Chapter 21 #2
“You still talking about the watch?”
“Maybe.” Dusting off a deep green pork-pie hat with an orange feather in the band, Simon plonked it on my head. “Smile for the camera.”
He angled his phone in front of our faces and the shutter sound echoed off the tarmac and the cobbled sets of the yard. At least his unquenchable brightness took the attention away from me looking like a cornered rabbit.
“Very dashing.” He threw me a chef’s kiss.
“Leave off.” I set the hat back down. “I can’t get away with any of this stuff.”
I set the watch carefully back on the table top, in its own space, not wanting to jumble it in with all the others.
Its uncomplicated, dented face stared up at me like it wanted taking home.
But what was I going to do with something that broken?
Why would anybody want that when they could have a shiny brand new one?
“Who says?” His eyes wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Mel for a start. That’s why we’re out here fake-documenting our past together, isn’t it?”
Simon nudged me, eyes narrowed.
“Are you saying you’ve never bought anything more exciting than that beautiful tie you got me?”
My mouth hinged open. I snapped it shut. Shrugging was the easiest thing to do.
One eye on me, Simon flicked through the next rail of clothing, watching me, waiting, but I had nothing to add. He pulled out a jacket, fingering seams and hems, opening the front to find the lining frayed and shredded. The hanger screeched along the rail as he put it back.
“Don’t you ever get yourself things like that?” he asked.
I squirmed. “Didn’t think you really liked it.”
His flick through the hangers on the rail stilled.
“Of course I did.”
Easy for him, wasn’t it? He was elegant – classy – nobody did a double-take when he said something cultured, or wore something camp or outrageous or just plain amazing, because he made it make sense.
When anything unexpected came out of my mouth, I had airs.
Or attitude. Or I looked like a shrunken gorilla, trying too hard, playing dress-up.
A wannabe straight guy was what Luke had said.
“When I was a kid, I bought these purple trousers somewhere like this.”
Simon blinked at me through the gap he’d made in the clothing. “Oh really?”
Tilting his head, he centred the full weight of his attention on me, and I wished he hadn’t. The story made me cringe.
“Yeah. They were sort of metallic? Like an oil slick.” I could summon a memory of the shiny fabric between my fingers. “Or the wings of a beetle, you know? Except they had this... snake skin sort of texture?”
My face went hot. Good god, why was I admitting teenage me had lusted after PVC dragon trousers?
But Simon looked intrigued. “They sound deliciously over the top.”
They had been. The polar opposite of everything everyone thought I was. That had been why I’d wanted them so much. But that wasn’t what I was trying to tell him.
“Never wore them, did I?” I grimaced. “I hung onto them for so long. Stashed in a box under my bed, still wrapped up in the plastic bag I brought them home in, with the receipt on top. Because I was supposed to take them back – waste of money, see? But I never got round to it, and then when I left for uni, I took them with me, lugging them all over – from halls to my first flat share. London. Waiting for some grand invitation to bring them out.” I picked up a mug from a stack near the back of the table so Simon didn’t have to be my only focus.
Which didn’t even work when I had to look at him for him to follow what I was saying.
“Did you get it?” he asked. “That grand invitation.”
How could he be so earnest about something as silly as that?
“No.” A lump wedged itself into the back of my throat and I swallowed hard to shift it. “I left it too long.”
“Oh, Ben.”
The mug I was holding had Yoda on it. Do, or fucking do not.
“I just—I felt stupid even owning them. They didn’t fit because I wasn’t sixteen anymore, and I’d found the gym hadn’t I?
And everyone I met got off on the tracksuit and the accent, acting like I was a hard case.
Because everybody knows only posh boys are really gay – and I’m only bi anyway, which means passing for straight’s supposed to be a bonus and—”
Oh fuck. That was all out loud.
Peering at me over a line of dusty velvet jacket shoulders, Simon’s lips thinned. “People are idiots.”
