little too honest, had told him about Nathan.
He hadn’t meant to. But the name had slipped out in the quiet, in that post-orgasm haze where the truth always came too easy and after Reece had asked about the photo he kept on his bookshelf of the two of them under the pier when they were eighteen.
And fair play to him, he’d taken it on the chin.
Said it was fine. They could keep things casual.
He was going through some unrequited shit, anyway.
But Freddie couldn’t continue the Reece fuck fests after that .
Not after crying about Nathan into his chest like a bloody idiot.
So yeah. Seeing him there today, swaggering into the garage, handsy and smirking like nothing had changed? It had been a disaster. A full-body reminder of a chapter he never should’ve opened again. One that had already read Nathan Carter across every damn line.
Tuesday wasn’t much better.
He stayed in bed too long, ignored three emails from work, and only dragged himself out for a guilt-fuelled five-mile run along the seafront.
The April wind bit his cheeks, but he welcomed the sting.
Punishment, maybe. Or distraction. He followed it up with a gruelling session at the gym.
Deadlifts. Squats. Anything that made his muscles burn.
Training for the five-a-side match. That’s what he told himself.
Staying strong. Staying fit.
But he knew better.
He wasn’t chasing fitness.
He was running in circles. Burning up the road and throwing weights around as if that might somehow lift the one crushing him from the inside out.
But it didn’t.
Nathan Carter was still in his head, no matter how far he pushed his feet into the pavement… or how much weight he tried to lift off his shoulders.
Fifteen years ago…
Sat hunched over his desk, Freddie pretended to focus on his Sports Studies coursework, but failed miserably. He kept checking the glowing MSN Messenger window in the corner of his old Dell monitor and his essay sat half- finished, cursor blinking. Like it knew he wasn’t really paying attention.
He wasn’t.
He was waiting.
Waiting for N8 (football icon) to come online.
The screen name Nathan had set up years ago during one of their IT classes and never changed.
Still had the same dumb arse status too: too tired to care, too wired to sleep.
But MSN had become their version of flirting.
Never in texts. Not on the phone. Someone might see that.
Only here, in the safety of green and orange icons and stolen moments between “seen” and silence.
Freddie clicked open the chat box, fingers poised, heart already too fast for no good reason.
He never messaged first. That was part of the unspoken thing they had.
This dance they were still figuring out the steps to.
Freddie had to let Nathan come to him. And he was as impatient waiting for that as he was a dial up connection to load the bloody thing.
Music played low through his tinny speakers.
Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys, a burned LimeWire mix.
And he tapped his pen on a battered Nike pencil case, trying not to look as if he was waiting for a ghost to appear.
He knew Nathan wasn’t at school or the computer lab in the library, meaning he had no access to internet right then. Still, he waited.
Waited for N8-football icon.
He was always waiting for Nathan.
A knock came at the door.
“What?” he called out, not looking up. Probably Piper wanting to borrow his old maths notes again. Or Mum, angling for a tenner from his TGI Fridays wages so she could invest in some pyramid scheme.
The door creaked open .
It wasn’t either of them.
Freddie swivelled in his chair, the half-written sentence on his screen instantly forgotten.
Because there he was. In the flesh. Nathan.
Filling the doorway as if he didn’t know how to be looked at.
Shoulders slouched, jeans grease-stained and clinging in all the right places, with that same navy hoodie, half-zipped and hanging crooked, sleeves pushed up, barely covering the white grease-stained vest hugging his chest beneath.
Christ. He looked unreal .
Freddie’s mouth went dry. Every inch of Nathan Carter, every careless, gorgeous, too-big-for-this-town inch , was unfairly hot and Freddie was stupidly grateful for the thick cloud of Lynx Africa still clinging to the room from his post-football spray-and-pray.
Because if he was gonna melt into a hormonal puddle, he might as well smell halfway decent doing it.
“Hey.” Freddie cocked his head. “Thought you were working late at the garage?”
“Yeah… I was.” Nathan wasn’t looking at him, and it was unnerving.
But he stepped inside, running a hand over his buzzed back and sides, then crossed the room and flopped onto the edge of Freddie’s narrow single bed as if someone had cut the strings holding him up.
His elbows hit his knees, and his head fell into his hands.
Freddie spun the chair all the way around, frowning as he watched him and rocked the chair from side to side. “Your old man again?”
No answer.
Freddie dragged his chair forward, the wheels snagging on the lumpy carpet and god-knows-what littering his bedroom floor—schoolbooks, socks, a half-eaten bag of Wotsits, and the open box of Tangle No More: Aromatherapy Hairbrushes – Limited Launch!
His mum’s latest invention. Half the brushes were leaking essential oil and had left oily flower-shaped blotches on the carpet.
One had lavender sprigs duct-taped to the handle.
He gave the box a shove with his foot. “Don’t ask,” he said after Nathan’s eyebrow arch, before giving up on the chair completely and standing, stepping over a rogue mug emblazoned with Revision = Precision , and dropped into a crouch in front of Nathan.
He nudged his knee gently with his own, trying to coax a reaction.
“Want me to go book in a fake MOT again? Wind your dad up proper?”
A ghost of a smile lifted Nathan’s mouth, but it didn’t quite land.
He shook his head.
“So what’s up?”
Nathan’s face pinched.
“Your dad’s a prick. Tell him you’re taking a year out after exams and we’re going to Ibiza whether he likes it or not.”