7. Bash
7
BASH
There was no easier way to describe the galloping of his heart than the constant, nauseating fear that pulsed through Bash’s veins in the dead of night. These shoes were definitely not made for running in, but it was less hassle than flagging down a taxi when he could quick-foot the distance just the same. The added boiling layer of his coat didn’t help him, either.
He was halfway out of breath and regretting his choice of a burger at the pub when Faye’s flat came into view. Every light glowed at the edges of her windows which meant that she was still awake. He’d kept his phone off of silent mode just in case she called him again, though Faye had no reason to doubt he’d come to her. The only thing that could’ve stopped him was if he wasn’t physically able. Or dead. And even then he still would’ve tried.
He’d been at the pub with old tennis friends when his phone buzzed in his pocket. The ding and sensation were easy enough to ignore, but a tug in his stomach as if that organ knew something which he didn’t made Bash pay attention. When the buzzing didn’t stop, he’d pulled the phone out to find?—
Faye?
Why would she call him at midnight? She never called that late, usually fast asleep by then, what with her early mornings. Bash’s panic went into overdrive and he’d known before he’d answered that he couldn’t ignore her call.
He’d been on his feet and left to run straight to her without thought, only her crumbling words and sniffles on the line playing in his mind.
“She’s my best friend and she called me because she’s scared,” he’d argued against the protest he’d received. “Of course I’m leaving.”
Faye never brought drama to his life. Ever . There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, including legging it rather suspiciously through London after midnight.
For the first time in a long time, he was scared. And he wouldn’t be fine until he saw Faye’s face and held her tightly in his arms.
Bash
I’m almost outside x
He sent the text so she didn’t spook when he buzzed her intercom, figuring that was safer than letting himself in on this particular occasion. But he needn’t have done; Faye opened the shared door to the hall outside of her ground floor flat before he’d even touched it.
“Peanut?” Bash tried to claw back his breaths. “Hey. Woah—” Faye flung her arms around him with such force that he stumbled, catching himself on his back foot and lifting his arms just in time to have them circle around her.
He’d tried to be as quick as he could in getting here, but it was too long.
“You came,” Faye murmured into his chest where her chin tucked down. The sweet mango scent that floated off of her after every shower filled the air beneath his nose, mixed with the cold bitterness of winter nighttime.
Hearing her quivering voice through the phone had squeezed Bash’s heart, but that ache and desperation to keep her safe was nothing compared to her shaking against his chest. If he could wrap her up in cotton wool and still let her be free, then he would.
Raising his hand, he smoothed down her hair, letting the soft blonde strands move through his fingers as he pulled her closer. “I said I would.”
She sniffled into his coat.
The nightly breeze whirred through the street, and Bash was even more aware of how they stood in the dimly lit alcove where a yellow light that should’ve been replaced ten years ago hummed above them.
“It’s alright,” he hushed and gently tried to step forwards with Faye still in his arms. “Let’s go inside, yeah?”
Bash coaxed her back into the warmth and, because he knew she needed the assurance, double checked the lock of the communal front door behind him. He glanced up the dark staircase towards her upstairs neighbours too before following Faye inside her flat.
The two windows in the living area were both closed off with heavy drapes and Bash spotted her safety keyring on the coffee table next to her phone. More and more every day he was glad he’d bought that keyring laden with self-defence items for her as a gift last Christmas, after she thought she’d been followed home. He drew in a slow breath at the vivid memory of why he’d bought her that thing at all.
The television mounted above a concerning number of houseplants played an old sitcom silently in a set up Bash realised was Faye’s attempt to make her flat seem as if someone was home. Silent so she could listen out for every tiny noise.
She trundled across the room to pick up the remote and as he watched her go, his gaze snagged on her pyjamas. All over the long red bottoms were cartoon pugs wearing Santa hats and a bouncy font reading ‘merry pugmas’. On top, she’d only worn a vest, and all that the rational half of his brain wanted to do was swaddle her in layers.
The TV went black and their eyes met, though Faye’s fell away beneath a pained brow down the length of his body. “Why are you wearing clothes?”
“What?” Bash half huffed a laugh from his throat. Would she rather he wasn’t wearing anything?
“You look … nice.” Faye’s features fell. “You look nice .” She repeated herself with more realisation. “You were out, weren’t you? God I’m so sorry.”
