Steph stared at Nero like he’d crapped in her handbag and sung her a lullaby. “What’s the matter with me? You’re the one being weird.”
“Whatever.” Nero spun back to the computer screen.
Steph said nothing for a while until she appeared at Nero’s side with a coffee and perched on the desk. “Where’s Lenny?”
Nero accepted the coffee and took a sip. “Lenny?”
“Yeah. You two are joined at the hip. It’s kinda freaky to see you without him.”
“Piss off. He’s only been here a few weeks.”
“Uh-huh, and you’re thick as thieves.”
“So?” Nero carefully scanned his food order one more time before he sent it off. “What do you care who I hang out with?”
Steph snorted. “I’m just making conversation. You know, that thing you’ve not bothered to do for the last six months?”
“Has it been that long?”
“Do you have to be such a wanker?” Steph slid off the desk. “Lenny keeps telling me how nice you are to him. If only he knew.”
“I’m not a wanker to you. I just can’t be arsed with you getting on my case all the time.”
“Getting on your case about what? Do you think I’m in love with you or something? Jesus, Nero. It was one shag. I don’t want to bloody marry you.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Rant apparently over, Steph flushed. “Never mind. Can’t we forget that night happened and go back to being friends?”
Nero couldn’t remember him and Steph ever truly being friends, even before they’d drunk a bottle of tequila and shared a clumsy shag, but for once turning away from someone—away from Steph—didn’t feel like the right thing to do. He held out his fist. “Deal. Now . . . tell me what else Lenny said about me.”
A few hours later, Nero grabbed a carton of posh hipster fruit juice from the bar and headed upstairs. Lenny was still on the bed, but he’d migrated from the edge to sprawling out in the centre, Nero’s precious notes spread out around him, along with a healthy pile of balled-up paper.
“That had better not be my shit you’ve screwed up.”
Lenny spared him an absent glance, apparently engrossed in whatever he was doing with a sketch pad and pencil. “It’s not. I wouldn’t screw up anything of yours. You have gorgeous handwriting.”
“My chicken scratch?” Nero leaned on the doorframe. “Can’t say anyone’s ever said that to me before.”
“Well, they should’ve done. Come here.”
Nero pushed himself upright and ventured farther into the room. Lenny tapped his finger on a page of Nero’s notes. “Your letters are small, but you space out your words. That means you’re meticulous and focused, but you like your own space . . . being crowded freaks you out.”
“I ain’t scared of crowds, mate.”
“That’s not what I said. Crowded and crowds aren’t the same thing. I’ve seen you in the kitchen. You’re cool as fuck until someone steps into your zone.”
“My zone? Where do you come up with this crap?”
“I’m not done yet.” Lenny drew a light circle around a sentence Nero had written about gas-pipe placement. “See these big capital letters? That means you’re generous, but the grooves you’ve carved into the page means you’re a little uptight, that your emotions are pent up inside you. What’s your signature like? I bet it’s illegible.”
Nero scowled. “You’re the fucking doctor.”
“No, I’m not, and if you look at my handwriting, you’ll see why.” Lenny held up his own page of notes, all printed in perfectly formed—and legible—cursive script.
“You write pretty.”
Lenny laughed. “I dance pretty too.”
Nero tried to smile, but humour was hard to find when Lenny hadn’t left Pippa’s since he’d arrived, let alone danced his beautiful heart out. “I’m going to make some dinner. You hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Tough. You’re eating.”
Nero left Lenny to his witchcraft and went to the kitchen. His hand itched for his cleaver, craving the satisfaction of bashing the crap out of a big joint of meat, but he picked a small paring knife instead and set about chopping the mountain of vitamins he was planning on force-feeding to Lenny. Making another omelette felt like a cop-out, so he whizzed up some soup and made cheese toasties to have on the side.
Nero took supper into the living room, then went to the bedroom and scooped up Lenny, pencil and all, from the bed before he could protest.
“What the—” Lenny smacked Nero halfheartedly on the back. “Nero! Put me down.”
