Lucky

by Garrett Leigh

  I hadn’t looked at the app in ages. There’d been no need when Dom was just a text away, and I hadn’t been in the market to hook up with anyone else.

  Had he, though? A week ago I’d have sworn blind he wasn’t, but the distance between us now was fucking with my head. The Dom I thought I knew was fading, leaving in his place the arsehole who’d left me naked and alone in a hotel room.

  With shaking fingers, I opened the app and searched the grid for his profile—or any profile that could’ve been him. There were many possibles, the world was full of closeted blokes whose only escape was murky Grindrland, but none of them felt like Dom, and his original profile was still gone.

  What if he’s ghosted me and picked up someone else?

  The notion taunted me, and my hand slid of its own volition into my coat pocket. I fingered the tiny plastic bag and then slowly drew it out, turning it over in my hands. The wrap of drone inside called to me, but I didn’t need a hit of that right now—I needed to sleep, long and hard, and forget about everything, just for a few hours.

  I opened the bag and dug out one of the Valium I’d scored on my way home from work. I hadn’t intended to drop them until the weekend, but fuck I needed a break from my head, especially now I’d left Jamila. Sleeping alone had always been rough. The warmth of someone else grounded me, soothed me, and only drugs had ever been a fair substitute.

  Screw it. I swallowed a pill and pocketed the bag. Then I went back to staring at my phone. I hadn’t been on WhatsApp since I’d last seen Dom either, and I avoided it now, opening the regular message app instead so I’d never know if he’d consciously ignored me.

  I tapped out a message.

  Lucky: i miss u

  Dom didn’t reply.

  Twenty-One

  Dom

  Lucky: i miss u

  My thumb hovered over the delete button, but in the thirty-six hours since Lucky had sent it, I hadn’t managed to erase it. Keeping it was madness—newspapers hacked phones all the time—but reading it every ten minutes was the only thing keeping me sane. Fuck, Lucky. I miss you too.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  I put my phone face down on the table and spared Isha a glance. He’d called a crisis meeting at my apartment to deal with the tabloid hack all up in my business, but with my thoughts dangerously obsessed with Lucky, I was finding it hard to focus. “Sorry, what?”

  “I was saying that any payment you make will actually give you some insurance. If this ever comes out, he’s guilty of blackmail, and you were just trying to protect yourself.”

  “But he never asked for money.”

  “No, but you can say he did, if anyone ever asks.”

  More lies. Bile rose in my throat and I found my gaze fixed on Constance as she bustled around my kitchen. Isha had wanted me to send her home, but I was fresh out of fucks. If she turned out to be the one who betrayed me then the whole world was screwed. “I need to think about it.”

  Isha shrugged and closed his laptop. “Fair enough. I can probably blag that you’re caught up in training for the derby, but after that…damn. Look, I know it’s awful, but you’ve got to move forward with this. Shut it down and move on.”

  “Move on with what? Being celibate until I retire and then spending the rest of my life dealing with this fucking circus anyway?”

  I spoke to myself as much as Isha, but his eyebrows rose ridiculous amounts. “Dom, if there’s another way you want to handle this, then I’m listening, but we can’t ignore it, okay? We need to utilise what little control we have left.”

  We. I wanted to punch him in the face, even though none of this was his fault. Without him, I’d have no lead to the faceless dude who apparently wanted to ruin my life. No way to stop the avalanche barrelling down the mountain. But I still resented him for making this shit real. For bursting my Lucky bubble. It was hard to accept that it would’ve burst eventually on its own, because even without what was happening right now…I didn’t even know his real name.

  A bone-scraping sigh escaped me. “I don’t have a better plan, but I’m not ready to pay someone not to fuck me over, either. Ask me tomorrow.”

  We’d opened our pre-match planning sessions to a bunch of injured military men once upon a time. They’d likened it to a special forces sit in, and I could believe it, though I didn’t reckon the SAS paid eight quid for half-litre bottles of water.

