Cash

Match of the Day was a riot in my house. Though football made Lucky nervous, he had a brain for figures and could tell you the league standings before the last whistles had blown, while I just watched it to ogle hot men in shorts, and Dom…fuck, it was complicated. He wanted to watch, but it was like he wouldn’t let himself. That he was scared of being dragged back in. Every Saturday was the same—Lucky frowning as he did calculations in his head, me half asleep on the couch, and Dom hiding behind his phone or his laptop, gaze flickering towards the screen when he thought no one was looking.

It was fucking horrible, but I was starting to understand. It had been a week since I’d spent hunt day with Rae, but I couldn’t get it—or him—out of my mind. I’d sworn to myself that making him comfortable, and safe, would be enough. That donating everything I could to his crew would quell the fire burning in me. But it wasn’t. Not even close. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stop staring at Dom’s jittery hands.

He noticed after a while, but didn’t say anything until Lucky had slipped out to smoke. “Something wrong?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re staring at me like a maniac, and I’m fairly sure it’s not my pretty face that’s got you so captivated. Come on…what’s up? And don’t say nothing.”

I sighed. “Didn’t Lucky already tell you?”

“No. Why would he tell me your business if it isn’t mine?”

God, I loved these two. They thought I’d saved them by giving Lucky a home, but they’d saved me by teaching me how to be human again. “I wish he had told you.”

“So you wouldn’t have to go over it again?”

“Yeah.”

“So don’t. Just tell what’s on your mind now…if you think it’ll help. We can go outside and beat the shit out of the punchbag instead, if you want.”

Dom liked hitting things when he got pissed off. Me? I was more of a wallower. Misery wasn’t real until I’d stewed in it for weeks at a time. And it had been weeks. Ditching Rae as his crew had come home had merely tipped me over the edge. I didn’t even know if they’d been successful or not. I glanced at the TV, and then back at Dom. “Do you miss it?”

Dom’s eyes narrowed a touch, but I knew him enough to know that wasn’t about me. “In what sense?”

“The people, I guess. I know you weren’t into the lifestyle.”

Dom snorted. “I said I wasn’t, but I still drive the wanky car and keep the knobhead apartment up town, so I can’t be that fucking humble.”

“What about the people, then? You must’ve had friends.”

“Not really.” Dom changed the channel, as though seeing his old life splashed across the screen, as well as in his own head, was too much. “There were people I liked, and who liked me, but no one knew me. Until I met Lucky, I was a stranger to even myself.”

“You didn’t love the game?”

“Of course I did, on some level, but it was all I knew, and there was so much of me it didn’t touch. Besides, it’s just a fucking game, Cash. No one dies if the ball doesn’t get kicked around a pitch. It’s obscene, when you think about it.”

I could think of worse things people did in the name of sport. My stomach clenched, and Dom faded out. I’d managed to resist checking Rae’s blog for an update on last weekend’s hunt, but barely, and only because I no longer had the heart to hear bad news. To see in black and white the consequences of a shit day. My pulse quickened even at the thought of it. Feeling Dom’s gaze on me, I swallowed thickly and searched for somewhere to hide my trembling hands, but it was too much. Lucky came back inside. He slid into Dom’s lap, and I took my moment to slip away.

Outside in the garden, I didn’t feel the cold. I sat on the bench I’d built with Lucky one summer night when he’d been feeling twitchy. I’d never told him I’d spent the whole time jonesing for something as much as he was. Only it hadn’t been the oblivion he craved—it was something more than I had, more than I was. It was something—someone—I’d left behind forever.

Shula crept into the garden, her mate a heartbeat behind her. She scoured the grass for anything I might’ve left out for her, but I hadn’t tonight, and any guilt I might’ve felt was held at bay by the knowledge that feeding her every night was crueller than it was kind. She couldn’t rely on me, and neither could anyone else. I wasn’t the man who’d taken Rae home and fucked him, but I wasn’t the man he thought I was either.

***

Rae: Heading out this weekend. Wanna come?

Groaning, I rolled over and stuffed my phone under my pillow. It was the third message Rae had sent me, and he always seemed to time it just right—when I was on my own in bed with nothing but him and his fucking righteous gang on my mind.

It had crossed my mind to find someone to keep me company at night, to distract me from the last person who’d shared my bed, but I’d only got as far as peeking on Grindr before Rae’s second message had popped up. After that…fuck. There was no way anyone could come close to how he’d made my body sing. I wish I’d never met him.

I had the mantra on repeat, blasting my brain cells with negativity every time the what ifs got too loud. It worked during the day when my hands were busy at work, and in the evening when Lucky and Dom kept me occupied, but at night, when I was alone with my thoughts, there was nothing—just a pull in my heart that hurt like a bitch, and a boner for Rae that wouldn’t fucking quit.

