“What are you glaring for? Have I fucked this up already?”
I came back to reality to find Luke frowning, worry and concern marring the chill vibe he’d rocked up with at the arse crack of dawn. It was all wrong, and guilt overtook my introspection. “Sorry. Just tired. Gus wanted to watch the last episode of Vikings last night.”
It was the truth. Luke didn’t need to know I’d been obsessing over Gus’s thick thighs at the same time.
And I got my reward in the form of Luke’s slackening shoulders and the return of the grin I remembered from my childhood. “We watch that show. Do you think Mia looks like Lagertha?”
“Yeah, actually, I do. And she acts like her too, so you’d better be careful if you don’t want her to cut your balls off in your sleep.”
“Better than being awake. But I get your point. She’s wild, man. I thought growing up would tame her, but she’s more... I don’t know, more Mia than ever.”
“That’s cos we don’t change, bro. Life just moves on.”
“When did you get so wise?”
I felt like it was a question he’d asked me before, but I couldn’t remember when, or if I’d given him a coherent answer. And I didn’t have an answer now. I settled for a shrug and got to work unloading the van.
It was packed with dusky-coloured roses and weird-shaped lilies, and beneath them were the vintage wooden boxes and flagstone slabs Luke had picked up last night. It was...a lot, and I had zero clue what we were supposed to do with them, despite the fact Mia had told me in great detail the night before. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d only told me. “What do you mean you don’t know?” I waved a bunch of green foliage in Luke’s general direction. “Didn’t she give you, like, a list or something? A plan?”
Luke shook his head. “Nope. She said you knew all about it.”
“She lied. I wasn’t listening.”
“You looked like you were listening. You had that frown going on that you used to have when you were obsessed with LEGO.”
Brilliant. So my perving over Gus’s face made me look ten years old and angry. No wonder he’d dodged me last night. He didn’t dodge you. He went to his own room, while you knocked out in yours. What do you want from him? A grand goodbye on the stairs every night?
I knew what I wanted from him: everything. But in the absence of truly understanding what that meant, I’d have settled for a goodnight kiss.
Probably.
Definitely.
Maybe.
As if. You lusted after kissing him for years. How long do you think it will take you to forget him finger-banging you into oblivion?
“Billy?”
“What?”
Luke sighed. “I don’t know. I s’pose we’re just gonna have to guess and hope she doesn’t kill us.”
“Kill you. You’re the one who has to go home with her.”
“And you’re the one who didn’t listen to her instructions. Trust me, we’re all in trouble.”
“Not Gus.”
“Right.” Luke rolled his eyes and hefted a slab onto his shoulder. “Because none of this is his fault.”
He strode away before I could answer, but I was absolutely not taking that hit-and-run shit from him. I picked up my own slab and followed him to the stand that was Mia’s for the day. “What’s Gus got to do with anything?”
“You’re the one who brought him up.”
Luke wasn’t looking at me. I set my slab down and got up in his face. “Why wouldn’t I bring him up? I live with him, he’s Mia’s brother, and he’s your best friend.”
“Is he? I’ve hardly seen him since you moved in with him.”
“Because you asked him to make sure I didn’t tear the town up.”
“I didn’t, actually. No one can stop you doing anything if you’re in arsehole mode. You think I’d put that on Gus?”
“I don’t know what you’d do, any more than you know me.”
It came out harsher than I’d intended, but Luke didn’t flinch. Just stared at me with a steady gaze that would’ve suited Gus better. “We can fix that, though, right? That we don’t know each other very well? I know I’m hard to get along with when I’m stuck in my own head, but I’m trying to be better.”
“And I’m trying not to be an arsehole, but I want to know why you’re talking about Gus like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you think you know something.”
“Something about wha—” Luke caught himself and shook his head. “Okay, you got me. I was putting the bins out when you left the other night. I saw you together and it made me think there was something going on between you. Is there?”
I thought back to when we’d left Mia’s last night, scrutinising the way Gus had meandered drunkenly down the drive, and the steadying arm I’d slid around his waist. Truthfully, it hadn’t been necessary. Gus was an adult who could handle a skinful, but given that we’d called time on hooking up, and I was missing him like fucking air, I’d done it anyway. I hadn’t considered how it would look to anyone watching. I hadn’t considered anyone except my own damn self and my poor aching heart. Bless.
Luke was still staring at me.
Back when I’d first rocked up in Rushmere, I might’ve glowered back, flipped him the bird, and stomped on by, but I didn’t want to be that dickhead anymore. I wanted us to be like Gus and Mia, easy, warm, and forgiving of age-old shit that didn’t matter. “Can I ask you something?”
Luke set his slab down. “Of course.”
“Did I sleepwalk when I was a kid?”
“Yup. Every night for two years until you started smoking weed. We didn’t make the connection at the time, but I figured it out when I was talking to someone about you offshore in Indonesia.”
“Indonesia?”
He nodded. “I was based there for a while after the earthquake in Sumatra.”
“Doing what?”
“Same as I did everywhere else. I put the fuel in the helicopters so they could fly their missions.”
“That was your job?”
