Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Theo
The café smelled like burnt espresso and wet pavement, the city’s two primary moods decanted into steam. I sat opposite Max in a fogged window booth, my coffee cooling and my shoulders riding an inch too high.
“Okay.” Max stirred sugar into his cappuccino. “First rehearsal debrief, now we’ve both slept since, and you’re seeing things a little more clearly. Nobody died, two people nearly ascended, and you made the fluorescent lights tremble with your eyebrows alone.”
I rolled my eyes at that last part. I nudged the cardboard sleeve up my cup. “We locked for precisely three measures. The rest was a homicide of vowels.”
Max snorted. “Your expectations are a Disney villain. It was our first day, man. We’re Rough Harmony, not Pre-Ironed Perfection.”
“Intentional roughness,” I corrected automatically. “There’s a difference.”
“Right,” Max said, his tone bright with mischief. “I swear, you’re like a musical dominatrix.” He narrowed his gaze, his eyes glinting dangerously. “‘You will blend, you filthy consonants.’”
I stared at him. “Have you ever considered not speaking?”
“Constantly. Never chosen that particular path, though.” Max drank, then set the cup down, his eyes softening. “You’re good at this. But you’re wound so tight that if someone shoved a lump of coal up your arse, in a week we’d have a diamond.”
I choked on a laugh despite myself. “God. Your mum. Where does she get these lines from?”
“She adores you,” Max said. “She also insists you need to ‘calm your tits.’ Those are direct quotes. And the part about the diamond? She stole that from a film she loved watching when she was our age.”
I cocked my head. “How are things with her?”
That familiar wince he tried to hide was answer enough.
“We talk regularly. Not about anything that matters, of course, and definitely not about the fact that her son spends his spare time in a BDSM club. That comes under the realms of TMI.” He took a drink from his cup.
“So we keep it vanilla, PG, whatever. She doesn’t want to know about my life and I don’t want to tell her. I call that a symbiotic relationship.”
I stared at the rain sliding down the glass.
Beneath the caffeine and the rehearsal-map still running in my head, a strange, low hum had taken up residence in my chest. I could still feel yesterday’s click—the lock, the crystalline overtone—echo in my bones.
It didn’t relax me but made me ravenous for more. For better.
For control.
“Tell me something you liked about yesterday,” Max prompted. “Not a note, not a correction. One thing.”
I rubbed the heel of my hand against my sternum, as if the restlessness were a physical itch.
“To be honest, there were a couple of things. Oliver’s breath plan, for one.
Liam’s anchoring. Zane’s ear, when he decides to use it.
Julian’s restraint when he remembers he’s not a lead.
Finnley when he stops brightening like a chandelier. Sebastian’s—”
Max made a face. “Don’t reward him. He already thinks God consults him about pitch.”
“God probably does,” I admitted with a grin. “Finally, Elliott’s tone, which can be awesome.”
Max grinned. “Wow, look at you, liking things.”
“I like outcomes. Liking things makes me lose time.” I tapped my cup. “We don’t have time to lose.”
“You have time to be a person,” Max corrected. “Which includes liking a thing so much your plans fall over like distracted dominoes.”
I grimaced. “I don’t… do that.”
“You do. You just don’t admit it out loud. Because if you admit it, you think you’ll break.”
My lips twitched. “And there you go again, rolling out the old armchair psychology. I always love this part.”
Max saluted me with a biscotti. “Judge all you want, Captain Clipboard. The truth is, you’re good, but you could be great if you unclenched, even a tiny bit.
How about letting one single molecule of chaos pass through your membrane without incinerating it?
” He shook his head. “Nothing changes. You were exactly the same in college.”
I opened my mouth to deliver a dry retort, but my phone buzzed on the table. GARY WALTERS lit the screen.
What came to mind instantly was not my high school and college best friend, but his brother.
His hot, sexy-as-fuck brother.
Max peered at my phone. “Gary?” His eyebrows shot up. “Haven’t seen him since that party where he fell asleep in the bath. Please tell me he got better at holding his vodka.”
I thumbed to answer, then tapped my EarPods. “Gary. Hey.”
“Hey, man!” Gary’s voice was a burst of sunlight through the rain, warm, easy, and exactly the way a decade-old friendship should feel. “You still alive or has London swallowed you like a python?”
“Half-swallowed,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Well…” Gary exhaled, and my senses were suddenly alert. I recognised that sigh. It was the one friends used when they were about to ask for something and wanted you to remember you loved them.
“Don’t stop now,” I prompted. “You’ve got this far.”
“I need a favour, and I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.”
