by Suki Fleet
Cai tried to keep his expression neutral as Loz walked back into the room, but he was in shock. He remembered the name. He remembered seeing the headlines in the newspaper. Four unconnected young men, missing. The younger staff at the kids’ home had talked about how scared they were of going out in town, even with their mates. Then clothing had been found. Blood. Missing had turned into murdered. And Loz’s cousin had been one of them.
Early the following morning, Cai took a few notes out of the envelope before he left the flat and headed to the supermarket. He bought a cheap mobile phone with a car charger and put some credit on it. Then he searched the aisles for a heavy-duty torch with a few packs of batteries to go with it, and a cheap wind-up torch for if the batteries ran out. He also found a little plastic lantern that seemed to give off a decent amount of light.
Having no idea what sort of food Nicky ate, but knowing he had nowhere to cook anything, he bought bread, ham, cheese and some salad veg and avocados and then milk, tea, coffee and biscuits. Finally, he added a tiny camping stove, a gas canister, matches and a kettle, as it seemed likely Nicky had nowhere to heat water. At least if Nicky threw it all back in his face it was food he and Soph would happily eat and, apart from the camping stove, it was stuff they could use.
A light frost blanketed the fields and glittered in the hedgerows. By the time Cai reached the driveway, the morning sun had already climbed half the sky, leaving the distant bank of clouds awash with pale indigos and pinks. For once the van radio worked and Cai arrived breathless and happy from having sung his heart out.
But Thorn Hall seemed to have a way of quietly sapping away joy, and Cai’s carefree mood lasted until he knocked on the study window and Nicky didn’t answer. The fire he’d lit last night had long since died, leaving the room gloomy and full of shadows. Worry quickly began to unspool inside him.
He headed around to the back of the house and was relieved to find the doors on the patio were still bolted. No one had broken in this way, though these doors were probably an opportunist’s dream. Cradling the bag of shopping in his arms, Cai banged on the glass with his elbow.
After the third try, Cai put the shopping down and knocked with his fist. He was considering having a wander around to check all the windows were closed and unbroken, when Nicky appeared in the kitchen capturing Cai’s attention as completely as a bright shaft of sunlight in a dark room. A tiny threadbare towel was flung over his naked shoulders, useless against the mass of dripping wet hair piled on his head. Faded black leggings rode low on his hips, emphasising how lean he was. Not that Cai hadn’t noticed yesterday that his ribs stood out like spindly tree branches—it was just that after everything that had happened with Nicky being followed and then finding him passed out in the study, Cai couldn’t help but see beyond Nicky’s fuck-off attitude to how vulnerable he was, physically and otherwise, no matter how much Nicky would likely try to deny it.
For a moment Nicky didn’t move. Cai picked up the bag of shopping and held it up.
“I’ve got something for you. Open the door?”
Shivering in the cool morning air, Nicky peered cautiously into the bag Cai had given him. His arms and chest were covered in goosebumps—his small, swollen nipples as red as bite marks. Cai tried not to stare, but the towel Nicky was wearing was so thin and fragile-looking it might as well have been made of tissue paper, and it hid nothing. Not that he hadn’t seen everything yesterday, but Nicky was beautiful—everything about him small scale, and, apart from the obvious signs of masculinity, he was androgynous.
Nicky glanced up and gave Cai another puzzled frown, holding the bag handles apart with the very tips of his fingers.
At first, Nicky hadn’t wanted to take the bag at all. Now he was acting as though whatever was in it might explode on him or bite him. Yes, because of course Cai had bought him that well-known brand of exploding, carnivorous bread. Rolling his eyes, Cai decided to leave him to it. If Nicky didn’t want the stuff… well, he’d tried. He turned to head back to the van to get the hedge trimmer.
“Wait….” Nicky cleared his throat. “Your phone. It’s in the study. I’ll get it, just… just wait here.”
Nicky put the bag down by the door, took a few steps across the kitchen, hesitated, then came back, picked up the bag and took it with him.
