But I didn’t. I spun on my heel and left.
Chapter Twenty
Mia
Walking home through Sandgrove Park, with the evening sun dappling the ground through the trees, was about as nostalgic as we could get without putting our school uniforms on and stealing my mother’s cigarettes.
Gus slow-rode his mountain bike beside me, face pensive as he considered my inevitable questions about him and Billy.
“It was a few years ago,” he said. “And trust me, it wasn’t romantic, but I didn’t get any sense he was particularly worried about anyone finding out.”
I kicked a pinecone along the dirt track we were following through the heathland. “Perhaps he wasn’t. Luke was gone, and I can’t imagine Fran giving him any trouble over something like that.”
Gus shot me a sideways look. “You’ve never liked her.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but what was the point? Gus knew how I felt about most things, even if I didn’t tell him. “It’s not that I never liked her. I just didn’t think she was there for Luke and Billy enough.”
“Her husband was dying.”
“I know. I’m not saying I’m right, but I think about our mum, and how she worked herself into an early grave so we could have choices. Why didn’t Fran do that? There was nothing to stop her, I don’t know, getting a job after Stan died, but she didn’t, and Luke left, which meant those boys didn’t even have each other.”
My rant had started softly but had risen in pitch by the time I was finished, and my hands were gesticulating wildly enough to amuse Gus, despite the solemnity in his dark gaze.
“Are you done?” he said.
“Piss off.”
He chuckled but sobered quickly. “It’s okay to still be angry at him for leaving. To not care about the rest of it. He knows he hurt you.”
“Are you still angry with me?”
“For what? For leaving? For doing exactly the same to me as Luke did to Billy, except without the nobility of financial provision?”
“Yes. All of that. Don’t ever think I don’t know how selfish I was back then.”
Gus gifted me another soft smile. The kind that made it impossible to tell how he truly felt. “I was never angry with you. Confused, maybe. But I was young and dumb too. It makes sense to me now. You couldn’t stay here without the two people you loved most. I get it.”
“You don’t. I love you just as much as I ever did Mum and Luke.”
“Yeah, but you knew I’d be okay.”
“I didn’t. I made myself not consider that you might not be and left anyway, just like Luke.”
“Luke considers everyone. That’s always been his problem. And like I said, he knows he hurt you.”
I was dying to know how Gus was saying that with such confidence, Luke wasn’t much of a talker, even to his mates, but I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does.”
“Nope.” I kicked another pinecone. “It’s in the past.”
Gus rolled his eyes. “Seriously? You think it’s that easy? That you two can jump into bed together like it’s all brand new?”
Of course I didn’t. The letter Luke had left on the doorstep haunted my sleep, and the ghosts I saw in him when I was awake tormented me by day, but I’d carried my anger for so long I’d lost the desire to return the savage hurt he’d left me with. It felt stale, and out of date, and I wanted so badly to let it go.
I sighed. “I don’t think anything is easy. Do you think Luke’s pissed off with you about Billy?”
Gus shrugged. “I don’t think so. I think you had it right at the time—I blindsided him, and he needed to think. I’ve seen that in him before.”
So had I. My earnest boy had grown into a brooding man, and my heart ached for him. “Do you think about him?”
“Who? Billy?”
I nodded. “Yeah. You don’t talk about your love life, so I never know how attached you get to the guys you hook up with.”
“I don’t get attached to anyone,” Gus said. “You know this, and I didn’t get attached to Billy. It was a physical thing, and after that night, we went back to nodding at each other in the street. Well, I did. He never really spoke to me again, but then, he never spoke to me that much before. The only thing we had in common was siblings with their own drama.”
My scowl seemed to bounce off Gus, but I took comfort in his easy laughter. Sometimes I worried that he hid behind his easy nature, but then I remembered that he wanted it this way. No attachment, no commitment, and no risk of ending up bitter and hurt. Of wasting years of his life chasing a dream he’d never even wanted.
We reached the fork in the path. One way continued the bike track up the hill, the other would take me the lakeside route home. I waited for Gus’s lecture about going straight back to the house and sticking to the populated public paths, and cued up my spiky response, but it died in my throat as the lake came into view. A lone figure was sitting by the water in my favourite spot. In our favourite spot.
Luke.
Gus saw him too and rolled to a stop. “That’s where he got to. He left me to clean up tonight. He never does that.”
“Maybe he’s more upset about you snogging his brother than you thought.”
“Trust me, he’s not. I think he’s just tired, but in any case, you should probably go talk to him. You’ve been home every night since the gala, so I’m assuming you’ve gone back to ignoring each other, which is totally out of order when I haven’t seen both of you as relaxed as you were the morning after since, well, forever, actually.”
I stared at him. “Relaxed? You walked in on us—”
Gus slapped his hand over my mouth. “Don’t make my ears bleed. Just go be with Luke so I can ride my bike knowing you’re safe, okay?”