“Okay.” Nero deposited Lenny on the couch and handed him a bowl of soup. “Eat.”
Lenny took it with a resigned sigh. “Do I at least get a spoon?”
“I reckon I can stretch to that.”
Nero fetched spoons from the kitchen. Lenny took his and patted the sofa beside him. “I want company too.”
As if Nero had any intention of being elsewhere for the rest of the night. He claimed the spot next to Lenny and his own bowl of soup. “How’s the design work going?”
“No idea. You dragged me away from it, remember?” Lenny glared briefly before he took a spoonful of his dinner and his expression brightened. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Make a bowl of swamp shit taste so amazing?”
“It ain’t hard to boil vegetables, mate.”
“Speak for yourself.” Lenny had another bite. “Anyway, I’ve got some ideas for the dining area. How do the bigwigs feel about street art?”
Nero shrugged. “Do hipsters like it?”
“Hipster, millennials . . . anyone trying to be cooler than they really are.”
“That’ll do. What you got in mind?”
“Colour, mainly, lots of it, but I haven’t come up with anything distinct yet. Urban Soul implies by its very name that the business has an emotional, and tangible, connection to something besides the food. I need to find that connection and paint it.”
Nero didn’t know quite what to say to that. Besides, his recent run of late nights and too much beer had caught up with him, and if Lenny didn’t mind sharing the living room for a while, Nero didn’t plan on moving—or thinking—for the rest of the evening.
Shame Lenny had other ideas; he’d disappeared while Nero had been lost in thought. He was back quick enough, though, clutching a pile of sketches. “Your silence is scaring me. I think you need to see it. I haven’t come up with the main element yet, but I’ve got some basic ideas for the dining room.”
Nero sighed. “Pass ’em over.”
Lenny bit his lip and relinquished the sketches. Nero flipped through them, growing steadily more impressed with each one. “I like this. I kinda figured you’d go for the obvious urban-warehouse theme and try to make it Mediterranean with some shit tablecloths.”
“Seriously?” Lenny pouted. “You think I’m that shortsighted?”
“Er, no?”
Lenny punched Nero’s arm—hard—and attempted to prise the sketches from Nero. “That faux-warehouse shit with all the exposed pipework has been done to death, and if you must know, I thought trying to paint Vauxhall, of all places, as Little bloody Italy would be totally fucking ridiculous, especially as you’ve yet to mention anyone involved who’s actually Italian.”
It was the most Nero had ever heard Lenny say in one breath. “They have pizza in Spain too, you know, and Turkey. It ain’t just an Italian thing.”
“Whatever. They still shouldn’t try and make it something it clearly isn’t.”
With convictions like that, it was hard to believe Lenny hadn’t been working for Urban Soul from the beginning. Nero probably should’ve said as much, but didn’t, because a breath of wind from the open window fluttered through Lenny’s bundle of sketches and revealed the last few. “Jesus. Is that the bus?”
“Yup. You don’t strike me as someone who takes pictures of stuff for fun, so I as
sumed you wanted me to draw it.”
Lenny was more right than he knew, and the fact that he had coloured the dilapidated minibus in bright, Ninja Turtle green made Nero’s day.
“You’re doing that thing again.”
Nero studied Lenny’s last sketch. “What thing?”
“The thing where you grin like a maniac, and I can’t work out if you’re about to strangle me.”
Lenny’s tone was uncertain enough to tear Nero’s stare from the minibus, but the emotion he found in Lenny’s eyes wasn’t one he’d seen before, and it masked the impact of Lenny’s unwitting hammer blow. “You think I’d hurt you?”
“Anyone can hurt you, Nero.”
Ain’t that the truth. But Nero’s own bitter cynicism was likely the last thing Lenny needed to hear. He turned back to the bus sketches. “You know, Tom hates green. He never allows it in a restaurant, but if we can put a pizza oven in this bus and make it pay, he might just let us get away with it.”