“It’s alright.” He was across the room in two strides before her puffy face could fall fully into her hands. Bash rubbed at her arms and then her shoulders as he said, “It was just a pint with Freddy and the guys. Not a date … or anything.” A very important detail to slide in there.
“I’m sorry,” she uttered.
“It’s okay. What happened?”
Sniffling, Faye drew upright. Her gaze had barely lifted from the carpet and her eyes were more red and exhausted than Bash had seen in a long time.
“Some noise outside woke me up,” she said. “I saw a shadow against my bedroom window, and I swear that there was someone outside. I tried to calm myself, but …”
She couldn’t. Exhaling relief that the reason she called wasn’t something worse, Bash hugged her against him, her hands going straight underneath his coat and scrunching in his hoodie.
“Okay,” he said slowly in his most soothing voice. “It’s fine. There was no one outside when I got here and your windows and front door looked untampered with.”
“I know it’s just in my mind. I shouldn’t have called.”
That fist around Bash’s heart, the one which she held there, squeezed and squeezed until he wasn’t sure it would ever relent.
“You can always call me, Peanut,” he promised as he let his mouth drift to her hairline, pressing his lips to her forehead. “I’ll always answer.”
He was glad when Faye didn’t put up a protest. Didn’t tell him that he shouldn’t feel obligated to her like that. But she wasn’t an obligation at all. She was his friend, and one who had needed him tonight.
Faye’s sniffling into his chest eventually stopped and they didn’t let go of one another for a minute. Bash guessed she was tired now more than frightened. There wasn’t much point in him leaving, not for the time it would take him to get home – for which he would actually call a taxi this time – or for the restlessness he would feel worrying about Faye until morning.
It was an hour after midnight and they both needed sleep.
“Listen,” he began as he smoothed his palm up and down her back, “I’m going to stay here tonight. I have a late meeting in the morning so it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I want to.” It was for Faye’s peace of mind but also his own that he’d stay, and the least that he could do. She didn’t argue with him; Bash didn’t think she had the energy to do so.
“Thank you, Sébastien.”
Hearing his full name which she didn’t use too often unless she was serious, in her dulcet tones, made Bash feel like a cheesecake left out in the warm. “You’re welcome, Peanut.”
Faye pulled back out of his embrace and gasped as she finally took a close-up look at him. “What happened to your face?”
Ah . He’d forgotten about that in the last hour, which explained why a few strangers had looked at him cautiously whilst he’d been running through the streets.
“It’s nothing.” The fresh graze was just a graze but had stung like hell – as he’d learned – when shampoo suds rolled into it.
“Did someone swing for you?” The volume of concern in Faye’s voice made his heart constrict.
“Only Bennet’s balls. ”
She blinked at him.
“That didn’t come out right.” Absolutely not at all.
Scoffing a chuckle, Faye reached up her fingers and Bash had to gently stop her from doing anything other than hovering them near his wounded cheek while he repeated the story he’d told at the pub of his stupid accident, all because he’d been thinking of how she’d reached for him on first instinct that morning when she’d slipped on a spilled drink at Baked . He’d darted to steady her anyway, but the fact that her hands had stretched out for him and no one else had done something weird to Bash’s insides.
He should be used to the feeling of her skin when their hands touched, but even after eleven years, he couldn’t stop that little tingle from happening.
“Do you want ice?” Faye offered from where she’d sprung towards her kitchen area, already reaching for her freezer door. Before Bash could get a word in, the blue-white interior light awoke as she rummaged inside. “I don’t have any peas, but I’ve got frozen onions?”
“I’ll pass on the onions, thanks. I already iced it earlier.” Combined with the chilled wind that beat his face on his way here, his cheek was still numb.
His gaze wandered between Faye’s choice of pyjamas and the bundle of blankets on her slatish-brown sofa. The trusty hot water bottle which he knew to make an appearance every month peeked out from between the haphazard arrangement.
“Speaking of,” he said, casually leaning over to find that the bottle wasn’t hot anymore, “your flat is really cold.”
Bash felt bad for saying it, the insensitivity twisting a knot in his gut. Money had always been tighter for Faye than he’d ever had to worry about. Running a business had taken a lot of investment on her part, and he didn’t mean to imply she couldn’t afford her heating. But it was mid-December in England, not the Bahamas. Nights here were frosty even with central heating, and he didn’t like the thought of Faye unconsciously reaching hypothermia in the night. It was a far stretch but he was a dramatic Annie sometimes.
