“Well . . . that’s not going to matter soon.”
“Say what?”
Lena shrugged. “I’ve got itchy feet. Kim wants to stay around here, but there’s someone back home I’m starting to miss.”
“Someone else?”
“Yeah, you know how it is.”
Brix nodded slowly, though he’d never quite got his head around Lena and Kim’s open relationship. “Is it serious?”
“As serious as it ever is for me. I’m a wanderer, Brix.”
“How does Kim feel about it?”
“You’ll have to ask him to know for sure, but if the grin on his face when he came back from that gig in Bude the other night is anything to go by, I think he’ll be absolutely fine.”
“Oh. Bloke or bird?”
“Bloke.”
And that was about all Lena seemed prepared to share. Brix absorbed the sudden influx of information and tried to process what it meant for him and the studio. Lena ran Blood Rush with an iron fist, and he had no idea how he’d manage without her.
Perhaps reading his mind, Lena put her hand on his arm. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you in the lurch. We’ll find someone to replace me, I promise.”
“It’s not that, love. I’ll miss you. Who’s going to bully me into cooking weird stuff on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Kim will still be here.”
“Aye, but he’s around less and less these days. The woodshop’s taking off, eh?”
Lena nodded. “He’s loving it. Keeps his mind off the other shit too.”
She didn’t need to spell it out. Like the rest of them, Kim had a past that occasionally caught up with him. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything, then. Just tell me how to sign my half of the studio back over to you.”
“What?”
Lena folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t keep it, Brix, when I’m not here earning it. I owe you everything in the world for giving it to me in the first place.”
“No, you don’t. I gave it to you because I needed you.”
“And soon you’ll need someone else. Please, Brix, don’t make this harder than it already is.” Lena put her arms around him, hugging him tight enough to contain the lump building in his throat. “You can always ask Calum to help you if it takes a while to find someone else. He’s good with computers, and he ran his own studio in London.”
Brix had forgotten that Lena probably knew as much—if not more—about Calum’s recent London life than he did. “Even if he sticks around, he won’t want to be parked behind that desk all bloody day.”
Lena snorted. “I think it’s a given that he’s going to stick around, providing you don’t scare him off, but as for being stuck on the desk: he won’t have to be if you all pitch in. Just ask him to help with the admin for a while; I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Brix wasn’t so sure about that, about any of it, and contemplating the idea of Calum sticking around indefinitely felt like tempting fate. He gave Lena a last squeeze, then followed her back to where Calum and Kim were waiting.
But when they got to the front desk, they found Kim alone and entertaining himself by carving patterns into the legs of Lena’s desk chair. “Where’s Calum?”
“Dunno,” Kim said. “Some dude rang for him, and he shot out of here like his arse was on fire.”
“Some dude? Rang where? The studio? Who was it?”
If Kim was startled by the barrage of questions, it didn’t show. He merely stared at Brix with his shrewd green gaze. “Studio phone rang. A posh cunt—Rob something or other—looking for Calum. I passed him the phone, he took it, then the next thing I knew, he’d scarpered. Figured he was late for his dinner.”
Brix ran to the door and outside, jogging to the end of the narrow street and looking both ways for any sign of Calum’s broad shoulders, but he saw nothing save a few lingering tourist shoppers and a gang of seagulls. Heart in his mouth, he looked both ways again, but to no avail. The view remained the same. Calum was gone.
Brix left the studio behind and ran home, hoping that, like most evenings after a long day at the studio, he’d find Calum camped out on the living room floor, staring into a newly built fire. But the cottage was dark and empty, the only sound Zelda’s disgruntled yowl as she sashayed around his ankles demanding her dinner.
Dennis was nowhere to be seen. Brix wondered if he might be upstairs with Calum and dashed up to check, but the bedroom was empty, and Dennis was sleeping alone in the bathtub. Fuck. Brix didn’t know much about Rob the ex, but the long-healed bruise on Calum’s face told him he was bad news—that and the profound distress that clouded Calum’s gaze each time his name came up.
