“Next time . . .”
Fuck’s sake. If there was one thing worse than editing reams of photos, it was editing them when my mind was elsewhere, like the weather, the lunch I’d forgotten to eat, or the crazy-hot fuck I’d had at the weekend. Next time. Yeah. Nice theory. Shame Kim and I had stumbled out of the gig venue, dazed and slightly awkward, without figuring when—or if—that would really happen. I’d been halfway home before I realised we hadn’t even exchanged numbers, an oversight that was bothering me more than I cared to admit.
Irritated, I glared at my computer screen. In my distraction I’d thrown a random textured filter over the current image I was working on, instead of reducing the background noise. I sighed and undid the action. The statuesque chick from Moon-Hot Monkey Paste was rocking the film grain, but it would probably take every trick in the book to make her look bad. The woman was beautiful.
I worked on the gig shots for most of the afternoon. The redhead caught my eye several times, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I spent most of my time scanning the crowd shots for Kim and his wild mop of dark hair. His lean shoulders and arresting smile. The venue had been dark and smoky, but Kim possessed a grin that brightened any room he walked into . . . in my head, at least. The only room I’d taken him into had been a fucking broom cupboard.
It was early evening by the time my phone pulled me out of my editing-induced coma. I glanced at the screen, saw my stepmother staring back at me, and scowled. Fucking Gaz setting her up on FaceTime. There was no escaping her now. With that in mind, I accepted the call, since it was safer than risking her showing up on my doorstep.
And obviously she asked me if I was all right. She always did, and my answer was always the same.
“Course I am.” I hauled myself off the sofa and stretched out the kinks in my spine. “Did you need me for something?”
“Dinner,” she said. “Your brothers are coming. I thought it would be nice if you joined us too.”
I rolled my eyes, glad I had my face turned away from the screen. Of course my darling brothers were home for dinner. They both lived in cottages on the bloody farm. It was only me, the perpetual black sheep, who refused to reside any further into the family bosom. “I dunno. Do you mean tonight? I’ve got a load of work still to do.”
“You can take a break, can’t you? Come on, Jasper. We haven’t seen you all week.”
I refrained from pointing out that I’d seen her for breakfast five days ago, and had spent the whole of my Saturday at that stupid crusty festival. Such logic would be lost on my wonderful stepmother. If she wanted me home for dinner, I’d be home for dinner. It was easier that way. Besides, I hadn’t looked in my fridge for days, preferring the company of my coffee machine and the bottle of Grouse I kept in my living room. Thursday night was pie night on the farm, and now I thought about it, there wasn’t much I wanted more.
Except a rematch with Kim.
“Jasper . . .”
I let my stepmum drown out the voice in my head and searched the detritus around me for some jeans. “All right, all right, I’m coming. I’ll be there in a bit, okay?”
“Seven o’clock,” she retorted. “Don’t be late, or your dad will have you out on feed duty.”
I was late, but somehow still the first of my siblings to arrive. Tardiness was in the Manning genes. The dogs met me in the yard, smothering me like they hadn’t seen a human for months, and I found my stepmother in the kitchen, who wasn’t much better.
“Oh, Jasper,” she said, after squeezing the life out of me. “You’re so pale. You look like you haven’t seen the sun.”
She was more right than she knew. Today had been the first day all week I’d crawled out of my bed before 2 p.m., but she didn’t need to know that. So what if I was a night owl? There was more to life than milking cows at the arse crack of dawn.
“I’m fine, Ma.” I wriggled out of her embrace and swiped a bit of bread from the counter. “Where are the others?”
Laura Manning stared me down a moment, before the oven timer distracted her. “Nicolas is up the fields with Dad, and Gavin got caught up on the motorway. He said to start without him.”
Gaz hadn’t answered to “Gavin” in years. I hid my smirk with another bit of bread. Laura almost always addressed us by our full names, no matter our ages or the context of the conversation. “What’s he on the motorway for? Where’s he been?”
“Sourcing furniture for the barn.”
“Yeah?” For as long as I could remember, the biggest barn on the farm had been derelict, too vast and draughty for the small collection of animals my family kept alongside their arable operation, and too beat-up to store equipment of any value. Then Gaz had taken over the commercial side of the business and decided the barn would be the perfect venue for his latest harebrained scheme: an organic canteen, serving up the delights Laura and Nicky’s wife, Francesca, cooked up from surplus produce. I’d figured the grand plans as pie-in-the-sky at first, but after years of false starts and procrastination, things had begun to move along in recent months and the barn had started to grow into something humans could inhabit. “What kind of furniture is he looking for?”
