Caught!

by JL Merrow

  “Probably.” Sean’s hands didn’t move.

  “Soon?” I hinted. “Before we have to boil the kettle again?”

  “Definitely.” He leaned in to kiss me, his lips soft, then slowly let go.

  I blinked at him for a moment before remembering I was supposed to be doing something now.

  “Coffee,” Sean said helpfully.

  “I knew that.” I spooned coffee into the mugs, managing not to spill more than half of it over the counter, which I counted as something of a victory.

  “Course you did.” Sean leaned in beside me and swept the spilt coffee grounds up with his hands, then brushed them off over the sink. “Milk?”

  “Fridge.” I inclined my head in the fridge’s general direction and poured hot water into the mugs.

  “Sugar?”

  “Cupboard. I’ll get it.”

  “Top?”

  “Bot—” I caught myself halfway through the automatic answer. “I beg your pardon?”

  Sean leaned on the counter, an evil grin plastered over his face that gave him a disconcerting resemblance to his nephews. “Sorry—thought we were playing word-association games. I always used to like those when I was a littl’un.”

  “I bet you were a horrible child.” I’d also lay money on my face being a violent shade of crimson right now. I hid it in the cupboard, under the guise of searching for the sugar.

  He was unrepentant. “You’ll have to ask Debs about that. Course, she reckons I still haven’t grown up.”

  “She’s undoubtedly right. Sugar.” I turned and presented him with the packet.

  “Honey,” he acknowledged, unrolling the top. “Spoon?”

  “Dish,” I muttered, handing him the appropriate item of cutlery.

  He frowned at it. “No, that’s definitely a spoon.”

  “I’m beginning to have a lot of sympathy for your sister,” I said drily. “Not to mention your parents.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t waste any sympathy on my dad.”

  I looked up sharply from my coffee.

  Sean shrugged and spooned sugar into his mug. He stirred it and stared into the whirling contents. “He buggered off when we were eight. Haven’t seen him since. Debs always says she wishes he’d hung around a bit longer so she’d have known the sort of bloke to avoid.”

  “Oh God. It must have seemed like a sick joke when the twins’ father left too.” I put down my mug and, hesitantly, put my arms around him.

  “Sick’s the word all right,” he said so quietly I had to strain to hear him. “Makes me want to puke to think if the worst happens, that bastard will have more claim to the boys than I will.”

  “You’ve been like a father to them.” It wasn’t a guess. I’d seen how they were with him—and how he was with them. “I don’t know what the legal position is, but surely if she names you their guardian in her will… And anyway, it may never come to that. People get better from cancer all the time.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Shit. Sorry—turning into a right miserable date, aren’t I?”

  “Don’t be silly.” I held him, hesitating, then said it anyway. “I never really knew my father either. He died when I was ten, and before that he was always working, you see—even at weekends, he’d be busy—and I was away at school half the year in any case.”

  “Yeah? How old were you, when you first went to boarding school?”

  “Seven. But I had to leave when Father died, so I was only there three years. I boarded at Loriners’, of course, but Mother was there too.”

  “Must have been rough. Leaving all your mates, right when you’d just lost your dad for good.” Sean’s hands stroked up and down my arms, their rhythm slow and soothing.

  “I…I found new ones. Eventually.” I managed a wonky smile. “Don’t know what I’d have done without Fordy.” Entirely failed to weather the bullying, probably.

  “Yeah. At least Debs and me always had each other. So you still see him, do you? This Fordy bloke?”

  “Not as much as I’d like. He’s married now, with a new baby.”

  Sean laughed. “I remember when the twins were first born. You’re lucky if you see him at all the first six months. He’ll be too busy trying to figure out how the bloody hell the steriliser’s supposed to work and wondering if he’s ever going to get a full night’s sleep again. He works, does he?”

  I nodded. “In the city. Stockbrokers. They live in Kent, though, Fordy and Linette. And Georgie too, now, of course.”

  “So he’s got the commute on top of everything. Poor sod.” He paused. “You and him ever…?”

