In the week that followed Kim’s visit to the farm, he called my father and committed to furnishing the barn while I wallowed in a pit of introspection. And then, as random deliveries of tables and chairs started arriving at the farm every few days, after years of not knowing he existed, I saw him everywhere: the shops, the bank—the pub, of all places.
I even ran into him at the Truro train station on my way back to London to tie up some loose ends.
“You stalking me?”
His tone was light, his grin playful, but after a fortnight of trying to ignore how ridiculous his sudden presence in my world made me feel, I wasn’t in the mood. Or, rather, I wasn’t in the mood for trudging up to London to scrape together the remnants of the life I’d left behind, but the semantics didn’t matter. All I knew was the longer he stood in front of me, the more likely it was that I’d bite his beautiful head off.
I sidestepped him, forcing a grin of my own. “Not my fault you’re everywhere I go, is it? Who’s the stalker?”
“Today? Technically, it’s you, as I was here first.” Kim caught my arm. “What’s the matter? You look like you’re shitting a fridge.”
Charming. I stopped and tried to gather the enthusiasm to reclaim my arm, but it was a tough ask as Kim’s scorching hold seeped into me, threatening to break through the bleak mood I’d woken up in that morning. “I’m fine. Just got a train to catch. What are you doing here?”
“I sent one of my guys to Edinburgh with a bunch of aluminium crockery sets for a gastro-pub.”
“Edinburgh? That’s some distance to go to deliver some plates. You couldn’t post them?”
“I could’ve, but Jack’s nanna lives up there. Might as well let him go and save my tax bill, eh?”
Couldn’t argue with that. How many hours had I lost to pouring over my own accounts and wishing I’d figured out better ways to spend my money? “Anyhow, I gotta go.”
I started to move away, assuming Kim would let me go, but he didn’t. His grip on my arm tightened, and he pulled me back, turning me so I was facing him. “Seriously, what’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Wrong? Nah.” I shook my head slightly, for some reason unable to look him square in the eyes. “Just got some shit to sort out.”
“Bad shit?”
“Not bad in the tragic sense, but it’s . . . uh, difficult.” That was one way of putting it, but I didn’t feel like explaining it to anyone, even now, months after the event.
Shame Kim hadn’t picked up the unwritten Manning family rule that reticence was a sign to leave me the fuck alone. He put his arm around me and stared up at the big screens. “What train are you getting?”
“The midday one.”
“To London?”
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t leave for fifteen minutes. I’ll wait with you, if you like?”
For all my desire to wallow in a pit of solitary self-pity, I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. We drifted to the northbound platform and sat on the grey metal benches. Kim eyed my twisting hands. “No bags. Day trip?”
“Hope so. I’m completing the sale of my flat tomorrow. Just got to sign some papers and pick up a few bits I left behind.”
“Oh. Where’s the flat? Anywhere nice?”
“Hoxton, so depends what you mean by ‘nice.’ You don’t strike me as the type of guy who appreciates grand-scale gentrification.”
Kim pulled a face. “Charging people eight quid for a sarnie and all that hipster crap? No, thanks. My mate Calum says the studio would make three times the profit if we set up shop in the big smoke, but we’d all be fucking miserable, and I reckon he’s right.”
“Probably. I’m a city boy, but those summers on the farm were the happiest I’d ever been.”
“You’re not happy now?”
“Is anyone?”
Kim said nothing. I uncrossed my legs and my knee brushed his. He flinched and stared at me, his expression unreadable. Had he felt it too? The jolt of energy that seemed to grow in intensity every time we touched?
And what the hell was he seeing in my face as I gazed back at him, lost in his stubbled jaw, chiselled cheekbones, and depthless eyes? Could he tell how much I still wanted him? That I’d spent two weeks cursing myself for pushing him away, even though I knew it was the best thing for everyone?
“I could come with you,” he said suddenly. “To London, I mean. Moral support. Company. Whatever.”
“Aren’t you busy?”
“Not today. Seeing Jack onto the train was the last thing on my list.”