Still glaring, I squirmed out of Gus’s grip. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I know. That’s not what I meant.” Gus pushed me. “Just go. I think it’s good that you have each other again, even if you are going about it in a totally fucked-up way.”
“It’s not fucked up.”
Gus snorted. “Okay. I’m sure you’ve had tons of deep and meaningful conversations and expelled all your demons. Whatever. Just go keep the man company. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. Oh, and by the way, it was him who fixed your window, in case you were wondering.”
He wheeled off before I could argue, leaving me to the lake and the silhouette of my pensive heart. And to the realisation that it had never occurred to me that Luke had replaced my rotten shop window. That he’d done so weeks before I’d got over myself enough to give him the time of day.
The man was going to be the death of me. I took the left fork in the path and traipsed to the waterside. If Luke heard me coming, he ignored me, and he didn’t look my way when I dropped down beside him.
I nudged him. “All right?”
He hummed and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I was, but if you’re here to get lairy with me about something, I’m not in the mood.”
“Well, I was thinking of scratching your eyes out for breaking into my shop and replacing my window, but I’m over that now.”
That earned me eye contact, even if it was a dead stare.
I stretched my own legs out, mirroring his pose and absorbing the conflicting rush of emotions that always swept over me whenever we were close these days. The years-old resentment had faded, but he still brought me to life in ways that battled with the belying mellowness—the peace—his presence brought me, even when I knew he was upset. “Why did you fix my window?”
“I thought you were over it.” There was humour in his dry tone, faint but undeniable.
I chanced a soft laugh. “I am, I just don’t get why you did it—at least, I don’t get why you did it then. We weren’t speaking.”
“You
weren’t speaking.” Luke lay down on the dusty ground and closed his eyes. “I just wanted you safe.”
Why? But I didn’t say it, because I knew the answer, though it wasn’t tangible enough for me to wholly believe it. He loves me. I wondered if he knew it yet either. I leaned over him and studied his face, as though the faint lines of stress and worry could open the door to his heart, but nothing solidified, and when he opened his eyes and caught me looking, I uttered the same words I had to him three nights ago in the town hall bathroom.
“Come home with me?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Mia
I traced idle patterns on Luke’s bare chest. Somehow over the last week, we’d fallen into a routine of hooking up after work, then falling asleep until one of us woke up to sleep-stalk the other. Usually me, as sex seemed to put him into a coma.
Not that I was complaining. Luke was so often troubled when he was awake that I enjoyed this quiet time with him. Took comfort in his peaceful expression and boyish good looks. Though he’d aged like a dream, he seemed younger with his eyes closed.
I sat up slightly to get a better view of him, all the while wondering how I’d gone from barely being able to face him, to falling in love with him all over again in the space of a few short months. Because I was in love with him. So in love. I just didn’t know why, or how, when I’d spent so long hating him.
The opposite of love is indifference, child. Hating that boy is as tragic as loving him.
At the time, I’d had no idea what my mother had meant, but it kind of made sense now, even if nothing else did.
What the hell are we doing?
I had no idea. All I knew was that we’d fallen into a vortex of substituting sex for communication, affection as comfort, and the weight of our unspoken conversations was suffocating.
Like he’d heard the chaos in my mind, Luke stirred and opened his eyes. In the darkness, he stared blankly at me a moment, then his expression morphed from relieved to wary and back again in the space of a split second.
I was growing used to that, the way he woke suddenly and didn’t seem to quite believe where he was, or who he was with. Moving our late-night encounters back to his house seemed to help, but he was still...unsettled. We both were.
Luke blinked again and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Just after midnight.”
He groaned. “Again? Girl, you gotta stop letting me pass out at eight o’clock every night. It’s fucking with my head.”
I poked him in the side. “And you have to stop calling me girl. I’m a woman, you fool.”
“I know. I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just habit.”
Habit. Right. After ten years of silence—
Stop it. Christ, that was getting boring. I’d gone to sleep with a resolution to stop fixating on the past, and here we were. He’d been awake half a second and I was already there. Maybe I was the fool.
Luke flopped onto his back. “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Do you think we should start eating dinner before we go to bed?”
He cracked an eye open and gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Then he sighed and sat up again. “Come on. I’m sure I can find something.”
I doubted it, as snooping around his kitchen the last time I’d been here had revealed an empty fridge and cupboards that held far more cleaning products than any normal bachelor was permitted to have. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and swiped his abandoned T-shirt from the floor. “Lead the way, sailor.”
That earned me another look, but I let it slide and followed him downstairs, trying not to drool at how edible he was in nothing but sweatpants.
I failed, obviously, because it didn’t matter how my heart felt about him, no red-blooded human could be unaffected by him. From his strong shoulders to his perfect feet, he was flawless.
And a magician, apparently.
I scrutinised the handful of ingredients he’d dumped on the counter. “How are you going to make dinner out of one packet of microwave rice and a couple of eggs?”
“I’ve got hot sauce too. And onions.”