  “Um. Possibly. But I’m fairly certain Linette doesn’t know—I mean, not that anything happened after they got together, of course not. But I don’t think he’d want her to find out.” My insides, like my tongue, felt all tangled up in knots by the end of that.

  “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, just wouldn’t have pegged you as the sort to be someone’s dirty little secret. Shit, I didn’t mean it like that. Come back.”

  I’d stepped away from him, my hands falling to my sides. “How did you mean it?”

  “Just—I don’t get that, you know? Keeping secrets from people you care about. Well, I get it, but I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe he thinks she’s happier not knowing?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Look, I wasn’t having a go at you or anything. I was just surprised, that’s all. Come back?”

  Sean gazed at me tenderly, and I couldn’t resist his entreaty a second time. I stepped forward, and his arms encircled me once more, our bodies pressing together, learning how to fit to one another. He chuckled into my hair.

  “What?” I asked, nuzzling his neck. He smelled of soap and shaving foam, with a warmer scent I could only identify as Sean.

  “Just…I’m not usually this heavy and serious and all that. Honest. Not at the start of a relationship, anyway. Course, I’ve never been in one with anyone like you.”

  I felt light-headed and strangely tingly inside. He’d said what Fordy used to refer to as the ‘R’ word. “I don’t mind,” I murmured. I wished he’d move away from the kitchen counter. The way he was leaning against it made it impossible for my hands to stray below his waist. I made the best of a bad job and pushed his shirt up under his jacket, my hands delighting in their contact with the warm skin of his back.

  Sean made a loud mmm sound, and there were definite stirrings in those jeans of his. I was hard again too, and when we kissed, I got harder still. His kisses seemed gentler this time, but somehow deeper. As if we were inviting each other in, rather than demanding admittance.

  When we broke apart once more, both of us were breathing heavily.

  “Shit,” Sean said. “I’d better go. But I’ll see you again, yeah? Sunday? Think I’ll be too knackered tomorrow night.”

  “Sunday,” I agreed, not certain I trusted myself to say any more. Part of me—a very definite part of me—wanted to ask him to stay the night. But another part of me felt nothing but relief that we weren’t moving so quickly. I’d never been one for casual sex. I never seemed to have the knack of separating the emotions from the act.

  And I was utterly terrified of the speed with which I was falling for Sean.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I’d invited Rose round for dinner on Saturday. In a halfhearted attempt to stem off incipient heart disease from all the takeaways, I nipped out to Tesco and bought a couple of pizzas and a prepacked salad.

  Hanne met me on my doorstep and cast a doleful eye at my purchases, clearly visible through the plastic of the gossamer-thin carrier bags the supermarkets were handing out these days. “Your pretty friend is coming over? You should have told me. I could have helped you make something special. Better than the pølsefocaccia.”

  “Ah… Rose isn’t actually my girlfriend,”
I said, visions of burned-down houses dancing in my head. “And she’s really not fussy.”

  “Oh, you young men.” She smiled at me kindly. “Women like to be spoiled. Even if they say they don’t. Next time, okay?”

  “Next time,” I agreed. It seemed easier than the alternative.

  As I walked into the kitchen with my bags, my eyes making the quick scan for furry invaders that had become second nature, I berated myself, not for the first time, for not just telling Hanne I was gay. After all, even in the unlikely event she reacted in horror and shunned me for the foreseeable future, when all was said and done she was only my next-door neighbour. Her disapproval would hardly blight my life and might even save me from further kitchen-related embarrassment.

  I’d survived Mother’s initial disappointment over my coming out perfectly well. And she’d quite come around to the matter now. She’d even been rather fond of Crispin. In fact, she’d been disappointed when we’d broken up, although of course, she hadn’t known the full details.

  It was probably best not to speculate what she might think of Sean.

  I filled the day with all the tedious but necessary chores I’d been putting off all week, such as picking up the dry cleaning and investigating local cleaners. For a room in which one did nothing but wash, it seemed a bathroom could get remarkably filthy if not attended to once a week.

