Dream_A Skins Novel

by Garrett Leigh

  I spun around as Sal emerged from the feed store. She was fine. Joe’s anger vibrated through me, but he was fine too. They were all fine. It was done. It was over, and I needed to get the fuck away from it all before I lost my shit all over again.

  Joe touched my shoulder. I brushed him off and walked away from him, ignoring him when he called my name. If my car keys had been in my pocket, I’d have made my escape that way, but they were upstairs in my room, and before I knew it, so was I.

  I shut my bedroom door and leaned against it, my heart thumping in my chest. Fighting wasn’t my bag, but I was good at it⁠—I’d had to be⁠—and a sick part of me got off on it when I didn’t keep myself in check. When I let myself be like him.

  ’Cause let’s face it . . . it was in me, whether I liked it or not.

  I closed my eyes, parroting the bullshit I’d fed Emma to get her out of the house. “The only constant in life is change. And I’m ready for it.”

  But was I? Until now, the farm had seemed a sanctuary from the real world⁠—the last place I’d pictured myself squaring up to someone⁠—but it was clear now that I’d been naive. Joe’s family had drama just like everyone else. More than everyone else, if the scene in the yard was anything to go by.

  A shudder passed through me. Those men had stood no chance of getting anywhere near Sal, even before Joe had appeared, but they’d meant business when they’d first arrived. If I hadn’t been there, how far would they have gone? Would they still go? They’d threatened to burn the farm down if Joe didn’t get to them first. Did they mean it?

  Pondering that question reignited the anxiety dancing in my chest. I exhaled long and slow, trying not to fight the inevitable. A full-on meltdown was probably avoidable if I could get out for a run, but that would mean facing Joe and Sal, and I wasn’t ready for that.

  Not yet.

  I went to my desk and forced myself to work. The words didn’t flow, but I hammered them out anyway, until my cracked muse gave up on me. I was staring moodily at nonsense I’d typed when a knock at the door made me jump. “Come in,” I called, expecting Sal.

  Joe slipped through the door and shut it behind him. He leaned on it in much the same way I had, but didn’t close his eyes. Instead, he stared at me, curious⁠—expectant, even⁠—like he was the one waiting for an explanation.

  “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” he asked quietly.

  I turned back to my laptop. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

  “Not if you were paying attention. Pretty sure Dicky McGee told you all you need to know about my family drama.”

  “So, what else is there to say?”

  Joe pushed off the door and came close enough that I could smell clean sweat and hay. “Whatever you want to tell me? I mean, I’m grateful that you twatted them, but I’m curious about the death moves. You wanted to kill him. Why?”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was disturbed that Joe had read me so easily, but I stood by my actions, however he’d interpreted them. I forced myself to look at him. “You wouldn’t kill someone who put their hands on your mum?”

  Joe’s eyes darkened. “She didn’t tell me that.”

  “Yeah, well. You know how it went down. He wanted money, she wouldn’t give him any, so he got tricky with her. I moved him on . . . that’s all. Guess he’s lucky it was me, not you, eh?”

  “Not necessarily. I had a row with him a few weeks ago. Got nicked for it. But he still came here and got in my ma’s face, so I can’t be that intimidating.”

  I begged to differ. The fact that a man as big as Dicky McGee had felt the need to come back with two equally large men said a lot, even if they had taken the pathetic route of harassing Sal. “Do you think they’ll come back?”

  Joe came closer still. He crouched beside me, his elbows on my desk, his forearms tanned and strong. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “I’m always worried, but having an idiot drunk for a father will do that.”

  “Is he violent?”

  “Christ, no. I wish he was. Perhaps I’d understand him better.”

  I laughed. Couldn’t help it. “You’d understand your father better if he hit you?”

  “You said violent. You didn’t specify that it had to be towards me. Am I missing something here?”

  He was missing the world⁠—my world⁠—but why would he want to share it with me? Why would anyone? I tapped a key on my laptop to bring it back to life. “Trust me, you’re not missing anything. Is Sal okay?”

