Read My Hands

Chapter 1

CHAPTER

ONE

SATURDAY

Simon Azie did not give the tiniest of monkeys who I slept with. Fact.

If he’d wanted to come for an after-work drink, he bloody could have done. On any of the other fifty-million Fridays I’d invited him. Fact.

Turned out though, I’d miscalculated the balance point – measured in numbers of pints consumed – between optimally socially lubricated, and totally turtle-dicked. Which was more of an inconvenient truth.

“Oh. Come. On!” A dead inconvenient truth, actually.

Manic-handed, I gripped the base of my cock, attempting to stop my hard-on collapsing in on itself like a soggy Cornetto cone left out in the sun too long. Spoiler alert: it was too far gone. Another pair of eyes zeroed on my crumpling ego, and my dignity withered right along with it.

“How old are you?” Luke, who was definitely not Simon, unhooked his thigh from the crook of his elbow, shifting higher up the pillows. He sighed like I’d planned it. I bloody hadn’t.

“Twenty-eight.” The brand spanking new Thames-view flat he’d dragged me back to turned all hazy at the edges as my pulse thrummed in my ears. “I’m twenty-eight. There’s nothing wrong with being twenty-eight.”

Except, when you said it three times in quick succession and went all high-pitched and warbled, it started to sound like there might be.

“No wonder you’re having problems. That’s nearly thirty.”

Oh, why had I bothered?

“Look, Luke. This never happens.” Lie. Total lie.

This happened every time someone zoned in on the bit-of-rough-from-Newcastle vibe I’d been trying to escape for the best part of a decade because it wasn’t really me.

“Do you want to give it a minute?” Nose-wrinkled sympathy sheeted off him.

“I guess so. Yeah? Okay.” The patronising git had thought all the gym-going meant I was a bouncer, hadn’t he?

Like everyone else who saw my attempt at squeezing into business-appropriate clothing and decided I wasn’t intelligent enough to work in anything else requiring a suit.

The memory blurred, but I’d probably corrected him, and he’d probably given me that surprised face people got when they realised I didn’t punch people in the head for a living.

A minute would not solve this.

His unflagging hard-on bobbed against his stomach, all carefree and tempting and neglected. My fault.

“Erm. Do you want me to...?” Genius. A Pavlovian flood of saliva welled in my mouth. Excellent, achievable plan B.

“Or…” Luke’s eyes glinted. “You could tie me to the bed and rough me up a bit.”

Oh Christ he’d really wanted me to be a Neanderthal, hadn’t he?

“What, now?”

“Look, I’ve seen these videos of people online.”

I sagged back onto my heels. “Of course you have.” Why did I always get the guys who wanted me to hate-fuck them through the mattress?

“Well?” Luke eyebrow-waggled suggestively. “How do you feel about hitting me?”

My entire brain fused, stuck on no. No No No.

“Dead hot in here, isn’t it?” A frenetic, rhythmic buzzing ripped around inside my skull like a rogue scooter.

“I’m quite warm, actually. Could really do with a glass of water.

” The buzzing intensified like an angry stag-beetle trapped under a wet tea towel.

Oh god. Dying in a stranger’s bedroom before thirty had never been the plan.

“Do you want one? I’ll get it. I don’t min—”

“Not really.” The beery enthusiasm in Luke’s voice deflated. “Thanks.”

My heart had to be warming up for an incoming cardiac event. Brilliant. I’d die, and he’d tell everyone I was a terrified, kink-shaming, self-hating shithead who couldn’t keep it up.

Priorities! Why did I even care? Minutes away from a brain aneurysm, I should be calling my gran.

“Are you not going to answer that?” Levered up on his elbows, Luke blinked at me like a llama underneath all his hair.

“...What?”

“Someone’s pretty keen to get hold of you.”

Oh.

A few feet away, the mound of my clothing lurked on the tastefully neutral, intensely vacuumed, anti-shagpile carpet, faintly quaking in the fuzzy pre-dawn blackness.

The buzzing wasn’t anything like a stag beetle, was it? It was exactly like the slightly broken vibrate on my dinged-up phone smothered by my rumpled work shirt and an ultra high-end wool-mix carpet. I should not have finished that last pint. Or the one before it.

My clothes abruptly stopped their little rave. Silence wadded into my ears so thick it felt like I’d gone deaf. Oh god. What if it was my gran?

“Shit.” Decanting myself to the floor, I scavenger-hunted my phone out of my crumpled trouser pocket.

Not Gran. A sturdy raft of floating notifications on the lock screen all had Simon’s name on them. Two missed calls and a batch of New Messages unfurled long enough to make a roadblock.

“It’s work.” What the actual factual hell?