Unease prickled Brix’s skin. Calum didn’t know Porthkennack that well, so there were few places Brix could think of that he might have gone. One of them was the cliff path only Lusmoores knew enough to tackle unguided in the fast-fading light. Common sense told him there was no logical reason Calum would’ve headed up there, but his gut said otherwise. After all, where would Brix go if his past had caught up with him? Where had Brix gone, each and every time?
He left the cottage behind and set off for the cliff path, hoping he’d make it up there before the storm clouds over the sea came ashore. Surely Calum already knew how dangerous the cliffs were in the rain? Or perhaps Brix had never told him. Panic gripped his heart as he realised he couldn’t remember. The cliff paths in and around Porthkennack had claimed a dozen lives in the time Brix had been alive, and countless more before he’d been born. Calm your tits. He’s probably in the fucking pub, but the quasi-Lee in Brix’s brain did nothing to quell the fear squeezing his lungs. Overreaction be damned. He had to find Calum.
Brix ran along the seafront, pulling his hood up against the spray that blew in from the crashing waves of the high tide. The clouds darkened as the cliffs loomed up ahead, and the daylight had all but gone by the time he spotted a lone figure on the bench at the bottom of the hidden path. Briefly, Brix talked himself out of the idea that it was Calum—their moment for stumbling across each other in such circumstances had already happened—but as he got closer, the hunch of the figure’s shoulders became too familiar to deny.
If Calum was surprised by Brix’s sudden appearance, it didn’t show. He merely raised an eyebrow, apparently oblivious to the driving rain that had begun to fall. “All right?”
“Are you?”
“Fucking blinding, Brix. Why do you ask?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Calum’s belligerence faltered, and the characteristic self-doubt Brix had come to hate coloured his features. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, mate. Just tell me what’s wrong. You’re not sitting up here for nothing.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Fuck no. Not even hard-core Porthkennack folk do that.” Calum didn’t reply, and his gaze returned to the tempestuous sea. Brix took a chance and dropped onto the bench beside him, reaching out and stilling his twisting fingers. “How’s your hand?”
“It’s fine.”
“What did Rob want?”
“What?”
“Kim told me Rob called the studio. I didn’t know you were still in contact with him.”
“I’m not. He must’ve seen some of my work on the Blood Rush page and recognised the style. Fucking ironic, really, ’cause he never took much notice of it when it was keeping him in wanky hipster suits.”
“He tracked you down? What does he want?”
“Dunno. Didn’t ask.”
“No?” Brix tried to ignore a selfish wave of relief at Calum’s apparent disinterest in Rob. “You didn’t speak to him?”
Calum shook his head. “Nope. Hung up like a pussy and ran away. Fancied a stroll up the cliffs, until I remembered you told me not to go there in the dark without you.”
“You’re not a pussy.” Brix squeezed Calum’s hands, then reluctantly let them go. “There’s plenty of people I don’t want to talk to.”
“Like Jordan?”
Brix swallowed but suppressed the age-old instinct to deflect anything Jordan related. How could he expect Calum to talk about Rob if he couldn’t hear Jordan’s name without flinching? Besides, this was Calum, and Brix wasn’t naïve enough to believe he hadn’t picked up on the discord in Brix’s heart when it came to Jordan. “I can’t talk to him . . . Don’t think I ever will again, and he knows better than to call me, but if he did, I reckon I’d be up here just like you said. Sometimes only the sea can hear you scream.”
“I’m not screaming,” Calum said dully. “I wish I could, but it won’t come out. Shit. That sounds so fucking stupid.”
“Not to me.”
“Liar.”
“Bollocks.” Frustrated, Brix grabbed Calum’s shoulders, forcing him to break his stare with the sea. “I’m a lot of things, and there’s things in my life I can’t tell anyone, even you, but I’m no fucking liar. If you think different, you’re in the wrong bloody town.”
