Cash

“Why don’t you go and see him?”

I glanced up from the tools I was packing away, chucking them one by one into the box with a satisfying clunk. “See who?”

Lucky rolled his eyes. “Rae, of course. You’re constantly on the phone to him, and you’re off tomorrow. Why not?”

“I’m not constantly on the phone to him.”

“Right.”

Lucky laughed, but he was wrong. I’d been on my phone a lot over the last week, but with Meg, Fletch…even Sprig a couple of times. I hadn’t spoken to Rae, and weirdly, considering the role he played in the Bedfordshire gang, he hadn’t come up in conversation until now.

A scratchy sensation coursed through me. I wondered if it was anything like the itch Lucky had described when he’d been craving a hit of the bad habits he’d left behind. Not a physical itch, at least not on the outside, but one that couldn’t be scratched without fucking up the entire world.

I threw a spanner at the box. Missed, and it clattered to Lucky’s feet.

He scooped it up and brought it to me. “What the fuck is going on with you now? I thought getting back into the saboteur stuff was what you wanted?”

I glowered at him. “What does sabbing have to do with you wanting me to go visit Rae?”

“Everything. There’s not much between the two, is there?”

He was more right than I wanted to acknowledge, but Lucky wasn’t going anywhere. We were both done for the day, and I’d promised to keep him company while Dom was away on a rare overnight business trip. Lucky didn’t do well on his own, and I was beginning to realise I didn’t either.

I left the rest of the tools where they were and scrambled to my feet. “Stop talking about shit you don’t understand. Let’s go get dinner.”

There was a Chinese place on the way home that served sweet and sour tofu Lucky seemed convinced was actually chicken. It didn’t take much to persuade him that swinging by on the way home and ordering enough for a small army was more fun than talking about the clusterfuck I’d created with Rae.

Or so I thought until we were flopped onto the couch and he was finally full. Lucky was a tactile fella. He put the telly on, turned the lights off, and cuddled me as if we were brothers far younger than I could ever remember feeling. It was different to how Rae laid with me. There was no heat in Lucky’s touch, only the friendship I so desperately needed.

I shivered.

He stole a glance at me. “Cold?”

“No.”

“Did you and Rae split up?”

It was quite a leap from my body temperature. I shook my head. “We were never together.”

Lucky shifted to look at me properly. I tried to lose myself in his pretty face—his long hair and high cheekbones—and pondered how different the last year could’ve played out if I’d been attracted to him. It would’ve meant no Lucky, and no Dom. No real friends who had my back however much of a moody bastard I’d turned into.

With Lucky’s gaze burning holes in the side of my head, it was a bizarre situation to consider, but that seemed to be my baseline right now. Wild comparisons that did nothing to move me forward.

I shoved Lucky’s shoulder. “Stop staring at me.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

Lucky blew a raspberry. “Bite me.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Says the bloke snuggled up with me when he’d rather be in a muddy tent with his definitely-not-my-boyfriend-partner-in-crime.”

“You’re wrong about that, too. Rae doesn’t have a tent anymore, and I don’t partner with him in the field.”

“I don’t know what the means, but whatever.”

He didn’t ask any more questions. Part of me was relieved, but the itch in me remained. I needed to talk, preferably to someone who understood me. Was that Lucky? Who the hell knew at this point? Sad fact was, he was my only option. Shame I couldn’t bring myself to take it.

A little while later, we went our separate ways, and it was a lonely walk to my attic bedroom at the end of the hall. Though I’d done it a thousand times before, pulling myself up into the loft seemed to rip my arms from my sockets, and the cloud that had trailed me for months now settled deep into my bones. After I’d left Cumbria, my uncle, sick of me flaking on his couch for days on end, had dragged me to a doctor. It had been such an extreme thing for a man like him to do, and it had woken me up a bit. The depression diagnosis had made sense, but I’d declined the prescription the friendly GP had insisted would help. Had I been wrong about that, too?

Probably. Lucky and Dom had made life better…lighter, warmer, but even those easy relationships felt tainted now. Like I’d ruined it so badly I’d never get it back. That whatever happened, I’d never be free of what Zander done to me. A violent shudder tore through me, and for a horrifying moment, I thought I’d puke, but the buzz of my phone distracted me.