Kim didn’t strike me as a lazy guy, and it was barely lunchtime. I dreaded to think how much he’d achieved in the time it had taken me to drag my arse out of bed and to the train station. “I can’t ask you to come with me. Apart from anything else, it will be boring as hell. I’m just going to the flat, and then the estate agents.”
“Won’t take long, then, eh?”
“I doubt it.”
“That’s settled, then, ’cause whatever’s put that cloud on your face, Jas, there ain’t no reason for you to face it alone.”
Kim bought a ticket on the train, and we settled into some seats towards the back, two seats, together, with no one around us. To my shame, I fell asleep almost immediately, worn out by a long night of putting the finishing touches to the images I’d shot of Red’s band, and then only a few snatched hours of restless sleep where my dreams had flitted between her, Kim, and the clusterfuck of heartbreak I’d left in London.
I woke with a jump somewhere near Bath, my cheek mushed against Kim’s shoulder.
“Shit.” I sat up and wiped my mouth. “Sorry. I’m a bugger for passing out on the train. I’ve ended up in Coventry before now.”
Kim chuckled, keeping his eyes trained on the iPad he was drawing on. “Lucky you. I got real bad travel sickness until a few years ago. Could barely ride a bike without chundering.”
“Nice.”
“Not really. My dad is a fisherman. Drove him half mad that I was such a pansy out on the water.”
There was no malice in Kim’s tone, no bitterness. I wondered what his old-school Porthkennack family made of his sexuality, but didn’t ask, because it was none of my fucking business. Besides, Kim had proved himself willing to share anything that mattered. It was me who was dragging him all the way to London without telling him what it was about the trip that made me want to dig my eyeballs out with a teaspoon. “I’m bi too, you know.”
Kim looked up from his work. “Yeah? How’s that working out for you? Ever wish you were one or the other?”
“Not for a long time. I’ve been through phases of hating both sides of the coin, but I’m all right with it now. You?”
Kim shaded a petal on the rose sketch he was working on. “I’m cool with it, most of the time. It’s hard, though. I’ve felt guilty in the past for liking blokes when I’ve been with a woman, and the other way around, but then I met Lena, and it didn’t matter anymore. We both liked everything, so there were no boundaries.”
“Free love and all that jazz?”
“Something like that.” Kim sighed and turned his iPad off, tucking the stylus pen into the side of the case. “Look, I’m not incapable of being faithful because Lena and I chose to have an open relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking. And it didn’t make us love each other any less. It’s—it was just different, and for a long time, I was as happy as I could be with all the other bullshit I was dealing with.”
“I don’t think you’re incapable of being faithful. And I come from a family of swingers, remember? It’s—” I stopped. Just what? What exactly was I trying to explain here? That Kim’s lingering relationship with Red was irrelevant? Because it was me who was emotionally broken? Me who’d closed off my heart from the possibility of ever loving anyone ever again? Not that Kim was asking me to love him. Why the fuck would he?
“Jas.”
I blinked. “What?”
Kim tilted his head to one side. “I’ve never seen you like this. You’re usually so . . . I dunno, fucking poised, and together. What’s up? You don’t want to sell the flat?”
How he knew the sale of my flat and my ramblings on sexuality were connected, I’d never know. Perhaps I’d mumbled my inner woes to him while I’d dozed on his shoulder; it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d talked in my sleep.
It was my turn to sigh. I plucked his iPad from his hands and raised an eyebrow, silently asking his permission to swipe through his sketches—tattoo designs, I assumed.
Kim nodded and leaned over to tap in his passcode. “There’s a couple of folders on there. Enough to keep you busy for a while.”
Perhaps I can love him after all. But as the errant thought crossed my mind, the train rumbled into Swindon, reminding me that only Reading stood between me and the city I’d sworn I’d never go back to. I opened a sketch of an old-school anchor-and-rope tattoo, similar to the one I’d seen on Kim’s chest. The design was classically flawless, and for the umpteenth time since I’d met him, Kim’s talent blew me away. I don’t deserve him. “I’ve cheated on every partner I’ve ever had.”
“That so?”
“Yep.” I swiped through the pages of tattoo designs. “All but one. Bet you can guess that karma caught up with me, eh?”
