Rory hoped the weekend was going to turn out okay. David probably didn’t realise how much it was going to change things, having the kids camped out on the sofa all weekend. It’d put a bit of a crimp on their evenings, what with the kids turning the lights out at nine. They wouldn’t be able to watch the telly or play on the PlayStation in the living room. Well, him and David wouldn’t be able to, at any rate, and so far the kids had been good about not watching stuff when they weren’t supposed to.
Rory had tiptoed downstairs a few times to check on previous occasions, and they’d always been fast asleep. Well, except for that time he’d heard Lucy reading her brother a story by the light of a torch, which had been so cute he’d got all misty-eyed and nearly tripped over his own feet creeping back upstairs.
“If they get a bit much, you tell me, and I’ll have a word,” he said on Friday night as he was shoving his shoes on, ready to go and pick the kids up. “And no one’s gonna be offended if you slope off to your bedroom to get away from the chaos. I’ll make sure they know that’s out-of-bounds.”
“Rory, darling, stop worrying. You’ll give yourself wrinkles. Oops—too late.” David grinned, the cheeky sod.
Rory laughed. “Am I bovvered? Least no one’s gonna mistake my face for a shop dummy.”
“Miaow. Speaking of which, you may want to check your shoes. There was a suspicious patch of feathers on the grass outside, and no sign of the bird which should have been wearing them.”
“Yeah, cheers for telling me before I got ’em on.” Rory held up his booted foot. “Right, I’m off. Shouldn’t be long unless Mr. Squiddy’s gone walkies again. Evie’s pretty good about getting the kids ready on time.”
“Does Lewis help pack their little bags?” David’s expression was so flippin’ innocent it had to be guilty of something.
Only trouble was, Rory wasn’t sure what. “Nah, think he leaves all that to her,” he said, and left.
When he got up to Evie’s, the kids weren’t just ready, they were sitting outside the front door on their luggage like the Girl Who Waited from Doctor Who. Lucy had loved that episode. Evie was hovering, looking a bit fed up. “Finally,” she muttered when Rory stepped out of the Škoda. “These two have been running me ragged since they got home from school. Next time, why don’t you pick them up from there? I can drop off their things during the day.”
Leo flung himself at Rory’s legs and clung on like a spider monkey. “Oof.” Rory managed not to stagger backwards, and patted his son’s tousled head. “Fine by me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, kids?”
“Yeah! Doughnuts!” Lucy shouted, bouncing up from her squished backpack.
Evie made a face. “And don’t fill them up with sugar over the weekend. I don’t want them hyper when I pick them up.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Rory hoped it came over as sincere.
She huffed, so maybe it hadn’t. “Now, you two be good, and we’ll see you on Sunday. Usual time?”
Rory nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine. Come on then, you two, are you coming or what?” He gently unpicked Leo’s grip from around his legs, hoisted him on his hip, and bent down to grab his backpack.
“Is David going to be there?” Lucy demanded as they drove off.
“Course he is, love. He lives there.”
She didn’t answer, and as he’d just got to a junction, Rory didn’t push it.
He’d find out soon enough if she was pleased about that or not.
Neither Rory nor David could work out whose turn it was to cook, and the kids wanted to help anyway, so in the end they all mucked in together. Lucy asked for fish fingers, and her eyes nearly dropped out of her head when David said he’d never eaten them.
“What, never?”
“Never.”
“Never ever?”
“Never ever ever.”
“What did you have for tea when you were little?”
David’s face went dreamy. “Hen—that’s my mother—used to do some yummy black bean and avocado quesadillas. And I used to love her quinoa bites with salsa. But they were only for a treat, obviously.”
Rory and the kids exchanged blank looks. “So . . .” Rory said slowly. “Is that the sort of thing you used to cook before you moved in here?”
“Oh, God, no. I lived on Lean Cuisine and smoothies. Hen did try to teach me to cook, bless her, but we ended up not speaking for a week. She’s really more into acquiring knowledge than passing it on.”
“Uh-huh. Right. Moving on . . .”
Then David had to ask why they weren’t having custard with the fish fingers, cos he’d seen that episode of Doctor Who, and the kids started on at him too, and before Rory knew it, he was opening a can of custard and bunging it in a saucepan.
That Moffat bloke’s got a lot to answer for, Rory thought darkly as he struggled not to gag on his dinner. He felt a bit better when he realised how green David’s face was, and that even Lucy was scraping off as much of the custard as she could and eating it separately.
Leo flippin’ loved it, asking for seconds in actual words and everything. Okay, he whispered in Rory’s ear, but it still counted. Rory felt a bit better after that.