Rae: Call me when you can.

***

Calling Rae immediately was easy, accepting his business-like tone, less so. But I deserved it. It wasn’t him who’d called time on whatever else we’d become to each other.

“There’s no official Beds hunt this weekend,” he said, “but we’re obviously unconvinced about that. The Bucks girl from last week—Petra—is watching out for Goon on their patch, but we’ve been in contact with the Hertfordshire crew too. It could be that the hunts join forces and jump from county to county for the rest of the season.”

I lay back on my bed and frowned as I struggled with geography. “How close is Hertfordshire?”

“Depends where you are, but the sabs we have contact with monitor a hunt eleven miles away.”

“That’s a long way to run if we’re in the wrong place.”

“You’re definitely coming then?”

My frown deepened. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Dunno.”

“Seriously?”

“I don’t fucking know, Cash,” Rae snapped. “I have no clue where you are on anything these days, so how would I know if you’re gonna show up or ditch us?”

“I’ve never ditched you.”

“Right.”

I couldn’t figure out if we were talking about sabbing or something else. My brain hurt, and as desperate as I’d been to hear Rae’s voice, this wasn’t the kind of conversation I’d craved. “Listen, I’ll be there, okay? I’m sorry I’m not there now to help you plan and get shit together, but on Saturday just tell me where you need me. Anything you need, Rae. You know that.”

“Course I do, Cash.”

He ended the call. I stared at the screen for a long moment. Then I reached over to my bedside table. At the back of the drawer, behind the johnnies and lube that hadn’t been touched since Rae was last here, was a half full plastic bottle of the worst vodka in the world. I unscrewed the top, tipped my head back, and necked it in one long swallow.

***

The day before the hunt, I came home to find my neighbours had repaired the hole in the wall that allowed Shula and Po to creep into my garden under the cover of thick, untamed bushes. It seemed symbolic…ominous, though I couldn’t say why.

“Don’t kick it down again,” Dom said as though he could read my damn mind. “We’ll find another way for them to get in.”

“There’s no time for that. If they come tonight and they can’t get in, they might not come back.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Dom said gently. “You’ve always said it’s wrong for them to depend on you.”

“On us,” I corrected. “I’m not the only one who feeds them, and that’s not even the point. I can’t—” I pictured Shula and Po making the hazardous journey from wherever they came from and discovering the bricked-up wall, and shook my head. “No. It’s got to be their decision. I can’t block them out.”

Dom had never shown much enthusiasm for our night-time visitors, but perhaps the abrupt shift in my personality over the past few months had made him more amenable to ridiculous things.

At least that’s what I told myself when Lucky came home to find us digging a tunnel and stared as though we’d grown fucking horns. I love my friends.

Next morning, I set off before dawn, but for once, the darkness didn’t match my mood. Days of painstaking coordination meant there’d be more sabs than ever on the ground today, and perhaps even a chance to sit down and talk to Rae properly. About something more than borderlines and phone signals. I’d created a situation with him that didn’t make sense, and I didn’t know how to fix it, but the radio silence was suffocating. There had to be another way.

I followed the sun to the cross-county meeting point in the arse crack of nowhere. There were faces I knew, and many I didn’t, and I tried not to scrutinise every stranger. What was the point? It had been the person I’d been closest to who’d fucked me over last time.

Stop it.

I claimed a space beside Sprig, absorbing an atmosphere that wouldn’t have been out of place in a war bunker. This was what I’d come for. I could wallow in the past at home.

Meg was leading the meeting, backed up by the lead Bucks sab, and a dude I presumed had come over from Herts.

“The only officially scheduled hunt today is in Bucks,” Meg said. “Beds ran unofficially in Bucks last week, so we really have no idea what they’ll pull today, and traditionally, the Hertfordshire hunt have always been transparent in their movements. They’re not due to run today.”

