—
She doesn’t love me,” Charles sobbed.
He was sodden and shit-faced. Exactly what Tim didn’t want to deal with right now. He put a hand on his former buddy’s shoulder. His jacket was soaked, his face streaked with water. Hard to distinguish the tears from the rain.
A worm of sympathy wriggled under the careful layers of non-feeling. “Let it go, mate,” Tim said.
“I just want to talk to her.”
He’d probably shown up hoping for more than that, but Tim wasn’t in the frame of mind to argue. Not with the man who had once saved his life and was currently drunk off his ass.
“You’ve got to leave it,” he said. “Let her go.”
Charles knocked his hand away. “Take your fucking hands off me. Laura!” He howled at her window like she was the moon. “Laura, you bitch! I love you!”
Christ. He’d have the neighbors out in a minute. Or the police. “Easy, man. Leave it.”
“If she’d just talk to me...”
Tim glanced up at the window where a shadow hovered behind the blind. “In the morning. You’ll both feel better.” Or not. Charles would have a hell of a hangover. “You can call her in the morning.”
“She won’t... She won’t fucking see me.” Charles’s voice was sad. His breath reeked of gin.
“Because it’s late.”Not too late for a booty call.Tim shook the thought away. “Time to go home. Let’s get in the car.”
Charles jerked away. “Laura!”
“Come on, now.” Another hand on Charles’s shoulder, guiding, reassuring. “You don’t want to scare her.”
“Never. I wouldn’t... Never do anything to hurt her.”
“Sure, mate.” Tim steered him to the car.
“I never touched her.”
Which Tim knew for a fact was a lie. He’d seen them together. “Here we go,” he said, cool and emotionless. A machine.
“She doesn’t love me,” Charles confided as Tim tried to load him into his Range Rover. Into the back seat, where he couldn’t puke all over Tim’s console.
“Watch your head.”
“She doesn’t love me because she. Still. Loves. You.” Every word punctuated by a blast of gin and a finger poke.
The pokes were hard enough to hurt. But otherwise Tim felt... nothing. Except something he identified dimly as anger, old and unproductive. Nothing changed.
“And you don’t love her,” Charles said. “She told me. You can’t love anybody.”
“Get in the fucking car.” Not so neutral now.
“Robot Man,” Charles slurred. “Should have let you die.”
Leave no man behind, the Americans liked to boast. But the British Army did not surrender its wounded, its weapons, or its honor without a fight. Which was the only reason Tim didn’t toss Charles into the gutter now.
Instead, he buckled his former best friend into the back seat and drove him home.
Eleven
He didn’t kiss me good night.