Laura shrugged, clearly half-engrossed in her cooking. “He mentioned wicker, but you’d have to ask him. I’m just the kitchen skivvy.”
“As if. We’d all perish without you, Ma, but seriously? Wicker? What the fuck is he thinking?”
“Language, Jasper.” Laura heaved a huge pie out of the oven and set it on the kitchen table. “And what’s wrong with wicker? I thought it sounded nice.”
“Yeah, if you’re eighty-seven and have a conservatory built from curtain poles and PVA glue.” Bloody wicker. I didn’t take much interest in the family business—most days, there was no need—but left unsupervised, the rest of them would have the whole enterprise dressed up in polyester and Formica tablecloths.
“It’s easily fixed,” Laura said lightly. “Talk to your brother if you have ideas. You know he’d love to have you work with him.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I left my vague answer hanging, but later, over dinner, my irritation with wicker-gate got the better of me, and I found myself beside Gaz, grilling him on his plans for organic interior design.
“Piss off, mate.” Gaz shovelled mashed potato into his mouth and pointed his fork at me. “This ain’t London. Folk round here don’t want tiny candles and fancy bollocks.”
“Who said anything about tea lights? I just think you should incorporate the décor into the whole project. What’s the point of marketing the food as organic and wholesome, then serving it up on a load of plastic crap?”
“What do you care?”
He had a point, but with Kim still fresh in my mind, I had an idea percolating. “What about some of that recycled stuff from the crusty-fest last weekend?”
Gaz eyed me like I was off my rocker. “Recycled stuff? Like what? Tables made from bog roll?”
“Stop being a twat. No, I mean like the stall in the back field. The one with all the stuff made from pallets.”
“Didn’t see it. I worked all day and didn’t get the chance to swan around browsing.”
I wanted to clobber him. There were four years between Gaz, Nicky, and me, which meant we knew just how to wind each other up. “Fine. You’re right. I don’t care. Have it your way and dress the whole thing up like an eighties jumble sale.”
Gaz sniggered and went back to his pie. I glowered at him, then spent the rest of the evening ignoring him. Childish? Probably, but being at the farm had that effect on me. Crammed around the kitchen table, stuffing my face, and up to my ears in the family business, it felt like I’d never been away.
I made my excuses around ten and headed out to my car. It wasn’t that late and it would be the wee hours before I crawled into my bed, but I’d had enough for one night. Nicky called me a miserable bastard, but I didn’t care. So what if I preferred my own company? At home, there was no one to piss me off, save my downstairs neighbours, who liked to have makeup sex as loudly as they tore lumps out of each other. Besides, I needed a fucking fag.
“Jas! Wait up.”
I turned, cigarette in hand. Gaz jogged out of the gloom, a conciliatory grin warming his face.
“Don’t let Ma catch you with that.”
“Piss off.” I rolled my eyes and lit up anyway. “What do you want?”
“Erm, I was thinking about apologising for winding you up about Kim, but I wouldn’t mean it, so I’m not going to bother.”
The casual mention of Kim caught me off guard. “You know Kim?”
“Only in passing. He works at that tattoo place, Blood Rush. Brix Lusmoore gave me his card when I told him we were scouting for furniture.” Gaz pulled a small wooden disc from his back pocket. “Though Kim’s stuff looks more like junk to me.”
And that was the beauty of it. I held the disc up to the faint moonlight. Both sides had a simple logo carved into it, but the details I’d been ruminating on all week were inscribed around the edge: a name, an address, and eleven magic numbers.
“Thought you might like it.”
I glanced back at Gaz. Somehow, I’d forgotten he was here. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I saw you chatting him up in the beer tent. That why you want me to use his furniture in the barn?
“I never said you should use it. Just that your ideas were shite.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, from what little I know of him, he seems like a nice bloke, and I was only joking about his work being junk. How about you give him a call, see if he can do us a quote? Might get yourself a reason to paint a smile on that ugly mug.”
A facetious retort played on my tongue, but I bit it back as I considered Gaz’s proposal. The address on the wooden disc was in town, not far from my flat. What was to stop me passing by, sticking my head in the door, and pretending I gave enough of a shit about the barn project to seek out his work?