The Herts representative stepped forward. “We’ve been lucky with the hunt we monitor. In the last five years, we’ve only lost a handful of foxes, and I truly believe those incidents were accidental. There are a few hunts out there who stick to the law, and ours is one of them…so far. Obviously we’ll never rest on our laurels, but we’re truly sorry for what you’re dealing with in Beds and Bucks, and we’ll do everything we can to help.”

His assessment of his home turf sounded optimistic to me—jaded cynic that I was. I caught his eye. “Are you sure the main hunt isn’t a front? We had one of those where I was before. Rode out trail hunting every weekend, barely crushing a dandelion, while rogue riders did the real thing two towns away.”

“We’ve considered that,” the Herts sab retorted. “Thanks for asking, but we have more issues with the badger cull right now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we have it easy.”

Score. I accepted the dressing-down with a nod. I didn’t care if he thought I was an idiot.

Meg took over again. The Bucks reps were dismissed to get ready for their hunt, leaving Herts and Beds to assemble into crack teams who would monitor the other local hunting sites, and stay mobile enough to hop counties at a moment’s notice.

“Cash, you’re with Rae,” Meg said. “Head back to our site and keep the van on the road.”

“With Rae?”

“Yes.” Again with the “idiot” look, though Meg’s eyes were kinder. “Him and Fletch have been up at the house since the early hours. Find them there and send Fletch to me.”

A lack of tingling in my skin had let me know Rae wasn’t there the moment I’d hopped over the fence and joined the meeting. Orders received, I slipped through the ranks and jogged back to my car, eager to get to Rae as soon as possible, though I was fairly sure a cool reception awaited me.

The Bedfordshire landscape was familiar enough to me by now that I drove to the camp’s village on autopilot, ditching my car at the supermarket. Before I hit the woods and possibly lost signal, I called Rae.

He picked up before the first ring completed. “Yeah?”

His flat tone cut through me, but I swallowed the clawing feeling in my chest. We’d talk later. “Where you at? Meg wants us on the road with the van, and she said to send Fletch to her.”

“Hang on.”

There were muffled voices as Rae communicated my message to Fletch, and then a harsh crackle as he came back on the line. “Fletch is on his way. Have you got the spare van key?”

My hand shifted automatically to my coat pocket. “Yup. Want me to grab the van and drive up to meet you?”

“Yeah. There’s only a half kennel of hounds up here, so I reckon whatever dogs he’s riding out today were moved out last night, but I want to hang on a little longer to be sure. It might be a decoy.”

I’d tried to explain the lengths hunts went to in their attempts to fool watching sab to an outsider once, and in turn, the extremes sabs use to intercept them. I was met with disbelief, but I accepted Rae’s explanation without a second thought. “Meet me at the bottom of the lane in half an hour.”

I ran to the camp and opened the gate with the key Meg had given me. The van smelt like Rae, but was tidier than when I’d last seen it, like he’d hardly been in it. Even his sleeping bag was neatly folded up, as though he’d rolled out of bed with more on his mind than tramping through the woods to spy on Goon’s place.

You think about him way too much.

Hardly news, so I let myself carry on as I drove the van off camp and hopped out to secure the gate. Let myself dream that he’d be waiting for me with a smile at the bottom of the lane.

He wasn’t. But then, with his gaze glued to his phone, he wasn’t looking at me at all.

I pulled up beside him, trying not to get a kick out of him dressed all in black, mud already spattered up his trouser legs. Maybe one day we’d fuck outdoors, rolling around in the dirt and the grass, clean up after in the river.

The fantasy made my heart skip a beat, but it was over before it truly got started, drowned in the reality that it had been me to call time on the fledgling relationship that could’ve led to magic like that.

Dickhead.

Rae pulled himself into the van. Finally, our eyes met. The beginnings of a grin ghosted across his face, but it didn’t materialise. “I see you’re in good mood?”

“Me?”

“It wouldn’t kill you to smile, mate.”

It was so close and yet so far from my own thoughts that I burst out laughing. Inexplicable, ridiculous chuckles that made Rae stare at me as if I was a mutant.

“The fuck is wrong with you?”

It took a moment for me to compose myself enough to answer. And even then, I didn’t have anything sensible to say. I shook my head. “Just happy to be alive, man.”

“Fair enough. Let me second that by having a fag.”