“It don’t always happen, but when it does, it’s good for us . . . It’s how we learn, how we grow.”
“Or how we realise what we deserve.”
“I don’t believe that.” Kim nudged me until I looked at him. “Fucking up doesn’t mean we deserve to be hurt.”
“No? Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that, in my case, at least. I was an arsehole, Kim. I can’t even— Shit, I can’t explain it. I had a different girl every week, blokes on the side, more girls. I wasn’t a liar, but I think that made it worse, because I just didn’t care. Drugs, booze, sex, it was all the same, you know?”
Kim nodded sagely. “They often come together. Makes it hard to know what to quit first.”
“Well, I quit it all when I found something—someone—who turned my life upside down.”
“Ah, you fell in love?”
“God, yeah. Hard, like a motherfucker.”
“Bloke or girl?”
“Bloke, which knocked me off my feet all over again.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “’Cause all the gay guys I knew up until that point were doing the same as me—fucking their way around Hoxton without a care in the world. No strings. No commitments. I guess I kind of assumed that’s all there was for them . . . for me. And then I met Rich.”
“The love of your life?”
“I thought so for a while. Four years, in fact.”
“That is a while.”
“Especially when you’re wasting your fucking time.”
I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Failed, and the sympathy in Kim’s kind eyes was hard to take. I preferred it when he gazed at me like I was the first naked man he’d ever seen. Which wasn’t going happen again, right? ’Cause I’d told him I just wanted to be friends. Dickhead—
Kim nudged me. “Tell me the punch line. Did he cheat on you?”
“Worse. He was cheating on someone else to be with me.”
Kim winced. “Wife?”
“Yup. Wife, two-point-four kids, the whole shebang. And when I look back on it now, it’s so fucking obvious. Shit, when I eventually found out, he’d been living a double life for our entire relationship—half the week with me at our flat, the rest of it in Northampton with his real family.”
I broke off as it abruptly occurred to me that this was the first time I’d told my tale of woe to anyone who wasn’t one of the handful of faceless blokes I’d fucked in the weeks of drunken malaise that had followed Rich’s revelation. And I was telling him on the train back to the scene of the crime, no less. Jesus.
“Go on,” Kim said gently.
I took a deep breath. “I caught him red-handed. A client invited me to a book launch close to where Rich was living with his wife. I never bothered to tell him I was going, because he was working away, like he always did on Thursdays. Which I guess worked out for the best in the end, because if I’d told him I was going, I’d never have walked into the event to catch him breaking bread with his wife, kids, and my big new client who just so happened to be his brother-in-law.”
“Ouch.”
I nodded. “Yep. I lost my life with him and a six-month contract that day. I care more about the contract now, but at the time—when I realised that everything we had was a lie, that I’d been nothing but a willing arse to satisfy his cock craving—it felt like the end of the world.”
“I s’pose it was, in a way. The world as you knew it, at any rate.”
“Yeah.”
I’d run out of steam, and as luck would have it, the train pulled into Paddington at that moment, a mere four and a half hours after we’d left Truro. I stood and squeezed past Kim’s legs, trying not to gawp as he unfolded his long frame, arching his swan-like neck to stretch out the kinks.
“How far is it to Hoxton from here?” he asked. “I’ve never been.”
I navigated the jostling crowds until we were safely off the train. “It’s forty-five minutes on the tube—here to Oxford Circus, then Kings Cross to Old Street. You don’t know London at all?”
“Only Brixton and Camden, where Brix lived, and even then I didn’t visit that often.”
“You’re not missing a lot.”
“No? Then why did it take you your whole life to leave?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. Instead, I led Kim underground and onto the first of three trains that would eventually take us to Hoxton. Tube journeys were usually quiet by nature—it was the London way—and neither of us spoke much. The silence was almost as comforting as Kim’s warm presence beside me, and before I knew it, we were in Hoxton and outside the tidy garden flat I had once called home.
Kim peered through the gate. “This is nice.”
“It was,” I said sourly. “I kinda trashed the place before I left.”