“Yeah. It’s more complex than it sounds, but at the same time, pretty fucking simple.”
Nothing about Luke was ever simple, and I wanted to ask him more about the sleepwalking. But I didn’t want to explain to him that I needed to know how I’d ended up in Gus’s bed the night of the barbecue despite being sober as a judge. And I didn’t want him to stop talking when it was the most he’d told me about himself in the best part of a decade.
But it seemed Luke was done with my deflection regardless of my sweet intentions. He clasped a heavy arm on my good shoulder and squeezed. “Look, it doesn’t matter, okay? About you and Gus, I mean. It’s none of my business. Just... I don’t know. Be careful with him. Shit gets to him more than he’ll ever let you see.”
I needed to know more. I needed him to elaborate on every facet of Gus that he knew and I didn’t. But before I could take a breath, an official with a clipboard interrupted us. It took Luke’s attention from me for a full half hour, and by the time she’d moved on, so had we.
We fudged together a vintage display that vaguely resembled the images Mia posted to her Instagram. I mean, it still looked like two roofers had done it, but it wasn’t nearly as terrible as I’d imagined.
Luke seemed surprised too. “We might get away with it. You think she’ll notice you trod on the calla lilies?”
“Yes. But we’ve got cheap fizz from the bargain booze shop, so I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”
“It wasn’t me who trod on them.”
“Yeah, but it’s not me who goes to bed with her, so...”
“You can run, but you can’t hide, bro. She’ll get you eventually.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I walked away from Luke to smoke, leaving him to deal with the first wave of people trickling into the
fair. It had been a long time since I’d last shown my face at a Rushmere event, and I was already jumpy. In years gone by, I’d have been scouting the car park on the watch for unattended valuables, but I was a good boy these days.
At least, I was trying to be.
I found myself in the car park anyway. It was a five-minute walk from the green and already stuffed to the rafters. I wandered around, chain smoking and trying not to obsess over Gus.
I failed. Because I was obsessed with him, and it was a strange place to be. A frightening place, when I considered the fact that it meant absolutely nothing. He’d told me from the start that we couldn’t do all the shit we’d already done. That even a hundred years ago, or however long it had been, our lives were already too interwoven to deal with a casual hook-up.
But nothing we’d done felt casual. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t now. The way my heart sped up at the mere thought of him was the antonym of fucking casual.
I had to laugh at myself. If I didn’t, the ridiculous angst in my gut would spill out, and without my oldest bad habits for company, I wasn’t equipped to deal with that bullshit. I leant against the car park wall and finished my smoke, letting my gaze drift, hyper-focussing on random things to distract myself from the Gus bubble. A Range Rover was parked opposite in full sun, and movement on the backseat caught my eye. A copper-coloured dog came to the window and pressed its hot, panting face to the glass.
Glancing around, I stubbed my smoke out and approached it, scanning the car park for the owners. There were plenty of people milling around at the exits, but no one anywhere near the Range Rover. I stared at the distressed dog, my pulse picking up a pace that had nothing to do with Gus and everything to do with the fact that the dog would die if its owners didn’t come back soon.
Very fucking soon. I’d been sat on the wall for a while. Best-case scenario, the dog had already been locked in the car for twenty minutes.
The dog’s eyes were wild. Foam bubbles were beginning to form on its lolling tongue.
There was a broken bench by the wall, loose wrought-metal hanging from its rusted bolts. My hands itched, and anxiety surged in my veins. Fuck it. I dashed to the bench and yanked free the biggest hunk of metal.
Back at the car, I stripped my T-shirt, wrapped it round my hand, and smashed the back windshield.
Gus
Somehow I knew the cluster of police cars was all about Billy. I approached the fair with trepidation, picking my way through the crowd that had formed in the car park. At the front I found Billy surrounded, naturally, by police officers and angry folk dressed head to toe in tweed. The kind who drove four-by-fours down narrow country lanes but didn’t like mud.
There was glass all over the floor from the smashed back window of a brand-new Ranger Rover, and Billy was shirtless, which made even less sense than the cocker spaniel he was clutching. Am I even awake right now? After a long night without Billy in my bed, I wasn’t quite sure.
I met Billy’s gaze. He shrugged, angry and insolent, like the old Billy, but I knew him well enough by now to know it was a defence mechanism. That he felt cornered, and being aggravating—aggressive, even—was the only weapon he thought he had in his arsenal.
It broke my heart that he still didn’t believe any different. But, then, why would he? What had actually changed in the months he’d lived with me? He drank less, and he hadn’t, until now, got in any trouble, but why? Because he was more secure in his own skin? Or because he’d been distracted by my migraine-inducing horniness?
Is that even a thing? In the time it took me to figure I had no idea, Luke had pushed his way to the front of the crowd.
We’d swapped personalities. He was no longer the one who hovered ineffectively on the sidelines of his own life. That role was, apparently, now all mine. Luke inserted himself between Billy and the nearest officer, facing Billy. “What happened?”
Billy shrugged again. “Some rich twat left their dog in the car. It was dying, so I smashed the window to get it out.”
