All? Right. Cos there was a fucking army of people wanting to hear my tales of woe.
But Gus wanted to listen, and I’d run out of reasons not to let him.
I blew out a noisy breath. “I punch stuff when my shoulder hurts...like, really hurts. You know, the kind of pain that consumes every part of you until you can’t think about anything else.”
“I know it,” Gus said. “Paracetamol doesn’t touch it, but couldn’t you have got a prescription from the hospital?”
“You need an appointment for that, with the surgeon, and I didn’t have a fixed address, so...anyway, I had some dodgy morphine pills for a while. They helped, but I promised Luke I wouldn’t score street drugs anymore, so when they ran out, I found a way to cope that I didn’t need anyone else for.”
I didn’t add that my first attempt had seen me slamming my good shoulder against a brick wall. That my second had involved hot candle wax and whisky. The horror in Gus’s stricken expression was enough, and I’d bared my soul enough for one day.
A doctor emerged from a room and called my name. I got up and left Gus alone with whatever he was thinking.
* * *
Whatever he was thinking turned out to be him being even more obsessed with what I ate than normal. “We need to cook something.”
I glanced up from reading the leaflet from my physiotherapy referral. “Cook? I thought we’d already established that was a health hazard.”
“No, we admitted we both can’t be bothered, not that it was permanent.”
The irony. I did need to eat, though. Or my fancy new chronic pain meds would give me an ulcer. “There’s loads of Super Noodles in the cupboard. I’ll make them.”
“You’re not eating that junk.”
If anyone else had said that to me, I might’ve decked them, but Gus spoke so absently, and with such worry in his earnest gaze that I took no offence. “It’s not junk, and for fifty pence a pack, who the fuck cares?”
Gus said nothing and went back to opening and shutting the fridge. I ignored him for a while, but eventually, the squeak and thunk of the fridge door was enough to drive me to my feet.
I came behind him and shut the fridge. “Are you so hungry that you’ve gone past the point of reasonable thought?”
“Whoever said I was reasonable?”
Everyone who’s ever met you. But that was beside the point, and I suddenly felt like the world’s biggest arsehole. Escorting me to the doctor had taken three hours of his day, then he’d skipped lunch to patch up an old lady’s roof for free while I’d huddled in the van counting the hours until the slow-acting drugs the GP had prescribed took effect.
I still couldn’t feel any marked difference, and my shoulder throbbed with every breath I took, but Gus being tired and hungry hurt more.
Especially as it was all my fault.
I reached around him and opened the fridge again. It hadn’t changed since I’d looked in it last night, and perhaps that was my fault too. If I hadn’t spent all my money on cigarettes and crappy noodles that wouldn’t sustain Gus longer than ten minutes, I might’ve had something to offer him. “Say we did try and cook something...like, uh, what? I wasn’t joking when I said was shit at it. Like, I can literally burn water.”
“Not true. You can make omelettes.”
“So can you, but we don’t have eggs.”
Gus grunted and shut the fridge. “I guess we can order pizza, but my creeper brain wants you to eat something real.”
He really was trying to kill me with kindness, a kindness I didn’t deserve. And I couldn’t let him spend any more money on me. There had to be another way.
I rarely thought about my dad. I’d loved him so much it was easier to pretend he’d never existed than face the fact that I’d never see him again. But sometimes my heart caught me off guard. Sights and sounds. Scents. I couldn’t walk past an Indian restaurant without remembering the lentil soup he used to make when him and my mum were searching the couch for spare change. I had no idea how to recreate it, but Gus had Wi-Fi so I could google that shit. “Hang on.”
Phone in hand, I traipsed upstairs and upended my bag on the bed. Grey watched me from the windowsill, but he’d seen me do stranger things, so he made no comment.
All kinds of crap fell out of my bag: dust, dead grass, screws, bolts. A handful of coppers. And then I struck gold—a two pound coin, and a handful of silver shrapnel. I didn’t know if it would be enough for the lentils and spices the internet said I needed, but I’d die trying.
Gus was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m going to the shop,” I said. “Are you coming?”
I had no desire to have him witness me counting out coppers to pay for lentils and a loaf of bread, but the prospect of being away from him right now made me want to puke, and I wasn’t in the mood to unpick that bullshit. Or anything else that came with being in close proximity to Gus. We’d kissed a million years ago, and now we’d spent the night together, snuggled up like old lovers, and I couldn’t make sense of how I felt. The cynic in me had the loudest voice, and told me he was just being nice because he loved my brother, but there was a tiny devil starting a rave in my gut, my heart, and every other organ in my body. A devil crying out for Gus to touch me again, to invite me into his bed and wrap his arms around me, despite knowing full well I had nothing to offer him in return.
Gus got his kicks on Grindr with men who’d given more than two blow jobs in their entire life. Men who knew how to give him the pleasure he deserved. Not—
“Billy?”
I jumped, startled to find Gus in my personal space, waving his hand in front of my face. “What?”
Gus stared me down for a moment, then shook his head. “Never mind. Come on, I’ll drive you to Tesco.”