  Fernando went in hard, outlining his game plan in minute detail. In the past, I’d have taken notes, but I zoned out as he droned on, not thinking about anything in particular, just…lost.

  Maldano kicked me under the table. “You okay?”

  I answered his mouthed question with a listless nod. He didn’t seem convinced, but I didn’t care. We’d been trapped in the conference room for hours, and claustrophobia was starting to eat into my apathy.

  “Dom.”

  I blinked. Fernando was staring right at me. “What?”

  Fernando narrowed his eyes. “If you’d like to pay attention, I was pointing out that the norovirus outbreak has already left us five bodies down, and that’s just players. It’s in double figures if we count coaching staff. With that in mind, when we finish here, single guys you can go home and stay there until you come in tomorrow. Anyone with families, I want you to stay in the team hotel overnight—stay away from the bugs your kids bring home from school.”

  “What’s the point in that if half the team already have it?”

  Fernando intensified his glare. “The outbreak started in the local schools. We’re just taking precautions.”

  I rolled my eyes. No player had kids at the local schools—they were all shipped out to poncy private academies, even the toddlers. Not that money could keep germs out, of course, any more than locking us all up. Still, at least I was one of the lucky—ha—ones who got to go home.

  The meeting broke up, and I booked it to the exit. In my car, I left my phone turned off in the glove box. I hadn’t replied to Lucky’s message, and I knew him well enough to figure he wouldn’t text again. Harassment wasn’t his style, and I didn’t deserve it anyway. Nor did I have the energy to deal with Isha’s hourly reminders that I had other bullshit to deal with.

  I drove home, glared at the out-of-service lifts, and hauled myself upstairs to my apartment. There’d been no physical training that day, but I felt like I’d gone ten rounds in the penalty box at Millwall.

  In my kitchen, I discovered a covered dish of Nigerian pottage that Constance had left me, something she often did if she got wind of a big game approaching. It usually didn’t touch the sides, but despite knowing my body needed fuel for the following day, I stuck it in the fridge without touching it. Food could wait. For now, I only had energy to brood.

  I retreated to my bedroom and stripped my clothes. Then I flopped naked into bed and buried my head under the pillow. Metaphor, much? Probably, but I had a headache and the blackness suited my mood.

  Despite my fatigue, though, I didn’t sleep, and there was an itch in my bones I couldn’t describe. A burn in my veins that kept me awake. After what seemed like hours of tossing and turning, I sat up, and turned my phone on.

  Isha’s messages flashed up on the screen. I hit delete without reading them, but my phone buzzed in my hand before I could toss it aside again, and my heart skipped a beat.

  It wasn’t Lucky…but it was the closest thing.

  Unknown: This is Jamila. Call me

  “You don’t understand,” Jamila snapped. “You don’t know him like I do. He can’t cope when things get hard, and he finds ways to get by—ways that get him in even more trouble.”

  The implication lacing her words wasn’t lost on me, but I needed more than vague catastrophes. “Explain. I can’t help you if you’re not clear what the problem is.”

  Jamila’s sigh rattled down the phone, conflict raging in every breath she’d taken since she’d admitted to lifting my number from Lucky’s phone before she’d given it back to him. “I can’t be the on
e to tell you these things, but I’m so worried about him. He’s stopped going home, and that means he’s out there somewhere on his own.”

  “Out where?”

  “On the street. Dom, Lucky was homeless when he met you. He’s only recently got a place, but it’s horrible…dangerous, and he hates it. It doesn’t take much to persuade him to take his chances outside instead.”

  Horror gut-punched me. Guilt merged with shock in a nauseating rush as pieces of an awful puzzle began to slot into place. Lucky’s dishevelled appearance, marks on his arms I’d chosen to ignore. That he never went anywhere without his bag, and he was always, always hungry. “I-I thought he had a job.”

  “He does, but it’s an apprenticeship that pays two hundred a week. Where’s he supposed to live in this city for that?”

  I had no idea. Ground staff at the club earned that in a day, and the players? Fucking hell. “When did you last see him?”