Of course he did. And that explained the cocker spaniel. I dragged my feet from where they seemed rooted to the concrete, and joined Luke and Billy. The dog stuck its tongue out and licked my hand. I laid a hand on its silky head and swore. “Jesus. It’s roasting.”
“She,” Billy snapped. “It’s a girl. It says Jessie on the collar.”
“So the owner cares enough to label her as a possession, but not to keep her safe?” I rounded on the nearest police officer. “Isn’t animal neglect illegal?”
The officer nodded. “It is, actually. But we need to be sure that’s what’s happened here. There’s been a spate of dog thefts in the area.”
Luke scoffed. “If he was stealing it, he’d be long gone, not waiting around for you to decide if he’s guilty or not. Look at the evidence—it’s boiling hot, and the dog is clearly distressed.”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?” Luke glanced between Billy and the officer, then it seemed to dawn on him that the officer was having a hard time accepting that Billy—a known face for all the wrong reasons—hadn’t broken into the car on the take. Luke could say otherwise until he was blue in the face; we all could. Billy’s rep would still follow him everywhere he went.
I stroked the dog again. “She’s still really hot,” I said to Billy. “Should we pour some water over her?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t have any.”
Ignoring the police, I took the water bottle a nearby woman held out to me. More came forward, and Billy set the dog down while a small crowd set to work cooling her down. When she was calm enough to drink for herself, I stood. “She’ll still need to see a vet. You should’ve let him help her before you surrounded him. You could’ve done that without letting him run off with her, if that’s what you honestly think he was going to do in a packed car park in the middle of the day.”
“He wasn’t going anywhere,” Luke said. “He’s working here, all day, with me on the Wild Amour stand. Check the paperwork. He signed in this morning, like everyone else.”
An officer departed to do just that, and frustration rippled through my veins. Were these clowns seriously more concerned with a potential theft than the fact that the dog would’ve died if Billy hadn’t taken her from the car, regardless of his intentions? I took a breath, my anger gathering pace, but Luke squeezed my elbow and shook his head.
I didn’t know what he meant, but before I could find out, a new commotion raged behind me. The owner of the car had returned, and...it was Barry Keane. Of course it was, though how that idiot had bagged himself a Range Rover, I had no clue. He’d been driving a Vauxhall Zafira the last time I’d seen him, when he’d lost his mind over Billy being within spitting distance of his house.
This isn’t gonna end well.
Chapter Eighteen
Billy
Barry Keane was an ignorant piece of shit. The kind that voted UKIP because he didn’t like Indian doctors and wasn’t afraid to say so. His kids were all the same, and I had zero remorse that I’d once put his youngest son in hospital. I’d do it all a thousand times over.
My only regret was that his son’s broken nose meant the police were more inclined to believe Keane’s ranting lies than my truth.
He got between Luke and the officer who seemed to be running the show. “That toerag is a born thief. Ask anyone round here. He’d have flogged my dog on by the end of the day, and we all know it. Probably to those pikeys on the A road.”
“Travellers,” Gus snapped. “See? He’s a racist as well as a liar.”
“And you can ask anyone anything you like,” Luke said. “Billy hasn’t lived here for five years. He only moved back a few months ago, and he hasn’t been in any trouble.”
It should’ve irked me that they were talking about me as if I was still a delinquent teenager, but it didn’t. Back then, Luke hadn’t been around to speak
up for me, and it gave me a distant fuzzy feeling to watch him do it now, a feeling that made me want to prove him right and make all the nice things he was saying about me come true.
I tried to focus on the dog who was, by now, serenely lapping cool water as if nothing had happened. She’d made no move to return to her owner, though, and I wondered if the police had noticed that Keane hadn’t glanced her way either. That he seemed more concerned with his car.
The debate raged around me. I tuned out and lost myself to Jessie’s silky ears. I didn’t care what they decided about me. They could arrest me. Charge me. Lock me up. As long as she was safe, I didn’t give a shit. I knew Gus would take care of Grey.
The police officer crouched in front of me. “Witnesses are backing your version of events, but we’ll need to take your details, in case the CCTV throws up anything else.”
“You know my details,” I said absently. “Or you’d have believed me in the first place.”
“I did believe you. But it’s about evidence. I can’t allow you to break into a car without proof you did it for the right reasons.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s how it works when you have a rap sheet like yours. I’ve arrested you before, do you remember?”
I forced myself to look at the officer and studied his weathered features. He seemed familiar, but then, this was Rushmere. There weren’t many faces I didn’t know. “I don’t remember, but it must’ve been a long time ago, I’m a good boy these days.”
“So I hear, so I’m hoping you’re not going to give me too much trouble about giving the dog back.”
“What?”
“The dog. It doesn’t belong to you.”
“You want me to give her back to that clown after he left her to die? Why aren’t you arresting him?”
The officer sighed. “It doesn’t work like that. Unfortunately, it isn’t a crime to leave the dog in the car. It only becomes something we can prosecute if the dog dies.”
“That’s fucking insane.”
“Mind your language, please. However much I agree with you, I can’t allow you to speak to me like that, okay? Just give me the dog so I can return her to the owner.”
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