Now there was a question. The easy answer was no, that we had nothing in common, and they weren’t interested enough to make any attempt to understand me, but that shit worked both ways. And as long as they were alive, I had a safe place to sleep anytime I wanted it. “Close enough.”
Cash eyed me over the rim of his coffee mug, and his next question was predictable. “Do they know what you do?”
I turned the heat off under the eggs and stuck four slices of toast in Cash’s swish toaster. “Yes. My parents don’t always understand me, but we don’t lie in our family. My dad is big on the truth being the path of the least pain.”
“Do you agree?”
I wasn’t sure how me fudging breakfast had led us here, but I gave the question the consideration it deserved. “Mostly. My mum was mortified when I got arrested on an old criminal damage charge outside my cousin’s wedding last year, but I think it would’ve been worse if it had happened down the road and she was the last to know.”
“What does she think?”
“That I’m a lunatic who needs to get a real job.”
“And your dad?”
A faint chuckle escaped me. “I don’t actually know. He’s not as vocal about his disapproval as my mother.”
“My mum was like that…vocal, I mean. Loud and Irish, if I pissed her off, the whole world knew.”
“She’s dead?”
Cash nodded. “For a long time now.”
“Were you close?”
“We’re Irish, man. Didn’t have much choice.”
I retrieved the toast, buttered it, and brought the food to the counter where Cash sat, still dressed in last night’s clothes. “What about your dad?”
Cash’s open expression faded, and he was suddenly fascinated by my clumsy arrangement of eggs and Hovis. “He’s a wasteman, as in loser, not a legit bin man. Haven’t seen him in years.”
“He doesn’t know you were a sab then?”
“Mate, he wouldn’t be able to tell you my eyes were fucking green.”
The thought of anyone living their life not absolutely bewitched by Cash’s hypnotic forest-green gaze was incomprehensible to me. I opened my mouth to say so, but his expression silenced me. I was pushing my luck.
We ate in silence for a little while, the weight of unspoken words heavy in the air. I searched the tangle of aborted sentences for one I could finish, but nothing came together. My time with Cash was precious, and finite. Did I want to sully it by dredging up the past?
“You said it wrong, you know, same as Dom did about you the other day.”
“Hmm?” I glanced up from pushing the last of my breakfast around my plate. “Said what wrong?”
“You asked if my dad knew I was a sab, past tense…just like Dom thought it was something you could do without involving me if we—”
“If we what?”
Cash shrugged. “If we stayed in each other’s lives.”
That was one way of putting it, but I hated that he’d chosen his words so carefully. My heart cried out for more from him. Something, anything, to help me decipher how he felt about me. And then shame hit me like a truck. This was the most open he’d ever been with me, and it still wasn’t enough. Could I be any more fucking selfish?
“What I’m trying to say,” Cash said, when I didn’t speak, “is that there’s no past tense when it comes to sabbing. I was a sab the last time I saw him, and I’m a sab now. Some shit you just can’t escape.”
“Do you want to escape it?”
Cash unleashed the full force of his intense stare on me. “I thought I did, even after we met, but…”
My heart turned over and struck up a painful tattoo in my chest. “But what?”
