“Need something?”
My head jolted up like a drunken giraffe. Dom was in the doorway, a mug in one hand, and my little bag of sin in the other. “Where did you find those?”
“On my bathroom floor.” Dom ventured closer and sat on the edge of the bed. “They must’ve fallen out of your jeans when I picked them up to wash them.”
“Don’t wash my clothes. I’m not a fucking child.”
“I know. I was just washing my own, so why the fuck not?”
“You don’t wash your own clothes.”
“Says who?”
“Says everything about this damn castle if it really is your house.”
Dom set the mug down on the bedside table. “It’s an apartment, actually, and yeah…I do live here, cleaning lady and all, but she doesn’t do my washing. Now you gonna tell me what the fuck this shit is?”
“Why do you want to know?” I hated the slur in my voice.
I hated the guarded look in Dom’s eyes even more.
“’Cause it’s in my place,” he said. “And I’d like to know what I’m about to flush down my toilet, unless you want to take it with you now and leave.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No.”
“I…” I ran out of words—like, literally. My brain stopped working and everything was blank. I stared at Dom, he stared right back, and nothing happened. A buried-deep part of me wanted to snatch the bag and boot it out of Dom’s swanky apartment, out of his life, like he’d apparently wanted more than a week ago, but the part of me that was cold to the bone and so fucking relieved to see him stayed put. “If I tell you what they are, will you throw them away?”
“Yes.”
“It’s drone and Valium.”
“The fuck is drone?”
“Mephedrone.”
Dom shook his head. “I have no idea what that is.”
“That isn’t a bad thing, but can you flush it…please? I can’t look at it.”
Dom got up and left the room. A toilet flushed and he came back with empty hands and an unreadable frown.
My heart sank. “Do you want me to go?”
“No, I already told you.” He reclaimed his place on the edge of the bed and put his arm around me. “I do want to know why you had them, but more than that, I want you to be okay. I don’t care about anything else right now.”
I wanted to fall against him and absorb the affection he was offering. I wanted to find strength in my Valium-addled legs and walk out on him like he’d walked out on me.
I wanted the cup of tea he’d placed in front of me.
I wanted him to take his coat off.
“Lucky,” Dom whispered. “Nothing matters to me more than you being safe and well. Just believe me, please?”
I woke with a jump, expecting the scratchy blanket of my rented room, and then, when it wasn’t there, the chill of a frosty morning. Or a damp one. Basically, anything but the sweetly scented sheets, and the solid warm body curved around me from behind.
Out of habit, I panicked, and scrabbled to escape the strong arms wound around my waist. They let me go, and I pretty much fell out of the bed before Dom caught me.
“Fuck. Sorry. I forgot where I was.”
“It’s okay.” Dom tugged me back to safety. “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Anything. You were pretty out of it when we found you.”
“We?”
“Jamila asked me to help her look for you.”
Coherent thought returned to me in a rush of horrifying images. I had no idea how the fuck I’d wound up in a bedroom I was fairly sure was Dom’s, but the idea of him and Jamila joining forces to scrape my sorry benzoed arse off the street was fucking horrific. “I’m sorry.”
“What for? Putting her through hell or what you’ve done to yourself?”
I turned my head slowly to face him. “Are you seriously fucking judging me?”
“No. I’m trying to figure out how you got here.”
“Literally? ’Cause if you work it out, I wouldn’t mind knowing.”
“I drove you here, Lucky. And this is my place, in case you’ve forgotten that too.”
“I haven’t…I remember you getting me out of the bath, making me tea, and feeding me some weird bean shit.”
“Pottage,” Dom supplied. “My housekeeper leaves it in my fridge from time to time. Reckons it has magical powers, and I pretty much believe her now. I thought you were dead when we found you—your lips were blue.”
I cringed. “Stop. I’m sorry, okay? Please don’t tell me anything else about it, though. I can’t—I can’t handle knowing you saw me like that.”
“Why?”
“Because it was never part of whatever game we were playing. You don’t know me, Dom. And I don’t want you to.”
Dom shifted away from me, and I mourned his warmth pressed against me, but the distance seemed far more real than the embrace I’d woken up in.
A heavy sigh escaped me. “I should go.”
“Go where? It’s five o’clock in the morning.”
“So?”
“So…” Dom rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “You’re right—I don’t know you—but I know you don’t have a safe place to go at night, so I’m asking you to stay here…at least till it’s light.”
“Why?”
Dom blew out a frustrated sigh of his own. “Is that what we’re doing now? Questioning every statement until we can’t make anything right?”
“Does it matter? You were the one who bailed, and I was messed up long before I met you anyway. That isn’t gonna change when I leave.” My heart told me I was being unfair to him. That I had no idea what had driven him to call time on our…arrangement, but I was angry, dammit—embarrassed—and I was always the dickhead who came out swinging. “I really should go.”
I started to climb out of bed before I remembered I was bollock-naked. “Where are my clothes?”
“In the wash. You can have some of mine if you’re that desperate to leave.”
His flat tone irritated me. “Have you got anything that didn’t cost more than I earn in a month?”
