I’d never covered my cock so fast in all my life, not even when my mum had caught me wanking in year ten. I wrenched my legs from Kim’s grasp and scrambled to my knees, swiping my jeans from the floor.
I missed and toppled sideways. “Shit.”
The woman chuckled again. “Don’t get dressed on my account.”
Oh hey, Red. I stared at the woman from the gig—the singer from Moon-Hot Monkey Paste, for a moment oblivious to Kim moving past me. In the flesh, she was as beautiful as the pictures I’d spent far too long editing: curvy and quirky, and covered in as much ink as Kim. I wanted to touch her, out of fascination more than attraction.
But Kim got there first. He grabbed her hand and started to pull her away. “Damn it, Lena. I told you I wasn’t around tonight.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Red—Lena, apparently—retorted, yanking her hand from his grasp. “To turn the burners off while you’re out. I didn’t realise you had company. I’m sorry.”
She directed her last words at me. With my skin still sheened with sweat—and other things—I didn’t know quite how to respond. I wiped my stomach with my T-shirt and shrugged. “It’s fine. I was—er—going, anyway.”
“Jas—”
Kim reached for my hand before he seemed to remember he was already holding Red’s, and something in the way he’d tangled his fingers in hers felt suddenly significant. I tilted my head to one side and regarded them, absorbing how their bodies had instinctively angled towards each other.
Shit. My stomach dropped. “You two are together.”
It wasn’t a question so much as stating the obvious. And the split-second silence that lacked the amused denial I’d subconsciously hoped for said far more than whatever Kim opened his mouth to say.
I cut him off. “Don’t. It’s not like you told me anything different, is it?”
And he hadn’t. My assumptions were my own. I yanked my now-grubby T-shirt over my head and searched for my shoes.
Kim’s hand finally found my arm. “Don’t go, Jas. It’s not what you think.”
Right. I forced a smile, struggling to keep my tone light as a brutal wave of disappointment washed over me. “It doesn’t matter, mate. Honestly. It was just a shag.”
Kim’s hand fell away. I took my chance and pushed past him, fortuitously spotting my shoes by the door. I stamped into them and made my escape, taking the wooden steps two at a time. The orchard had seemed beautiful when I’d arrived, the grass dappled with the setting sun as it filtered through the trees, but the canopy of leaves felt oppressive now, and I was drawn like a moth towards the fading daylight ahead.
“Jas! Jas! Wait up.”
Kim caught up with me on the dusty path that ran parallel to a field of strawberries I hadn’t noticed on my way in. I kept walking, though I did pay him the courtesy of looking at him. After all, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Hadn’t claimed to be gay, or single, or both. And, stupidly, I hadn’t asked him.
Stupidly, because this was a game I’d played before, though admittedly, this round had been lightning fast compared to the clusterfuck of my last serious relationship.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I wasn’t going to. Seems to me that you don’t want to listen.” Kim’s gaze was steady as he passed me an A4 envelope. “Figured I’d give you the drawings I did for you to take home. No reason we can’t work together if it was just a shag, eh?”
I’d pretty much forgotten that the original purpose of my visit had been to discuss the furniture plans for the barn renovation, and the concept of upcycled tables and chairs seemed worlds apart from the chaos playing havoc with my insides. Just a shag? As Kim let go of the envelope and walked away, every instinct I had told me it was anything but.
I dragged myself back to my flat and hit the bottle, blocking the niggle of shame with swig after swig of my favourite whiskey. After hours of pacing, the couch called my name, and I wound up squint-glaring at the ceiling, dribble-ranting at myself for being a naive twat.
Kim had told me no lies, but he hadn’t told me the truth, either. My assumptions about his sexuality were out of place with everything I believed in, but he should’ve told me he had a missus . . . right? So what if she didn’t seem to care that she’d pretty much caught him balls-deep in me? That was her prerogative. Me? I preferred to be kept in the loop. Surprises weren’t my bag, ’cause every one that had ever been forced on me had been shite.
This one was no exception. In the murky light of arse o’clock in the morning, the reality of how taken I’d been with Kim set it. I’d fucked my way around most of Hoxton before I’d admitted defeat and retreated to Porthkennack, but I could barely remember a face, a scent, a sensation.
I remembered every moment I’d spent naked with Kim. I remembered every moment I’d been in his presence, and fuelled by a bottle of single malt, the ridiculousness of my overblown sentiment set in. I’d known the bloke a fortnight, but the churning in my gut was ten times what it had been when my life in London had unravelled all those month ago.
What the actual fuck?
No sensible explanation came to mind, so I dragged myself from the couch and fetched my iPad from my office. A photography app was open, loaded with final RAW files that I really needed to sift through before I converted them to JPEGs, but I shut it down with barely a glance and opened Facebook instead. Kim didn’t strike me as a social-media kind of guy, but what did I know?
