Junkyard Heart (Porthkennack Book 7)

by Garrett Leigh

  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?”
<
br />   “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.