“Understandable. Did it fuck the sale up?”
“No idea. I left the estate agents to deal with it. I haven’t been back since the beginning of summer.”
“Got keys?”
The Eiffel Tower key ring in my pocket suddenly felt like a brick. I retrieved it and dangled it on two fingers like it had been to Chernobyl and back. They were Rich’s keys, you see. I’d lost mine on a drunken night out in Farringdon and had borrowed his the week before I’d caught him basking in familial bliss with someone else. I’d hidden them in a plant pot when I’d moved into my Porthkennack apartment, buried them, like their absence would take everything else with it, because life worked like that, right? Out of sight, out of mind?
“Come on, mate.” Kim snagged the keys and reached across me to open the garden gate. “You don’t want to be here, I get that, so let’s get inside, get shit done, and piss off home.”
I drifted after him to the front door. “You’re starting to sound like my handler.”
“Do you need handling?”
I cringed as Kim unlocked the flat’s front door, picturing the mess I’d left it in. “Maybe.”
But my apprehension proved unwarranted. The estate agents had done their job—no doubt adding a hefty whack to their fees—and had gutted the place of any sign of my drunken tantrums. All that remained was a pile of broken furniture in the back bedroom, and a box of photographs some kind soul had been thoughtful enough to save.
I ignored the photos and glared at the smashed bookcase. “I don’t give a fuck about most of it, but I loved this bookcase. It was the first piece of grown-up furniture I ever bought.”
Kim regarded the pile of splintered wood. “That’s some serious rage, man. Did you do that to everything you owned?”
“Pretty much. I was blackout drunk at the time, and you probably know how that ends.”
“It ended with me drinking myself into a coma, and this right here”—Kim gestured at the bookcase—“was about all that was left of me.”
I swallowed thickly. Kim was so calm and poised that it was hard to imagine him as anything but. “I have so much respect for you.”
“Why? I haven’t done nowt special. I’m surviving.” Kim moved past me to the window and gazed out at the bustling streets of Hoxton. “It’s so busy here. Porthkennack gets a bit mental in the summer, but it never seems this . . . frantic. I feel stressed just watching these people.”
I joined him at the window and had to agree. I’d never noticed how oppressive London was until I’d left for good. As a kid, my time in Porthkennack had been like crossing over into Narnia or some shit, and going home at summer’s end had been a return to normality. There’d even been times when I’d felt comforted by the throngs of moody commuters and faceless natives, like the hum of frenetic energy had been in my blood, my DNA. But I didn’t miss it now. Porthkennack had yet to truly feel like home, but as I stared out over the city, Kim a silent beacon of who-the-fuck-knew-what beside me, I knew without a doubt that I’d never return to London.
With a sigh, I turned away, eying the box of photographs I really couldn’t afford to ignore. God knew what was in it. The possibilities ranged from nudes of Rich to the lifestyle shots of a bowl of tomatoes I’d once done for a food magazine, and with any luck, the vintage images of the barn back in Porthkennack, taken by the old owners sometime in the fifties.
I left Kim at the window and braved the box. As luck would have it, Rich’s nudes were the first thing I put my hands on. With a grimace, I tossed them over my shoulder without looking at them, subconsciously, perhaps, knowing that Kim would retrieve them, though why I wanted him to see my douchebag ex in all his naked glory, I had no idea. An arsehole, Rich might’ve been, but he had a hell of a body—thickset and strong, sculpted muscles in all the right places. I’d never been so attracted to someone until I met Kim.
Kim. Huh. Despite my preoccupation with my self-pity party, I couldn’t deny that Kim entranced me far more than Rich ever had, physically or otherwise. Hindsight was a wonderful thing.
“This is your ex?”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Yup. Don’t be fooled by his baby face. He’s fucking ruthless.”
“Banker?”
“Wanker, actually, but yeah. He works in the city.”
“Do you miss him?”
It was a question I’d asked myself a lot until I’d met Kim, and I still wasn’t altogether sure of my answer. “I miss the company—as sporadic as it was—and the sex, but I don’t think I miss him. Even without the clichéd double-life bullshit, he was a bit of a prick.”
