by JL Merrow
It’d been brilliant.
Rufus was almost sorry to get back to the B&B. Except not really, cos it was definitely a bit nippy once the sun had gone down, and anyway, he had a meal to get ready.
“Dad, we’re home,” he called out. “Did you get all the shopping?”
Dad’s head appeared round the door. Then the rest of him followed. “Ah, Rufus. Yes, although I couldn’t get fresh porcini mushrooms”—Rufus tensed—“so I got some dried ones.” Rufus relaxed again. He could work with that. After last night’s elaborate dinner, he was just doing a simple pasta dish tonight, with a side salad dressed with balsamic vinegar.
“Right, I’ll just wash my hands, and I’ll get dinner on.” He headed straight for the sink.
“Right-oh,” Dad said, and disappeared again.
“Um . . .” Michael hung his jacket on the back of a chair and looked awkward. “You want me to, um, peel anything or chop it or whatever?”
Rufus beamed. “You could mince the garlic. You know, if you’re not worried a bit of mincing will threaten your masculinity.”
“Eff off.” Michael glanced at the door. Maybe he didn’t want Dad or Shelley to catch him swearing.
Bless.
“So where’s this garlic mincer, then?” Michael carried on, opening and closing cupboards. “What does it even look like?”
Rufus stared at him. “Um, like this?” He held up the appropriate article.
Michael frowned at it. “That’s a knife.”
“Well done. Go to the top of the class. Excellent skills in utensil recognition.”
Michael raised an eyebrow. “Any more of that and I’ll demonstrate my skills in shoving utensils where the sun don’t shine. Seriously, you expect me to use that? It looks like something you’d use to gut a bloody zombie.”
“What are you, stupid? Everyone knows you have to go for their brains or they just keep coming. And yes, this is what you use to mince garlic.”
“But it’s fucking enormous.”
Rufus smirked. “That’s what he said.”
“In your dreams, pretty boy. Wanna get out a ruler? We all know who’d win a dick-measuring—”
He broke off as Shelley wandered in, carrying a couple of dirty mugs. Luckily, she seemed a bit dreamy and like she hadn’t heard what Michael just said. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Rufus and Michael, and frowned. “Everything all right in here, boys?”
To be fair on her, Rufus was waving an eight-inch stainless-steel blade at Michael at the time. “We’re fine, thanks. Just getting started on dinner.”
She still didn’t look convinced. “Do you want me to take Michael off your hands?”
Over Rufus’s dead body. And probably Dad’s as well. “No, thanks. He’s helping,” Rufus added proudly.
“He’s gonna teach me how to mince,” Michael put in sourly.
Shelley smiled. “That’ll be nice. Rufus is really good at that. Want me to do anything to help?”
“No,” Rufus and Michael both said at once.
“Oh. Okay. I’ll go and have a sit down with your dad, then.”
Dinner was fucking amazing. Again. Michael wondered if he could get the recipe off Rufus for his mum—but nah, no point. He’d never seen her use fresh garlic in his life, and as far as she was concerned, a mushroom was a mushroom, and she didn’t hold with them having weird names and giving themselves airs. Good, plain food, that was what his mum liked to cook. And yeah, she was great at it—no one was allowed to knock Michael’s mum’s cooking—but maybe it did get a bit samey after a while, the whole meat-and-two-veg thing. Michael liked potatoes as much as the next man, but he was starting to think maybe he didn’t need to have them in some form every meal.
Now, Rufus’s food . . . Yeah, it was a faff, and he’d moaned the whole time when Rufus was getting all finicky about how fine he chopped the garlic, but even he could taste the difference between the end result and the sort of thing Mum produced with her jar of garlic powder. He’d never really got the whole post-shag downer thing—he always felt fucking fantastic after he’d just come—but swallowing the last forkful of Rufus’s pasta gave him a whole new understanding of the concept.
Michael was glad they’d already shagged, cos seriously, if he’d only just met Rufus, he’d have thought the bloke was well out of his league with a talent like that.