She finished rearranging the contents of her freezer and wandered towards him, rubbing her hands over her bare arms. “I turned the radiators down so the boiler won’t die again.”
Head cocked, Bash sighed.
Faye …
That knot in his stomach? Make it ten. Twelve if he included the scare of her SOS call.
He withheld the second wind of his urge to sigh her name. A scolding from him wasn’t what Faye needed tonight. She should be staying with him in his home, in his guest bed with all of its duvets and blankets and under-floor heating, but he couldn’t force her.
Bash shrugged off his coat, dropped it on a kitchen chair, and pulled his hoodie off next. “Here, it’s warm.”
Faye’s eyes flicked between his determined gaze and the mass of orange he held out for her. She even took a step back. “Oh, no, I’m okay.” Though her wobbly smile said otherwise.
“Your nose is pink.”
“It is?” She touched that button shaped feature.
Gotcha. Bash’s lips began to slant. “Please take it.” He was one moment away from putting the hoodie on her himself if she didn’t take it in five, four, three …
“Won’t you be cold?” Faye stepped closer again, fingers creeping out towards him.
“I run hot, don’t worry.”
With a cute twist of her mouth, Faye considered the hoodie, then swiped the offending material like it was her favourite doughnut. She drowned beneath the bulk of orange that came to her mid-thighs, and somewhere not so deep inside Bash’s chest a new trove of accomplishment unlocked, because she was wearing his clothes. And not just any clothes: his favourite hoodie that she’d gifted to him one Christmas, thinking that he wouldn’t ever wear it.
It was his favourite hoodie .
The years of their friendship had rarely involved the exchange of garments except in dire circumstances. One awkward night out in Fulham where he’d spilled a mojito down the white shirt of his pirate costume and then gotten the shirt caught on something – he didn’t know what – that ripped it clean down the middle, meaning he’d had to borrow the cape from Faye’s Little Red Riding Hood costume, was just one example.
This, he thought. This is what he wanted. Late nights with wholesome food and the television playing on low as Faye wrapped herself in his clothes then huddled herself in him. Within his embrace, burrowing at his side.
For a dreamlike second Bash’s mind took him to a place with a picture of them curled together on this sofa behind him, and it felt so real that his eyes glazed over. His body warmed from the inside out with those thoughts pushing away the midnight chill.
Chill. Midnight. Faye.
His head involuntarily twitched and Bash was back in the reality of a boiler-less flat at one a.m, with night time hours dwindling away. Tiredness crept up his hips and crawled up his spine, and the tail end of Faye’s voice made him refocus.
“Hm?”
“Stay here for a second,” she repeated, at a guess, before floating past him.
Bash had zoned out for too long to know why he wasn’t supposed to move, but the aches in his legs were on the verge of making them give way, so he propped himself down on the arm of the couch.
The light in the bathroom clicked on and a cupboard door opened and closed.
“Here.” Faye padded her way towards him with a tub of—was that cream? “It’s good for things like cuts and grazes,” she said.
“Oh, right. Thank you.” He went to take the small tub but she stopped him.
“Let me.” Faye slotted herself between his knees before Bash could count his blessings and his thighs automatically opened wider for her. His heart rate doubled its pace, too.
She popped off the lid of the tub, shifting both halves to hold with one hand in some sort of female witchery, and examined his cheek. “Wow, it’s really gotten red.”
Not because of the graze. This was too close. Bash hadn’t had a woman near him like this in a few months, which was some kind of record for him.
He clutched the armrest under him as if it was a life raft. It was then, the only thing stopping Bash from pitching forwards and closing the two inches of space between them. The skin of his arms rose with goosebumps and it wasn’t from the lack of heating.
In this position, they were eye to eye, Faye’s decidedly upon his cheek. The press of her finger with the cream to his graze made Bash hiss as the sting zapped to his spine.
“Sorry,” she said softly, wincing. “I’ll try to be quick.”
Bash’s nerves for this lack of air between them got the better of him.
“It’s alright,” he said as he shifted his gaze over towards the kitchen and began mentally listing random implements and utensils which caught his eye; anything to stop how his leg had decided to come alive and bounce under his self restraint.
They’d been physically close before, but it’d been a long while since Bash had felt the warmth of Faye’s breaths upon his lips – mug, spoon, whisk – even in this completely platonic situation. She was being kind and dabbing the cream over his cheekbone, but the lack of warmth in the room made the heat between them all the more prominent – the mango scent of her mixing with the crisp outdoors scent of him.