Chapter Nine
Gus
Billy made thick lentil soup spiked with curry powder, and served it with buttered white bread. Then he fell asleep on the couch, apparently exhausted by creating something so simple and amazing.
With a protesting heart, I left him downstairs, because the alternative was throwing him over my shoulder and carrying him back to my bed, and he already likely thought I was off my rocker.
Somehow I slept, and I woke in the morning to find him standing over my bed, face twisted in a fiery scowl.
“I want to know something,”
I sat up, squinting in the dim light of the dawn. Billy leant closer—close enough for me to kiss him in a world away from this convoluted mess. “What do you want to know?”
“Who looked after you?”
“What?”
“When you had your surgery. Who looked after you?”
“No one.”
“Why not? I know Mia wasn’t here, but Luke was. Why didn’t he take care of you?”
“I didn’t need him to.”
“You mean you wouldn’t let him.”
“What?”
“Thought so.”
Billy turned on his heel and stomped out of my room. Bemused, I flopped back on pillows my imagination told me still smelt of him. Did that really just happen? Or had my Billy-fuelled dreams seeped into my consciousness? Because, damn, had I dreamt of him. Benignly for the most part, but there’d been sequences hot enough that I was glad I’d woken up half on my stomach.
When my morning wood had subsided, I hauled myself out of bed and searched out Billy.
He was in the shower, naturally, so I trudged downstairs in search of caffeine and found Luke sitting at my breakfast bar looking so like Billy that my sleepy self did a double take. “What are you doing in my house at six a.m.?”
Luke eyed me over the rim of a cardboard coffee cup. “Same reason I’m ever in your house at six a.m.”
“You’re coming to work?”
“Course I am. It’s been nearly a month. Di
d you think you’d got rid of me for good?”
Billy had me so wrapped up I hadn’t given Luke’s extended break much thought at all. “Um. No. Just not sure we need you with what we’ve got on this week.”
“Why don’t you take the day off then?”
“Because I have nothing better to do and I need the money.”
“Since when? You hoard money under the mattress just like your mother did.”
I gave him the finger and helped myself to the paper bag of pastries he’d dumped on the counter. It was true that I was frugal with whatever I didn’t spend on eating, but what was wrong with that? My mum had rebuilt her dilapidated house with her own bare hands and paid her mortgage off ten years early on the wage of a teaching assistant. So what if she’d kept shoeboxes of cash in the attic? “Tell me why you’re really here? Are you bored?”
Luke smiled as much as he ever did when my sister wasn’t around. “A little. Mia’s got a busy week in the shop and I’m too annoying to help her out, apparently, so you get me instead.”
“You sure that’s a good idea? What about Billy?”
“What about him? You think we can’t work together?”
I didn’t think it, I knew it. Billy tolerated me on the rooftops because I left him alone to get on with work he could do with his eyes closed. Luke wasn’t like that. Couldn’t leave a job without checking every tiny detail a thousand times. Me? I was used to him, and he bought me three meals a day to make up for the wasted time. Billy didn’t eat enough for that to work on him, and he sure didn’t have the patience.
Half an hour, a shower, and three croissants later found me crammed in between the Daley brothers while Luke drove—control freak—and Billy stared mutinously out of the window. He hadn’t reacted to Luke’s ambush, but tension seeped out of him in vicious waves, and his silence was razor sharp compared to the blunt edges of Luke’s habitual quiet.
Luke said nothing because he had nothing to say.
Billy wanted to scream. I could feel it.
We pulled up at the job. Me and Billy had fallen into the habit of me unloading the van while he put the ladders up whatever building we were working on and assessed where we were at. He was good at it, better than me. But today he hung back, loitering by the van with a cigarette in his mouth.
Luke scowled and stomped past him to haul the ladders down. “Jesus-fucking-Christ, put that fag out, will you?”
He walked away without waiting for an answer. And Billy kept smoking.
Man, this was gonna be a long day.
* * *
Time crawled. I swear, it was ten o’clock for three hours, and by midday, I’d had enough. I slid down the ladder and booked it to the high street without waiting for either Daley brother’s response to my muttered goodbye.
I passed through the trader’s market and ordered Thai food. While it was cooking, I dropped in on my sister at work. “Your boyfriend is doing my head in,” I grumbled instead of pointing out that the vintage sign outside Wild Amour—her high street florist—needed a new coat of paint.
Mia glanced up from the orchids she was trimming. “And that’s my problem how?”
“Didn’t say it was your problem. Just that it was happening.”
Mia snorted. “Are you going to elaborate?”
I flopped onto the stool at her counter. “He turned up for work today and ruined everything.”
“Everything? As in he messed up?”
“No, everything with Billy. It was all working out until Luke showed up and wound him up.”
“Okaaaay. And it’s definitely Luke winding Billy up and not the other way round? Because the last time I checked they were as bad as each other.”
Valid. But at some point in the last month, my brain had become all about Billy. “It’s both of them,” I grudgingly admitted. “But Billy was doing fine until today. Luke didn’t need to come back.”
