Cash

It was official: hooking up with Rae had sent me round the fucking bend.

I drove to the garage, unlocked it with the keys I’d had the foresight to attach to my house set, and showed him the souped-up Transit, complete with shiny alloy wheels, hardly inconspicuous. “I’ll leave the car here and we can drive the van back to my place.”

Rae flicked another of his patented dark glares my way. “I can drive it back tonight.”

“If you like, but you don’t look in much state to make the journey.”

He stopped limping around the garage like a caged animal. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” He so fucking wasn’t. I’d known it even before I’d caught sight of him across the dilapidated camp his crew called home. Christ, he’d been run over by a fucking quad bike, had his ribs kicked in before his mate—Twig, maybe?—had pulled him clear. He probably shouldn’t have been walking, let alone contemplating driving a heavy van. “We should do something about those wheels before you go, though.”

“Like what?”

“Spray ‘em. Can’t have you camped out in the woods like a fucking Christmas tree, can we?”

A faint ghost of humour lightened Rae’s face. “I might well end up sleeping in it before long. My tent’s a disaster.”

“Then you’ll like what’s in the back of this.” I beckoned him closer and opened the van’s barn doors at the back. “It’s not much at the moment, just a raised shelf really, but chuck a mattress on it and you’ve got yourself a bed.”

A real smile replaced Rae’s faint smirk. He wrapped an arm around himself and came closer. “That could work. I’m getting tired of waking up with my face in the mud.”

“Yeah, it got old real quick for me too, but we had a house to go back to when we weren’t embedded, so it wasn’t so bad. Your gang have it rough.”

“We’re not refugees, mate. We chose this life.”

“I chose it too, once upon a time. Don’t make it easy.”

I walked away to find what I needed to dull down the wheels. It wouldn’t be a proper paint job, but it would do, and the midnight bodge served me right for putting poncy alloys on it in the first place. Damn things had cost more than the rest of the van was worth, but at the time, I’d needed the distraction—anything to keep my hands busy. Pretty similar to how I felt right now.

Spraying the wheels took some time. Rae watched me work, his dark gaze burning holes in my skin, but after a while, he disappeared, and I let him go, trying not to think about Old Jim’s reaction to a stranger snooping around his business.

I needn’t have worried, though. When I was done with the wheels, I found Rae sitting on the floor, leaning against a tyre stack a few feet from where I’d been working. He looked half-dead. I dashed around the garage, cleaning up and putting it back as I’d found it, then I crouched in front of him, nudging him gently. “All done, mate.”

Rae sat up, rubbing his chest again. “Okay.”

I helped him up. His face was blank, but a pained hiss escaped him as his legs bore weight, and his usually warm complexion drained of colour. “Fuck, remind me to smoke more weed when I get home, yeah?”

The way he said it made it sound like we were going home together and I couldn’t make sense of how it made me feel…entranced by the dream, gutted that it wasn’t real, all the while telling myself to give him the van keys so he could drive out of my life for good.

But I didn’t give him the keys. I steered him to the passenger seat and helped him climb up. His phone slipped out of his pocket. I handed it to him. “Text your crew,” I said. “You ain’t coming home tonight.”

***

I drove us back to my gaff and parked the van on the street, but Rae didn’t stir when I shut the engine off. He didn’t react at all until I opened the passenger door. “Rae?”

“Huh? Where are we?”

“My place. Come on.”

I held out my hands. He stared at them like he didn’t believe they were real, then grasped them and slid out of the van. “What are we doing here?”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning. Figured you could use some sleep. You hungry?”

Rae stared a moment, his face still tinged with grey, then shrugged. “Nah. Just knackered.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. He’d looked like warmed-up shite since I’d rocked up on his camp—skin pale, eyes tight with discomfort—but it seemed worse now. The gleam in his dark eyes had faded and he was clearly exhausted. “Fair enough. You can kip in my spare room. No offense, but I don’t think you’ll make it up the ladder to mine.”

“Would there have been an invitation otherwise?”