For a long moment, Calum appeared frozen, like a fox in headlights, and Brix’s grip on his shoulders loosened, guilt gnawing his belly, but then Calum’s gaze cleared, and he placed his hands over Brix’s, tentatively twining their fingers. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Brix, let me have that one. I called you a liar: I was fucking out of order, and I’m sorry, okay? I just . . .”
“What?”
Calum shrugged. “It’s been a long time since someone tried to understand me—since I last understood me. I’ve got no idea who I am, but you already know that, don’t you?”
Brix chewed on his lip. There was no doubt in his mind that Calum was lost, but who wasn’t? He shuddered, allowing the biting wind to see into his soul. “You know your own mind, mate. Just gotta let go of whatever—or whoever—has convinced you that you don’t.”
“Whoever.” Calum let the word hang. “If you’d said that a year ago, I’d have laughed in your face, or punched you. I’ve never let anyone talk shit about him.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that when you’re with someone. You have their back, even if they’re a complete knob. That’s the point.”
“He’d never hit me before, if that’s what you’re getting so angry about.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Right.”
Calum looked away. Brix caught Calum’s face and forced him to meet his eye again. “I’m not playing games with you. No lies, remember? I want to understand the hold this bloke has over you. You don’t have to hit someone to fuck them up.”
“I used to wish he would sometimes—before he actually did, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d have known for sure that he was wrong.”
Brix swallowed. Now they were getting somewhere. “Calum, anything he did to hurt you was wrong. Did he control you?”
“Only because I let him.”
“Or because he manipulated you. That’s not the same thing.”
Calum’s shrug was unconvinced, but the driving rain and increasing wind distracted Brix from the urge to put his arms around him. He settled for squeezing Calum’s hands again. “It’s blowing a fucking hoolie out here. How about we go home and continue this over a cuppa, eh? Get out of the wind?”
Calum glanced around, apparently noticing for the first time that they were both soaked to the skin. “Thought you wanted to meet your dad?”
“It’s early yet. He’ll be in the pub till kicking-out time. Let’s go home, Cal. Please?”
It looked like Calum would refuse, but then something seemed to shift in him and the rejection Brix feared never came. Calum wrapped his fingers around Brix’s wrists and slowly nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
They made their way home in silence, but it wasn’t loaded. Calum was a quiet man by nature, and Brix was deep in thought. It had never been Calum’s way to talk about himself, and it was clear his relationship with Rob had made that worse. It was obvious he needed to, though. Was Brix the right person to break down that wall? Was he neutral enough? Or would the growing urge to jump on the next train to London and twat someone be too transparent for Calum to trust him?
Brix had no idea, but as they got closer to home, the need to ease the cold in his bones became more pressing, something that wasn’t lost on Calum.
“Jesus, you’re shaking.”
“Yeah, well . . . this ain’t the coat for hiking.” Brix shrugged out of his leather jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. “Have we got wood in?”
“No, it’s in the shed. I’ll get it.”
“But your hand—”
“Sit.”
Brix ignored Calum’s instructions and went to the fireplace while Calum fetched wood. He hadn’t got round to sweeping it out that morning, but it appeared Calum had if the spotless grate was anything to go by, and the sight of it spread a little warmth through Brix’s chilled bones. Having someone in the cottage all the time was as comforting for him as he hoped it was for Calum.
“Here you go.” Calum knelt beside Brix and laid three fat logs on the grate. “Where’s the kindling?”
“In the bucket.”
Calum grabbed a bundle with his good hand and threw it on the logs with some rolled-up newspaper. He retrieved the matches from the mantel and lit the paper. The flame flickered and grew, curling around the kindling, and the gentle, growing heat seeped into Brix. He dropped his head with a low groan. The cottage’s open fireplace had always had a tranquilising effect on him, sending him to sleep even in the bleak days after he’d first returned to Porthkennack. That year, for the first time ever, the arrival of summer had felt like a curse.