“A pizza oven?” Lenny leaned forward, his unnerving frown all but gone. “I just played around with the outside, thought they could maybe sell it. I didn’t think of turning it into one of those food trucks. Do you really think they can?”
“Maybe.” Nero tapped the sketch. “I can probably fix up the engine if the bosses spot a bit of dosh, but they’ll do the rest—the design, the name, the concept. I’m crap at that stuff.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
Lenny scowled. “You’re so down on yourself.”
“Nah, I know my limits.”
Lenny looked as though he wanted to say more, but Nero yawned hard enough to crack his jaw, and Lenny took it as his cue to snatch his sketches back. “Enough work. You’re knackered.”
Nero couldn’t deny it, but before they shut business talk down completely, a reckless thought overcame him, spilling out before he could check it. “Do you want to see the site? And the bus? We could get a cab, and Cass could come too. We wouldn’t let anything happen to you, I promise. We could even go at night—”
“Nero, I can’t.”
Of course he couldn’t. How could he, when he’d been terrified of the outside world for as long as Nero had known him? And you thought a trip to a shitty building site would change that? Guilt and stupidity boiled in Nero’s blood, obliterating the inevitable warmth he carried when Lenny was around. I’m sorry. But he didn’t say it aloud. Couldn’t. The shame in Lenny’s eyes was too much.
Nero gathered the dirty bowls and plates and retreated to the kitchen. The urge to roll a joint and smoke himself into oblivion was strong, but he settled for a fag instead and stood on the fire escape, watching the last strains of red sunlight as they melted away. Steph had told him earlier that he’d been different since Lenny had arrived—calmer, mellower. Was that true? As Nero’s skin itched and his heart pounded, he doubted it. And what the fuck did Steph know? It wasn’t like she could see the precipice of madness Nero walked along each day.
Nausea churned in Nero’s belly. He took a deep drag on his smoke and leaned on the railing, bowing his head as night swallowed the city. Despite the bright streetlights, the darkness was all-consuming, and Nero wondered if it would ever end, or if he’d one day have to help it along.
“Nero?”
He didn’t look up. Couldn’t take the sight of Lenny hovering in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“Have you got Netflix?”
“No, I haven’t got fucking Netflix. Have you?”
“What do you think?”
Nero sighed and briefly closed his eyes, and then he raised his head and saw that Lenny hadn’t even made it as far as the open door. “Come outside.”
“Nero—”
“Come outside.”
“No.”
“Fuck this.” Nero pushed off the railing and strode inside. He grasped Lenny’s arms and yanked him to the door. “Look around. No one can see us unless they’re in a helicopter or some shit. There ain’t nothing to be scared of up here.”
Lenny squirmed, fighting Nero’s hold on him, his strength belying his slender frame. “Let me go.”
“No.”
“Nero.”
The panic in Lenny’s eyes tore Nero in two, but he held firm. “I’m not going to force you outside, but I want you to try, just once, and soon, before these four walls send you too far round the bend to come back.”
Nero released Lenny and returned to the railing. The rational minority in his brain was mortified, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn and see the fears he’d made his own so long ago staring back at him. He lit another smoke and took a drag harsh enough to make another man choke, but not Nero. A sky of thick, suffocating smoke had set him free, even if he’d had to wait five years to truly know what that meant. Old ghosts could haunt him all they liked, they were still fucking dead, right?
Warm fingers closed around Nero’s wrist. Despite his certainty that it couldn’t be Lenny, his heart drove him to lean into the touch, and then, as Lenny trembled, to open his arms and hold Lenny tight against him like he should’ve done weeks ago.
Shivering, Lenny pressed his face against Nero’s chest. He mumbled something. Nero held him closer, absorbing the sweet smell of Lenny’s hair. “What’s that?”
Lenny shook his head, so Nero let him be and gazed out over London. For a while, he was lost in the heady combination of Shepherd’s Bush bustling below and the heat of Lenny’s terrified embrace. It was some time before he realised Lenny’s grip on him had slackened and they were watching the city together. “It’s safe up here, I promise.”