Folding his arms, Cai leaned against the half-rotted door frame and gazed out across the overgrown lawn. He tried to imagine the garden full of people, laughter, kids playing, but he couldn’t. Something about the place was wrong. No wonder Nicky was so tense and uptight. Living here could make anyone tense and uptight. Had he always lived here, like this? Like he had nothing? Surely if he sold the house he could find somewhere smaller and live better… but then, perhaps the house wasn’t his to sell. What had he said about a will being read?
Out the corner of his eye the copse loomed blackly, but Cai refused to look at it—there was something wrong with those trees too. Instead, he gazed out at the rolling fields beyond the lawn and wondered a thousand things about Nicky that he really shouldn’t have been wondering.
“You charged the phone.”
Startled out of his thoughts, Cai lurched away from the door frame and found Nicky barefoot in the doorway, wearing a few more clothes and holding both the phone Cai had bought him and the one he’d borrowed.
Nicky crept around quiet as a cat. He needed a bell around his neck or something.
At least he hadn’t brought the bag of shopping back out.
Nicky held out Cai’s phone.
Cai slipped it in his pocket. “I charged it in the van on the way here. Not much use if it’s not charged.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I got one with a car charger so I can charge it for you while I’m here in the day. When you get your electricity fixed, I can pick up a mains charger for you.”
“You bought it with your own money, the food and everything.” Nicky’s expression was hard to read. He had a way of making everything sound like an accusation.
“You paid me too much. Too much for this job.” It was true. Cai had looked around, and even for the size of the garden, Nicky had paid him well over the odds.
Nicky frowned. “Why are you doing this?”
Cai rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “Why did you leave out that coat for me that day I was getting soaked?”
“If you got sick you wouldn’t be here working, you’d be at home in bed,” Nicky said immediately, as though he didn’t even need to think about it.
“Oh.” Cai swallowed the feeling that rose up in his chest. It felt a lot like disappointment. “Of course,” he added. He took a step backwards, misjudged the patio and stumbled clumsily onto the grass.
He had work to do. Concentrating on picking his feet up and not embarrassing himself further, he headed towards the side of the house.
“You got rid of Cyril. I… I was grateful,” Nicky called after him.
At half twelve he headed back to his van to grab the bottle of water he’d remembered to fill before leaving the flat that morning.
Before he reached the van, he noticed there was something shining on the bonnet. As he got closer he saw it was a plate, a beautifully ornate dining plate, decorated with delicate gold flowers that Cai, with a fluttering feeling of apprehension, suspected cost more than his van. On it sat a sandwich, stuffed full of tomatoes and ham and salad leaves.
There was a note stuck to the edge of the plate.
I told you I was a prick.
PS Tell me how much everything cost. I didn’t pay you too much.
PPS I like ham and avocados.
PPPS Thank you.
It was as though no one had ever done anything nice for Nicky before and he was trying hard to work out how to behave.
Cai picked the sandwich up off the plate (which he was leaving exactly where it was for the time being) and grinned as he took a bite. He’d remembered water but forgotten to sort out anything for his lunch.
The hairs on the back of his neck
lifted, and he glanced towards the house. There was no sign of anyone at any of the windows but he had the sensation he was being watched. He nodded his head in thanks, hoping Nicky was the one doing the watching.
The next few days passed in a sunny but exhausting blur. There were no further strange happenings and no visitors. Whoever had followed Nicky into the copse earlier in the week hadn’t appeared again. And, not being a wary sort by nature, Cai stopped looking for shadows.
At home, Loz had become a semi-permanent house guest, which meant Cai worried less about Soph getting the bus back from school and could stay at Thorn Hall longer in the afternoon. This extended his workday to around twelve hours—an utterly punishing routine he knew he couldn’t continue for long. But Cai ploughed through, happy to let the quiet routine developing between him and Nicky keep him going.