“Come on, mate,” Calum said. “Couch.”
“Hmm?”
Calum frowned, clearly puzzled, like he’d seemed so many times since he’d come to Porthkennack, wearing the lingering confusion of four years of silence. Brix wished he could explain and ease the lines of anxious fear from Calum’s gaze. But he couldn’t. He’d tell him a thousand Lusmoore secrets before he shared the darkest of his own.
He let Calum help him up and lead him to the sofa. Tea appeared, and by the time Calum set a plate of cakes on the coffee table, Brix was warmed up enough to string a sentence together. “The girls from the sandwich place still bringing you their leftovers?”
Calum flushed. “Apparently so, at least that’s what Lena keeps telling me. Not sure I believe her. Reckon she’s baking them herself just to rib me.”
“She does make a mean Victoria sponge, but I don’t think she’s got time to make all this lot.” Brix snagged one of the giant butterfly cakes he could never resist, even in his blackest mood. “I keep her pretty busy, and she’s got a lot on her mind right now.”
“Kim said she might be leaving.”
“He told you that?” Brix couldn’t hide his surprise. Kim didn’t share with outsiders, but then, this was Calum. Brix had trusted him implicitly from the moment they’d met. Perhaps Kim saw what he saw, maybe they all did. Did Calum know how many firm friends he’d made in Brix’s little slice of the world? “I don’t want Lena to go. She’s practically my mother. I can’t handle that computer system on my own.”
Calum nudged Brix gently. “That’s ’cause you don’t want to. It’s not that hard, honest.”
It was on the tip of Brix’s tongue to ask Calum to help, then the reason they were huddled on the couch in wet clothes returned to him. Calum had never admitted that he’d stayed in Porthkennack to hide from Rob, but Brix knew it was true, and now Rob had found him . . .
The possibility of Calum moving on left Brix sick to his stomach, and more than a little ashamed, because wanting Calum to stay in a place that wasn’t where he wanted to be made him no better than Rob, right?
“I’ll miss Lena,” Calum said when Brix failed to respond. “Sounds like her and Kim have a complicated relationship, though.”
“Not really. Kim’s bi and Lena’s a free spirit. She never wanted to settle
, and now Kim’s with someone else . . .” Brix didn’t feel like explaining how much Kim needed the stability and longevity Lena couldn’t give him. “They love each other, but they’ve always had room for more.”
Calum said nothing, apparently lost in his own thoughts, and reminding Brix that Kim and Lena’s eclectic way of life was the least of their worries. He put his cake down and closed his hands around his tea mug, though Calum’s skin held the warmth he truly craved. “Tell me about Rob.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Whatever you want to tell me.”
Calum let out a heavy sigh. “It’s hard to put into words without feeling like a complete twat. You can tell me it’s not my fault as much as you like, but it has to be to some degree. He didn’t make me a fucking doormat.”
“Was it your idea to put the shop in his name?”
“No.”
“Or your phone? And what about your flat? Whose name was that in?”
“His. He didn’t live there, but the rent came from the business account, which was his too.”
“Harsh.”
Calum sighed again. “And that’s not the worst of it. I can’t even explain the spell he cast on me. I took out a massive loan a month after we met, gave it to him to set up his accountancy business, but he never made the payments. Black Star paid some of it off when I didn’t take a wage, but I’m way behind.”
“How big was the loan?”
“Thirty grand.”
“What? How the fuck did you secure it?”
“On my own place. I bought a bedsit in Hampstead not long after you left.”
Brix braced himself. “What happened to it?”
“I sold it at a loss. Rob didn’t like me having something that was just mine.”
“Rob’s a cunt.”
Calum snorted. “I know that now. At the time, I thought he wanted to buy a flat together, close to the shop, and maybe buy that premises too. We had plans, you see. It took me a long time to realise he’d made them all up, and by then . . . by then I was in so fucking deep I couldn’t see how badly I needed to get out.”
“What enlightened you in the end?”
House of Cards Page 13