“Yeah, I see that now.” Lenny turned so his cheek rested over Nero’s beating heart. “It’s just . . . it’s hard, you know? I believed you when you said it, I just couldn’t bring myself to risk it. I’ve been wrong so many times.”
“I’ve been wrong a lot too. Sometimes it’s easier to accept it, eh? Let the shit wash over you?”
“Something like that.”
Nero hummed a lazy reply. Having Lenny in his arms was incredible, but he already dreaded how he’d feel when he had to let go.
Perhaps sensing his thoughts, Lenny sighed. “I wish we could stay up here forever.”
Me too. “Bloody starve, though, wouldn’t we?”
Lenny chuckled. “You would. I don’t think you’ve ever let anyone go hungry.”
“Very funny.” Though Lenny’s words reminded Nero of the custard tarts he’d stashed in the fridge. “I reckon Cass might’ve left one of those Fire Stick whatsits in the bedroom if you wanna go inside now?”
Lenny nodded slowly, but he didn’t move. “Nero?”
“Yeah?”
“Before we go in, can I tell you why I’m here?”
Nero dashed inside and grabbed the custard tarts from the fridge. Leaving Lenny, even for a moment, felt like the end of the world, but if Lenny’s drooping eyes meant he was anywhere near as tired as Nero, they both needed some sugar.
Back on the fire escape, Lenny hadn’t moved from where Nero had left him, his gaze still trained on the horizon. Nero handed him a custard tart. Lenny frowned. “What’s this?
“Custard tart. It’s good for your soul.”
“Not my pancreas though, I’ll bet, or my belly with all that scrummy pastry.”
“Maybe. I don’t know shit about stuff like that.”
“Tell me something interesting about custard tarts, then. You always know where your food comes from.”
Nero rolled his eyes. Was it his fault his nana had never let him eat a bite without lecturing him about the old country? “Custard tarts used to be made by nuns because winemakers gave them the egg yolks for free.”
“Why?”
“Because they used the whites to clarify their red wine and sherry.”
Lenny smirked around a mouthful of pastry. “You never disappoint.”
“Give it time.”
Lenny’s humour faded. Nero pointed at the wall. “Wanna sit?”
“W
hy not?” Lenny let Nero guide him to the wall, and they slid down, their backs against the warm concrete, legs stretched out. “Got any more of those tarts?”
Nero relinquished the bakery bag. Lenny snagged one. “Don’t let me eat them all. My poor guts can’t handle the wheat.”
“You stalling?”
Lenny shrugged. “A little, though I don’t know why. Cass has told you everything anyway, right?”
“Nope.”
“Really? You’re his best friend.”
“So? Don’t mean we tell each other shit.”
A faint smile threatened the downward turn of Lenny’s lips. “You’re such a bloke.”
“If you say so.”
“You say that a lot. It’s like you don’t have an opinion of yourself.”
Nero grunted. “This what you wanna do? Dissect my personality?”
Lenny sighed. “I guess not. Okay. So . . . what did Cass tell you about me if he didn’t tell you everything?”
“He told me you needed help.”
“And?”
Nero shrugged. “That was about it. He said you needed a bolt-hole and job, then Tom mentioned the coppers were being dick bags. I don’t know how important the details are, but if you being scared as shit of the outside world is anything to go by, I’d say you were hiding from something or someone, like you said before.”
“When did I say that?”
“When you took up residence in the fridge.”
“Oh.”
Oh, indeed. Nero sucked in a breath. “Are you in trouble with the old bill?”
“The police?” Lenny laughed humourlessly. “I wish they were that interested.”
Nero’s lip curled up before he caught the instinctive snarl in its tracks. This wasn’t about him. “Who you running from, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Lenny shook his head. “I can picture every line and blemish on his face, smell him, feel his eyes on me, but I’ve got no idea who he is.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, for Nero’s mind to piece it all together. Hitman? Nah, too far-fetched, but the alternative idea rattling his brain felt just as bad, perhaps worse. “Are we talking about a fucking stalker or some shit?”
Strays Page 8