I let go of Rae’s hands. After two years of silence, my old life had called to me in a way I couldn’t describe, but I couldn’t deny the attraction to him was still there, simmering below the conflict raging inside me. “Um...I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter anymore. You need to recuperate before you go home. I’m offering you a safe place to do that.”

Waiting for his answer seemed impossible. So I didn’t. I drifted to my front door and eased it open, hoping it wasn’t one of Dom’s days to get up early and jog around Tottenham in relative peace.

Thankfully, the house was still asleep. I showed Rae to the ground floor room I’d set up as a spare bedroom and left him to it while I made tea and shot Lucky a text to let him know there was someone in the house.

When I returned to Rae, he was standing at the window, staring out over the garden.

“This is nice,” he said. “Wild. You wouldn’t think you were in London.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.” I passed him a mug. “But laziness worked out well. I keep the patio clear for the fire pit, but I let the rest please itself, within reason. Don’t want the council on my back.”

Rae grunted, reminding me that local authorities were probably the bane of his life. That he was likely living in tents because some rich prick had blocked his gang’s planning application for a permanent home.

A gust of wind rattled the window, and my weirdo desperation to look after him kicked up a gear. I took his elbow and guided him away from the outside world. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So you have everything you need.”

Rae seemed to wear his scepticism like a second skin, and for a moment, I feared he wouldn’t answer me. Then his hands moved to his coat and he unzipped it, shrugging it gingerly over his shoulders.

I took it from him and hung it on the back of the door. When I turned back, Rae was pulling his T-shirt up, and I got my first glimpse of the damage a quad bike could do to a man’s torso.

“Jesus. Did you go to A&E with that shit?”

Rae eased his T-shirt over his head and laid it on the bed. “No, but Drey used to be an RAF medic. He reckons nothing’s broken, just bruised.”

Bruised wasn’t the word. Mutilated, more like. There was no other way to describe the blackened patches marring Rae’s body. From his shoulders to his slim hips, barely an inch of skin on his right side was untouched.

My hands twitched, as if I could run my palms over him and heal him. Twat. “Did you text Fletch?”

“Not yet.”

“Do it now,” I said. “I’m not giving you the van keys until you’ve seen a real doctor.”

Rae snorted. “That’s sweet, but I don’t have one. The GP surgery in our village is full, and there’s no way you’re dragging me to a London A&E at this time of night. Besides, I’m fine. It’s getting better already.”

“Take your shoes off.”

“What?”

I backed up and leaned on the doorframe. “If you’re fine, you’ll have no trouble getting those boots off.”

“Fuck you.”

There was no malice in Rae’s tone, but he didn’t move either. Had I made my point? Who the hell knew? But our umpteenth stare down was getting us nowhere.

I ventured back into the room and pointed at the bed. “Sit.”

Rae sat, and I crouched in front of him, unlacing the kind of combat boots that gave me nightmares. They were pretty clean, given where he’d come from, but up close all I could smell was mud and fear. Only Rae’s pained gasp as I eased them off his feet kept me in the present.

“Sorry.” I finished with one and moved onto the second. “Are you sure you haven’t broken your ribs?”

“Sure as I can be,” Rae ground out. “But I can handle that shit anyway. I—” He stopped and shook his head. “Never mind.”

I manoeuvred the remaining boot from his right foot, trying to ignore the buzz in my hand as I wrapped my fingers around Rae’s ankle, and mourning the loss of it when it was time to stand up. “Listen, I’m not going to drag you anywhere you don’t want to go, but I can probably persuade a friend of mine to come here and take a look at you? It can’t do any harm.”

“You reckon? Last person came on our camp to do us a favour turned out to be Daily Mail scum.”

My heart flinched. “Yeah, well. You know that’s not me. Just think about it, yeah? And get some sleep.” I started to back out of the room, but Rae caught me in another inscrutable stare. “What?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Thanks, I guess. It’s weird as fuck to be in your house again, but I appreciate it.”

I tried for a smile. “You’re welcome.”