Spatula. Egg cup. Fork.
Something new awoke in Bash with each press of Faye’s gentle fingers, how she curled her lip between her teeth in concentration and tilted her head just slightly. Pulling on his hoodie had mussed up her hair and she looked … like the missing piece of him. Like he imagined she’d look on a morning after sleeping at his side.
“All done.” She backed out of the space between his thighs and Bash finally looked at her again.
“Thank you.” Relaxing his grip upon the sofa and breathing more easily than he had a moment ago, he gave her an appreciative smile.
Faye’s small smile at him in return broke as she yawned into the sleeve of his hoodie.
“Go back to bed,” he murmured, earning a tiny nod before he moved to about-turn around the end of the couch. “I’ll sleep on your sofa.”
“No way.” Faye reached for his wrist, snatched her phone from off of the couch, and tugged him along with her through the flat. “You complained for a week about your neck after the last time you did that.”
The heart in Bash’s chest definitely missed a beat as he realised where he was being willingly dragged. A thousand thoughts all scattered and flew in his mind. “I wasn’t that whiny.”
“You absolutely were. You were insufferable.”
In the next second, Bash found himself in the doorway of Faye’s bedroom, which made him fight to keep down any excitement he’d normally have for standing in a woman’s bedroom at night. He’d been to this flat too many times to count but rarely had he ever crossed this threshold.
A lamp on a nightstand cast a yellow glow around the room, and the corner of his mouth rose at the fluffy, pink sherpa duvet cover and the stack of pillows on the bed. The room was chaotic in the good sense, with various open sketchbooks and pencils lining the top of a stack of drawers, Faye’s books all leaning over in her bookcase.
None of the wood grains or shades of white of her furniture matched, which for once, didn’t set off the critical sirens in Bash’s interior designer mind that usually made him twitch. Not where Faye was concerned.
Everything in this flat was her. How could he ever wish to change that?
Faye curled herself beneath her duvet and looked at him expectedly. The invitation was clear in her eyes, if not a little shy, but Bash still toed off his shoes and sneaked forwards like he was a fox and she, the doe.
“Do you mind that I'm in outdoor clothes?” A few flecks of dirt from how he’d ran here had dried near the hems of his navy chinos. He could take them off to leave himself in just his briefs, but that might perhaps cross a line that hadn’t ever been breached before.
Bash was good at restraint but even that might push the extent of his limits too far.
“Not really.” Her answer was a tired drawl. “I’ll wash the sheet tomorrow anyway.”
Nodding absently, Bash sat on the edge of the bed and turned up the cuffs of his trousers to hide the dirt regardless. He went to his belt next automatically but paused just short of unbuckling it, maybe because it was Faye’s bed which he gradually left an indent in the mattress of. There was something significant – suggestive – in taking off his belt, at least in his experience, and he wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea.
Wrong idea. What was he talking about? Of course she wouldn’t. Faye was the one who’d invited him to sleep in her bed, not the other way around. This sharing agreement was purely for the sake of the health of his neck.
“What are you doing?” She sounded wary.
Losing my mind.
“Debating if you’ll hit me with one of your hundreds of pillows for taking my belt off.”
“Just take it off.” A command which wasn’t aided by the fact that Faye was right there and he was right here upon her bed, undressing .
“In a rush, are we?” Bash teased over his shoulder, met by Faye’s rolling eyes. Maybe he should’ve taken those frozen onions after all? They’d be a sure way to kill his eager mood.
He rolled the belt up and left it on the nightstand before falling backwards and making himself comfortable amongst the sherpa and pillows. With some shuffling around, Faye forced him to accept the fact he would sleep under the duvet when he should’ve perhaps stayed on top. It’d be colder, yes, but that would’ve been a minor consequence to resisting temptation to cuddle up to her in her sleep.
With a click, the room went dark.
They lay next to each other, a safe two feet between them since they were well past the stage of building a pillow wall, but Bash felt anything but sleepy. The obnoxiousness of his own breath sounds annoyed him after only half a minute. He tried to silence himself, which was far more uncomfortable than he’d have thought. The entire length of his side was completely aware of Faye exhaling her own quiet breaths into the silence.
“Is this weird?” Her question was a hoarse whisper.
“We’ve shared a bed before.”
“Passing out drunk at uni doesn’t count.”