“You feel free without him?”
I shrugged. “Some days. Still hurts, though. Bastard broke my heart.”
Kim came up behind me and peered over my shoulder. His hands were empty, but I didn’t ask what he’d done with Rich’s nudes. Didn’t care. How could I when Kim was standing so close to me, the warmth of him making my skin tingle?
“Why have you got pictures of fairy dust?” he asked.
I picked up the images he was pointing at. “That’s not fairy dust, it’s grains of sand shot with a macro lens.”
“Seriously?”
Kim plucked a photograph from my hands and held it up to the light. His puzzled frown would’ve been comical if it hadn’t been so beautifully endearing. “Why is it purple?”
“Because it is purple, at least that handful of grains was. Sand is a weird and wonderful thing if you look closely.”
“And you have to care enough to look, eh?”
Kim didn’t seem to expect an answer, so I passed him the rest of the sand series and returned to sifting through the box. The old barn images were at the bottom, stuffed into a ripped brown envelope. I spread them out on the floor and snapped a few shots of them with my phone to send to Gaz. Hopefully, we could frame some of them and display them in the refurbished barn. I glanced at Kim. “Don’t suppose you make picture frames, do you?”
“I can make anything if I’ve got the right materials.” He appeared at my side. “What have you got in mind?”
“These.” I nodded at the barn images. “I’d like to keep as much history in the barn as we can.”
“Good job you got a pile of unused wood over there then, innit?”
I followed Kim’s amused gaze to the smashed-up bookcase. “Seriously? You can do something with that mess?”
“It’s not a mess, Jas. It’s in transition to a new life.” Kim ambled over to the bookcase and produced a foldaway sack from the bag he’d brought with him. “See these bits here? ’Bout a foot long, I reckon. Do the trick nicely.”
He started gathering lengths of splintered wood, while I stared at him like he’d suggested we collect kryptonite from the moon. He’d half filled the sack by the time I returned to the real world.
I didn’t go and help him, though. How could I when the sunlight streaming through the large Victorian windows was hitting him so beautifully? My fingers itched for my camera, but for once I’d left my precious Canon at home. I pulled my iPhone out, loaded the app that allowed me to shoot in RAW, and snapped a few experimental shots.
Kim rolled his eyes. “Always working, eh?”
“Says you.”
“Touché, I’m going to run out of wood to pick up in a minute, though. Want me to slow down?”
That he was so willing to work with me made me want to jump his bones. “No, no, just carry on. The sunlight behind you is perfect. Don’t suppose you fancy taking your top off, do you? Ink and white walls are a fetish of mine.”
Kim’s only answer was a roguish wink as he set his wood-filled sack aside and pulled his Judas Priest T-shirt over his head. He tossed it vaguely in my direction and turned around, showing me his lean, inked-up back in all its glory. And glorious it was. I snapped away, stepping closer with every shot, cursing the fact that I’d always been too busy getting off to take in how fucking stunning he was naked: his slender bones and sinewy muscles, his flawless milk-pale skin. I wanted to take a thousand pictures of him—to already have a thousand pictures of him. I wanted to touch him, to press my face between his shoulder blades and breathe him in.
I wanted to sink my teeth into his elegant neck.
Reluctantly, I settled for a quickened pulse as Kim unbuckled his belt. I’d never noticed what underwear he wore—and now I knew why. Because there was no underwear, not today, at least, only a narrowing trail of dark hair that led to the one thing I definitely recalled.
Swallowing, I snapped his elegant hands as they pushed his jeans down his hips, stopping tantalizingly short of what I wanted to see most. Camera forgotten, I dropped my phone in the box of photographs and stepped into Kim’s personal space. My hands covered his, shoving his jeans down those final few inches, and our lips met in the kind of kiss that made me wonder what we’d been doing all day when we could’ve been doing this.
I pushed him against the wall, absorbing his low groan, and revelled in the way he fell slack in my arms. His cock dug into my stomach. I broke away only long enough to pull my T-shirt over my head, and then I dropped to my knees and took his dick into my mouth with a slow, wet, slide of my tongue.
