And halfway along the path, just as the trees closed around them and swept them up in darkness, Cian’s footsteps stopped and his hands were fists in Max’s T-shirt, pushing. Guiding.
The bark hit Max’s back, and then Cian’s weight dragged.
Then they were sitting against a tree in the pitch black, and Max could hear Cian’s breathing.
“Nobody ever comes down here?”
“Not at night,” Cian whispered, and then his lips were on Max’s.
Something about the darkness made it—sweeter. Sharper. Seven for a secret, never to be told. The old nursery rhyme whispered through Max’s mind, and he felt his skin come alive in the silence. His fingers itched to touch. His body felt too tight. Cian was straddling one of his thighs, and Max wanted there to be no denim and cotton between their legs. Wanted skin. Just skin.
It was a lazy, hazy exploration though. Cian’s hands stayed firm around the back of Max’s head, catching him inescapable in that kiss. The gentlest grapple of them all.
But Max’s hands had no such discipline. They wanted to touch, so they did. They smoothed over Cian’s trousers, feeling the hard lines beneath. They cupped his hips, swiped at his stomach, and counted his ribs, rising and falling between them. They ghosted over his chest but learned their lesson from the sharp smack they were punished with, finding instead the long lines of his back.
And Cian felt—
Captivating. Incredible. Max could feel life—could feel passion, emotion, the crash and burn of every thought and every feeling under that invisible skin. He could feel Cian. Not the girl, not the boy, not the passage between the two. Just Cian. He wanted to feel that everywhere, all of the time.
He broke off to say it, but Cian’s mouth simply found his neck instead. The teeth it put there were sharp and sensual, and Max could only breathe raggedly as things came undone—first his belt, then his jeans, then him. Cian’s hands were sure and insistent, and Max could only gasp dumbly through it as the world changed beyond the darkness, as though time ran only outside the woods, and they were here, caught forever. As time slowly began to start again, Max found an overwhelming need to hold on. To grasp at that feeling—that simultaneous rush of power and powerlessness he’d felt in Cian’s palm—and find it again. To capture it. To warm it, share it, and give it back.
And along with it, perhaps, undo Cian the way he could undo Max? Could he do that? Could he find places like that on Cian—unbottle the dangerous, devastating boy who had Max falling in l—
He caught at Cian’s hand, damp and hot, at his belt.
“Let me—”
“No.”
The voice was soft. The kiss that caught the corner of Max’s mouth was even softer.
“Not yet.”
Chapter Nineteen
MAX WAS GROUNDED for the whole weekend.
And he didn’t damn well care. It was out of the way of people like Jazz and Tom. He couldn’t grade with his face bashed to pieces anyway. And Cian—
God, Cian had put that buzzing under Max’s skin, not just on his lips.
Max wasn’t ashamed of his libido. He’d liked girls since he was thirteen. Boys since…six weeks ago, apparently. But he’d never actually done anything. Well, not with anyone. He was as acquainted with clearing his browser history and getting round the parental lock on his phone as any of the other boys at school.
But it turned out that whole ‘you’ll like it when you try it’ thing was true. For him, anyway. He spent all weekend in his room with the door locked, remembering and reliving the feel of Cian’s hand on his skin.
Who cared about being grounded?
It only got better when he was woken on Monday morning by an argument between Mum and Aunt Donna about whether he ought to go to school. For once, Mum won. So when Aunt Donna went out to work, Max got to stay at home and have a late breakfast with Mum, just like when he was little.
Only Mum wasn’t upset like she’d been all the time back then. So, even better.
“You can help with some of the wedding plans,” Mum said as she put his fry-up down in front of him. “And catch me up on this little thing with Cian, hm?”
Max paused, fork halfway to his mouth.
“Uh—”
“I take it that’s where you went Friday night?”
“Um. Maybe?”
“And you had your date on Thursday…”
Max steadfastly refused to fill in the blanks.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Max?”
His chest caught at the B-word. It rolled over his skin, rubbing itself against his face like a happy cat.
“Yeah.”
And his boyfriend liked to—do stuff.
Mum beamed and slid into the seat opposite, clutching her cup of coffee. “Tell me.”
“Mu-um…”
“It is Cian, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…”
“Mm, bet Donna didn’t see that coming when she signed you up for boxing.”
Max shrugged awkwardly, wanting to sink below the table. God, she had to know what they did Friday night. She had to. Why would she be asking if she didn’t suspect?
“Can we not?” he blurted out. “It’s just…you know. New.”
“Everything starts somewhere,” she said and propped her chin on her hand. “Are you going to be inviting him to the wedding?”
Max squirmed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You should, you know.”
“That’s months away.”
“Not very long now. You’ll need to start coming to fittings soon. I’ve picked out a suit for you.”
Max grimaced. He hated formalwear. It made him look even fatter than usual.
“Although with this boxing, I might have to change it for another.”
Max paused, a spoonful of beans halfway to his mouth. “Why?”
Mum chuckled. “Oh, honey, look in the mirror. And check the size of your clothes lately.”
Max glanced at the tumble dryer, in which his Friday jeans would still be waiting for their Monday evening turn on the ironing board.