  For a protracted moment, Joe stared at me, his eyes deep pools of something I couldn’t escape. Didn’t want to escape. But he sighed before I caught up with him, and the moment passed. “Ma’s fine. She’s used to dealing with my dad’s mess. If you’re okay too, I’m going to head out and try to get to the bottom of this bullshit.”

  “You’re going after those blokes?” Tension rippled through me. The urge to kill had simmered down while I’d sat and brooded on where it had come from, but the thought of Joe fighting alone reignited the worst kind of fire.

  He touched my arm, lightly at first, but then his fingers closed around my wrist, his thumb pressing against my pulse point. Sometimes I wondered if people could hear my thundering heart, but I didn’t care if Joe heard it, if it outpaced his by a mile. How could I care about anything when the heat of his touch reached every part of me?

  “I’m not going after Dicky,” he said. “I want to, but I’ve fucked up too many times to believe it will change anything. Besides, I can’t get nicked again for at least a year.”

  “Got a record?”

  “Little bit.”

  “But Dicky McGee’s the one harassing you.”

  “Don’t mean nothing in this town. We’ve got too much gypsy blood in us for the police to ever take our side.”

  Gypsy blood explained Joe’s wild eyes and dark complexion, and as I glanced around my borrowed room, little clues that I’d missed made sudden sense. There was even a Romani trailer abandoned in one of the fields outside. How had I not made the connection before? “Your grandpa was a gypsy.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Joe nodded anyway. “Roma. Came over from Bulgaria in the thirties. He was travelling with a circus, but when it all kicked off in Europe again, they couldn’t go back. He trained horses in Norfolk for a while, then came here to work as a farrier.”

  “How did he end up with this place?”

  “He won it in a card game. We’ve bought more land legitimately over the years, but this house is someone else’s history.”

  “Sounds like you have plenty of history here.”

  Joe’s eyes darkened again. “Too much. Listen, Sal’s going to be downstairs for the rest of the day. Would you mind keeping an ear out while I go deal with my old man? I know it ain’t your problem, but⁠—⁠”

  “It’s fine.” Everything was fine while Joe’s hand was still millimetres away from holding mine. “Your mum is safe with me.”

  “I know.” And then he was gone, away and to the door before he looked back. “Hey, Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come have a beer with me later, if you’re not too busy. Maybe we could both use the company.”

  Believe (a SHORT excerpt)

  Believe

  Rhys had never felt anything that came close to how Jevon made him feel. To hear that a even a fragment of it was reciprocated blew the stress clean out of his soul. “You can talk to me, mate. And not just about sex. Do me good to listen to something outside of my own head.”

  “Introspective, eh?”

  Rhys shrugged. “According to my brother, the fountain of all knowledge. He reckons I have one skin for work, one for hooking up, and neither is who I really am.”

  “Everyone’s got skins, dude. You think I wake up in clown mode every day?”

  Rhys chuckled, but was saved from answering by the server coming back. “You order,” he said to Jevon. “I gotta take a leak.”
>
  He retreated to the gender neutral bathrooms and by the time he returned, Jevon was alone again, twirling a straw in a rum and Coke. “So…” he said as Rhys reclaimed his seat.

  “So, what?”

  “How did you end up becoming a paramedic? It’s a pretty intense career choice.”

  “It wasn’t really a choice,” Rhys said. “Not a conscious one, anyway.”

  “Curious.”

  “Scuzzy, actually.” Rhys gulped some of the rum-laced drink Jevon had ordered for him. “I was a terrible teenager, and it spilled out into adulthood until I wound up doing community service at Kings hospital. From there, I got a job as a healthcare assistant, then a place on a paramedic course. I quit briefly to work in butcher’s shop—ironic, huh?—but I knuckled down eventually, and here I am.”

  Jevon tilted his head to one side, spearing Rhys with a quizzical frown. “What’s scuzzy about that?”