“Jesus!” Kim’s head hit the wall with a dull thump. His legs quivered, and for the first time since I’d met him, his composure slipped. “Jesus, God, yeah.”
I grinned at his incoherency and fumbled for my wallet and the single condom and sachet of lube that remained in it. Thank fuck, because I don’t know what I would’ve done if yanking Kim to the floor and riding his dick had been off the table.
Supplies retrieved, I tried to find the willpower to release his cock from my mouth—a tough ask as his every sound and shudder travelled through me. I tore at my own belt buckle, desperately seeking friction, and dragged my teeth along Kim’s dick until he growled and pulled my hair, thrusting into my mouth, scraping the back of my throat.
“What do you want, Jas? You want me to fuck you right here? Screw all the bad memories out of you?”
It could never be so simple, but screwing Kim on the hardwood floor of the home I’d shared with Rich was going to happen. Besides, Rich was the last thing on my mind as Kim and I stripped away our remaining clothes.
Kim lay back on the distressed floorboards, naked and beautiful, his inked skin too flawless for me to resist running my tongue over his chest and biting down on his nipples. He squirmed beneath me and groaned, deep and low. His fingers dug into my hips, and I took the bruising touch as my cue to get a move on.
Biting my lip, I sank down on Kim’s dick, paying heed to a subconscious plan to take it slow, ease him in, but my body and my brain didn’t seem to be connected, and the moment he pierced me, all bets were off. I ground down hard, pressing myself so tight against him that bone crunched bone. He gasped, and I swallowed it with a kiss that conversely calmed me, even though an inferno was building in my gut.
I broke away. “We need to stop having fuck-hot sex if we’re just going to be friends.”
Kim’s only answer was a groan, coupled with a brutal upwards thrust of his hips.
I took the hint and braced myself on the wall, riding him harder until Kim took over, drawing his knees up and driving so deep into me that I saw stars. Crying out, I dropped my head to his chest, absorbing the clean scent of his sweat. With him fucking me like this—so rough and raw—I was going to come without touching my dick, a phenomenon that had always blown my mind, but with Kim? Damn. Every nerve in my body was set to explode, and digging my teeth into his tender flesh was the only thing tying me down to the world.
Kim came with a yell, and I followed a heartbeat later, throwing my head back, my mouth open in a silent scream. He shuddered and jerked beneath me, and I shot all over his belly, coming with more force than I could ever remember coming before.
“Fuck.” I fell sideways, pulling off Kim’s dick a little fast for comfort.
“Easy.” Kim rubbed my back. “I’ve got you.”
Oh how I wished that were true, but as breath returned to my lungs, perspective came with it. Jumping on Kim, however willing he might have been, hadn’t changed the fact that, in this damn fucking flat, Rich was all I could see.
Perhaps sensing the conflicting chaos brewing in my treacherous brain, Kim shifted and tightened his arms around me. “Don’t freak,” he said gently. “We’re friends, remember? I’ve got you.”
The warmth of his embrace was stronger than the simmering heat of our third scorching encounter, but the disquiet in my gut remained. Fucking Kim felt as natural as breathing, but that meant nothing in the cooling light of reality. Kim’s lingering relationship with Red bothered me less than I’d assumed it would—if it bothered me at all—but as I pulled back from Kim and briefly saw nothing in him but Rich’s betrayal, I knew that I had a long way to go before I could think of letting this happen between us again.
We dressed in silence. Kim, perceptive as ever, seemed to know that I didn’t want to talk. He pulled his clothes on and drifted back to the window, his lean shoulders framed this time with shadows as the sun disappeared behind the building opposite. “You can’t hate him forever, you know. It ain’t good for the soul.”
“I don’t hate Rich.” It sounded hollow even to my own ears. “I hate what he did. And how it makes—made—me feel.”
“Same thing.”
Kim didn’t turn around. I yanked my T-shirt over my head and went to him, sliding my arms loosely around his waist from behind. “It’s not the same thing. I don’t think about him anymore. It’s just being here . . . it feels like the scene of the crime.”
“That why you wanted to fuck me here? Some weird sexual exorcism?”
