The Third Date (Starting Over)

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “Was it you this time?”

  “Eh, sort of. I got mad, he was frustrated, it all got a bit out of hand.” Gabriel waved dismissively. “It happens.”

  “Never seen you shout either.”

  Gabriel laughed. “That’s just you being special.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mm. You should have heard me when Michael and I were breaking up.”

  “Who’s Michael?”

  Chris was treated to a lovely story about a creepy stalker former fuckbuddy, then persuaded to give Gabriel a change of scenery and help him downstairs to the sofa. He could manage the bathroom on his own now—though hot showers were still dicey—and going up stairs was working fine, but going down was still too much. He’d get to the third one and start clinging to the banister, white-faced.

  Thankfully, he weighed about as much as Chris’ racing bike, and carrying him down a flight of stairs was considerably easier than hefting an unwieldy metal frame on and off trains.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said as they rearranged cushions and tried to find the remote. “Getting the shit kicked out of him by Kevin didn’t work, but you cold-cocking him outside a pub did? You’re tiny.”

  “Thanks,” Gabriel drawled.

  “It’s true.”

  “I think the police had a bit more to do with it. Plus I’d moved in with Aled and lost my job, so I guess I disappeared a little bit. He probably forgot all about me.”

  “Didn’t think stalkers did that.”

  “Well, he hasn’t showed up again,” Gabriel said cheerfully. “Hey, so if Aled’s going to Cornwall this weekend, we should do something.”

  “We should also not tell him until he’s already sending baby pictures, because I’m not cut out to be a referee in your slanging matches.”

  “We don’t have that many,” Gabriel protested.

  “Sure.”

  Chris wasn’t dumb. Couples fought. He just didn’t want to see it—especially when he wasn’t sure whose side he should be on.

  “Back on track,” Gabriel said. “Let’s do something.”

  “Right,” Chris said. “Because I’m going to be persuaded to let you get on a bloody bike.”

  “Not that kind of something,” Gabriel said. “Just—I don’t know. Let’s go lounge around somewhere that’s not the house. Have a fancy spa day or something.”

  Chris grimaced.

  “What? Too manly for a spa day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody’s too manly for a spa day,” Gabriel retorted. “There’s a spa hotel near Halifax that Kevin’s taken me to once or twice after some brutal games. The masseuse is amazing.”

  “I can’t think of anything less relaxing than a stranger feeling me up,” Chris said flatly.

  He was already losing the argument, and he knew it. Gabriel wasn’t channel-surfing anymore, for one.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll take you, but I’m not joining in.”

  “Not even with the Jacuzzi pool?”

  Chris groaned.

  “I’ve heard the hot towel shave is good too,” Gabriel continued in that faux-casual tone he adopted whenever he was scheming. “Kevin swears by it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So I could have my massage while you get a shave, and we could meet in the pool area…”

  “Or I could come and collect you from the massage area so you don’t fall on tiles.”

  “We could bring the wheelchair.”

  Chris hesitated. The light wheelchair had been abandoned the moment Gabriel got home. He refused to use it, to the point where they did the shopping while he had his midday kip. He wouldn’t go out in it, no matter how much Chris bribed and Aled threatened. He’d only done it twice—once for a date with Aled, and once for a mandatory hospital appointment.

  Maybe this could be Chris’ turn.

  “You’ll use the chair.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You won’t argue?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll let me take a photo as proof for when Aled finds out and goes insane?”

  Gabriel narrowed his eyes. There was a long pause. But eventually he nodded, and Chris sat back against the cushions.

  “Fine,” he said. “Call your damn hotel.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The hotel had been the best idea that Gabriel had ever had.

  Aled could do a decent massage, but nothing beat the lady at the Grand Royal. There was nothing either grand or royal about the old hotel, but both could be liberally applied to Sofia and her magic hands.