  Rose arrived a few hours after sundown, like a fashionably tardy vampire, and we took our pizzas into the lounge to eat perched upon the sofa, despite the presence of a perfectly good dining table. I had to pop back into the kitchen for the salad. Rose had left it languishing on the kitchen counter in a rather pointed manner, I thought.

  Rose freed a slice of pizza from the clinging, cheesy embrace of its fellows, and daintily placed a forkful of coleslaw on top. “So go on, tell me all the gory details. Did Sean stay the night?” She took a bite.

  “No,” I said with a barely suppressed sigh.

  “You went to his?” she asked, her hopeful tone somewhat muffled by her mouthful of food.

  “No.” I cut myself a bite-size morsel of pizza and virtuously added a baby lettuce leaf.

  Rose swallowed. “Quickie in the bushes after the show?”

  “No. I can’t think of anything less conducive to a successful career in primary education than being caught in flagrante a stone’s throw away from the swings. Also, it was extremely cold.” Lettuce and pepperoni grease was not, I decided, a match made in heaven. Perhaps I should follow Rose’s lead and stick to the coleslaw.

  She gave me an evil smile. “Worried you wouldn’t show to advantage?”

  “Eat your pizza, woman, and stop speculating about my sex life.”

  “You’re no fun. Fine, just give me the PG version. Did it go okay? You and Sean get on all right?”

  “Yes, actually. It went really well.” I put down my fork, distracted from pepperoni and cheese by the memory of Sean’s kisses.

  “You’ve got the world’s soppiest smile right now. Is it twu wuv?” she simpered.

  I struggled to think of how to reply. “It’s very early days. And it didn’t all go well. He introduced me to his ex, which I could have done without.”

  “Ew. Awk-ward,” she singsonged.

  “His female ex, which made it even worse.” I mercilessly stabbed a cherry tomato in the heart and popped it in my mouth, whole.

  “Stop being sexist. Why’s a female ex worse than a male one?”

  I swallowed. “She just is, okay?” My insides were all tangled up with half-formed doubts and anxieties. Not to mention pepperoni. “And she wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  Rose shrugged. “Never met her, but if she’s the one I remember seeing around the village, she seemed all right. If you like them skinny.” She looked at me. “Which obviously he does. Mixed-race girl, wears really tight jeans?”

  “Well, when I saw her, she was wearing a floor-length skirt and frilly blouse, but I suspect she’d dress differently when she wasn’t actually in costume. She seemed to get on with him really well. Asked about his family, joked about people he worked with.”

  “So? They were together for a while, weren’t they? Course she’d have met that lot. Just ’cos you haven’t yet doesn’t mean anything.”

  “That’s not what I mean… I mean, she seemed very much his sort of person.” I stared at my plate for a long moment, but there was no wisdom to be found in the arrangement of the pepperoni atop my pizza. Although the pineapple chunks Rose had insisted we add made a pretty pattern. “Not at all like me.”

  “Why should she be like you?”

  “I just thought… People have types, don’t they? Perhaps I’m not really his type.”

  “Maybe he looks for something different in a girl than he does in a bloke.” She cackled. “If he doesn’t, he’s going to be in for a bit of a shock when the lights go off.”

  “Well, obviously there will be that sort of difference. But I just thought… Aren’t people bisexual because they don’t care what gender people are? So wouldn’t they look for the same thing in either gender?”

  Rose frowned. “Don’t see why. Maybe he likes girly things in girls, and blokey things in blokes?”

  “But doesn’t that mean, then, that no one person will ever have all the attributes he’s looking for?”

  “It’s not a bloody checklist. Least it isn’t for the rest of us. You, maybe. I can just see you with a list of required attributes you have to tick off before you go out with someone: taller than you: check; bit of rough: check; enormous—”

  “I don’t have a checklist!” I cut her off hastily.