Mia finished up her orchids and set them aside. “Actually, he did. You can’t expect him to give up his job because Billy’s shown up out of the blue needing help. Luke has bills to pay too.”
“I know that. Maybe I should find another job so they can run the family business together.”
“And let them kill each other?” Mia stood as a customer entered the shop. “No, brother. That’s not a good idea. Luke needs you, we all do. Besides, aren’t you both always complaining the phone never stops ringing? There’s plenty of work to go round.”
“We’d need another van. There’s no way I can stand between them all the time.”
“Then get another van.”
She made it sound so simple. As if I had any say whatsoever in the future of Daley Roofing Ltd., and I wasn’t just the idiot who kept the peace and ate a lot.
I took cartons of yellow curry and rice back to the job. Billy was sitting in the back of the van, smoking, his face like thunder. “I swear I’m gonna fucking deck him.”
“What did he do?”
Billy shrugged, and the years faded from his face, leaving him boyish and cross. “He thinks I’m shit at everything.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Then why does he check everything I do like I don’t know how to use a fucking drill?”
“Because that’s what he does. He checks everything I do too, and his own work about a thousand times. It’s not personal.”
“Don’t do that,” Billy snapped.
“Do what?”
“Act like it’s okay that I’m an arsehole. I know you do it with him too, and Mia, and you fucking shouldn’t. Why do you let people walk all over you?”
“What makes you think I do?”
“This entire conversation.”
I knew what he wanted. A fight. A screaming row. Maybe he wanted to punch someone. To punch me. But it wasn’t going to happen. There was nothing he could do to make me set my emotions free. Didn’t he know that if I let them go I’d never get them back? Didn’t he, of all people, understand that? I spread my hands in surrender. “This conversation is whatever you choose it to be, mate. I don’t care if you think people walk all over me. I’m not going to change because my personality annoys you.”
“You don’t annoy me.”
“No? You look pretty damn annoyed.” Annoyed. Wild. And so beautiful it didn’t matter that he was so ridiculously unreasonable I had no clue what to do with him. “Look,” I said. “Can’t you just give him a break? It was never going to be easy for you two to work together after so long.”
“So long nothing. We’ve never worked together, and the last time we were in the same room for more than two hours was ten years ago.”
“I know that. And I went through this with Mia when she first came back and was suddenly living with me when I hadn’t seen her for five years. You think it was easy to have her up in my face all the time? Shouting, throwing things around, and banging your brother in my kitchen? I’d missed her so much, and I loved her, but man, if I didn’t want to throttle her half the time.”
“You could’ve schooled me without referencing my brother’s dick.”
“I’m not schooling you.”
Billy grunted and lit another cigarette. “Sounds like it, and I get your point, but you’re forgetting a major difference between my situation and yours.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
Billy slid out of the van and blew smoke in my face. “You’re the nicest bloke in the world.”
He walked away before I could answer.
I figured he’d head back to the ladders, but when I climbed onto the roof we were working on, he was nowhere to be seen.
Luke shook his head. “I asked him to bring those boards up. Guess he’s decided he doesn’t want to work after all.”
“You asked him to carry scaffold planks one-handed up the ladder?”
“Course I did. I need them up
here and he’s down there. Somewhere, at least. If he’s not in the pub by now.”
“He hasn’t been in any pub since he got back.”
Luke frowned. “Why are you defending him? He’s been a pain in the arse all day.”
“And you haven’t?” A sudden irritation swept through me, too spiky and fast for me to contain it. “Jesus, Luke. You’ve been on him like white on rice. What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect anything. I’m just trying to get the job done.”
“By asking him to hoof scaffold planks around when he’s only got one working shoulder? Are you serious? Or do you just not care that he’s in pain?”
My shout rang out on the rooftop, and Luke flinched. In the lifetime I’d known him, I’d never raised my voice in anger. What was the point, when there was always someone around to shout me down? But Luke wasn’t like that either, and our friendship had been built on a mutual respect of each other’s desire for a quiet life.
He set his drill down and took a cautious step closer to me. “What are you talking about? He told me his shoulder was fine when I asked.”
“When did you ask?”
“A while ago.”
“A while as in before he came back? As in months ago when you were dealing with the court case and he probably didn’t want to worry you?”
“No, when I let him into your house. I mean, I know he didn’t bother with the physio...” Comprehension dawned in Luke’s worried gaze.
It hurt to see him torn up, but I bit my tongue. Yelling at Luke already felt like a betrayal, of him, and of Billy. Him because I’d always been the steady person in his life he could trust, and Billy because he’d trusted me with his pain. Trusted me enough to sleep in my bed while I held him and wished I could kiss his suffering away. “Whatever. It’s a lot to ask of him when he’s still recovering. You could’ve waited for me to come back.”
Luke nodded slowly, processing, and I should’ve left it. I’d made my point, but somehow I couldn’t let it go. “He’s a good worker, better than me at some stuff. You need to have a little faith and stop assuming he’ll mess everything up.”
Unforgotten (Forgiven) Page 8