  By the time Chris came back from his hot shave, ready to take Gabriel to the pool, Gabriel could have dissolved into a puddle. Or died. And he wouldn’t have cared which.

  Even the vertigo didn’t get a look-in over his bliss as Chris helped him down off the massage table and through the warm, steamy corridor to the baths. He sank into the hottest pool in the set, then spread out like a starfish, his head in Chris’ hands to anchor him in a haze of happy bliss.

  “The phrase ‘better than sex’ comes to mind,” Chris drawled.

  “To be fair, this is better than most sex.”

  “Bloody hell. Can I record that?”

  “I said most.”

  “I still want to record that.”

  Gabriel couldn’t even muster up the energy to flip him off.

  “Do you feel better?” Chris asked, towing him by the shoulders back to the edge but making no move to right him.

  “Mm. Yes.”

  “Do you maybe want to ring Aled when we’re done here and apologise for shouting?”

  Gabriel hummed. “He was being over the top.”

  “Yes. He should apologise too. But you shouldn’t have lost your temper.”

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  Gabriel did feel a little bad. He knew he had a short fuse at the moment, and Aled hadn’t really deserved being screamed at. But the man could be too stubborn for his own good and, at the time, Gabriel hadn’t seen a way of being reasonable that would work.

  Though since when had just yelling worked, either?

  “He’ll be driving.”

  “It’s called voicemail.”

  Gabriel hummed. “Yeah. You’re right. Once we’re done here.”

  They hadn’t booked in to stay the night, just use the facilities for the afternoon. But they were going to get dinner. Gabriel had never been treated to dinner here, but all the online reviews raved about it. He wanted to find out, and apparently the menu was healthy enough to pass muster with Chris.

  “I’ll call him between this and food.”

  They had an hour and a half in the baths, and Gabriel floated through every minute of it. The water was almost scalding, and he didn’t move a muscle. Chris came and went to the ice baths and the mid-range pool that dominated the set, but Gabriel remained in the hottest of the hot, feeling every pore open wide and bleed all his anger and tension and shame and negativity out into the water. He’d showered before getting in, obviously, yet he felt as though the water should be black as he pulled himself free at the end of their session. His skin tingled as he scrubbed down in the showers, and he hummed a jaunty tune as he gelled up his hair while waiting for Chris to finish washing.

  When he opened the electronic safe at the back of his locker, his phone was waiting on the bottom. Gabriel turned it over, then slipped out of the door into the corridor and leaned up against the wall. Aled would be driving. But—

  “Hello?”

  He rolled his eyes. “This had better be the hands free.”

  “Services,” Aled replied. He sounded calm. Friendly. It wasn’t their first blazing row, and Aled could put on an impressive sulk, but there wasn’t a trace of it in his tone and Gabriel relaxed. “Just passed Birmingham. Stopped for a drink. Even with the air conditioning on full, it’s nasty out here. Is everything all right?”

  Gabriel was impressed he’d left it that long before asking.

  “Yeah. Chris and I are at a sp
a. I feel amazing. Full-body massage and an hour and a half pruning in the hot water.”

  “You’ll look a right sight, then.”

  “I look beautiful,” Gabriel corrected. “So. I’m sorry about earlier.”

  Aled sighed. “Me too. I was being obstinate.”

  “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. But I should have been prepared to listen.”

  Gabriel curled his toes in his shoes. “Truce?”

  “Truce,” Aled agreed. “When I get back, we’ll go out and have another cheesy date. I’ll pay for dinner, you pay for the cinema tickets. Mutual apologies.”

  “Then we can kiss and make up in the gents’ toilets like a couple of teenagers?”

  Aled laughed. “If you want.”

  “Do you want to see a bad movie so I can blow you in the back and we won’t miss anything, or a good movie so we can enjoy it?”

  “Mm, let’s see what’s listed,” Aled said. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, anyway. You best get back to your spa date with Superman.”

  “I’ll tell him you called him that.”