  “So there you go, then. Neither does he.” Rose piled more coleslaw on her half-eaten pizza slice. “So what was he like, then? This last bloke you went out with. ’Cos if the name’s anything to go by, he wasn’t a lot like Sean.” She snorted. “Crispin. I mean, seriously, who names their kid that? I bet he’s some long-haired, limp-wristed fairy who flounces around spouting poetry all over the place. And I’m not being homophobic, all right? I’m just stupid-name phobic.”

  “Crispin was the games master,” I said as drily as I could. “He’s never flounced in his life, and he’s always hated poetry.” And he had remarkably sturdy wrists, I remembered with somewhat less of a pang than I’d expected.

  “You two don’t sound like you were very well suited, then. At least Sean likes stuff you like.”

  I found myself smiling. “He’s something of a revelation, isn’t he? I mean, you look at him—boy from the council estate, comes from a broken home, works in a, well, not particularly revered profession. But he doesn’t let his background define him or hem him in. And he’s not ashamed of his interests.”

  “God, I can feel my teeth rotting away just listening to you. You’d better not wear that soppy smile in front of the kids. They’re vicious little bastards for spotting a weakness. So when’s the wedding, then? I need to start saving up for a hat. Unless the Old Hatter left a few tucked away in the attic here? Nah, they’d all be three hundred years out of fashion and made of crinolines and stuff.”

  “I’m fairly certain a crinoline was a type of petticoat, not a hat. And there’s not—” Mortifyingly reminded of that night at Badgers, I lowered my voice substantially. Not that I thought Sean was listening outside my window, or indeed within miles of being able to overhear my incautious outbursts, but once bitten, et cetera, et cetera. “There’s not going to be a wedding. We’ve had one date.”

  “Two, if you count that night in Badgers.”

  “Which I’d been trying to forget.”

  “Three, even, if you count the squrat.”

  I frowned. “Skwuh-rat?”

  “It’s short for squirrel-you-thought-was-a-rat. So yeah, you’ve had three dates already. Actually, when you put it like that, I can’t believe you haven’t been to bed with him yet.”
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br />   “It’s only a date if both parties know it’s a date,” I said firmly. “And squrats don’t count. So we’ve had one date, that’s all. And I’m hardly going to rush into things with someone I’ve only just met.”

  “I don’t know. I thought you gay blokes were all about casual sex.” She took a last mouthful of her pizza, which seemed to have disappeared much more quickly than my own.

  “Sorry to disappoint, but some of us prefer it to mean something.”

  “S’pose I should have expected that from you. I’m a bit surprised at Sean, though. Or did he try it on, and you slapped him down?”

  “There was no slapping. We just mutually agreed not to rush into things.”

  “Huh. First time I went out with Shitface, I had to beat him off with a stick.”

  “Which only goes to prove he was never good enough for you.”

  “Well, I didn’t beat him that hard.” She clicked her tongue. “Shame, really, with hindsight.” She looked sad, though, and I didn’t think it was the missed opportunity for violent assault that was bothering her. I cut a generous slice from my remaining pizza and slid it onto Rose’s plate.

  If I’d been expecting thanks, I was disappointed. She merely set to with gusto and a muttered “Lightweight”.

  “If he came back,” I said cautiously as she tucked in, “and said he was sorry and it’d all been a terrible mistake, would you take him back?”

  There was a heavy moment of silence. Possibly because Rose had her mouth full. Then again, perhaps not. “Doesn’t matter, does it? He’s not coming back.”

  “But—”

  “Would you take Crispy Beef back?”

  Ouch. “Point taken. And don’t call him that. He’d probably like it. More coleslaw?”

  “Nope, I’m stuffed.” She promptly gave herself the lie by forking up the last of my donated pizza. “So when are you seeing Sean again?”

  “Tomorrow.” I gazed at the last ragged remains of my pizza and put my knife and fork together with a sigh.

  Rose swallowed. “Ooh, that sounds keen. What are you doing?”

  “Not sure yet.” Actually, come to think of it, we hadn’t made any arrangements at all, so I didn’t even know if I’d be seeing him daytime or evening. “I might introduce him to Portia.”