  “A week ago. He was upset about you, but he told me he was going home. I let him be for a few days, but then I went by his work and he wasn’t there either. They said he was on study leave or something for an assessment he has to take.”

  “So maybe he’s studying.”

  “But where, Dom? The only places he feels safe are the garage and my place, and he hasn’t been to either. He’s turned the tracker off on his phone, and when I went by his place, the warden said he hadn’t seen him in days.”

  “Have you called him?”

  “Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” Jamila’s voice rose. “Of course I called him, dozens of times, but he didn’t answer, and he hasn’t been online either. I’m worried his phone’s been nicked—that he’s been hurt, or—”

  “I get it.” It was my turn to snap as I faced up to what she was saying—that Lucky was more vulnerable than I’d ever imagined, and that he needed us, and he needed us now. “Listen, I’m going to call him now, okay? If I can’t reach him, then I’ll come and get you, and we’ll look for him together.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Jamila whispered, the fight in her gone.

  “Neither do I, but we’ll find him. I promise.”

  My promises meant nothing as Jamila and I circled the neighbourhoods she knew he’d slept out in before. When my eyes weren’t scouring every shop doorway and alley they were trained on the temperature reading on my dashboard. It was dropping every ten minutes. “He’s going to freeze if he’s out here.”

  Jamila kept her gaze on the window, scanning the Tottenham pavements. “He’s slept out in worse.”

  “That doesn’t make it any warmer now.”

  “So buy him a fucking coat,” she snarled.

  “I—”

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s really not. He wouldn’t have let you do that even if you’d known how badly he needed one. He hates it when I buy him stuff. He even smuggles cash into my mum’s purse when he stays with us—like she has any idea he’s been there.”

  I turned down a side street, recalling what Lucky had told me about the blurred lines in his relationship with Jamila. I expected jealousy, but none came. How could it when it was clear she loved him so much? “I bought him dinner a few times; I could tell he didn’t like it, though.”

  “Yeah. He only caves when he’s hungry. I think he lives on cereal most of the time—fuck, stop the car.”

  I slammed my foot on the brake, jolting us both forward. “What is it?”

  “There.” Jamila pointed. “Come on.”

  I killed the engine and threw myself out of the car, trailing Jamila as she hurried down a dingy alley. At the bottom was a heap of cardboard boxes, and a tatty grey bag. God, no. Please no.

  Jamila was two steps ahead of me, but I caught her easily and pushed past her. My trainers crunched on broken glass as I reached the boxes and crouched down, my breath misting the freezing air. I pushed the boxes away and brushed back a tangle of sandy-brown hair. “Lucky?”

  Twenty-Two

  Dom

  “We’ll take him to my place,” I said. “Get in the car.”

  But Jamila was already backing away, shaking her head. “He doesn’t want me.”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t,” she said. “If he thought I could help him he’d have come to me in the first place. Take him home, Dom. He needs you right now.”

  She ran off, disappearing into the night. I watched her go, but the urge to chase her down was drowned out by the slender figure passed out in the back of my car. I swallowed convulsively and opened the car door, slipping in beside Lucky, and trying not to recoil from his icy-cold skin. “Jesus, Lucky. What happened to you?”

  A shiver was his only answer, and the pressing need to get him warm—safe and warm—overrode the mess of emotions surging through me.

  I took my coat off and draped it over him, and then I clambered into the driver’s seat and cranked up the heat. We were an hour from my Greenwich apartment—and taking him there was more risky than checking into an anonymous hotel—but Lucky was a mess. Getting caught at my place was bad enough, but stumbling around a hotel lobby with Lucky off his nut?

  Fuck that shit.

  I drove home, giving myself whiplash with the number of times I turned around to check he was still breathing. At my building, I parked in the underground car park, praying they’d fixed the lifts in the few hours I’d been gone, and for once being a rich prick in a rich-prick’s apartment block paid off.