  “Terrifying,” Aled drawled. Something swooshed, and the faint sound of traffic filtered down the line. “I best hit the road. Thanks for calling.”

  “Drive safe.”

  The last remaining bit of tension popped and vanished as he hung up, and Gabriel slipped back into the changing rooms just in time to catch Chris stepping out of the showers with a towel around his waist and water trickling deliciously down his pecs.

  “Why are you asexual?” Gabriel said mournfully, but behaved himself and sat down to watch instead of pouncing. “I called Aled.”

  “Made up?”

  “Yeah. We’re going on a cheesy date when he gets back.”

  “Didn’t think you really did dates anymore.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “With him,” Chris clarified.

  “We do sometimes.”

  “Aren’t they just preludes to your sex games?”

  “Well, most of them end up there, sure. But the date itself is still nice,” Gabriel said.

  “Very romantic.”

  “It can be. And he pays and I won’t put out and…”

  “Aaaaand you can stop right there.”

  Gabriel grinned around his thumbnail, then bit the end of it as Chris dried and dressed. He openly stared, but he was thinking, too.

  “Thanks,” he said eventually.

  “For what?”

  “For gluing us back together.”

  “Come off it. You had an argument. You weren’t getting a divorce.”

  “No, but…you stepped in like you fit. You do fit.”

  He’d joked about them dating and getting to know each other at the beginning, but truth be told, Gabriel hadn’t really anticipated Chris slotting in so seamlessly. Aled could be a touch territorial, and Chris more than a touch shy. He hadn’t really expected the three of them to work for so long in such close proximity.

  “Do you like him?”

  “Aled?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chris shrugged. “Sure. Nice guy.”

  “No, I mean…is it more than that?”

  Chris shook his head.

  “Huh.”

  “Why?”

  “You—work. I mean, we work. All of us,” Gabriel said.

  He chewed on his thumbnail as Chris slapped some cologne on, then lifted his arms for a hug before being levered to his feet.

  “Drink and dinner?”

  “Please,” Gabriel said.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “I’m wondering if this is one big relationship or me in two separate ones,” Gabriel admitted.

  Although he’d been polyamorous since he’d discovered what fancying other people felt like, he’d never considered any of his relationships joined-up in that sense. He had relationships with Greg and Kevin and Aled and Chris—but none of them had relationships with each other, too. He’d never been in a triad, just a few very sexy threesomes. If he were to draw them in a diagram, he’d be a blob radiating straight lines in every direction, but none of those lines ever joining to one another.

  Except for now.

  With Chris in the same house, interfering in their row, getting Gabriel to make amends…

  He was involved in a way nobody else had been. Sure, Kevin and Aled swapped him over now and then, and he knew from a few pouncings where one or the other had mysterious knowledge of his whereabouts that they talked behind his back, but they never went for drinks together. Aled didn’t come round for dinner with Kevin and Judith and the kids. They knew each other, but there wasn’t really any kind of relationship between them.

  There was one between Aled and Chris.

  They’d gone out for a drink and dinner of their own while Gabriel was recovering. They ganged up on him occasionally. They talked without him sat in the middle. Chris hadn’t bothered trying to move back into the spare room.

  Chris might not fancy Aled, and Aled probably didn’t fancy Chris either, but there was some kind of friendship there. A relationship. More than any of Gabriel’s other boyfriends had ever had between them.

  Had his accident created a triad?

  “Do you and Aled still go on dates?”

  Chris snorted. “You what?”

  “You know, your curry date when I had dinner at Kevin’s, and—”

  “Sure. If you want to call ’em dates, then yeah. We’ve had a couple of dates.”

  “Maybe you should talk about your future on the third date.”

  “Don’t push your luck,” Chris warned.

  They’d reached the restaurant. Gabriel flirted their way to a table in the conservatory overlooking the gardens. Chris called him shameless once the waiter had retreated to get their drinks.

  But the thought lingered.