“Oi, Rufe, why are you not working as head chef in some posh London restaurant?”
Rufus glanced at his dad. “Uh . . .”
“You oughtta be cooking for royalty, not plebs like me,” Michael went on, cos seriously, it was like a tragedy or something.
“There’s a lot to be said for staying at home,” Gerald said. “Although you’re quite right, Rufus could go straight to the top if he wanted to. We’re just lucky he’s chosen to remain here.”
Shelley looked up from her salad. “Yeah, it’s such a shame—”
“Could you pass the wine, please?” Rufus interrupted her. “Thanks, Dad. Shelley, do you want a top-up?”
“I shouldn’t, but oh, go on.” She held out her glass.
“Yeah, me too.” Michael drained his glass and shoved it under Rufus’s nose before they could finish it off between them. He wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but this stuff was all right. Not all sweet like his mum’s Liebfraumilch, which was a crap name for a wine anyhow. His middle sister Hope had done German at school, and she’d told him it meant love woman milk, which sounded a bit dirty if you asked him.
“We’re going to need another bottle,” Shelley said. “Gerald, would you, love?”
“Yes, of course.” Gerald got up and disappeared into the kitchen, coming back a minute later with the goods.
“That’s better,” Shelley said. “Now, what was I talking about?”
Maybe Rufus didn’t hear her, cos he burst straight in with “Michael used to stay on the island when he was a kid,” and then they all got talking about chalets versus caravans and how you didn’t wanna stay in the holiday camp up by the Needles these days, what with how half of it had fallen into the sea. Which was all kinds of disturbing, cos the more they described it, the more Michael was convinced he had actually stayed there one time.
He was gonna have nightmares tonight. He could tell.
They went for a walk after they’d eaten, just him and Rufus. Down to the seafront and along the prom, all lit up with street lamps and reminding Michael vaguely of a trip to Blackpool Illuminations when he’d been little. He’d almost forgotten that ever happened.
He wasn’t sure, but he reckoned he’d eaten too much ice cream and thrown up on the tram.
“Jesus, you trying to bring back bad memories for me?” Michael protested once he realised they were heading towards the pier.
“What, of meeting me? Thanks.”
As if. “Any time. Nah, seriously, you got any idea how crap it was, getting shoved in the sea like that? The water was fucking freezing. Half the bloody Atlantic Ocean went up my nose.”
He’d been expecting some sympathy, maybe even a “poor baby,” but Rufus was frowning. “I thought you said you’d jumped?”
Shit. “No, wait, you said I’d jumped. I didn’t say nothing. It was Trix, right? She got in a snit when I broke up with her, din’t she?”
“And she pushed you in the sea? Poor baby.”
“Finally I get some sympathy here.”
“Not you. Her. She must have been really upset.”
“Oi! I was sodding upset about it and all.” Especially when he’d seen the mess she’d made of his stuff.
Rufus bit his lip, which was well cute and made Michael wanna forgive him. Jesus, he was gonna have to watch all these mushy feelings. “Were you going out with her long?”
Michael shrugged. “Only a few weeks.”
“And you came on holiday with her?” Rufus’s tone was disbelieving.
Michael felt a bit defensive. It wasn’t that weird. “It was Trix’s idea. Thought it’d be a laugh, din’t I? And it’s n
ot like we went to Outer fucking Mongolia. If it didn’t work out, I could just go home.”
“Except you met me,” Rufus said, all smiles again.
Michael wanted to hug him, but that not-too-far-from-home thing cut both ways. “Yeah,” he said, and gave Rufus a friendly shove instead, which led to Rufus shoving him back and them getting into a bit of a tussle (which wasn’t the thing on the end of his mum’s curtain tie-backs, he’d found out from his calendar a week ago Wednesday), and nearly knocking over an old lady walking her dogs, which did a good job of getting rid of the stiffy Michael had been getting from all the messing about.