Bash could tell by the way she spoke that she smiled. He turned his head on his pillow and looked at her in the darkness, finding the outline of her nose and chin with the light her curtain didn’t quite filter out. “What about that night in Amsterdam?”
“It’s not my fault the window broke and my hotel room was freezing.”
“And still you came knocking on my door like a lost puppy.”
“You answered that door,” Faye pointed out, the sardonic lilt in her voice catching somewhere between Bash’s chest and his gut. “At one a.m. I could’ve been anybody.”
She could’ve been. Anyone could have been knocking on his door to their cheap hotel, but Bash recalled that somehow he’d known it was her, like a premonition. Perhaps he’d just gotten lost in his dreams that night of having Faye one day turn up at his door.
They’d been young, dumb, and fresh out of university on that trip. The two of them, Maisie, Freddy, and Sienna. Their one last big hurrah before peeling away to find their jobs and build their lives. By coincidence, the five of them had stayed within London, and sometimes at their get-togethers, Bash felt as if he was back in time to those days.
An old familiar lump lodged itself in his throat. “Well, then I’m lucky it was only you,” he said around an unwarranted chip of disappointment.
He was here now, wasn’t he? Years later, he was still Faye’s best friend. She was still in his life. What more could he ask for? He should be happy and grateful for how things were because this way, as friends, he was never going to lose her.
He was never going to lose her.
Faye was quiet for so long Bash thought she’d fallen asleep. He’d returned to staring at the blank greyness of the ceiling, too awake to fall asleep himself. Sprinting straight after scoffing a burger meant the burger was still lodged uncomfortably somewhere between his stomach and his throat. Perhaps he could slip out to Faye’s kitchen – she was bound to have indigestion relief somewhere.
“Do you ever miss those days?”
His breath hitched at the unexpectedness of her question, her voice even quieter than before yet holding so much weight. By the sounds of it, her mind tossed and turned too.
That trip to Amsterdam had been half a decade ago, when summers and years seemed to go by so slowly. He and Bennet had been on the cusp of landing the big client who’d secured their standing amongst the ranks of luxury design. He’d had little to worry about except for carpet colours and bespoke furniture, and one particularly problematic cut glass chandelier from Milan, he recalled .
He still had those things on his mind all of the time, only now, time was the pivotal point. The epicentre. He knew realistically and hoped that he still had a long life left ahead of him, but the things he’d always brushed off as saying would happen for him ‘later’, felt like they should be happening now. Bash didn’t know how to describe it.
He wet his lower lip, preparing for his admission harbouring a depth only a conversation in the dead of night could do.
“I miss feeling like I have all of the time in the world,” he rasped.
There was a rustle of Faye’s pillow beside him. “You still do.”
Bash shook his head without knowing if she could see him or not in this darkness, exhaling a long drag of air. “I go to work, I make my money, and I keep on wondering who exactly I’m doing it for when it’s just myself in my big, empty house at the end of the day.”
There was something just missing, and he knew exactly what it was. A feminine shaped hole with a few smaller ones beside her. Maybe even one with four legs. He’d always wanted a dog. He’d have to rip up all of the carpet in his house first, mind you, and replace them with wood and low-pile rugs, but that was doable enough.
Something that felt rather like the sleeve of his hoodie whispered against his elbow, before Faye’s fingers curled around his bicep. The chill he’d felt before just for wearing a t-shirt no longer applied.
“You work so hard, Bash. It’ll all pay off one day, I promise.” Faye’s voice began to slur with her slip towards dreamland. “You’ll be jetting off like my parents do with the person you love soon enough,” she said, causing Bash’s heart to clench. “You have to keep thinking of that.”
His cheek fell towards his pillow to look at her, though he could barely see her at all. It was good enough to feel her there beside him .
“I know you’re right, Peanut. I’m trying to be more optimistic about things.” The pressure of her fingers on his arm began to slip. “You’re tired. Get some sleep.”
Bash’s heart did some sort of somersault when he heard the first soft, even breath that meant he was alone in his awakeness. Knowing that after the night she’d had, Faye felt safe enough to sleep with him so close did strange things to that organ tethered to her with invisible string. He had to resist reaching across and brushing the hair from out of her face just in case he woke her when he did.
Instead, he rolled onto his side and waited out the tumbling of his brain until the last thing Bash remembered was Faye rolling too, and her head tucking down to rest right by his chest.