It seemed like I’d just blinked, and then Kim was easing out of me and gently coaxing me upright. He kissed the back of my neck and smoothed my sweat-damped hair out of my eyes. “All right?”
I moaned, better than all right, but incapable of intelligible speech. Kim chuckled and fumbled around. Fabric touched my hand, my back, and my legs, cleaning me up, then he spun me and pressed his forehead to mine.
“Yourdaydreams next time, eh?”
“Next time . . .”
Fuck’s sake. If there was one thing worse than editing reams of photos, it was editing them when my mind was elsewhere, like the weather, the lunch I’d forgotten to eat, or the crazy-hot fuck I’d had at the weekend.Next time.Yeah. Nice theory. Shame Kim and I had stumbled out of the gig venue, dazed and slightly awkward, without figuring when—or if—that would really happen. I’d been halfway home before I realised we hadn’t even exchanged numbers, an oversight that was bothering me more than I cared to admit.
Irritated, I glared at my computer screen. In my distraction I’d thrown a random textured filter over the current image I was working on, instead of reducing the background noise. I sighed and undid the action. The statuesque chick from Moon-Hot Monkey Paste was rocking the film grain, but it would probably take every trick in the book to make her look bad. The woman was beautiful.
I worked on the gig shots for most of the afternoon. The redhead caught my eye several times, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I spent most of my time scanning the crowd shots for Kim and his wild mop of dark hair. His lean shoulders and arresting smile. The venue had been dark and smoky, but Kim possessed a grin that brightened any room he walked into . . . in my head, at least. The only room I’d taken him into had been a fucking broom cupboard.
It was early evening by the time my phone pulled me out of my editing-induced coma. I glanced at the screen, saw my stepmother staring back at me, and scowled. Fucking Gaz setting her up on FaceTime. There was no escaping her now. With that in mind, I accepted the call, since it was safer than risking her showing up on my doorstep.
And obviously she asked me if I was all right. She always did, and my answer was always the same.
“Course I am.” I hauled myself off the sofa and stretched out the kinks in my spine. “Did you need me for something?”
“Dinner,” she said. “Your brothers are coming. I thought it would be nice if you joined us too.”
I rolled my eyes, glad I had my face turned away from the screen. Of course my darling brothers were home for dinner. They both lived in cottages on the bloody farm. It was only me, the perpetual black sheep, who refused to reside any further into the family bosom. “I dunno. Do you mean tonight? I’ve got a load of work still to do.”
“You can take a break, can’t you? Come on, Jasper. We haven’t seen you all week.”
I refrained from pointing out that I’d seen her for breakfast five days ago, and had spent the whole of my Saturday at that stupid crusty festival. Such logic would be lost on my wonderful stepmother. If she wanted me home for dinner, I’d be home for dinner. It was easier that way. Besides, I hadn’t looked in my fridge for days, preferring the company of my coffee machine and the bottle of Grouse I kept in my living room. Thursday night was pie night on the farm, and now I thought about it, there wasn’t much I wanted more.
Except a rematch with Kim.
“Jasper . . .”
I let my stepmum drown out the voice in my head and searched the detritus around me for some jeans. “All right, all right, I’m coming. I’ll be there in a bit, okay?”
“Seven o’clock,” she retorted. “Don’t be late, or your dad will have you out on feed duty.”
Iwaslate, but somehow still the first of my siblings to arrive. Tardiness was in the Manning genes. The dogs met me in the yard, smothering me like they hadn’t seen a human for months, and I found my stepmother in the kitchen, who wasn’t much better.
“Oh, Jasper,” she said, after squeezing the life out of me. “You’re so pale. You look like you haven’t seen the sun.”
She was more right than she knew. Today had been the first day all week I’d crawled out of my bed before 2 p.m., but she didn’t need to know that. So what if I was a night owl? There was more to life than milking cows at the arse crack of dawn.
“I’m fine, Ma.” I wriggled out of her embrace and swiped a bit of bread from the counter. “Where are the others?”
Laura Manning stared me down a moment, before the oven timer distracted her. “Nicolas is up the fields with Dad, and Gavin got caught up on the motorway. He said to start without him.”
Gaz hadn’t answered to “Gavin” in years. I hid my smirk with another bit of bread. Laura almost always addressed us by our full names, no matter our ages or the context of the conversation. “What’s he on the motorway for? Where’s he been?”
“Sourcing furniture for the barn.”
“Yeah?” For as long as I could remember, the biggest barn on the farm had been derelict, too vast and draughty for the small collection of animals my family kept alongside their arable operation, and too beat-up to store equipment of any value. Then Gaz had taken over the commercial side of the business and decided the barn would be the perfect venue for his latest harebrained scheme: an organic canteen, serving up the delights Laura and Nicky’s wife, Francesca, cooked up from surplus produce. I’d figured the grand plans as pie-in-the-sky at first, but after years of false starts and procrastination, things had begun to move along in recent months and the barn had started to grow into something humans could inhabit. “What kind of furniture is he looking for?”
Laura shrugged, clearly half-engrossed in her cooking. “He mentioned wicker, but you’d have to ask him. I’m just the kitchen skivvy.”
“As if. We’d all perish without you, Ma, but seriously? Wicker? What the fuck is he thinking?”
“Language, Jasper.” Laura heaved a huge pie out of the oven and set it on the kitchen table. “And what’s wrong with wicker? I thought it sounded nice.”
“Yeah, if you’re eighty-seven and have a conservatory built from curtain poles and PVA glue.” Bloody wicker. I didn’t take much interest in the family business—most days, there was no need—but left unsupervised, the rest of them would have the whole enterprise dressed up in polyester and Formica tablecloths.