Rae lit a cigarette and went back to his phone.

I wanted to shake him.

And I didn’t want to know what—or who—had him so captivated by his text messages.

The idea of Rae with someone else was enough to obliterate the manic humour I’d arrived with. I scowled at the road ahead until I remembered a small detail from the clusterfuck of last weekend. “No coppers.”

“Hmm?” He glanced up from his phone.

“Coppers,” I repeated. “They were waiting for us last week, and the hunt wasn’t even here. You think it means something that they aren’t here now?”

Rae finally shoved his damn-fucking phone into his pocket. He scanned the road ahead, and stuck his head out of the window to check behind us.

He was windswept when he turned back to me, the tip of his nose pink with cold. “All clear.”

“So?”

“So…” He fished his phone out again. “I guess we’ll see if that means the real fight is going to be here.”

***

An hour later, we were still rumbling up and down the lanes surrounding the prime hunting ground unimpeded. Goon’s place was quiet, the woods were clear, and there was nothing going on in Hertfordshire either. The Bucks hunt had ridden out and was in full swing. If nothing happened in Beds in the next half hour, I was considering hitting the A5 to give Petra and her crew some back up.

Rae was reluctant to leave. “It’s too obvious. We can’t believe what we see anymore.”

“But what if nothing happens around here, and shit goes down on an actual hunt?”

He shrugged. “Then it’ll be like the hundred hunts that’ve happened here without Bucks support. We can’t be everywhere.”

In practical terms, I knew he was right, but driving around aimlessly pissed me off. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and mauled my bottom lip with my teeth. My nerves were live wires. Doing nothing was impossible.

Rae’s fingers closed around my forearm. “You’re vibrating,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Snapping at people wasn’t my jam, and a few years out of sabbing, caught up in my own head, had mellowed me to the point of being apathetically horizontal. But that had all changed when I’d met Rae. I’d been on edge for months, and he was right. I was fucking vibrating.

I jerked my arm away, and instantly regretted it, my body crying out for his electric touch. “I’m fine.”

“Cash.”

“What?”

Rae reclaimed my arm, his grip this time so absolute I couldn’t escape it without swerving the van. “Pull over.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it.”

“For fuck’s sake.” A layby was up ahead. I drove into it too fast and braked to a stop with a screech that should’ve made me wince.

It didn’t.

Rae scowled at me. “What the hell is going on with you? If you haven’t got the right head on for sabbing today, do me a favour, and go home.”

I wondered what constituted the right head for sabbing. What made his level glare more suitable than the fire I knew I was chucking right back at him? Then I realised it didn’t matter…because he was right. As riled-up as I was, challenging Goon to a duel, him armed with a pitchfork, and me with nothing but my temper, sounded like an ideal day out.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I sighed and banged my head on the steering wheel. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, man. Just talk to me. Maybe I can help.”

A bark of humourless laughter escaped me. I gestured at the bleak winter countryside around us. “Unless you’ve got the answer to making this shit end already, I very much doubt it.”

“Define this,” Rae said. “You mean today in general, or the reason we’re here?”

“Both. Neither.” A heavy sigh escaped me. “I guess I’m used to either hiding away from all this, or doing something about it, you know? I’d forgotten what it’s like to wait around for the worst thing in the world.”

Rae’s hand was still vice-like around my arm, but his grip loosened a bit. Suddenly it was friendly and not restraining. “I figured you’d have trouble adjusting.”

“Oh you did, did you?”

He shrugged. “Not tangibly. I just remember watching you storm the horse charge last week and wondering how you did it—how you went from your day job to being a fucking warrior in the blink of an eye.”

“Did you ever find the answer?”

“Not beyond the belief that fixing cars is what you do, and sabbing is who you are, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“Thanks for the wisdom, granddad.”

Rae laughed, and it held none of the bitterness of my own forced chuckle. He let go of my arm, sat back in his seat, and threw his booted feet up on the dashboard. “You’re welcome.”

I didn’t have a witty comeback, or even an unwitty one, but ending the conversation when we’d been so long without one felt like sacrilege. The van rumbled to life as I turned the key in the ignition, but I didn’t put it in gear, because for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, this moment seemed sacred.