By Friday, he’d given up texting me. I missed it—I missed him—even though I’d failed to respond to a single message.

I came home to an empty house. Lucky and Dom, perhaps bored with my sulking, had gone back to Dom’s place. At least, I figured that was why they’d gone until I checked my phone, and spotted the paparazzo lurking in the back hedge. Fuckers. Dom had been out for ages now, and the press still acted like it was brand new. As if he was the only gay bloke who’d ever played football. I considered hauling the twat out of the bushes and kicking him into next week, but respect for Dom stopped me. It wouldn’t have helped.

Still, having someone watching my house made me antsy. My mug had never wound up in the snaps lurking photographers sometimes caught of Dom, but I’d spent so long under the radar—living like Rae—that the idea of my face splashed across the tabloids was enough to drive me to drink.

At least it would’ve been if I’d had anything in the house worth drinking.

Irritated, I resorted to pacing the living room, only stopping to peep through the back curtains like a fugitive. I was debating spraying the pap with the hosepipe when Lucky called.

“Come here,” he offered. “Or Dom will get you a hotel. Please, Cash. Don’t let our shit hold you hostage.”

The irony took another chunk out of me, and I laughed. “Nah, you’re all right. I’m just being dramatic. I can go out if I want. What are they gonna do to me?”

“That’s not the point,” Lucky said. “You shouldn’t have to worry about it.”

“Neither should you or Dom. Besides, I’ve got places I can go if it gets too much.”

“Same place you went all day last Saturday?”

“Piss off.”

Lucky sighed. “Seriously? You’re still not talking about that?”

“Nope.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yep.”

“And a fraud. You were the sunniest fucker in the world when I met you.”

It was banter, but it hit home. Lucky knew more about me than anyone outside of my family and the sab world, but he didn’t know it all. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have made up for the cloud I’d cast over his home. “I’m sorry, mate.”

“So are we. Doesn’t change anything, though, does it?”

We left it at that. He went back to loving Dom, and I went back to fantasising about what I’d do with an empty house if I wasn’t brooding over persecuted foxes and their enchanting protectors.

Hours later, or at least it seemed that way, I retreated upstairs to the relative sanctuary of my room. Despite fighting it for days, opening Rae’s blog seemed the logical next step, and I was eyes-in on his latest post before I truly comprehended what I was doing. The hunt he’d sat out of with me had played out as expected. Rae was their fastest, most agile sab. Without him on the ground, and with less neutral monitors than usual, Rae’s gang had been outmanned and outgunned. It had ended badly, and Rae’s guilt and pain seeped from every word on the page.

Fury tore through me before I could check it, a blind rage that joined forces with every loitering emotion and drove me off my bed. I ripped my phone from my pocket, jamming out a message as I made a mental list of every bit of kit I’d never managed to part with.

Cash: I’m coming

***

Rae

I never slept the night before a hunt, even if I didn’t spend it trespassing on landowner’s property and vandalising their vehicles, so I was wide awake when Cash’s message came through, ambiguous as it was.

His van had blacked out panels in the back. I could see out, but no fucker could see in. I figured that meant if I stared hard enough, I’d see him approach, but I didn’t. A few hours before dawn, he appeared like a ghost.

“What have I told you about letting randoms wander onto your camp?”

I sat up, disentangling myself from my sleeping bag. “You’re not a random.”

“Could’ve been, though, eh?”

“What do you suggest? We borrow a hound from up the road?”

Cash snorted and opened the van door wider so I could see him.

And he could see me. His eyebrows rose.

“What?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you came all the way here to tell me I look like shite.”

“The opposite, actually. You look like the night I first met you.”

I’d forgotten that the last couple of times he’d seen me I’d been a coughing, limping disaster. “Yeah, well. I’m better now. Back in business. Question is, are you?”

Cash held my gaze a long moment, then he stepped back and nodded to a rucksack at his feet. “Get your boots on. I’ll show you.”

Twenty minutes later, we were edging towards Goon’s place. I nodded to the open windows. “There’s a bloke up there with night vision or some shit, and someone else patrolling the yard. Even if I got over the wall, I’d never get to the vehicles.”

Cash nodded. “I thought as much. In my old patch, the main house was like Fort Knox. We only got over the gates a couple of times, and we always got caught.”

If Cash’s landowner was anything like Goon, I didn’t want to imagine what had happened next. “So what did you do? Disabling the vehicles is the only reason we’re still going.”

“I know. That’s why I brought these.” Cash dropped his backpack on the ground and unzipped it. “Stingers. Little ones that won’t send a lorry full of dogs off the road.”