  He hadn’t meant to do it, and he was sure that they were hardly aware of it themselves, but their V shape was closing into a triangle.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cornwall was pretty in the long summer twilight.

  Tom had taken up a position on the board of his father’s hotel firm last year, but Suze hadn’t wanted to actually live in one of the hotels and had insisted on getting their own place. In the end, they’d bought a little house on the outskirts of St Ives, with an optimistic—given that Tom had about twenty siblings—two extra bedrooms for housing their future offspring.

  It was buried in a nest of small, twisting residential streets, and Aled still relied on the satnav to get him to the right cul-de-sac, but the moment his car turned into the mouth of the street, a front door opened. Blonde hair flashed. He had barely stopped the car before Suze opened his door, leaned in and hugged him in a death-defying chokehold.

  “Oh my God, hello!”

  “Hey,” he coughed.

  Suze and Aled were the same age, though she looked infinitely better for it than he did. They’d grown up round the corner from one another as children and had been lifelong friends. In effect, Suze was his sister. And with her ash-blonde hair, fair complexion and post-baby belly, she could even pass for the real thing.

  But more than looks or history, her hold was like coming home. Her familiar perfume. The way her hair tickled his nose. The exact timbre of her voice. Aled closed his eyes and basked for a long minute, just holding on to the one person left in his life who he considered family. His parents were gone, his nan had passed, but his sister was still here.

  “Come on! Come and meet your nephew!”

  And his family was growing again. Aled allowed her to drag him out of the car and had to fight to be permitted to bring his bag instead of being bullied straight into the house. He didn’t really care all that much about seeing the baby—Aled was about as child-friendly as the measles—but the warm familiarity of their house, the same pictures on the wall they’d had in Yorkshire, the booming hello from his brother-in-law—

  Everything else just fell away.r />
  The accident, the row, Gabriel’s health, how Chris was fitting into their lives, whether his boss was going to let him out of the upcoming conference in the US…

  None of it mattered in the middle of Suze’s hall.

  “Drop that!” she said, smacking his hand on his suitcase. “Tom’ll sort it later. Come and meet Euan!”

  Euan.

  After Aled’s dad, who’d been a father to Suze as much as he had to Aled. An affable, laid-back man who’d adopted his best friend’s orphaned son and made sure he never felt the lack of blood relation between them. The calm presence in Aled’s upbringing, who’d puffed away on his cigarettes in the background while Aled had been figuring out who he was and what he wanted to do with himself. The man with the stiff upper lip over minor crises, but who’d shaken and openly cried at his wife’s funeral, at the loss of Aled’s grandfather, at Aled’s graduation, at Aled’s wedding. The gentle but firm hand that had steered him, and the constant security that had said Aled could make mistakes, could fail, could be a billionaire or a binman, and it wouldn’t make any difference. His father would still be proud of him, and his mother would still adore him.

  The name still brought a lump to Aled’s throat.

  Only briefly, though. Euan was a lump. Four days old, he looked like an oversized blood clot in a fluffy jumper. He was in a Moses basket on the kitchen table, and the only resemblance Aled could see to anyone on earth was the tiny wisps of brown hair. He’d always wondered if saying new babies looked like their parents wasn’t a bit of a backhanded compliment, and Euan’s squashed, ugly face confirmed it. Hopefully he’d grow into the nose.

  “Cute,” he said lamely.

  “Hold him!”

  “Oh, God. Really? Do I have to?”

  Suze punched him in the arm until he sat down, then the blood clot was deposited in his clumsy arms. Immediately, a gob like the Channel Tunnel opened and a shriek that could kill a man at a hundred paces emerged. Then Tom settled the clot’s head against Aled’s elbow, and it mercifully shut up again.

  “Aww, he likes you!”

  “Great,” Aled said, and promptly ignored the clot in favour of Suze. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “The midwife was amazing. I’m still struggling to breastfeed a little bit, but he likes formula so it’s not too bad.”