My left hand twitched, and it took only a split second for me to give in and reach for Rae.

Never one to make things easy, I stretched across him and took the hand farthest from me, tugging on it, until he turned in his seat to face me. “I miss you.”

It wasn’t what I’d planned to say, but fuck, I meant it. Returning to sabbing had been a call I couldn’t ignore, and I’d fought hard to convince myself the intensity of how I felt had been nothing new—that it had nothing to do with Rae, but perhaps I’d been wrong. Fuck that. I was wrong. Sabbing was a part of me, but not the whole of me. There was room for more, there had to be, or none of it meant anything. “I mean it, Rae. I really have.”

Rae stared. For a moment he was very still—too still. Then a smile broke through, slow and sweet, and his fingers tightened around mine. “You fucker.”

“Am I?”

“Damn right. I’ve been a mess since you binned me off, but it was easier because I thought you didn’t give a shit. Knowing you miss me too makes it so much worse.”

Guilt charged through me. Just a few short weeks ago I’d been so certain of my actions, but the madness of it now hit me like a ton of bricks. Yeah, I’d been burned before, and fuck yeah being in love with someone who put their life at risk every weekend scared the shit out of me, but pushing my feelings for Rae aside hurt so much I couldn’t see how I’d ever thought it was the only way. “I’m sorry.”

Rae’s gaze flicked out of the window and back again. “You shouldn’t be. I got it then, and I get it now, I just wish things could be different.”

“What if they could be? Different, I mean?”

“How is that possible with everything you said? I don’t want to make things harder for you, Cash. I—” Rae stopped and inhaled a shaky breath. “Fuck, I don’t know what I want. I just know that trying to unravel it while we’re sabbing is a bad idea. You consume me, man. I can’t fucking think straight around you.”

I was still clutching his hand like a drowning man. His words made sense, but something inside me wouldn’t accept them, even though I knew when perspective returned, there’d be no other way. “I—”

“What?” Rae demanded. “Cash, we can’t keep turning this circle of half sentences and contradictions. We—”

Fuck half sentences. I cut him off with a kiss—a rough, dirty clash of lips that stole his breath and mine.

He didn’t resist, just melted against the glass behind him and let me ravage his sweet mouth, until it awoke the same desperate beast in him.

We fought for dominance, shoving and pulling at each other. I was heavier than Rae, but he was fierce, and something in me cried out to have him push me back across the seat and straddle me. We ground together, still kissing, and for the first time in weeks—in months—everything felt right.

I slid one hand under his clothes, gliding my palm over the smooth skin on his flank, as the other found its way to the nape of his neck, fingers seeking soft hair like a moth to a flame. The smell of him, his taste, fuck I’d missed him.

Breathless, I pulled back to tell him so, but was instantly lost in his liquid stare. There was so much I needed to say to him, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

And I couldn’t work out if he was amused, or pissed off. Rae was like that—addictively inscrutable. Dangerous. I kind of wanted him to hit me, as though I craved a connection to him so primal only pain could ever be the bridge. You fucking loon. But I didn’t care. I wanted him. I needed him. And I’d take him anyway he’d let me.

Rae leaned forward and sucked in a shaky breath. His gaze darted to my lips and back again, and then something seemed to shift in him, to give way. He cupped my face in his rough hands, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones. “I wish I’d never met you.”

How many times had I thought the same about him? Too many to be hurt, but it hurt all the same. In another life, perhaps being together would’ve been easy. Fun. Like it had been the night we met. Foxes had died since then, and foxes had been saved. But without this…without him, it wasn’t enough.

I held his wrists, counting his pulse against my fingers. “But we did meet.”

Rae opened his mouth to reply, but an obnoxious chime from his phone shattered the charged air between us. Conflict raged in his beautiful eyes, but in a thump of my heavy heart, he was gone, scrambling off me to get to his phone.

He swiped at it, oblivious to me crumbling beside him. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“The hunt. It’s moved out on the next farm over. Headed this way.”

I stared at him a beat longer, then shrugged as reality kicked me in the nuts. “Well then. Sab on.”