Normally, Simon acted like I stopped existing outside of my agreed hours. He booked me in with careful notice, and was so disgustingly respectful he paid me overtime for the ten-minute chats I tried to grab with him at the end of the day. It bloody did my head in.

“But it’s half-two in the morning!” Luke flipped the bedside lamp on, dousing the room in the unhelpfully-low red glow of mood lighting and Gen Z outrage.

“...And?”

He stood, swaying slightly as he stepped in towards me and I cricked my neck up to look him in the face, already kind of seasick.

“You said”—his finger danced in front of my nose; I blinked at it, cross-eyed, stepping back—“you were an interpreter.”

“I am an interpreter?”

He snorted a laugh. “Whatchoo going to interpret at two in the morning?”

Fantastic question. Either something was going spectacularly wrong, or Simon was bum-dialling me. Repeatedly. I should not care which it was.

“I’m not going to bloody answer, am I? It’s stopped ringing now anyway.”

Right on cue, it started up again. Thank you, Universe.

“Hang on. That’s a video call.” Looking thrilled, Luke snatched the phone out of my hand.

“Yeah, it’s—”

“You think he wants to join in?”

“No, I—”

“I’m going to answer it!”

Time slowed. His thumb hovered with intent, eyebrow hitched up like he thought he was funny. I scrabbled to grab it off him. “Don’t you bloody—”

Click.

“—dare.”

My stomach dropped hard. The line opened out into the fumble-gap of an unexpectedly answered call and the total panic-fest of cavernous silence on both sides.

“Give me the phone,” I mouthed, inching sideways to snatch a pillow up off the bed. But Luke shook his head, holding it selfie-style, like the total boundary-lacking shit I had failed to clock him as. Hitting him grew more appealing.

“...Ben, turn on another light please? I can’t see a thing.” Distracted-sounding, Simon’s vowel-thick voice croaked in above a rumble of traffic. Too loud, mildly garbled. And now was really not the time for it to crackle goosebumps all along me.

“Give me my sodding phone Luke.”

Surprisingly, Luke gave me my sodding phone.

Then he clapped his hands, and every light in the building turned on. Because he lived in a spaceship from the future. Apparently.

On screen, an image of the pair of us topless and rumpled flash-bulbed into life as the phone’s camera adjusted to the thousand-watt daylight brightness. And I died. Half mast. Basically naked. Next to a guy who was so very new to twenties he thought I was geriatric. In front of my boss.

“Oh.” Simon peered into his phone on an evident double take. “Hello Ben.”

His lips did that thing they always did at the edges when he was pretending not to smile. Through the laugh clearly lodging at the back of his throat, his voice bled through even more thickly and less precise.

I sat down sharply, tackling Luke onto the bed next to me with a firm grip on his wrist.

“Hi.” There I was, pasty as all get-out, skin fluorescing white – because when had I last seen the sun? Boring brown buzz-cut, as usual. Next to Luke, exuding boy band hair, trust funds, and manscaping. With an Oxford pillow shoved into my lap. Excellent.

“Oh my god. And I thought you were all masc4masc. Is this your boyfriend?” Luke bubbled with pure deluded optimism. “Were you going to film us?”

Grin stuck on, I hissed at him through gritted teeth. “What’s wrong with you?” He did not seem to be interpreting my glare correctly.

Simon’s deep brown eyes flashed with laughter. “Glad to see I didn’t wake you up.”

My spine tingled. Like it always bloody did whenever he spoke. Defensively, I folded my arms tight across my bare chest. Then unfolded them again. In case it looked like I was flexing. Fuck. Everything.

Simon looked like he’d fallen out of an alternative old Hollywood movie that hadn’t been whitewashed: all technicolor glamour and detail, cheekbones and tailoring and class.

Effortlessly, disgustingly perfect, in his vintage, high-waisted suit and his cufflinks and tie clip and braces, rocking all these sartorial choices I never knew existed before I met him, because I hadn’t even known sartorial was a word.

Did he sleep in a suit, or never sleep at all?

“Simon.” My foot vibrated against the anti-shagpile carpet. “Why the—” I did not swear at him. That would not have been professional. “Why are you calling?”

If I stayed exactly in this spot, he probably couldn’t tell I was naked.

“Hi.” Luke leaned closer, jostling for screen space. “We can ignore Ben if you—”

“Excuse me, no we canno—”

“—I’m Luke.”

Amusement lifted the corner of Simon’s mouth. Fan-bloody-tastic.

Next to either of them, I was wallpaper. Always would be. Actually, scratch that; I was paint. Solid, matt emulsion. In greige.

“Simon, right? You should absolutely talk me into a phone-cam threesome.”

Simon was the wallpaper. The fancy high-end stuff someone had hand drawn, or hand painted, or dusted with legitimate gold leaf.