  Lucky didn’t weigh much, and I half-carried him inside, thankful the reason I’d chosen to live here was that the other residents were mainly foreign businessmen who wouldn’t care if I slit someone’s throat in the stairwell. In the lift, Lucky slumped against me, eyes closed, and I wondered if he was aware he was moving. That he was no longer in the cardboard shelter he’d built himself in a grimy Tottenham alleyway.

  If he even cared. My horrified exchange with Jamila when we’d found him haunted me, and what could’ve happened if she hadn’t called me? Fuck.

  “Jesus, I think he’s dead.”

  “Nah, he’s just wasted,” Jamila had said. “He pops Valium when he’s out here sometimes…when he’s stopped caring what happens to him.”

  I got Lucky into my apartment and double locked the door behind me while he slid to the floor. Lacking any brighter ideas, I left him there, and hurried to the bathroom. The walk-in shower would’ve been easier to manoeuvre him into, but my heart drove me to the freestanding bath I’d never used. I turned the taps on and threw in some scented salt that had come with the apartment.

  Back in the hallway, Lucky was stirring. I crouched in front of him, my hands on his knees. “Lucky?”

  He groaned, his head lolling so loosely he looked like a cartoon.

  I tried again to rouse him. “Come on, mate. Wake up. I’ve got a bath ready for you.”

  Even with his eyes closed, confusion coloured his features. He shook his head and brought his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around himself.

  I touched his hand—still cold, despite an hour in the sauna I’d turned my car into. “Look at me.”

  “No.”

  The whispered word was muffled by his knees, but I heard it like he’d shouted it in my ear. Fear stampeded through my soul as I considered two possibilities: one, that he was so fucked up he needed medical help; and the other, that I’d hurt him so much he’d rather be on the street than anywhere near me.

  A desperate sob built in my chest. I hadn’t cried since my father’s funeral in Rio Tinto a decade ago, and even then my tears hadn’t hurt as much as they should’ve. But the pain in my heart now was something I couldn’t describe. I dropped my head, resting it on his damp denim-clad knee. “Lucky, please.”

  For a lifetime, he didn’t respond. The silence was so loud I forced myself to look at him again, and slowly—so fucking slowly—he raised his head too. One eye slid open, and then two, and his woozy azure-blue gaze fixed on me.
“Dom? Is it really you?”

  Lucky

  Hot water had always been my jam, but even with Dom pouring it over my shoulders, I couldn’t get warm. I shivered, teeth chattering, until he cursed and hauled me out of the tub like a rag doll.

  He carried me to a bed and dried me with a towel that smelled like him. “Where are we?”

  “My place.”

  I tried to process that, but my brain was liquid Valium. My chin dropped to my chest, and it was only him manhandling me again that kept me conscious.

  He moved me to the middle of the bed and propped me up against a thousand pillows. “Stay there. I’m going to get you some food.”

  Panic overrode the chemical tranquillity pulling me under. “Don’t go.”

  “The kitchen’s ten feet away, Lucky. I’ll be back.”

  He kissed my forehead, and then he was gone. I shuddered again and my sluggish gaze scanned the unfamiliar room. With the big bed, huge TV, and funky furniture, it was a larger, sleeker version of our bolthole hotel room—luxurious, but utterly meaningless without Dom in it.

  I brought a hand to my bare chest, inhaled a shallow breath, and tried to join the scattered dots in my memory. If Dom wasn’t the cruellest hallucination known to man, then somehow I’d found my way from my favourite bench in Tottenham to wherever he lived, all under the power of the extra Valium I’d known was a bonehead idea. That it might kill me if the cold didn’t. I rubbed my arms, fighting the clouds I wasn’t sure were born of apathy or drugs—

  Drugs. Fuck. I scanned the room, but I was naked in Dom’s bed with my clothes—and the contents of my pockets—who-the-hell-knew where. Dom didn’t seem the type to go through my stuff, but if he did, chances were I’d find myself back on the street.

  I swung my legs off the bed and planted my feet on the floor. My knees wobbled and I cursed my stupidity. Two Valium had always been enough to knock me out. Why the fuck did you take three?