It took me a while to track him down. I eventually found him tagged in a photo on the site for the tattoo studio—a photo of Lena wearing fuck-all clothes and baring her beautifully inked back. With considerable effort, I refrained from chucking the iPad across the room and snooped a little deeper. Kim’s name appeared frequently on the studio’s business page, but there wasn’t much of him in the flesh. I clicked through to his personal page. His profile picture was of him with another man—Brix Lusmoore if I recognised the telltale bone structure and killer good looks that held a hint of danger. The tag confirmed it.
I expected to find Kim’s photo uploads awash with Lena, but she was oddly absent, and his relationship status was blank. Hmm. I scrolled further down. His sexuality was listed as bi, which came as no surprise, though I couldn’t deny the flash of relief. And guilt. I’d judged Kim by someone else’s piss-poor standards and had half expected him to be masquerading as a straight dude with a wife and two-point-four kids.
So you erased a whole slice of the spectrum? Including yourself?
Nice.
The niggle of shame that I’d avoided by hitting the bottle finally kicked in. My insecurities weren’t Kim’s, or Lena’s, whatever she was to him—whoever she was to him. They were mine, and were only still with me because I allowed them to be. I was a big boy, not a green teenager, and I’d fucked up the one thing—my family aside—that had brightened my life in Porthkennack.
Kim likely thought I was a total wanker, and as I sloped off to bed to jack off and pass out, I reckoned he wasn’t far wrong.
A few days later, the pleasurable ache at the base of my spine had faded, but the cloud of despair remained. I stayed off the booze—mostly—and worked myself into a Lightroom-induced migraine. When it had eased, and my fridge had reached a critical state of depletion, I admitted defeat and ran home to my stepmother, craving the comfort she’d always been so much better at giving than my own mum.
She didn’t ask what had led me unshaven and bedraggled to her kitchen counter. Just dumped a dish of cauliflower cheese in front of me, and put the kettle on the stove. After plying me with obscene amounts of strong, sweet tea, she asked the one question that could put me off the first hot meal I’d had in days.
“Did you get to speak to that carpenter man about the barn furniture?”
I pushed the baking dish away. “He’s not a carpenter. He does welding and shit too, and tattooing.”
“And?” Laura looked at me expectantly. “Tattooing isn’t much good for our old barn, and for God’s sake don’t let your brothers get any more ghastly ink, but the welding sounds interesting. What did he have to say?”
I wondered if I’d inadvertently called her in my sleep and told her of my plans to visit Kim at home. As luck—or not—would have it, the envelope Kim had pressed into my hand was in my camera bag, something I rarely left the house without.
With Laura at my shoulder, I spread the contents of the envelope out on the kitchen table. Sketches, mostly, interspersed with a couple of Polaroids of existing pieces I assumed Kim wanted to work from: snapshots of artfully rusted fishing equipment and seaside paraphernalia. The concept was a perfect blend of the farm’s rural setting and the wild seas of Porthkennack just beyond the gates.
I loved it, like I’d loved Kim’s work from the start, and however much I’d embarrassed myself, that hadn’t changed. If I could wrestle the rest of the design plans away from my hapless brother and negotiate a fair price from Kim, the barn could truly be something special. My imagination took over, and I pictured the rustic canteen I’d dreamed up when Gaz had first mentioned his harebrained idea. Laura and Co.’s food combined with Kim’s chalk-white pallet tables and chairs . . . Damn, if I hadn’t been so intent on mourning what had never been mine to begin with, I’d have been pretty fucking excited.
As it was, I let Laura’s obvious delight seep into me and accepted one of her crush-to-the-bosom hugs.
“Ah, sweetie,” she said. “It’s so nice to have you here, but you’re skin and bone. Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
My slim-ish frame had nothing on Kim’s slender bones, but my only answer was a shrug.
Laura clicked her teeth like I was five years old again and refusing to tell her where I’d last seen my missing shoe, and then she sighed. “I’ll admit that I don’t know your mother that well, but sometimes, you’re just like her— So quick to speak your mind about everything except what matters.”
“Is that your way of calling me an opinionated brat?”
“No, dear. Quite the opposite.”
I didn’t get it, but my best mystified scowl had no effect on Laura. She hugged me again, made more tea, and continued to study Kim’s designs until my father joined us a little while later.
“Someone ‘ere for you, lad.”
“Me?” I barely glanced up, too engrossed in a set of chairs that looked like they belonged in a Narnia film. “Not that bloke from the dairy is it?”
My dad glared. My sexuality had been embraced by the whole Manning clan with open arms, but shagging the milkman’s son hadn’t gone down well, especially when my dad had caught us in the barn in question. “Dear Lord, Jasper. There’s five bedrooms in the house. Have you no self-control?” I eyed the brandy Laura kept by the stove for cooking. Apparently not. “If it’s not Carl, who is it?”
“See for yourself,” my dad grumbled. “I’m having a brew.”
Sighing, I tore myself away from Kim’s mastery and drifted outside, my mind still on the barn. I had few friends in Porthkennack outside of the ones I’d borrowed from Gaz and Nicky, and part of me wondered if this was another of my father’s attempts to coerce me into taking home one of the farm’s stray cats—his lifelong mission.
Despite the fact that he’d been on my mind from the moment I’d met him, Kim was the last person I expected to see.