  Rhys shrugged. “It’s not my calling, I guess. I didn’t get into it to help people…I was trying to help myself. Save myself, I suppose.”

  “From what?”

  “Everything. My dad died a little while ago, and before that, he was in prison for some shit that went down at home. It took me some time to get past that.”

  Jevon said nothing for a long moment. Just stared at Rhys like his bottomless eyes could burn a path to everything that had ever hurt Rhys. Like he wanted to take it away and set it on fire.

  But he couldn’t do that. No one could. Rhys had started plenty of his own fires, and somehow all the bullshit still lived in the ashes. “Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered. “I’m not one of your kids that needs saving.”

  More silence. But the server intervened with the food Jevon had ordered while Rhys had been gone. Two pizzas, and a salad that looked like it belonged in the Tate Modern. And for the first time in days Rhys was actually hungry. They dug in while Jevon explained between bites what he was doing with his life for the next few months.

  “I swore down I’d only do a few birthday parties, but I’ve got four next week alone.”

  Rhys chuckled. “You don’t like them?”

  “It’s not that. Any chance I get to act the fool is fine by me, but it just seems kind of—I don’t know—hollow, I guess. Which is why they make us do it.”

  “Who does?”

  “The team who look after the entertainers at the charity. There’s a psychologist here in London who comes to visit us on site, and checks in with us when we come home. He’s the reason we’re only allowed to do three month stints in the camps before they bring us home for a while. Before him we had people bedded in for most of the year without a break, and not even soldiers do that.”

  There was beauty in the comparison. Jevon and his coworkers fought wars of their own with laughter instead of bullets, joy in place of despair. But at what cost? Rhys had seen enough medics go under to know the risks were real. “Do you ever feel like not going back?”

  “Not really.” Jevon toyed thoughtfully with a pizza crust. “It’s hard sometimes—lonely too—but I can’t imagine leaving those kids with nothing, you know? Even if all we give them is a few days of madness. It is getting harder, though. Lots of governments are tearing the camps down.”

  “I thought that was a good thing? The camps I’ve seen on the news look awful.”

  “They aren’t great, but where else do these people go? At least in the camps the aid organisations know where to find them. And, it’s safe for them to look. We’ve done some street work, but I don’t fancy roaming the Albanian countryside on my unicycle. Getting shot ain’t my bag.”

  Rhys shuddered. He’d seen a few gun shot wounds since he’d joined the chopper team, and the thought of Jevon getting hurt turned the dinner in his belly to dust. “When are you going back?”

  “Second week in December.”

  “Gone for Christmas then?”

  “I’ve been gone every Christmas since the war in Syria kicked off. There’s a dedicated camp in Hungary for the Yazidi and Christian refugees who won’t come to the main sites. We go there when we can and try to make it really special for the children there.”

  “Why don’t they come to the big camps?”

  Jevon shrugged. “It’s complicated, and I try not to think about it too much. I want these kids to believe they can do anything, and I can’t do that if I’m bogged down in the politics.”

  Rhys traced lazy patterns on the back of Jevon’s hand. He wanted to ask more, but at the same time, the thought of Jevon leaving the country in just eight weeks time made him feel sick. This was why he didn’t do relationships. Because life always got in the way and fucked everything up. Among other reasons, obviously. Mostly the fact that he had no idea what to do with the ever-growing bone deep affection he felt every time Jevon crossed his mind. Every time they touched. Kissed. More.

  I can’t do this.

  But I need him.

  Rhys took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat. The pizza place had filled up while they’d eaten and it was kicking. Staff flitted around with trays of food, and the hot guy manning the pizza oven seemed to be in constant motion. Rhys watched him work, absently admiring the flex of his tanned forearms, and the concentrated expression that made him equal parts alluring and intimidating. The dude was hot, and Rhys was about to say so when another man approached the chef from behind.