Then they played games until bedtime. Rory showed the kids a bath—they didn’t look that dirty, or whiff or nothing, so he didn’t reckon they needed more than a quick dunk—and got them into their jim-jams and back downstairs with a couple of pillows and some fluffy blankets.
“Leo wants David to read to us,” Lucy announced.
“Love, you can’t ask him to—”
“It’s no trouble,” David cut him off, letting Mr. Willis catch the long pheasant feather he’d been teasing him with and disappear under the coffee table to mangle it at his leisure. “I’d be delighted to. What literary treats are in store for us tonight?”
“Francesca the Football Fairy.” Lucy scrabbled around in her backpack and brought out the book, which was a bit worse for wear these days. “It’s our favourite.”
Rory gave him a commiserating look. “There’s a whole series of them. Football, painting, kitten, even musical flippin’ instruments. You name it, they got a fairy for it.”
“Sounds like a place in Soho I used to frequent.” David hoisted a happily squirming Leo onto his lap and opened the book. “Now, children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”
Rory listened, bemused, as David’s animated voice brought life back to words he could have recited backwards in his sleep.
It was cosy, the four of them lined up on the sofa. Nice. Like being a family again. And all right, David was only the lodger, but . . . but he wasn’t, was he? Not really. Would he read the kids stories if he was just a lodger? No way.
He was a mate. A good mate.
Rory wasn’t sure what Evie did about bedtime at weekends anymore, but his rule was lights out at nine o’clock sharp, so he and David tucked the kids up under their blankets and said good night.
Once they were out in the hall and the door shut behind them, David turned to him and whispered, “So what do we do for the rest of the evening? Go to bed?”
“Nah. Well, sorta. I usually go upstairs and watch telly on the laptop. Join me if you like?”
“Ooh, that’d definitely be more fun than going to bed alone. What are we watching?”
“Whatever you want. You into, like, Marvel and stuff?”
“Does a hobby horse like spotted dick?”
“That was a yes, right? So, uh, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D? Agent Carter?”
“Agent Carter. That lipstick is to die for.”
“Nah, it don’t kill you. Only knocks you out. Come on, then. Before one of ’em gets up for a wee and finds us hanging around out here like we want to read more stories.”
They tiptoed upstairs, and David turned to him. “You get it set up. I’ll go and get Gregory.”
“He’s a big Marvel fan and all, is he?”
“He’s more into period drama, but what is Agent Carter if not that? He adores Hen’s DVDs of Brideshead Revisited.”
“Fine, but I’m not waiting while he gets changed. He can come as he is.”
“Spoilsport. It’d serve you right if he turned up naked.”
“He’s a bear. With fur. I don’t think naked’s an option. I’ll see you in a jiffy.” Rory flung himself on his bed, punched the pillows a few times until they made a good back support, and opened up his laptop.
David was there before he’d even got the website to load, holding Gregory in his arms. Rory patted the bed beside him. “Come and pull up a pillow.”
“Now there’s an offer I don’t get from you every day.” David sat down, carefully placing the teddy bear between them. He—the bear, that was, not David—was wearing a tiny set of striped pyjamas, so either David had changed him in double-quick time or Gregory had been a lazy sod and never got dressed today.
Rory smiled at himself. He was getting as bad as David. “How long have you and Gregory been together?”
“Oh, years. Decades. Well, nearly. I found him hiding under the Christmas tree when I was four. He wasn’t called Gregory then, of course. We had a little confab about it and changed his name a few years ago. Apparently he thought Boobie Bear wasn’t dignified for a bear of his advanced age.”
When he was four. That must have been about how old David had been when his dad had died. Rory sneaked another peek at the teddy. He was looking pretty good, for a twenty-year-old soft toy. Still had plenty of fur, although it was thinning in places. Not that Rory was in any position to throw stones. “He always had the piercing?”
“Oh, the button in his ear? Yes, that’s original.” David smiled down at the toy, and there was something in his face that made Rory feel strange inside. Sort of hot and lumpy. But in a good way. “Do you think I should get one to match?”
Rory laughed. “Yeah, why not? I reckon it’d suit you.”
“Well, if I do, you’re explaining it to Hen. She has Views on permanent body art.”
“Good thing I never got a tattoo, then. Right, we starting from the start?”
“Oh, yes. We have to see poor tragic Colleen’s brief arc.”
“Here we go, then.” Rory got it set up, hit Play and Full Screen, and settled back to watch.