“No.” Shame prickled across my skin. “I mean, yeah, they are. But—I would have been a kid in a clown costume.” My voice knotted up, so dry it barely came out.
Guaranteed, Simon Azie had never psyched himself out of wearing a pair of trousers.
“I can’t do purple trousers. I’m this boring-as-anything straight-looking bloke who doesn’t fit in bloody anywhere, trying too hard. ”
Simon rounded to my side of the table. His frown shadowed his whole face, and it shouldn’t have even been there, because none of this was his problem. “That’s not true, if you wanted—”
“It is true.” I set the Yoda mug down on the table with a clack. What did I want with it anyway? “My whole life it’s been true. There’s people like you, who get away with however they want to be, and there’s people like me. Who everyone else tells exactly what they are. That’s just how it is.”
“Where did you get that from?”
“Everyone, Simon. Over and over again.”
“Like who?” Certainty he had all the answers simmered in Simon’s eyes. But he was wrong.
“Like most of the blokes I’ve ever hooked up with. Like my own gran.”
“And what would she know?”
“Yeah, alright,” I laughed, and it sounded ugly and dismissive. My smile failed. “She only brought me up.”
“What?” Confusion pinched into his eyes. “Brought you up? You said you didn’t stay with her long.”
Oh bollocks. I had said that. Trust him to remember. And I had nothing good to tell him.
“Well,” I said, and my whole body twanged with adrenaline, ready for the fight. “I lied.”
What was he going to think about his perfect interpreter now?
“Oh.” Simon frowned. Backing down right where I’d started bristling, he diverted his attention to the rack of clothes again.
I watched him straighten. The notches of his spine pulled into line directly over each other, disappearing the slight stoop he got into sometimes, talking with me. Without it he was a solid inch taller. Ridiculous that he pulled himself down for me.
His face shifted, visibly rolling my answer through all those rooms in his head where he must have stored every personal detail he discovered about everyone he’d ever met. I bet he never had liar stacked up to go in his Ben room.
I braced for him to say something spiky I could bat back, but his voice stayed level. Calm. “Why?”
The truth squirmed and thrashed in my gut. I couldn’t let it out. The slippery mud-eel of a thing had teeth. “Don’t know.”
Simon raised a single eyebrow and kept it hovered there. My pulse thudded thickly in my forehead.
He could have called bullshit.
It would have been better than this guilt trip. How come I owed him the truth when he didn’t even want the whole of me? Jaw tensed, I scuffed the yard cobbles, and the stupid broken watch face stared at me from the table.
“Right then.” The tension line of Simon’s mouth softened. “Shall we head back home?”
He picked up the Yoda mug, pulling out his wallet.
“What are you doing?”
“Buying you a mug for the office.”
I frowned. “But—”
“You seemed to like it. It’s only three quid.”
“What about me lying to you?”
“You don’t want to talk about it, so…” Simon made a vaguely bored, dismissive sound, puffing his cheeks out. “Can’t be that important. It is nearly lunchtime.”
I gritted my teeth. “Look, I didn’t want you thinking I was a fraud, alright?
” Surely he understood that. “There I was telling you Mam was Deaf, and all about me speaking BSL. My first language, like I’m grass fucking roots.
And it was. It is. But Matt’s right. I didn’t use it for years.
I had to learn it all again, basically from scratch. ”
Simon tilted his head, blinking at me maddeningly, like he was still waiting for the so what. Heat crept up the back of my neck.
“You act like I’m the best interpreter you’ve ever had, but I’m not.” The shame of spelling it out for him lodged in my throat, too dry and too hard to swallow. “I can’t be.”
Simon hummed. “And yet the fact remains, you are.” He nudged in against my shoulder, and his body heat bled into me.
He didn’t pull away. “Listen to me. You’re exactly who I need, Ben Cooper.
You always have been. No matter what you wear.
Or who brought you up. Or what you choose to tell me. It’s always been perfectly fine.”