“I’m doing this whole piece on tech in the bedroom.” Wincing softly at me, Luke’s voice dropped to a whisper, talking from behind his hand. “And wannabe straight guys in sexuality crises.”

How bloody dare he? “Actually, I’m bi—”

“Come over”—no one cared what I was—“I’ll do an in-depth threeway interview. It’s the Rubicon Building. Limehouse.”

I spluttered a choke, grabbing for my phone again as Simon raised his voice.

“Ben, what did your friend just say?”

Oh, I bet he never dicked about with dubious randoms, did he?

He was too classy to do anything other than go on proper, real-life dates with blokes he met on , and have lots of spectacular, deeply fulfilling sex afterwards that had everything to do with cataclysmic orgasms and choirs of angels, and nothing to do with whisky-dick and mutual disappointment.

“I’m not working right now.” My voice crackled in my throat like I’d revisited puberty. “I don’t have to tell you what he said.”

“That’s very petty.” Through the screen, Simon locked me into a solid stare. I resisted squirming right out of his eyeline to hide.

“Yes.” For him, I was butter on a toasted crumpet. But I would char in hell before translating anything Luke had said. “It is.”

It was.

Exceptionally petty. Against my ethics code too, which made me unprofessional and a horrible person.

Picking and choosing what to facilitate access to was playing god.

But avoiding telling Simon the guy I’d gone home with wanted to shag him more than he wanted to shag me seemed like a reasonable exception. Right?

Simon was bold and vibrant and beautiful. Even if I convinced myself handpainted fan-tailed goldfish swimming about in a silky pool of deep, dark night-sky blue were my destiny, I lacked the guts to go for wallpaper like that. Or him.

Luke shouldered me mostly out of the way of the camera. “I said you could come round. You don’t need to speak to Ben, I’m right here.”

Silence weighed in like we’d dropped into a dead zone.

And then Simon’s voice rang through. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t catch a word of that.” The burred, blurred warmth of his muddied consonants melted deep into me. “There’s a shadow on your face.”

There bloody well was not. All of us could see the screen. Simon’s shoulder lifted in a micro-shrug – innocence itself. Never Had I Ever witnessed him back-peddle.

“Don’t take this the wrong way – Luke, was it?

– you’re quite mean-mouthed when you speak.

” Oh, there it was. The double-down. “I’m sure your accent is lovely”—Simon stretched the word out, feeding all kinds of warmth into it.

Next to me, Luke leaned in, smile half-hitched while Simon reeled him in—“but, I have no idea what it is.”

Four-point-five second eye contact. Remorseful, self-deprecating grimace; I knew his routine.

“I’m afraid,” Simon continued, “it’s throwing off my understanding of the minimal word shapes you are bothering to use.”

“You what?” Luke’s jaw hinged open, confusion fogging over him thicker than a volcanic dust cloud. “Mean-mouthed? I am not.” Planes would be grounded. Crops would fail.

Simon ploughed right on. “Ben, on the other hand, is a wonderfully expressive speaker. Look at him – his face is a perpetual open book.” Beneath his seriousness, Simon’s eyes glinted.

Open-booking my need to stuff my fist into my mouth to keep from laughing my arse off out of sheer panic, that was me. Hearing people never thought about how they shaped their words.

Luke glared.

“Simon’s deaf,” I blurted. Obviously. Why was I making it sound like an excuse?

“Please don’t take this to heart, but nothing you say is remotely intelligible.

” Simon’s brows furred together, as though the very concept he’d insulted anyone made him deeply uncomfortable.

Because he was a bullshit merchant of the highest order.

“I really do need Ben to myself tonight.” The bastard wet his lower lip.

He had to know he could destroy entire countries with a move that lethal.

“I would be forever grateful to you for letting me steal him away.”

Practically hypnotised by Simon, Luke escorted me out of his flat as soon as I pulled my trousers on.

He slammed his front door in my face before I even had my shoes laced up.

Then he opened it again to toss my work bag out, and everything spilled across the communal corridor in a drift of pens and old receipts and backdated invoices I’d absolutely remember to give Simon first thing Monday morning.

Half a dozen reinforced locks clattered into place, as if I needed reminding I was never getting back inside.

I sagged against the wall, staring down at the mess of my things. Getting laid this weekend: not happening. Good job I never really liked ultra-high-end wool-mix carpets.

My phone burbled.

Simon

I’ll pick you up outside in ten

For fucksake.

I should have told him to piss off and leave me be.

Scrabbling to help in the middle of the night was not the path to vanquishing my unrequited crush.

No was a complete sentence. But Simon had never said he needed me before.

His whole world had to be on fire. And what if I was the only interpreter in the entire South East stupid enough to pick up their phone at anti-social o’clock in the morning? What then?

Oh dear god, I was so screwed.