Every morning, he would knock on the back door, a small bag of food in his arms from the garage shop he passed on the way, and he and Nicky would say hello, and it would be awkward, but the kind of awkward Cai felt a growing sense of excitement about. Then at irregular intervals throughout the day Cai would find a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits or a sandwich waiting for him in one of a few places: the bonnet of the van; on the floor just inside the back door or the patio next to it; on the steps outside the front door. It became a sort of game—though Cai spent far too long wondering what exactly the rules of this game might be so he could play it better. He’d never been very good at figuring out games.
By Friday, Cai had cleared enough branches, bushes and vines to make another four small bonfires—though he hadn’t let himself build them. Yet. All he’d done was separate the piles. He was half tempted to set them up and leave instructions for Nicky to light them over the weekend. But Nicky was on his own out here, and Cai would worry about the fires blazing out of control if the weather changed.
At half past two he took a break. Without the overgrowth covering it, the side of the house caught the warm spill of afternoon sunlight. The grey walls glowed and the old wavy glass in the sash windows glittered.
Muscles aching, Cai lay back on a small patch of grass he’d flattened at the edge of the lawn and let his gaze drift over the house, pleased with what he had achieved. Tomorrow was the start of the weekend and he had every intention of spending as much of the next two days in bed as possible. His body longed for a rest. Telling himself he was just going to shut his eyes for a moment—that of course he wasn’t going to go to sleep—Cai drifted into a doze.
He woke with a shiver to find Nicky standing over him, blocking out the sun, and holding a mug with a scalloped-edged plate balanced on top of it. Wisps of Nicky’s hair had blown loose from his plait and haloed his head like a crown of fire where they caught the sunlight. Cai longed to feel the weight of that thick plait in his hands, almost as much as he longed to undo it.
Noticing he was awake, Nicky swallowed and looked distinctly uncomfortable. “You were going to get sunburned lying there.” Cai raised an eyebrow. “I left the tea by the back door. You didn’t come to get it. It’s cold. You probably don’t want to drink it now.”
Cai rubbed his hands across his face, then sat up. He held out his hand. “Cold tea is exactly what I want right now. Thank you. I didn’t mean to go to sleep.”
“I ate your biscuits. You took ages to wake up.”
“They’re your biscuits.”
Taking a sip of stone-cold tea, Cai wondered exactly how long Nicky had been standing over him blocking out the sun. For all his no-holds-barred abruptness, sometimes he seemed almost shy. As though he didn’t know how to act around other people.
“You should go home now. You’re tired.” Nicky stared off towards the house as he spoke.
“Will you be okay?”
Nicky turned back and fixed him with his glittering stare. “Was I okay before you were working here?”
Cai shielded his eyes and smiled as he looked up, trying to hold Nicky’s gaze without being blinded. “I don’t know, were you?”
Bodies, Nicky
Crouched in front of the hearth, Nicky snapped the brittle twig in his hand and threw it, with a frustrated sigh at the large stack of the kindling in the fireplace. This was the third time the flaming match he’d placed in so carefully into his time-consuming kindling pyramid had guttered and died. If he threw the match anywhere else in the room the whole house would probably go up in a few seconds, but the one place he wanted a fire and nothing… it was like a bad joke.
Yesterday, Cai had shown him how to set the fireplace up, how to stack up the kindling so air flowed around it and the little flames weren’t immediately smothered, but it wasn’t working and Nicky was impatient, and now everything was starting to annoy him.
Especially everything that made him think about Cai.
“I can come back if you need anything,” Nicky muttered to himself in a poor imitation of Cai’s deep voice.
It bothered him that he could imagine Cai so vividly. Remember every nuance of his voice as he spoke. It was almost as though his presence was there in the room.
“Yeah, I need you to come back and light the fire for me. I can’t seem to do anything without you. I don’t know how I managed these past twenty-nine years.”
Sarcasm was a pathetic fail-safe, a way to both speak the truth and to hide from it. And Nicky knew it got to Cai—even if he was very fucking good at not rising to it. He could picture Cai’s reaction, the way he’d blink slowly and quietly blow air out of his nose as if he were calling on some great reserve of calm. Nicky had had to watch Cai very closely to figure that out, but the knowledge had pleased him. He liked that he got to Cai, liked that Cai wasn’t impervious. Though he did need to know just how far Cai’s calm went. How could he trust someone until he knew what they reacted to? And what that reaction might be?