Nothing and everything was the simple answer. Kim had been an awesome fuck, but that was about all I was good for these days. All I wanted to be good for. Getting close to people, close enough to bang them more than once, was overrated. Despite angsting over not grabbing Kim’s details when I’d seen him, now that I had them, reality kicked in. No good ever came from returning to the scene of the crime—not even one as hot as my encounter with Kim.
I passed the disc back. “No, thanks, mate. Just stick to the wicker, eh? What’s the worst that can happen?”
A week later, I found myself loitering outside the address I’d memorised from Kim’s calling card. The exterior of the building was nondescript, but wood scented the cool breeze and, though it was daft, I sensed Kim’s presence. Felt it tickling my skin and warming my bones.
Idiot. I shook myself and braved a few steps forward. Outside the workshop, odd and sods of materials were stacked in haphazard piles. Pallets, obviously, and some old crates, and by the door was a stack of battered sheets of aluminium. I studied them and tried to imagine what Kim might use them for. Nothing came to mind, but why would it? My creativity was limited to Photoshop and pissing around on Illustrator. I couldn’t build a bloody sandcastle.
I left them behind and wandered into the workshop. There appeared to be no one about, until a teenaged lad popped up from behind a pile of corrugated iron.
“All right, mate?”
“I’m looking for Kim,” I said. “He around?”
The boy inclined his head to the left. “He’s upstairs. Go on up.”
“Cheers.” I headed for the stairs at the back of the open-plan workshop. They led to a corridor, at the end of which I found an office, and Kim, who was on the phone.
If he was surprised to see me, he hid it well. He muttered a hasty goodbye to whoever he was talking to and treated me to a grin that set off every facet of his devilishly handsome face. “Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes? Wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”
“It’s a small town,” I said. “You’d have run into me eventually.”
“That’s what I’ve been hoping. Been kicking myself for not getting your number.”
My heart skipped a beat. I hadn’t allowed myself to wonder if I’d been in Kim’s thoughts as much as he’d been in mine. “Erm, anyway. I’m here on business, as it goes.”
“That right? Well, if you’re after that pool table you were eying up at the festival, you’re too late. I delivered it to some crazy Ukrainian bird in Newquay last night.”
A very real pang of disappointment rippled through me. There was nowhere to put Kim’s boat creation at home—the flat was rather minimalist by design—but I mourned its loss. The photos I’d taken on my phone had done the piece little justice. “Actually, I was hoping to scope you out for a bigger project. Have you got time for a coffee?”
“Coffee?” Kim pulled a face and my stomach sank. I’d sought him out because I wanted to see him again, see if the heady encounter I’d replayed in my mind—and the crazy-hot spark—had been real, but after a long, largely sleepless week, ruminating over Gaz’s harebrained barn plans, I’d set my heart on persuading Kim to come on board. His work was amazing, and I couldn’t envisage the barn without it.
My mind raced. In all the ways I’d pictured this scene playing out, it hadn’t occurred to me that Kim might refuse to hear my pitch. “Or . . . I could just quickly explain now, and—”
Kim cut me off with a deep chuckle. “Fuck that. Let’s go for an ice cream.”
Well, okay then. It was barely lunchtime, but who cared? Not me.
We left the workshop and shuffled across the road to the best ice cream shack in town. I bought the cones, and we found a quiet bench. We made small talk for a little while, skirting around the fact that he’d had me bent double with my arse in the air. Then Kim ditched our rubbish and pulled me back to the reason I’d given for tracking him down.
I filled him in, showing him photos of the barn, and then the new plans I’d sketched out to replace Gaz’s wicker fiasco.
Kim studied them, apparently thoughtful. “It’s a beautiful building.”
I snorted. “You should’ve seen it six months ago: it was falling down. Had been for years until Gaz got a bee up his arse about it.”
“Still, look at these beams. They’re gorgeous.” Kim swiped through a few more snaps. “You’re right about the wicker, though. It’s proper naff.”
“Finally, a voice of reason.”
“Yeah?” Kim grinned. “Are you the lone wolf in this?”
“Black sheep, actually. They wanted my input. Now I reckon they’re sorry they asked.”
Kim laughed and put his hand on my arm. “Families are like that. You’ll never win. Now when are we going to fuck again?”