Some sabs didn’t care about the hounds. I did. That Cash did too made me warmer than the icy twilight deserved. “How many do you have?”

“Three. They’re so small that one won’t stop the lorry on its own, but if we spread them out, we should get lucky.”

“What if they figure it out after the first one and drive around the rest?”

“They won’t be able to if we target the bend with the ditch. To get out, they’ll have to reverse, and that’s when we lay the last one.”

We. Adrenaline kicked through me. Cash had turned up with his bag of tricks, but little to tell me about his intentions. I couldn’t lay a spike strip on my own, without someone at my back. Was Cash gonna be that man? For real?

He answered my unspoken question with a grim nod. “You ready?”

Fuck yeah.

We didn’t have much time. The bend Cash had earmarked was a quarter of a mile from the house and hidden by trees, but I couldn’t guarantee there would be no Goon squad knobbers out looking for me already, and I knew they’d be gunning for me by sunrise.

Cash shouldered his bag and we jogged through the woods, him following my lead until we got to the road.

“Hold this. And keep your gloves on.” He gave me the end of the first stinger and dashed across the road. Seconds later—or so it seemed—he was back.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. They used to take longer to set, but we got some prototypes from an anti-terrorist lab a few years back. The police use the bigger version in London all the time. Anti skid, see? Stops the vehicle without killing anyone.”

Personally, I wasn’t particularly worried about the fate of the people driving the hound lorry, but I was trying to be better man. “What if the police pick these up? Will they know where they came from?”

Cash winced. “Maybe. If we can, we’re gonna have to scoop them up.”

Brilliant. I’d had hopes of laying the last stinger and scarpering home for breakfast, but nothing about sabbing was ever so simple.

We laid the second strip and retreated to a safe spot to wait for the vehicles to roll out. Instinct told me they’d move the hounds first, taking advantage of the fact that I’d failed to disable the lorry, but we had to keep watch to be sure, be ready to scoop the stingers and re-lay them if we needed to. If we even could

I led Cash to a dug-out I’d holed up in before. Concealed by undergrowth, it was sheltered from the wind, relatively dry, and gave us the perfect view of the gates.

“Hope they don’t come out too fast,” Cash said. “We won’t have a lot of time to switch things up.”

I crouched and carved out an indent for myself in the earth. “We’ll be fine.”

Cash didn’t seem convinced, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I settled in, sensing his gaze on me, but I didn’t look at him when he finally ducked down beside me. Who knew how long we’d be in this hole, and now we weren’t busy laying stingers, his close proximity was…interesting. Whether he wanted to or not—and I had no idea where he was on that—Cash did something to me. Brought me to life in ways only sabbing had before. I’d felt it the last time we’d been together, but it had been dulled by the ludicrous state of me. Healthy and whole, I was a fucking mess for him. Every sideways glance and accidental brush of hands, I catalogued it all, buried it in the Cash part of my brain. Indecipherable, but undeniable.

He sat beside me, poised, and utterly focused on the gates. I tried to mirror him, but restlessness kept me fidgeting until he laid a hand on my arm.

“Easy,” he murmured. “Could be hours yet.”

“Fucking hope not.”

“So do I, but you’ll knacker yourself if you don’t rest.”

“Freeze to death, more like.”

Cash snorted. “Bollocks. You survived a good few winters in that tent. You’ll be all right.”

I didn’t want to be all right. I wanted to be somewhere warm—and preferably naked—with him, and the fantasy was a distraction I couldn’t handle when I had work to do. I’d seen only the next hunt, the next badger cull for so long that the new colours in my life were spinning me for a loop.

An hour passed, cloaked in a silence that was neither companionable nor loaded. Cash was a study in patience, while I tapped and twitched, swinging wildly between running through everything that could go wrong with the operation, and what it would feel like to push Cash down on the frosty ground, relieve him of his combat gear, and take his cock in my mouth.

It was an intense state of flux.

Two hours into our watch, my stomach growled loud enough to scare the birds. Awesome. I was hungry too, something else I’d neglected to take care off. The pockets I usually stuffed with chocolate and dry-roasted peanuts were bare. Fucking idiot.

Cash handed me a Bounty bar. “Eat that.”

“What about you?”

He produced another, dark chocolate this time. “I’m good.”

Famished, I inhaled the chocolate bar, hoping the sugary coconut would slow my racing mind, but Cash moved closer and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay? I’ve been-uh-worried about you.”

I tried not to lean into his touch. Failed. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I keep telling myself it’s because you got hurt, and ill, and there isn’t really anyone around to take care of you, but…fuck, I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

Cash shook his head. “You do something to me, man. It isn’t just about sabbing anymore. I like you, Rae.”