Weird how much better it was, watching a show with someone who was as into it as he was. David wasn’t exactly quiet. He threw out comments on everything from what the characters said and did to the way they dressed. Rory got into the spirit of it and added some of his own. It was fun.
After they’d watched the first two episodes back-to-back, he paused it and had a bit of a stretch. They’d both slipped down a bit on the pillows, so they were more lying than sitting, and he was getting a crick in his neck. “You all right, there?” he asked David.
“Mm, perfect.” He straightened Gregory, who’d started to lean over, then turned to Rory with a wicked grin. “Tell me honestly, Rory. Am I the only man you’ve ever had in your bed?”
Rory gave him a look. “You’re on my bed, not in it.”
David met his gaze with a defiant air, pulled down the duvet a few inches, and shoved his toes underneath.
Rory had to laugh. “Cheeky sod.”
“Mm, fair comment. On both counts.”
Okay, that made Rory feel a bit . . . weird. He hadn’t meant that literally. Hadn’t even thought about the sort of thing David might like to get up to in bed.
Now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
David gave a nervous laugh and pulled his feet back out from under the duvet. “Ignore me. You don’t want to listen to anything that comes out of my mouth. So, next episode? Or should we call it a night?”
He was all tense and still, like he was holding his breath, and suddenly Rory felt ashamed. So what if David did like to do stuff in bed with blokes? Didn’t mean he was gonna jump on Rory and do it to him just cos they happened to be sitting on the same bed and having a laugh together, did it?
“Next episode,” he said firmly, pushing down all the weird feelings and trying to forget them. “You wanna grab a drink or something first? Still got some of that whisky left.”
David scrambled off the bed, smiling like a kid who’d been told to go find a bag of sweeties. God, sometimes Rory forgot how young he was. “I’ll get it. You’re having a glass too? I’d offer to make Scotch cocoa but it’d be a crime with whisky this good.”
“Neat’s fine. Bring the bottle, yeah?”
“Oui, mon capitaine.” David snapped off a sharp salute, turned on his heel, and scampered off.
Shaking his head, Rory cued up the next episode.
They ended up watching the next two, but Rory was nearly falling asleep by the end of the second one cos it had to be well late by now. He looked at his clock and groaned. “Call it a night? The kids’ll be getting me up about six hours from now.”
“Oops. I forgot little ones tend to do that.” David yawned and stretched, his T-shirt riding up again. “Can I just not move? I’m not sure moving at this juncture is actually possible. Why am I so tired? I’m never this tired on a Friday night.”
Rory laughed. “Kids, eh? They take it out of you.”
David lounged back against the pillows. “But they are adorable. Do you think they like me?”
“Course they like you. They don’t make just anyone read that flippin’ football fairy book.”
“Don’t you dare say a word against Francesca. She and I are soul mates. Apart from the whole liking football thing.”
“Uh-huh. Soul mates. Definitely.”
David grinned up at him. “Sooo . . . Tell me, Rory, Rory, Rory: who would be your soul mate? Out of our Agent Carter heroines, that is. Angie or Peggy? The sassy blonde, or the cool, competent brunette?”
Rory didn’t know about soul mates, but then he didn’t reckon that was what David was really asking. “Peggy.”
“Oh, that was fast.”
“Proper old-fashioned stunner, ain’t she? What about you, then?”
David raised an eyebrow. “Peggy or Angie?”
“Nah, you tosser. Uh, Stark or Jarvis? The, uh, the moustached millionaire—”
“Oh, very good.”
“—or the British butler?”
“Let yourself down a bit on that one. Hm, that is a hard one. Which is what he said. Either. No, both.”
“Yeah?” Rory frowned. “I mean, yeah, Stark’s fit enough, even I can see that, and he’s got all the charisma, but Jarvis? He’s just a bit . . . I dunno. Boring?”
“But look at the way he fills out a three-piece suite. Suit.”
“Never been much for suits. Too . . . stiff.”
“You say stiff like it’s a bad thing.” David sniggered.
Rory found himself laughing too, and it was great, until flippin’ Barry popped into his head. He could guess what Barry would say about him and David sitting in bed together sharing dirty jokes. And . . . it was stupid, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like there was anything actually going on between him and David.
Thinking that didn’t make him feel better, though. Cos, so what if there was something going on? Who was Barry to say that wasn’t right?
Not that there was, mind.
But—
“I’m off to get my beauty sleep,” David said, grabbing his teddy bear from where it’d fallen down between the pillows, and getting up. “Sleep tight.”
“Yeah, mate. You and all,” Rory said, his voice a bit funny for some reason he didn’t want to think about.
He’d sleep on it. Things would be clearer in the morning.
Right?