Like that made it better. I hopped up on the counter to watch him work, enjoying the cool marble against my bare thighs. It reminded me of our town hall encounter, and even though we’d fucked twice tonight already, heat pooled between my legs.
Luke chucked a wok on the stove and smirked at me.
I raised an eyebrow, but he left the bait hanging and cooked up a storm instead, while I watched, and drooled over both him and the food.
Ten minutes later, he presented me with a bowl of perfect egg fried rice, complete with chilli sauce on the side and some bashed up prawn crackers. “You did not just cook that,” I said.
He shrugged. “I was pretty skint when I bought this place. Lived on rice and canned tuna for months, which was still better than the slop we’d been eating on the ship.”
“The ship? Were you on the same one for a long time?”
“Yeah.” Luke nudged the bowl closer to me, his expression guarded, but I was done being afraid of the huge gaps in each other’s lives. He’d been a sailor for nine years and I wanted to learn every moment he was prepared to share with me.
I snagged a prawn cracker and scooped up a mouthful of spicy rice. It tasted as good as it looked, and I crammed in another mouthful before I gave voice to one of the million questions burning my brain. “What kind of ship were you on? Was it big?”
Luke wiped something from the corner of my mouth with his thumb. “That’s what you wanna know?”
I shrugged. “Right now? Yeah. I don’t know anything about navy ships, or any ships, actually, that aren’t a P&O ferry.”
“It felt like a ferry at first—you know, the lower deck parts that smell of metal and car fumes—but trust me, it’s nothing like going on holiday.”
“You never went on holiday.”
He laughed. “True, but living on a destroyer was nothing like how I imagined a holiday to be.”
He’d answered my question, but I was none the wiser. A destroyer? Damn. It sounded like death.
I ate more rice and pondered my next question. “So what was it like? Were there lots of people on board?”
“A few hundred,” he said, finally helping himself to some of our shared feast. “But I spent most of my time with my gang on deck, or in my cabin. The only other place I really went was the mess hall, but I tried to spend as little time there as possible, because the smell of the crap they fed us was fucking rank.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You always had a thing about smells.”
“Good ones, usually, like your hair, but there wasn’t much of that while I was crammed in with a bunch of sweaty blokes.”
“You didn’t hook up with any hot comrades then?”
“Nah, boys don’t do it for me.”
“There weren’t any girls around at all?”
“What are you actually asking me?”
I had no clue, but now we were on the subject, the dog in me wouldn’t quit. I devoured a last mouthful of rice and shoved the bowl at him to finish. “I guess I’m asking you if you ever had a girlfriend, not that it’s any of my business.”
“It’s not my business that you married some French twat, but I’m still glad you told me.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Not really. I want to kill him.”
“Why?”
Luke shrugged. “He hurt you.”
So did you. I cleared my throat. “Noted. So tell me about the girls.”
He shook his head and ate the last of his magic rice. “What do you want to know? Who? Where? How many?”
All of it.
A ghost of a smirk crossed Luke’s face, as though he was privy to my every thought. “There weren’t many, and no one at all for the first few years. I was too
busy and fucked up about my dad. Work helped, you know? I didn’t really look up until two years in.”
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “I did what Gus is doing now. Hooked up with randos and moved on before anything got heavy. It was weird, though. I never felt anything emotionally for anyone I slept with, and I expected that, wanted it, even, but I didn’t realise until...”
I nudged him. “Go on. Until what?”
Luke sighed. “I didn’t realise until we got close again a few weeks ago that I wasn’t feeling anything physically either. It’s like I’m numb to all women except you.”
He straightened up and took the empty rice bowl to the sink. My heart followed him, but I stayed where I was, running my gaze over his broad shoulders and long, muscular arms, cataloguing his tough exterior like it hadn’t been a couple of hours since I’d last had my hands on him. The distraction worked, and heat rose in me again until he turned around with a blank expression on his face.
No way. Did he really have no clue that this worked both ways?
I crossed the kitchen and inserted myself into his personal space, winding my arms around his waist in a flood of affection that had nothing to do with sex. “It’s been the same for me,” I whispered.
Luke stared down at me. “But you were married.”
“To someone I didn’t love.” I knocked my head against his chest. “And before that I had similar experiences to yours. No one ever made me come like you.”
A chuckle rumbled out of him, disbelieving, and laced with a hysteria I recognised. And I hated that—hated that he was so afraid of how he was feeling. Afraid to feel at all. Had loving me done this to him? Or had life truly busted him up so badly he didn’t know which way was up? “What was it like?”
He blinked. “What was what like?”
“Being a part of wars and conflict. You’re so brave, but I just can’t bear to picture it.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “It wasn’t like that for me anyway. I was a sailor, not a soldier, and the only direct role I ever played in conflict was humanitarian, distributing aid, stuff like that. I saw some awful shit, but I had the privilege of knowing I hadn’t personally contributed to it. And I guess I needed it that way. Back then, with a gun in my hand, I’d have been dangerous. Besides, war never healed anyone.”
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