“Fine. I’m freaking out because the dude I fucked a few months ago came back.” Lucky’s eyebrows rose and I realised I’d never got around to telling him about Rae in the first place. I’d just assumed he’d heard us getting busy and left it at that. “Um, yeah. I hooked up a while ago.”
“With a dude?”
“Yes, with a dude. Why’s that so surprising?”
“It’s not, I’d just figured you’d pull a bird when you got back on the horse after—”
I cut him off with a scowl. I tried not to drink too much around Lucky because he had substance…issues, but occasionally I ended up wasted in his company, and one such night I’d let slip about the fucking riot my last relationship had turned into. Too much booze had ensured I couldn’t much remember his reaction, or just how deep I’d gone, but judging by his frown right now? Huh. Maybe I’d said too much. “Anyway, I wasn’t planning on seeing him again, like, ever, as we didn’t swap numbers and shit, or surnames, but then he rocked up at the house the other night.”
“That’s who that was?”
“Uh-huh.”
Lucky opened a can of baked beans and tipped it into a saucepan. He was cooking tonight, which meant egg and chips. Not that I was complaining. I’d been too wired to eat much for the last few days and my stomach was starting to protest. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Whatever you’ve been sitting on since then. Come on, mate.”
I sighed and slumped forwards on the kitchen counter, ignoring Lucky’s increasingly concerned frown as his typically mellow housemate slipped further into a terminal sulk. I wasn’t as mean-mugged as Dom, but I got around that with blanket humour. Lucky wasn’t used to me angsting over shit. “He knows me.”
“Knows you?”
“Yeah, from before I came to London, though he doesn’t, like, actually know me.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Tell me about it.” I picked at the label on the bottle of water I’d been planning on having for dinner before Lucky had cornered me. “I was involved in something before I came to work for Jim. I walked away from it, but Rae’s in deep, and he came looking for me, not knowing I was the same person he’d screwed a few months back.”
“You were involved in something,” Lucky repeated slowly.
“Yeah.”
“Cash.”
“What?”
“Unless you’re Fred West reincarnated, there’s nothing you can tell me that I won’t one hundred per cent accept.”
Lucky had lived a life of his own, and was the least judgemental dude in the world, but a blood-sworn code of silence had conditioned me to be cagey about sabbing. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just…tell him. “It’s complicated.”
“Isn’t everything?” Lucky threw the frying pan onto the stove. “But I can’t understand whatever the fuck you’re talking about if you keep being so bloody vague.”
Another sigh escaped me, and I forced myself to sit up. “Okay, so you know I went to uni up north?”
“Cumbria. Some geography shit?”
“Geology. Whatever. I got into a bunch of stuff while I was up there. Socialism, activism…animal rights.”
“Shocker,” Lucky deadpanned. “You know you should be reducing my rent for all the iron and protein you’re depriving me of with your meat ban, right?”
“Fuck off. There’s plenty of iron and protein in vegetables. But you know that already, so if you want to pump me for info you’ve gotta stop talking shit.”
Lucky waved a hand for me to continue and cracked eggs into his pan.
“So,” I went on. “There was a hunt that rode through the village close to where I lived—a fox hunt. I didn’t pay it too much attention at first because it was supposed to be a trail hunt after the ban came into place. Then I met some local sabs in a boozer and they, uh, educated me.”
I didn’t add that I’d had a wild three-way with the dude and his wife and the experience had opened my eyes to the joys of bisexuality. Lucky and I could talk about sex all night at the best of times, we didn’t need an excuse.