“I thought you must’ve stretched them,” he mumbled.
“Stretched what?”
“My jeans.”
Mum rolled her eyes. “Denim doesn’t stretch, sweetheart. You know when you came down to breakfast yesterday, you looked—”
Her voice creaked, and she stopped.
Max chewed on his lip and waited.
“You looked like your dad,” she mumbled.
Max frowned.
“Really?”
He didn’t know what his father had looked like, and the only picture Mum could bear to keep out on display was just a headshot. And he’d never really thought he looked like that picture. He looked like a Farrier, that was for sure—same fat build as Uncle John, same square jaw as Grandpa, even Grandma’s thin, flat eyebrows. And he certainly didn’t look anything like his pretty, skinny mum with her curls and dental-advert smile.
But his dad?
“Mm. Oh, go on. I suppose I can show you. Donna won’t see.”
She disappeared upstairs, and Max heard her rummaging around in her bedroom. He pushed his cooling breakfast away, oddly full despite only being half done, and peered down at himself. Mum had to be kidding. His gut was ballooning over his pyjama bottoms. His feet were white whales on the tiles. His breasts—well. Yes. Breasts.
Mum shuffled back into the kitchen and put a single photograph on the table.
Max stared.
The couple in it were immediately apparent. Mum hadn’t changed in ever, and her bright laugh and windswept hair, captured forever in the photograph, were the same as if she’d put on an identical skimpy dress and gone down to the harbour right at that very minute to re-enact the image.
The harbour was different—still recognisably theirs, but simply different. Shops Max had never known. Little fishing boats that hadn’t been sailed in years. A shiny new car parked just at the edge of the frame that hadn’t been manufactured
for eleven years.
And Dad.
Not a formal picture from a Navy record. But…
A towering monster of a man in swimming trunks and nothing else, with big ears and a bigger grin, an arm slung casually around his girlfriend’s waist like he was some dumb jock kid with the entire world laid out before him. Like he was invincible. The kind of arrogant, happy, smug git everyone hated but nobody rationally knew why.
And he was massive. He towered over Max’s mum, well over six and a half feet tall. He was even taller than Grandpa. Maybe even as tall as Uncle George, who had to duck to get through doorways.
He wasn’t a beanpole like Grandpa, though—he was huge. Barn doors were smaller. His shoulders were wider than the doorframes Uncle George had to duck through, and his hips were so big Mum’s arm couldn’t get around them. He was obscenely large, an almost comical figure in the otherwise simple, standard little picture.
But—
He wasn’t fat.
Max squinted at the man he didn’t remember. He wasn’t fat. He was enormous, probably the biggest man Max had ever seen, but…
Max could see the faintest traces of abs. His pecs were huge. His biceps bulged like a professional weightlifter’s.
And there wasn’t a trace of fat on him.
“He’s—”
“Big?”
“Massive,” Max said.
“I was only fourteen when we met, and he was just this fat kid down the street,” Mum said softly. The word pinched at Max’s ears and he frowned. “I loved him the minute he said hello. God, my parents were furious. He was eighteen years old, far too old for me, and just the son of those good-for-nothing Farriers. I was supposed to go to university, get a job in the city, be somebody. Not be mooning around after Fatso Farrier.”
Max flinched.
“He was—”
“Yes, but—not like they call you. Nobody would have dared,” Mum said, chuckling gently. “He was a monster of a man. Oh, very nice, such a gentle soul, just like you, but—well, I suppose people weren’t so daring back then. And maybe having brothers helped. Certainly John could frighten the life out of you at thirty paces, so perhaps everyone thought messing with John Farrier’s little brother wouldn’t end well.”
Max could imagine that. Uncle John’s dullness did manifest itself as intimidating most of the time.
“It was just a nickname. All his friends called him that. And he would laugh about it. Even when—” She paused and swallowed and then began again. “Even when he drank, he was such a gentle man. The number of times the police would bring him home and say he’d been lovely all the way, they just didn’t want him to fall into the harbour in the state he was in.”
Max touched his fingers lightly to his father’s smile. Fatso Farrier. Like father, like son.
But, like father, nothing like son.
“Do you still love him?” he whispered.
Mum’s eyes shimmered and she coughed a wet laugh.
“Oh, God, yes.”
Max bit his lip. “I’m sorry for what I said about him the other day.”
“It’s all right, darling.”
“I shouldn’t have said it.”
“No, you shouldn’t. But—sometimes I forget that you took your grandfather’s death worse than his. You never really knew your father.”
“Did he like me?”
She squeezed his wrist over the table.
“He adored you, sweetheart. I used to have to put you on the phone to him when you were just a tiny baby so he could hear you babbling. He never expected you—neither of us did—but he loved you from the very moment he found out you existed.”
Max’s mouth twisted in a smile. He knew that story. Mum hadn’t told his dad at all. He’d come home from some deployment or other to find his fiancée with nine months of baby belly stuck out in front of her. They’d gotten married the following week, on a wet winter’s morning at a registry office in Bude because it was the only one in the whole of Cornwall with an opening.
And he was born a week later.
“Would he—”
Max paused.
Swallowed.