“I like that I get you, Cai,” he whispered.
“You only like it because you’re too scared to admit I get to you too.” Cai hadn’t said that and Nicky couldn’t really imagine that he would. He could imagine Cai calling him out though, eventually. Or maybe he just wished it. Wished someone would. Anyone. For once.
He hadn’t always been an empty vessel. Anxiety and fear hadn’t always been wound around his heart like weeds he couldn’t kill. He’d believed in love. In trust. Before all this. But then what had happened had happened, and everything he felt for Lance was tangled up with how much Nicky felt he owed Lance for keeping him safe. And now Lance was gone, those feelings had given way to an emptiness he couldn’t quite get his head around.
Perhaps time had encased his heart in stone and he no longer understood people. Why did they go out of their way to help, like Cai did? What were their motivations? What did they want in return? He used to think if he knew what made people tick he could become the clock they ticked to. That had been before, though. Before these blank two years. Before when sex had been the easiest thing of all. A language he’d understood and that understood him. Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Did Cai want to fuck him? Was that what this was?
It had been so long that sex didn’t seem so easy any more.
“Do you want to fuck me Cai?” he whispered in the dark room, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck rise up as though the words produced a static charge. “Do you think fucking me will make me nicer? Think it will fix all the ways I’m broke? Do you have a magic penis?” He snorted at the thought. Thinking about Cai’s dick wasn’t what he’d intended, but his ever helpful brain provided a nice image.
“Anyone would think you were missing your gardener,” a voice said from behind him.
Nicky jerked forwards in shock, blind panic sending him crashing into the chimney breast. The sharp corner of the exposed brickwork cut deeply into his forehead, but he barely noticed. Beside him, Cai’s neat stack of logs spilled noisily across the floor.
He turned, his heart stuck in his throat. It was hard to breathe.
Fox Mask was no longer wearing her fox mask. Pale and fre
ckled, she looked younger than he’d imagined her, in her twenties, younger than him perhaps. Her greasy-looking dark blonde hair was scraped back in a severe ponytail, sharpening her features.
Her thin pink lips were making the shapes of words but Nicky’s blood was roaring so loudly in his ears that, for a moment, it blocked out every other sound. She wasn’t even pointing her gun at him. Instead she swung the rifle back and forth in a lazy arc, mostly aiming it at the dusty floorboards.
“I don’t trust you, Nicky,” she mouthed, noticing the direction of his gaze. Her dark eyes were flat and expressionless, one side of her mouth turned up as if in disgust.
Nicky’s shock gave way and the sounds returned, though his breathing had quickened and he was beginning to feel very light-headed. “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?” he gasped. “Strangle you with my hair?” He had no idea how he got the words out; fear was devouring his ability to think straight. Part of him wished for a tiny hit of whatever she’d drugged him with last time.
She cast her gaze around the room. Nicky splayed his palms against the cool wall behind him, dug his nails into the sharp flaking paintwork. Blood from the cut on his head dripped slowly, redly, onto the floor. He couldn’t even feel it. All he could think was why was this happening? And who the fuck was she?
She rocked back and forth on her heels. The tape holding her shoes together whispered against the floorboards. “Were you involved? I can’t work it out. I’ve been creeping around like your shadow and I just don’t know.”
Nicky’s stomach plummeted through the floor. She’d been here in the house with him… was she the presence he’d felt? The noises? But they’d been happening for longer than a few days. His head was spinning.
“Involved with what?” His voice shook. He didn’t care.
With one fluid movement she swung the gun up and pointed it at his chest. Nicky flinched, turning his head away and closing his eyes. “If you’re going to shoot me, just fucking shoot me,” he hissed. He couldn’t take it.
“Don’t like a bit of teasing, Nicky?”
