“Don’t get all soppy on us,” Dylan chastised. “It doesn’t suit your image as an Adonis.”
Everyone around them smirked at that.
Kyrone ran his fingers over his tattoo. “You can scoff all you like, but I’ve been scoring more punters since I got this. Besides, all that matters is thatIlike it.” He stared pointedly at Jag. “Pub quiz. Tomorrow. Bring Michael.” He wasn’t asking anymore.
Jag sighed. “Fine. I’ll be there. I can’t promise that Michael will be, though.”
“Good enough.” Kyrone grinned, happy that everyone he cared about at the club would be at the pub quiz in the evening, along with Jared, who, despite the bombshell he’d dropped in the afternoon, made Kyrone insanely happy.
* * *
When he got back to the flat, Kyrone found Jared soundly asleep. In contrast, Kyrone was too wired to even think about going to bed. He couldn’t even cuddle up beside Jared and soak up his beauty and warmth. He grabbed himself a drink and a snack and turned the TV on as low as it would go, but his gaze kept drifting to the scrapbook that Jared had brought with him. He’d given Kyrone permission to look through it, but doing so almost felt like an intrusion on a life he knew nothing about. But then, all Jared knew about that life were the stories his family had told him.
Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him, and he flicked the scrapbook open to the first page. He hissed in a breath as he saw a photo of Jared lookingverydifferent. It was still unmistakably the same person, but his blond hair was shorter, his face had more colour in it, and he looked strong and healthy. He was still slender and willowy but not even close to being painfully thin.
The difference between Jared, then and now, made Kyrone’s chest hurt and really brought home to him just how much weight Jared had lost while he’d been trapped in a coma, just how thin he was now, little more than skin and bone, and that was after months of being awake and working on building himself back up. Kyrone couldn’t imagine how hard it had been for Jared to look at the photo and others like it and then face himself in the mirror.
In this photo, Jared was standing in front of a Christmas tree with two young women, both a little shorter than him. They had the same straw-blonde hair and darker eyebrows, although only of them had Jared’s brown eyes, while the other had bright blue eyes. They were all happy and smiling, their clothing smart. Kyrone guessed they were Jared’s sisters. Not that he’d mentioned that he had sisters. It was obviously a posed picture, probably one that got sent out in an annual Christmas letter to distant friends and relatives.
There were dozens more photos of Jared and his family in the first part of the scrapbook, stretching back into his very early childhood. Some were posed photos; others were candid shots of first days at school and holidays in far-flung countries. Probably one of the most painful ones to look at was Jared holding up his driving license, which must have been newly acquired. It almost seemed cruel of his parents to have included that particular photo, considering he’d been driving the car at the time of the freak accident.
What Kyrone couldn’t fail to note was that there were very few images of Jared with anyone other than family members until he got towards the back of the scrapbook. At that point, the pages became less organised, as if someone had taken a lot less care about putting the photos into it. There were more than could fit on each page, and they overlapped each other like a hectic collage. Those photos rarely had Jared in them, and it was clear to Kyrone that they had been taken while Jared was at university—probably mostly by him. They were of friends in various clubs and bars. He wondered how many of the people in the photos had sent get-well cards while Jared lay in a coma. Did they know he’d forgotten them all, or had they drifted away before he’d even woken up?
He looked up, smiling, as he heard the bedroom door open. Jared shuffled towards him, hair dishevelled and eyes heavy with sleep.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Kyrone said.
“You didn’t. I woke up, saw the time, and wondered where you were.” Jared leant over the back of the sofa and kissed Kyrone’s cheek.
After moving the open scrapbook onto the coffee table, Kyrone raised his arm, bringing it under Jared’s chin to curl around his neck. “How’s your head?”
“Still there.”
“Funny guy!” Kyrone chuckled as he dragged Jared over the back of the sofa and onto his lap, turning him so he was lying on his back in the same action. Jared’s legs dangled over the back of the sofa as he smiled up at Kyrone.
“Maybe you should have been clearer.”
“How’s your headache?”
“Mostly gone,” Jared replied. His smile faded a little. “I think it got worse because of talking.”
“All the emotions caused a tension headache?”
Jared nodded. He stroked Kyrone’s jaw. “You were looking at my scrapbook?”
Kyrone felt a twinge of guilt. “I hope that was okay?”
“I said you could. Did it help?”
Kyrone shrugged. “Probably about as much as it helped you. You’ve got two sisters?”
“Yes. Bianca and Cordelia.”
Kyrone’s eyes widened. “No offence, but their names are as posh as your accent.”
Jared gave him a withering look. “Ididn’t name them, and my accent isn’t that posh.”
“You keep saying that, but it really is.” Kyrone leant down to kiss his full lips. “And sexy as sin.”