“Would he have been…”
Mum squeezed his wrist a little harder.
“Been what, darling?”
“Disappointed.”
She made a soft sound, and Max swallowed against an enormous lump in his throat.
“I’ll never make the Navy,” he mumbled hoarsely. “And I have a—a boyfriend. And I’ve been through so many schools because I’m a fat, usele—”
“Clever, kind, sensitive boy,” Mum said softly.
Max sniffed. “Sensitive’s not for the Navy.”
“Oh, please. Your father used to write me poetry. Your soft streak didn’t come from the Gardner side of your genes, sweetheart!”
Max laughed, a wobbly and feeble little sound.
“Honey. He would have been proud of you.”
“W-why?”
“Because you are a Farrier, darling. That family took in a pregnant teenager because their son loved her. I mean, your grandma never even liked me, but she took me in anyway. That family looked after their son’s widow and little boy when they could have washed their hands of the pair of us. Your Uncle John might be a boring old fart—”
Max spluttered a guilty laugh.
“—but he fought tooth and nail with the Navy to get your father classified as a death in service so they would pay us what was owed. And when I got together with Donna, where did your uncles go?”
“Nowhere,” Max whispered.
“Nowhere. Exactly. We aren’t their problem anymore, yet they’re still family.”
Max swallowed.
“You are just like them, Max. And your father loved every last inch of you then, and he still would now.”
Max stared blindly at the photograph, his vision too blurred to see the captured smiles of his parents.
“You keep that,” Mum said.
“’Kay.”
“And if you want…”
Max scrubbed the tears away, took a deep breath, and prompted her to carry on.
“I—I know we haven’t discussed it really, but…Donna wants me to take her last name when we get married.”
“Oh.”
“And I want to. I love her, and I want that.”
“Um. Good?”
“But if you want to keep the Farrier name, then you do that.”
He blinked.
It hadn’t even crossed his mind. Mum would be Lucy Watts. And he’d be Max Watts.
Something deep inside recoiled. Some part of him, buried way down underneath everything, wriggled uncomfortably with the label.
It didn’t fit.
“I don’t want to be a Watts,” he said, but…that didn’t sound right either.
“Then don’t.”
“I mean…you know…it’s not about Aunt Donna. I like Aunt Donna fine. It’s just—”
“It’s just, she’s Aunt Donna.”
Max opened his mouth…and then closed it. And nodded.
“I get it, sweetheart. It was too soon after your granddad died and…well. Honestly, I always thought you took Donna on far better than another boy might have done.”
Max shrugged awkwardly.
“She won’t be upset if you don’t want to take her name, honey.”
“It’s not about her, though. If we were Gardners, maybe it’d be okay because Nana and Granddad suck—”
Mum laughed but didn’t argue.
“—but we’re not. And…it feels like leaving Grandpa behind.”
And there it was.
It wasn’t about his dad or his uncles. It was Grandpa.
It had always been Grandpa.
“Max.”
Mum’s hand stroked his wrist, and Max stared resolutely at the photograph.
“You’re a Farrier. And neither of us—whatever we’re called or wherever we go—will ever leave Grandpa behind.”
Max turned his
hand over to squeeze hers and felt that wriggly, unhappy place inside settle.
Chapter Twenty
CIAN WAS WAITING on the wall again when Max walked out of school on Tuesday.
“Hey,” he said, grinning under a huge pair of sunglasses. “You like ’em?”
“You look like an aviator pilot.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a no; you look like a poser.”
“I look fantastic and you know it.” Cian snorted and slid off the wall.
He did as well. Those combat trousers were back, and he had a blue T-shirt this time in a deep, rich shade that drew the eye.
“Oi, Fatso! That your girlfriend!” a voice yelled from the school gates.
Max’s gut clenched, but Cian laughed and seized his tie, reeling in him for a sharp kiss.
“Let ’em stare,” he whispered. “They’re just jealous as fuck.”
Max let his gaze wash up and down Cian’s lithe form deliberately and raised his eyebrows.
“Um, duh?”
Cian grinned. “Oh, you’re good for the ego. C’mon. Your place. I’m not digging that school uniform. I’ll wait outside again.”
Max let himself be towed. “Do you have to wait outside?”
“Yep.”
“But…my room’s more private than the woods,” Max dared. “And I could close the curtains and turn the lights off if you want it to be dark.”
Cian laughed.
“Oh no you don’t. You and me on a bed, that will get regrettable.”
Max squeezed Cian’s hand.
“Why?” he asked eventually.
“Why what?”
“Why regrettable? Do you…I mean…Friday night was—”
“Best Friday night ever,” Cian said, and Max’s chest eased. “But I have zero self-control, and it was too mucky in the woods to be getting naked-naked, and your room has no such issues.”
“And you don’t want to get naked because…?”
“Because I’m not ready to yet,” Cian said and pinched the inside of Max’s wrist. “Keep that up and I’ll change the plan.”
“What is the plan?”
“Today? Nothing.” Cian shrugged. “Just bum around and do stuff. I don’t know. But when does your school break up for the summer?”
“Friday,” Max said. “But I have exams for the two weeks after.”
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