“Maybe.” I couldn’t lie to him. “But I would’ve wanted to fuck you wherever we were.”
Kim finally looked at me. I half expected him to be frowning, but his grin was as easy as always. “That’s sweet, but we should probably stop fucking each other. No offence, mate, but you seem a bit lost, like you really do need a friend.”
That, I couldn’t deny. I gave in to the craving to press my face against his back. “You’re right . . . about all of it. I guess Red walking in on us actually did us a favour. Put the brakes on before things got too complicated.”
“Things are only as complicated as you allow them to be. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever fuck again, just that you’ve obviously got some heavy shit weighing you down. And I don’t reckon you’ve done much talking about it, eh?”
I shrugged. “Nope. My family is an open book, but I’m the anomaly. A reticent loner, like my mother.”
“You don’t have to be alone, Jas. Maybe here”—Kim gestured out of the window—“but not back home. There’s a soul for everyone in Porthkennack, even if it’s just a pal to make you a brew when you’ve been up all night with the moon.”
I’d heard it said before that everyone found a friend in Porthkennack, but as a child I’d never believed it. Running riot on the farm with my brothers every summer, I hadn’t needed friends, hadn’t wanted them, but Christ, I wanted to be Kim’s friend. “How are you going to make me a cuppa in the morning if we don’t have sleepovers?”
Kim stepped out of my loose hold and turned to face me. “In good time, Jas. Speaking of which, it’s getting kinda late. What time does the estate agent’s place shut?”
Shit. Truth be told I’d forgotten about the real reason for traipsing all the way to London. I glanced at my watch. It was long gone seven, and even with the estate agent’s Thursday late-opening hours, getting there before they closed looked like a distant dream.
Damn it. Always a fucking shambles. “I gotta go.”
I made for the door. Kim moved like a snake and blocked my path. “We’ve gotta go, Jas. Friends, remember?”
Well, okay then. There wasn’t time to debate his generous interpretation of being my friend. We dashed through Hoxton, hoofing the sack of wood, and the photos, between us, to the estate agents and made it with seconds to spare. Perhaps because the process was rushed, I didn’t feel much as I signed the flat away and handed over the keys.
Or perhaps it was Kim’s steady presence at my side. His silence was like a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, and later, as we tubed it back to Paddington, I found myself staring at him and trying to imagine the chaos his life must’ve been when he’d been drinking.
“You thinking about us fucking on your bedroom floor?”
“What? Oh, um . . .” Heat flooded my cheeks, as instant as my attraction to him had been when we met. “No, actually, I was thinking about you in a totally different context.”
“How so?”
I shrugged. “I’m trying to picture you as a raging alcoholic.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Suits me. Hopefully, you never will.”
“Think you’ll make it this time?”
It was Kim’s turn to shrug. “I try not to think about it at all. Just take each day as it comes.”
“Are you tempted a lot?”
“Not on days like this, when I’m distracted by shit that matters. It’s harder when I’m bored . . . and alone, which is probably why Lena finds it so hard to stay away.”
I could imagine other reasons why Red would find it difficult to stay away from Kim, but I kept those to myself. If Kim didn’t know how much I wanted him by now, then we’d been screwing each other all wrong. “I like being alone. Need it sometimes—the peace and quiet, the solitude. I can’t think straight when I spend too much time with other people.”
“Ah, so that’s why you never thought it was weird that your ex was away so much? Because it suited you not to?”
“I guess so.”
The train rumbled into Paddington and jolted to a stop, throwing us against each other. The contact was electric, and my breath caught in my chest, but the doors opened before I could cross the invisible line we’d sketched out since we’d left my Hoxton flat behind.
We got off the train and rode the escalators up into the overground station, Kim still guarding the photos and his precious wood. In the main ticket hall, we found the big screens in the main ticket hall were awash with red, signalling that many trains heading southwest had been cancelled. Brilliant. I scanned the screens over and over, searching for a way home, more eager to escape London than I’d ever been, but the situation—whatever it was—seemed to get worse by the second.