Am I dreaming right now? I was milliseconds away from kissing him. From absorbing the warmth from his body, adding it to the heat that pulsed between us, and trying to set right the imbalance in a relationship I didn’t truly understand. But the screech of wrought iron cut me off mid-lean, and Cash jumped back from me like he’d been burned.

“The gates! They’re opening.”

Snogging in the dirt forgotten, I scrambled to my feet. From our vantage point, I had to press up against Cash’s back to see. We fit together like a glove in a position that hadn’t occurred to me, but there was no time to dwell on it.

The hound lorry appeared on the road. Relief washed over me, but it was short-lived as it approached the stingers. For all I wanted to stop the hunt, I had no desire to see the hounds hurt. Cash reckoned the lorry would come off the road gently, but with my sole experience of stingers coming from traffic cop TV shows, I wasn’t convinced.

Faces covered, we crept from our hidey hole and ducked down into the ditch that ran alongside the road. It was a risky move, as it wasn’t quite deep enough to conceal us, but we had to stay close enough to act. To re-lay, or scoop and run. Or to fight, though it hopefully wouldn’t come to that.

The lorry entered the bend. Heart in my mouth, we followed, and I braced myself for impact, for the ear-shattering bang of exploding types.

But it never came. A low hiss pierced the air, then the screech of brakes, and the shudder of the protesting engine. The lorry rolled over the second stinger. Another hiss, and then it rolled to a stop, gently and utterly disabled.

Fuck. We did it.

There was no time to appreciate the sight of Goon’s hound truck completely incapacitated, though. I glanced at Cash. He met my gaze for a split second, then leapt out of the ditch. I followed, and without looking at each other again, we split. I went for the stinger the lorry had never reached, and he doubled back for the riskier task of retrieving the ones it had.

Don’t look back. Don’t look back. I dashed to the stinger and ripped it from the ground, winding it up as tight as I could before sprinting away. Behind me, I heard cab doors open. Shouting. And a commotion that turned my heart upside down, but I didn’t look back. Couldn’t, because both of us getting caught would leave the gang short-handed for the rest of the day.

I kept running until I reached the rally point we’d agreed on if shit got real. My lungs heaved, and my pulse hammered in my ears. I doubled over, chasing breath that wasn’t there, desperately scanning the horizon. Come on, come on. But Cash didn’t appear. Five minutes passed, and then ten. I dropped to my knees and punched the ground, fury ripping through me. If they’d caught him, there was no doubt in my mind they’d hurt him. Cash was stronger than his young face and slim frame suggested, but the Goon squad were heavy set and mob-handed. They’d brought iron bars to the last—

“The fuck are you doing down there?”

I whirled around. Cash stood behind me, coat torn, face flushed, his eyes bright with adrenaline. “Jesus. You’re a damn ninja.”

He grinned faintly. “I try. Are you okay?”

“Are you?” I stood and moved quickly to examine him, not giving a single fuck that having my hands all over him wasn’t the norm. Beyond his wrecked coat, there was mud splattered up his back, grass in his hair, and a raised cut on his cheekbone, the mark deepening with every second I stared at him. “What happened?”

Cash shrugged. “I got first stinger up, but the second one was stuck under the back wheels. Some wanker caught me as I was digging it out.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Walloped me a couple of times, but this ain’t my first rodeo, man.” Cash grinned. “I got the job done.”

He held up the bag he’d had strapped to his back when he’d appeared this morning. “All stingers present and correct.”

It nearly made up for the bruise forming on his face. My fingertips fluttered over it. The urge to kiss him was again so consuming, I almost actually fucking did it, but we weren’t that far from the road. We had to get gone before the Goon squad came looking for us.

Keeping a sharp ear out for activity behind, we legged it back to Cash’s car. He drove two towns out of our way to stash the stingers for him to collect later—he really had thought of everything—then we slipped back onto the camp.

Meg met us at the gate. She seemed unsurprised to see Cash with me, but I didn’t get a chance to wonder why. “Police are coming. Fletch called from the south road. We’re about to get raided.”

It would be the third raid of the year. We kept nothing incriminating on site, so I’d never worried about it, but if our suspicions about a copper joining the hunt were true, anything could happen.

The gang gathered in the centre of the camp. Cash pulled me aside, his usually calm gaze darting around. “You’ve never used stingers before, right?”

“Never.”

He shook his head. “Then I need to scarper. If they take my name and look me up, they’ll put two and two together, and get a feel for what else you’re gonna be capable of moving forward.”

“For real? You’re that loaded, eh?”

There wasn’t time for Cash to explain. He kissed my cheek, his tongue ghosting over my unshaven skin, then he melted away, leaving me to ponder if I’d dreamed our morning of mayhem.