“Bongo? Why?”
Calum shrugged. “Why not?”
Brix stood back and considered the hen. “I s’pose she could be a Bongo. I reckon she’s gonna be a good girl. She dropped an egg as soon as she came out of the crate, like she’d been walking around in the sun her whole life.”
With the hen so warm and soft in his arms, Calum didn’t want to consider where she’d come from. “I’m sure she’ll be just fine with you looking after her.”
“And what about you, eh? You gonna tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
“What do you want to know?”
Brix ran a gentle hand over Bongo’s placid form. “Anything you need to tell me. I’m not going to force it out of you, but you need to give me something if you’re going to stay here.”
“Stay here?”
Brix fixed Calum with a glare that had silenced many a cocky apprentice or ignorant client. “It don’t take a genius to work out you’re up shit creek without a paddle, and I reckon if you had any inclination to hop it home, you’d have borrowed a wedge off me and done it already. Am I right?”
“Maybe.” Calum lost himself in Bongo’s lizard-like gaze, hiding from Brix’s piercing stare. “I guess if I wanted to go home, I wouldn’t have wound up here in the first place. It’s not like the train didn’t stop before I fell asleep.”
“So why didn’t you get off?”
Calum shook his head slowly. “I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be as far away from him—from there—as possible.”
Brix raised his eyebrows again, clearly catching Calum’s slip. “This is a long way to run. Are you in trouble?”
“What? Oh, no. It’s nothing like that, I’ve just . . . lost myself, you know? And I don’t know how to get it back.”
Brix plucked Bongo from Calum’s arms and set her down in the dusty run. “Know how that feels, mate.”
Calum didn’t doubt it. Brix had always possessed a quiet wisdom that came from a life that had seen too much. “I suppose I could get one of those Wonga loans or something. It would get me back to London, at least.”
“Is that where you want to be?”
Calum thought of the shop in Rob’s name—filled with his cronies—and the barren flat in Paddington that had never felt like home. “I’d rather shoot myself.”
“Then stay here, like I said. You don’t have to explain yourself. Reckon I know all I need to.”
“But I haven’t told you—”
Brix held up his hand. “So? I’ve got a spare room and some guest slots in the studio. It’s not like you don’t have a trade. You’re still tattooing, aren’t you?”
Calum snorted. “It’s about all I’m doing, but I haven’t got any kit. It’s—” His voice fell away as his heart wept for Dottie. “I don’t have anything, Brix.”
Brix laid a hand on Calum’s arm, his slender inked fingers wrapping around Calum’s wrist like a blanket of heated vines. “Then you best stay right here until we figure this shit out.”
Brix threw a tin of tomatoes into the Bolognese sauce on the stove and stirred it in, scraping the meaty goo from the bottom of the pan with a little more force than necessary as he watched Calum stare a hole through the back door from the couch. Anyone else would’ve thought him obsessed with the chickens, but Brix knew better. Calum’s studied gaze was empty, and whatever he was seeing had taken him somewhere else entirely.
If the subtle distress in his dark eyes was anything to go by, it wasn’t any place pleasant, and that was Calum all over—subtle—though that was the only thing Brix recognised in the shaken shell of a man he’d once counted among his closest friends.
Not his fault, though, is it? You’re the one that bailed. The devil on Brix’s shoulder also reminded him to nip upstairs and neck his evening meds. When he came back, Calum hadn’t moved. Fuck this. Brix got his biggest pasta pot out of the cupboard and clanged it down on the stovetop.
Calum jumped. Brix felt bad for a moment, but the brief spark of life in Calum’s tired gaze was a relief. It had been hours since he’d last spoken; he’d clammed up right after agreeing to stay the night in Porthkennack.
“Sorry,” Brix said. “Checking you’re awake.”
“I am now.”
“Good. You can help me massacre the spaghetti.”