They apologised, sat the old dear down on a nearby bench, and chatted about her grandkids for a bit to calm her down. She had three, with two of ’em roughly the same age as Faith’s eldest, so Michael was able to give her some pointers for birthday presents, which he wrote down for her cos she’d come out without her glasses.
“That was really nice of you,” Rufus said after they’d waved good-bye and walked off side by side with no messing about this time.
“What was?” Michael was busy brushing sandy paw prints off his jeans.
“You know. Spending all that time with her.”
Michael shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, well. Old ladies don’t get listened to much. There’s an old biddy next door to Mum’s I do a bit of gardening for—I mean, it’s not like it’s any extra effort when I’m doing ours anyhow—and every time I go round she always says it’s the first conversation she’s had all day that wasn’t with her cats.”
Rufus gave him a soppy smile. “You’re just a total sweetie under that rough, gruff exterior, aren’t you?” He slipped his hand in Michael’s arm.
“Shut up,” Michael muttered, embarrassed, and pulled away to jump up on the low wall and look out to sea. “’S France that way, innit? You ever been over there?”
“No—you?”
“Nah. Weird, innit? I’ve been to Spain, Greece, and a couple of other places, but never to the country next door. You get over to Southampton much?” Michael asked, cos it was sort of on topic and a lot more relevant to his interests than whether Rufus went on foreign holidays.
Rufus didn’t answer for a mo. “Um. Not a lot, lately.”
“S’pose you never had a good reason to, eh?” Michael said with a leer, jumping back down. “What about gay bars, then? There’s none over here. I checked.”
“When?” Rufus asked as they walked on.
“Before I came, obviously.” Cos he still hadn’t sorted out his phone, which for all he knew was dead as a fucking dodo after whatever Trix had done to it.
From the whiff of the water that’d dripped out of it, he had a nasty suspicion she’d dropped it down the bog. And peed on it.
Rufus gave him a level look. “So while you were packing to come away with your girlfriend, you went online to see if there was anywhere you’d be able to pick up men? Did you come here planning to split up with her? And wouldn’t it have been cheaper, not to mention kinder, to do it at home?”
“Oi, I didn’t come here to break up with her. It just happened, all right? I realised it wasn’t gonna work, so I, you know. Broke it to her gently. And seriously, why are we even talking about this? You always spend your time out with a bloke talking about his exes?”
“Well, sometimes, yeah. Like I said, it’s not a big dating pool on the island. It’s always good to find out if you’ve got someone in common.”
Michael laughed. “What, so you can bond over what a tit he was? So go on then, tell me about your exes.”
“You really want to know?” Rufus started counting on his fingers. “Well, first there was Andrew Harding, when we were at school. We just kissed, really. I mean, I tried to give him a blowjob once, but he, um, came before I could get my mouth on it. Then there was a bit of a break, cos Mum was ill and I didn’t feel like going out much.” He stared out to sea for a mo, blinking.
Shit, Michael wanted to hold him. He put a hand on Rufus’s shoulder, which seemed to rouse him out of wherever he’d buggered off to.
“Then there was Dyl, but we broke up when he went off to uni. So if I’m planning to carry on the family tradition, we should be getting back together in around eight years or so. And then there was Adam. And now you.”
“What happened to Adam?”
“He was the tit.”
“Couldn’t keep it in his pants?”
“Don’t think he knew where his pants were, half the time.” Rufus looked lost in memory, and it was a fucking awful memory at that.
“Bastard.” Sod it. There was no one much around. Michael gave Rufus a quick hug to get rid of the sad face. Yeah, that was much better. Then he frowned. “Oi, what about Simon?”
“Who?”
“’S what you yelled out that first time when I got you off.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did. Or something like it. P’simon? Whatever the fuck kind of name that is?”
“Oh. That. It was, um, Poseidon. You know, Greek god Poseidon?”
“Uh-huh.” Michael smirked. “Got a thing for Greek gods, have you? So Percy Jackson films are like total wank fodder for you, yeah?”
“Um, yeah, well, not all of them. It’s just, Poseidon’s like god of the sea, and you came out of the sea, so I was sort of saying thanks . . .” Rufus trailed off at Michael’s look, which was fair enough because bloody hell, this was cracking him up.
