Leo tied a knot in an extra-long chip and rubbed the oozing grease between his fingers. “He didn’t talk?”
“Nope. Never said a word. They reckoned he’d been taught to be quiet at the orphanage. Seen and not heard, maybe? Didn’t stop him crying all night when he was a baby, though.”
Leo’s chest hurt. He couldn’t picture Charlie as a toddler, alone and unwanted on the other side of the world. It didn’t make any sense. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want Charlie?
I want Charlie.
Later that night, Leo let himself into the silent Poulton house. He checked on Lila, then took a shower and redressed his arm. The small tear he’d sustained from vaulting the school fence had healed, and he could look at it now without retching.
Didn’t stop him pulling a hoodie over his T-shirt, though. Hiding the bandage meant he could pretend it wasn’t there until morning came and it was time to face it all over again.
On his way back to his bedroom, he peeked through Charlie’s open door and found Charlie asleep, facedown on a sketchpad, still clutching a pen. Leo wondered absently what he’d been drawing, but Charlie’s cheek obscured the page.
Leo crept into the room and pried the pen from Charlie’s slack fingers. He set it on the bedside table, then hovered, suddenly transfixed by Charlie’s slender wrist.
I want to hold it.
The notion made Leo’s head swim, and he let the thought grow and morph into a vision of him reaching out and closing his hand around Charlie’s arm, feeling the warmth of his skin and the steady beat of his pulse. Then he pictured sliding his fingers lower to twine with Charlie’s, because Charlie’s hands were magic. Leo felt them on him every time he closed his eyes. Every time darkness flickered in his fractured subconscious and threatened to pull him under. Charlie had touched him that way only once—or twice, maybe; Leo wasn’t sure—but even long after Charlie had let him go, Leo’s skin had smouldered with the best kind of heat. A heat that healed every hurt Leo had ever known.
Would it feel like that for Charlie? If Leo touched him too?
Would it fuck.
Leo retreated to his own room and crawled into bed. The room swallowed him up, but with the curtains half open and the lamp glowing its soft light, he didn’t feel as suffocated as he sometimes did. Didn’t feel the need to knock on Kate’s door for a pill to help him drift. Instead he closed his eyes and pictured Charlie asleep, imagined the rise and fall of his chest, and the flutter of his eyelids as he dreamed.
A week later, Charlie pulled on a clean T-shirt, hyperaware—as he’d become every time they were in the same room—of Leo watching him.
“Are you going out?” Leo asked.
His tone suggested he didn’t care much for the answer, so Charlie shrugged and rummaged in a drawer for a hoodie to ward off the stiff breeze rattling the windows.
“Where are you going?”
Charlie glanced around. Leo was on Charlie’s bed, stretched out, his good arm behind his head.See? He doesn’t give a crap.But Charlie paused anyway. Leo had a way of staring at him that made him forget what he was doing. Made him forget everything except the vortex of his stormy gaze. “I’m meeting Jess and Lucy at the park.”
“The wicked witches?”
Charlie rolled his eyes. Despite Jess’s and Lucy’s best efforts to befriend Leo, he’d ignored them as much as he seemed to ignore everyone that wasn’t Charlie or Wayne knobhead Murphy. “You’ve met the rest of the girls in our year, mate.They’rethe bloody witches.”
Leo scowled—like he always did when Charlie forgot himself and called himmate—but Charlie couldn’t be arsed to placate him. It had been a long week, and Leo’s moods had begun to grate on him.Is it really so hard to be civil?
“Anyway.” Charlie stamped into his scuffed Converse and drifted to the open door. “I’ll see you later, yeah?”
“Whatever.”
Leo rolled off the bed and squeezed around Charlie. Their shoulders brushed, their legs, their hands, and Charlie shuddered, a barely there tremble that tickled his nerves. Leo glanced back. Did he feel it too? By his blank stare, probably not, but then the apathy melted from Leo’s face and he let loose one of his elusive grins.
“Can I come to the park with you?”
They walked into town in near silence. Leo wasn’t much of a talker, and Charlie was still reeling from the scene in the bedroom—that imagined encounter that made him feel warm all over. Damn Leo and his hypnotic eyes.Why does he have to look at me like that?
For all he knew, Leo looked ateveryonelike that, but that oddly painful notion did nothing to calm the roiling in his belly.
“So, what do you do in the parks around here on a Friday night? Back home, we get stoned and break stuff.”
Charlie chanced a glance at Leo. He rarely mentioned the life he must’ve had before him and Lila came to Heyton, and he’d never referred to Swindon ashomebefore. In fact, Charlie reckoned he’d never heard Leo use the word at all. “Um, some of the girls smoke puff. I’d rather have beer, though. Smoking’s for skanks.”
Leo took the dig with the insolent smirk that drove Charlie crazy in so many conflicting ways. “Where do you get beer from? Do you nick it from Reg?”