My spine straightened on instinct. “Okay.”
“It’s Cameron.”
The world edged out of focus for a fraction of a breath. Not enough to be dramatic, but enough that I tightened my hand around my cup without even thinking about it.
Gary kept going, oblivious. “His landlord pulled the plug, and he and his flat mates have two weeks to vacate.”
“Right.” My voice sounded strained, and nothing like me. I cleared my throat. “That’s… shit.”
“Yeah. He’s scrambling. So I was thinking—well, more like hoping…
You’ve got that place in Hammersmith, right?
Is it big enough that you could let him crash there for a bit?
Just until he finds something. He won’t be in your way, I promise.
He’ll be at classes, drawing, painting, working, whatever. He’s quiet. You know Cam.”
I stared at a raindrop as it fattened, joined another, and rolled down the pane in search of more drops to assimilate.
Inside me, a hallway of doors opened at once.
Cameron in a hoodie at the leather bar, leaning over the menu, his breath warm against my ear.
Cameron, sixteen, laughing in a choir room. Cameron at eighteen—
My pulse kicked hard enough to feel it in my gums.
“Theo, you still there?”
I forced air into my lungs. “Here. Sorry. Coffee brain.”
“So? Can he?” I caught the thread of worry running through Gary’s voice, softening it. “I wouldn’t ask, but I can’t bring him here right now. We’re packed. Besides, his studies are there. You’re—you’re the safest person I know.”
I shut my eyes. That sentence slid under all my defences.
You’re the safest person I know.
I wasn’t. Sure, I could be. I’d made a religion out of being safe, solid, reliable. But the request cracked another door open and let memory spill through it.
It wasn’t the leather bar memory that rose first.
This one was older. Sunburned.
Four years ago
The summer smelled like cut grass and sunscreen and the kind of heat that turned cheap beer into syrup.
I remembered the sticky back of Gary’s plastic patio chair, the oscillating fan in the kitchen that turned lazily as though it really couldn’t be bothered, the way the afternoon light cut across the deck.
“Come by,” Gary had texted. “Cam got his A-level results. We’re doing burgers.”
I’d gone because that was what I did, because it was easy and familiar and the right amount of noise in my head. I’d caught the bus to Didsbury, walked up the slab path, rung the bell, and told myself not to remember the kid who used to shadow us, all limbs and questions and hero-worship eyes.
The door swung open on Cameron Walters, and the breath caught in my throat. The kid I remembered was gone, submerged in someone with broad shoulders, longer, sun-lightened hair, his grin still reckless but edged now with self-possession.
Cameron had grown into a gorgeous man.
“Hey, Theo. It’s been a while.” Cameron grinned. “Gary’s in the kitchen murdering onions.”
My smile came automatically. “He’s been attempting that homicide for years.”
“Come save us.” Cameron led the way through the hall toward the kind of kitchen every British family had at least once.
I knew exactly how it looked before the door opened, because it hadn’t changed in all the years I’d known Gary.
Colourful magnets covered the fridge, a bowl of bananas on the edge of too ripe sat on the worktop, and the doorframe was marked by lines where someone had marked Gary’s and Cameron’s heights at varying stages of their lives.
“Congrats on your results. Are you happy with them?”
Cameron paused at the kitchen door. “Yeah. Now all I have to do is find an art college. And save up a ton of money to pay for it, because a student loan is gonna kill me.” Then he pushed it open, and my eyes watered instantly.
“Fuck, Gary, how many onions are you massacring?”
Gary’s eyes gleamed. “Can’t have too many onions.” He pointed at Cameron with the kitchen knife. “Did Cam tell you he got a B in English Language?”
Cameron rolled his eyes. “Did Gary tell you I got an A* in Art and Design, another in History, and an A in French?”
I chuckled. “If he teases you too much, ask Gary about his A-Level results.”
Gary glared. “Just for that, you get to make the salad.”
I headed for the fridge, bristling as Gary told me to make sure I rinsed the tomatoes properly, while Cameron went out onto the patio to fire up the barbecue.
“Be careful!” Gary yelled. “Remember last time?”
Cameron’s voice floated back to us. “You’re never gonna let me forget that, are you?”
Gary snickered. “Nope. It’s an older brother thing. Unless, of course, you do it on purpose, because you’re dying to have a hot firefighter rescue you?”
“Who says I want that?” Cameron retorted.
I stared at Gary. “Is he gay?” I whispered.
Gary snorted. “If he is, he hasn’t said a word, but then again it’s none of my business.” He grinned. “I just like teasing the little bastard.” He cupped his mouth and shouted, “Because he makes it so easy.”