“Your turn to judge me, is it?” Dom got out of bed, revealing that I was the only naked idiot, but he didn’t wait for me to respond before yanking open a drawer and chucking a perfectly folded hoodie at me. Sweatpants followed, and then he stormed out of the room, leaving only anger I couldn’t quite decipher in his wake.
I closed my eyes. However long I’d slept in his bed had been enough to clear most of the Valium fog, but I’d never been so tired in my whole life. When I was with Dom, it sometimes seemed like I’d only begun existing after I’d met him. That everything that happened in-between our secret encounters happened to someone else, but my worlds had collided now, and everything was still such a mess. Dom didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him either.
Could we fix it? Did either of us even want to? Doubt warred with a million conflicting emotions in my gut, but somehow I found myself at the edge of the bed, swinging my legs over the side. Dom had walked out on me, but I wasn’t going to walk out on him.
Twenty-Three
Dom
I didn’t expect Lucky to follow me. I wasn’t even sure I’d wanted him to until he came up behind me and wound his arms around my waist, pressed his cheek against my spine, and held on for dear life.
Damn it, Lucky. I closed my eyes and leaned against the kitchen counter, hoping the cool marble would ground me.
It didn’t. Lucky’s touch had me flying no matter the shadows weighing us down, and it was all I could do not to sag against him. To spin around and hold him tight enough that he knew I’d never let him go.
As it was, I settled for picturing him curled up in a heap on icy concrete, and wondered how the fuck anyone ended up like that. You privileged fucking arsehole.
I sighed. Lucky knocked his head on my back. “I’m sorry.”
“What
for? You’re right—I am the one who bailed. My life’s still too screwed up to subject you to it, and all that’s changed is now I know your life isn’t too hot either.”
“That’s why you said you couldn’t see me anymore? Because your life is a mess?”
In another world, I’d have thought Lucky seemed amused, but he had no right to laugh at me. Not when he had no idea who I was and what him being in my life could cost us both. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
“I know.” I turned around and grasped Lucky’s wrists before he could retreat. “But I’ve been awake all night and I have to go to work in an hour to be the person the rest of the world thinks I am. I can’t do that if you’re not going to be here when I get back.”
“You said nothing’s changed.”
“It hasn’t.”
“You look like shit.”
I’d expected Lucky to legitimately ask why the fuck he should stay when it was highly likely I’d bail on him again the moment I got home, but his words hit me all the same. I looked like shit because I felt it, and I had no idea how I was going to last ninety minutes of the roughest domestic game of the year.
I pulled him impossibly closer and kissed the top of his head. “Can we go back to bed…please?”
Lucky stretched out beside me like a cat. He was still slower than I was used to, but at least his eyes weren’t pointing in different directions anymore. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
“If I had my way I’d tell you nothing. I don’t want you to know what a disaster I am…I liked it better when I was a mysterious hook up.”
“Did you?”
Lucky shrugged, conflict clear in his soulful eyes. “I don’t know. Things feel so complicated now.”
I slid down the bed so we were level. Pressure welled inside me, like a dam threatening to burst, but I fought the growing instinct to vomit my entire life at Lucky’s feet, to lay it all out so he could judge for himself how privileged a wanker I really was, rather than taking my vague word for it. I stroked his face, scratching the soft stubble covering his jaw. “I wish I was better.”
“Me too, Dom. Me too.”
“Are you a drug addict?”
Lucky’s hooded eyes widened. “What?”
“I’m not making any assumptions. It’s just with you being wasted last night and what I found on the bathroom floor…” The force of Lucky’s glare hit me. “What?”
“If you weren’t making assumptions, you wouldn’t say shit like that.”
“So tell me I’m wrong. I want to be wrong, Lucky.”
“You’re a prick.” The half-smile playing on Lucky’s lips overrode any venom. “But to answer your question…no, I’m not an addict. I have bad habits I can’t seem to quit when shit gets real, but I don’t use anything when I’m happy and warm. If I am addicted, it’s psychological, not physical.”
“What do you use?”
“You know what I use…you flushed it down your bog.”
I’d wondered if he’d remember that. If he’d wake up searching for it, needing it. “I know what Valium is, but not the other stuff.”
“Drone,” Lucky said absently. “It used to be a legal high.”
“A what?”
“You’re cute. What kind of bubble do you live in?” He laughed at a joke I didn’t understand, his face briefly alive and as I remembered it. “Anyway, I didn’t use for ages, but then I stopped sleeping, so I needed a little sniff to get me through the day, and Valium to take the edge off when I got home.”
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I told you I moved into a new place, right?”
“When you’re not at Jamila’s?”
He shook his head. “I’ve never lived with Jamila—she lets me stay there sometimes when her mum’s at work. It isn’t my home…I’ve never had one, and I still don’t, really.”
“The new place fell through?”
“No, but it’s probably not what you pictured when I told you I had my own place. It’s the halfway house in Stoke Newington, the one behind the bus station.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Why would you?”