Kim touched my arm. “There’s a sleeper heading out from platform nine. We’ll have to leg it, though. It leaves in two minutes.”
How he’d seen that in the mess of red on the screens, I had no idea, but I took his word for it and set off at a run, following the bustle of people who’d obviously had the same idea. The sleeper trains took all night to reach Truro, but a seven-hour train ride was better than no train at all.
At least, I thought so, until I remembered too late that sleeper trains were mainly made up of two-man cabins. And as luck would have it—or not—the only spaces left on the train was a single seat next to the communal toilet, or a cabin with the world’s smallest double cot.
“Take the cabin,” the Network Rail worker said. “Your tickets aren’t usually valid for the Night Riviera, so make the most of it. Got phone chargers and everything.”
Like I gave a fuck about charging my phone, which was just as well as it turned out the phone “charger” was a two-pin AC plug socket.
Kim dropped his bag by the tiny bed. “You can have it, if you like. I can sit in the seat.”
As if. I stuck my head out of the cabin door. “Neither of us can sit in the seat. It’s taken.”
“Oh.”
Oh, indeed. I sat gingerly on the bed and wondered what Kim was thinking. Was the idea of sharing an actual bed with me so horrible? Or was he doubting that we’d make it all the way home without fucking again?
His face gave nothing away as he sat down beside me, but his jaw-cracking yawn implied the latter was unlikely. I leaned into him, closing my eyes briefly as he did the same. “Thank you for coming with me. I’d probably be in some arse-end pub by now if you hadn’t, or some dodgy gay bar. I tend to put my dick in all the wrong places when I’m upset.”
“So much for solitude.”
“Solitude is my sober happy space. Drunk me is a total cock slut.”
“Nice.”
“Not really.” I didn’t have to look at Kim to know he agreed, but I did anyway and found nothing but acceptance in his steady gaze. Part of me yearned for a reaction, for judgement, but most of me was eternally grateful that I could be so freely candid. “Sex addiction is a thing, right?”
“It is. I’ve met a few sex addicts in rehab, and it’s supposed to be one of the hardest addictions to treat.”
“No magic pill, eh?”
“There’s no magic pill for anything.” Kim lay back and closed his eyes, his body rocking with the motion of the train as it pulled out of Paddington. “You just have to find better ways of coping with reality.”
Reality. Huh. For me, that meant a long journey home to a new flat that was, by design, even more lonely than my life in Hoxton had become. Or did it? Perhaps it didn’t need to be that way. I kept my family at arm’s length by choice, and rarely saw them outside of the farm, but Kim and I had vowed to be friends, real friends, and I couldn’t imagine feeling alone with him by my side.
I looked down at him. Lying back with his feet still on the floor, he couldn’t be comfortable. I nudged him, absorbing his sleepy groan like a warmth-starved vulture. “Get in the bed. There’s a duvet and everything. We can top and tail, if you like?”
“Top and tail?” Kim cracked an eye open. “After we’ve both been traipsing around London all day? Fuck that.”
“Fair enough. You take the duvet, I’ll sleep on top.”
Kim sighed and pulled the duvet back. “Jesus, Jas, just get in. I’m sure we can manage a few hours kip without ruining our beautiful friendship.”
Put like that, how could I argue? Besides, as Kim rolled onto the bed, there was no way I could resist the call to slide in behind him, moulding my body to the curve of his, all the while leaving as much distance between us as the narrow bed allowed.
Kim chuckled.
In the dim light of the room I imagined his knowing grin lighting up his face. “What are you laughing at?”
“Would you still be my friend if I said I was laughing at you?”
“Probably.”
“Would you still be my friend if I asked you to put your arms around me?”
I sat up, propping myself on my elbow, and peered over his shoulder. His eyes were closed, but the set of his jaw was different somehow, like vulnerability had crept into him while I hadn’t been looking. I put my hands on him and cautiously scooted closer. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I’d wrap my arms around him anytime he wanted, but I said nothing as I pulled him close and buried my face against his neck. Didn’t need to. Hundreds of miles from home, rocking in limbo on a train that smelled of damp and stale sausage rolls, I only needed him.