And yeah, it was pretty cute too. Christ, Michael had never met anyone like Rufus before. He wasn’t even sure there was anyone like Rufus.
“Oh, look,” Rufus said brightly. “We’re nearly at the pier. Do you want to go up it?”
“Not a lot, no.” Michael shivered inside his jacket. “It’s getting a bit nippy.”
“Right, this way, then.” Rufus led him up a steep side street, away from the pier. “Want to go for a drink somewhere?”
Michael couldn’t see the point. He wanted to get laid, not wasted. “Nah, why don’t we head back to the B&B?” He grinned. “We could do something to warm up there.”
“I’m not having sex with you with Dad and Shelley in the house.”
Shit. You had to admire the bloke for sticking to his guns—well, most of Michael did, but his dick was less than impressed. “That’s crazy. You had sex with me in that shack where anyone could have seen us.”
“Yeah, but not Dad and Shelley.”
“How d’you know? They could’ve come up to check on your dad’s mate’s place or something.”
“No, they couldn’t. We had the car, remember?” They turned the corner, which meant they’d now be walking downhill, thank God. Michael liked to think he was pretty fit, but they’d done a lot of walking today and that hill had been bloody steep.
He didn’t realise until too late that Rufus was leading him back down the high street. Bugger. That’d take them right past him and Trix’s hotel. Still, what were the odds they’d run into—
Fuck. There she was. Judy the judgemental receptionist, coming straight towards them. Michael thought fast and dragged Rufus into the nearest doorway. Then he snogged the crap out of him.
A couple of passing cars honked their horns, and someone yelled out “Poofters!” which, yeah, obviously he hadn’t quite thought this through. Michael cringed inside but carried on with the lip-lock, cos if he stopped now it’d be even worse.
He just hoped Judy wouldn’t realise it was him—far as she knew, he was straight. So with a bit of luck she’d just walk on by without saying anything he wouldn’t want Rufus to hear. Rufus had already been a bit too keen to see Trix’s side of things. If he found out she’d just proposed to Michael when he dumped her . . . Well. Not that Michael thought he’d done anything wrong—for Christ’s sake, how was he supposed to know she was gonna do that?—but he could see how, if you put the wrong sort of spin on it, he might not come out of it all smelling like roses. More like raw sewage.
Michael really didn’t want Rufus to
start thinking of him as a big, steaming pile of shit. He shivered.
Rufus seemed to like that, and held him tighter. Okay, this was getting to be a problem, because that stiffy was back with a vengeance. He risked a look over his shoulder, and was in luck—Judy’s pert little tight-skirted bum was wiggling its way up the high street, away from them. Thank God.
“Why’d you stop?” Rufus asked, sounding breathless. Score one for Michael.
“Coast’s clear,” he said without thinking.
“What coast?”
Shit. Although, looking on the bright side, the stiffy was no longer a problem. “Uh, them gits what were heckling us. But maybe we oughtta get outta here in case they decide to come back and give us a kicking?”
“Yeah, guess so. Um. Give me a mo.” Rufus glanced around nervously before adjusting himself in his jeans.
Score two for Michael.
“Okay,” Rufus went on. “I’m good.”
“Good? You’re fucking perfect,” Michael said, cos he liked to see Rufus smile. And fuck it, maybe it was true, at that.
Course, once they got back to the B&B, that was the end of their alone time. Despite Rufus’s dad having theoretically given his blessing for them to . . . Actually, come to think of it, all he’d given his blessing to was Rufus taking Michael out on a sight-seeing tour. Yeah, the evening made a lot more sense once Michael had remembered that. Whatever room in the place they tried hanging out in (kitchen, guests’ living room, etc., etc.) they ended up getting cockblocked when Gerald turned up to do some apparently vital bit of household maintenance. Although he was clearly running out of ideas by the end of the evening. He used the “radiator needs bleeding” excuse two rooms in a row.