  This dude was half the size. Slender and blond, he reminded Rhys a little of Dylan. He climbed up the other man’s back and wrapped his arms around his neck, kissing his cheek. The chef’s answering smile was blinding.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Jevon squeezed Rhys’s fingers, breaking into his reverie. “I hung around here a lot when my sexuality first started making itself known.”

  “Just to watch them?”

  Rhys could understand that. Dylan and Angelo’s relationship made him jealous as hell, and Harry and Joe were so utterly perfect together that Rhys often wanted to puke when he was near them, but the moody chef and his elegant partner were a joy to watch. Like the distance between them and Rhys made their love easier to bear.

  “Not just them,” Jevon said. “There’s a few queer blokes around here—more than a few, actually—and being around them made me feel normal.”

  “You don’t feel normal?”

  “I do now, but I didn’t for a while. There were moments when I was so terrified I couldn’t imagine how it would ever end well.”

  “What changed?”

  “Lots of things over time. Work, family, relationships. Things that I thought were gospel turned out to be the opposite. My dad being so awesome was a big factor, and Efe is my best friend in the world. But something has always felt missing. I figured it was just the sex, but then I met you, and…well…it’s more than that.”

  Of course it was. Rhys had pictured himself having sex with Jevon so many times it almost seemed like they’d done it already. But it wasn’t enough. Being with Jevon was so much more.

  A new chef took over at the pizza oven, and the dark haired man and his partner disappeared. Rhys watched them go, sensing Jevon’s gaze on him, but unable to face him, though he wasn’t entirely sure why.

  “I watched them fuck once.”

  That got Rhys’s attention. He turned to Jevon and wondered instantly how he’d held out so long. “I’d let him fuck me.”

  If Rhys’s candour offended Jevon, it didn’t show. “Which one?”

  “The darker dude.”

  Jevon shook his head. “It was the other way around.”

  “For real?”

  “Yup. I didn’t watch it all, so maybe they switched, but what I saw was so sensual and hot, I knew I’d like bottoming…if I ever found the balls to try.”

  If. A tiny word that held so much power. Rhys rarely topped, preferring the oblivion of having his own brains screwed out, but he wanted to fuck Jevon. Needed to. Even if it tied a bow around the heartbreak they were surely heading for.

  Rhys caught the eye of their se
rver and signalled for the bill. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Crossroads (a SHORT excerpt)

  Crossroads

  They reached the chalet. Angelo unlocked the door, but Dylan stopped him before he could go inside, and caught him in the kind of kiss they didn’t often have the patience to wait for. Tender and sweet, it was a slow burn, and reminded Dylan of the very first kisses they’d shared after their explosive first encounter at the club. Those kisses had been such a perfect contradiction that Dylan had known from the start he was falling in love with this beautiful man.

  My beautiful man.

  Angelo’s back hit the doorframe, and he gasped, his legs shaking, perhaps as much from Dylan’s touch as his wild night on the dance floor. But it didn’t matter how hard Angelo’s illness ever shook him, Dylan would always be right here, arms tight around him, holding him up.

  Finally breaking their kiss, he slipped an arm around Angelo and guided him inside. There weren’t many places in the chalet they hadn’t fucked, but right now, the bed was calling their names.

  Dylan eased Angelo down onto his back. “Did you clean up in here?”

  “Yeah…when I came back from work. I know you get all horny for fresh sheets.”

  “I get horny for you, but it’s so much more than that, baby.”

  “I know.”

  Angelo pushed Dylan’s coat off his shoulders, then set to work unbuttoning the shirt Emma had forced them all into at the last possible minute before the wedding. It joined Dylan’s coat on the floor. They kicked off their shoes, and Dylan stripped Angelo of the rest of his clothes before standing to remove his own jeans.

  Naked, he came back to the bed and crawled over Angelo, covering him with his body until there wasn’t an inch between them. He fused their lips together and hooked his arms around Angelo’s legs, lifting them gently until they were draped over his shoulders. “Okay?”

  Angelo sucked in a shaky breath and nodded. “I’m so hard for you. Fuck me, Dylan…please?”