I said nothing, because I had no defence. My employers supported city charities and occasionally sent players out to various projects, but it was sanitised, our appearances a photo op for Twitter. It didn’t mean anything.
“Anyway,” Lucky went on. “Before I scored that room, I slept out when Jamila’s mum was home, and when things get rough at the halfway house, I still do. It’s a devil I know, if that makes sense.”
“It does. But what’s so bad about where you live?”
Lucky shrugged. “It’s not safe at night. The staff goes home, leaving the whole building to a couple of night wardens. My door’s been bashed in, my stuff gone through, and someone set fire to the bathroom a few weeks ago, but that’s not even the problem…it’s more the anticipation of something happening. It reminds me too much of—”
“What?” I prodded gently when he broke off with a sharp intake of breath. “Is it your dad?”
“I s’pose so. I told you before that he stopped hitting me, but the threat never seemed to fade. When he was angry, I’d hear him stomping around downstairs, and I’d shit myself every time I thought he was about to come up to my room. I didn’t sleep for years until I started smoking weed.”
My heart ached for him. My childhood had been messed up too, but nothing like his. My angst had been my own, and for all my father’s faults—that he’d loved me for someone I wasn’t—he’d never laid a hand on me. I’d feared his disappointment, not his fists. “What are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About your living situation. You can’t carry on sleeping rough.”
Lucky laughed humourlessly. “There’s nothing I can do until my apprenticeship ends. After that, I can earn proper money, but it’s six months away, at least, and that’s if I don’t do the extra bits.”
“Do you need the extra bits?”
“If I don’t want to be a grunt my whole life, yes.”
“What about the night wardens at the halfway house? Surely they can do something if you feel unsafe?”
More toneless laughter. “Night wardens earn seven-fifty an hour, Dom. Do you think they wanna be anyone’s hero?”
Desperation clawed at my insides. “You know I can help you, don’t you?”
“No, thanks.”
“Lucky—”
He pressed his hand over my mouth. “Nah. We’re fucked up as it is without you playing sugar daddy.”
I peeled his hand from my lips. Argument boiled in my chest, but I swallowed it down. Lucky was an adult, and no good would come from me forcing my money on him.
“Besides,” he said when I didn’t speak. “You were right when you said we shouldn’t see each other anymore. You know my darkest secrets, even if you don’t know me, but I can see in your face that you’re not going to reciprocate.”
“Lucky, I—”
“I know.” He silenced me again, his hand firmer this time. “Whatever you’re about to say, I fucking know, okay? But as long as you can’t talk to me, we can’t be anything real to each other.”
How could something hurt so much? As I gazed at him and he gazed right back, pieces of me crumbled. My body cried out to yank him against me. My heart screamed at me to challenge him, to put something—anything—in motion to dismantle the iron curtain keeping us apart. But I did nothing, and now I had to leave him all over again. “I have to go.”
“Uh-huh.” Lucky leaned away from me, already shutting down. “Give me a sec to dress up in your huge clothes and I’ll chip off too.”
“You can wait for your clothes if you want. The machine is set to dry them as soon as the wash cycle is done.”
“What?”
“Stay,” I said even as I rolled off the bed, tearing my gaze from him to search
out my phone and anything else I needed to take with me. “Rest, eat, whatever. I’ll be gone all day, so there’s no point in you rushing off.”
“You want to leave me alone in your posh penthouse?”
“It’s not a penthouse.”
“You’re still leaving a homeless bum in your place.”
“I don’t care. It’s raining and I know I’ve fucked this up. I just can’t—” I blinked hard as a fresh headache began to creep across my skull. “Just stay a while, okay? At least until the rain stops.”
“And then what?”
I had nothing.
Lucky snorted and turned away.
“Whoa.” Maldano’s voice seemed far away as he yanked me off the bathroom floor. “Not you too?”
I stumbled sideways, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “Piss off.”
“Not likely. If you’re puking too that makes six. At this rate, we’re not going to have eleven men standing.”
I regained my equilibrium and tried to compute what Maldano was saying, but my head hurt too much. In fact, everything hurt.
Maldano gripped my arm and steered me out of the bathroom. He sat me on a bench and disappeared, only to return with one of the club’s medical staff.
“What the fuck?”
The medic hovered nervously as I scowled at Maldano, who shrugged and spread his hands. “We gotta know if you’re fit to play, man. If you’re not, they’ll probably call the game off.”
“Off?”
“Yeah. I told you already. We’re six men down. Our bench is totally wiped out.”
The medic kneeled in front of me. “When did you start vomiting?”
“What?”
“Jesus, Dom,” Maldano muttered. “Wake the fuck up and answer the question, will ya? We ain’t got time for this.”
Reality finally crept into my consciousness. You’re at work, remember? I tried to focus on the medic. “This morning. I puked as soon as I got here.”
“Nothing at home?”
“No.”
“And when did you start to feel unwell?”
I’d felt sick for months, and now the helplessness I’d carried since Lucky had carved his name on my heart was merging with whatever bullshit bug I’d picked up from the last place on earth I wanted to be. “I don’t know.”
Lucky Page 18