He was more right than I wanted to acknowledge, but Lucky wasn’t going anywhere. We were both done for the day, and I’d promised to keep him company while Dom was away on a rare overnight business trip. Lucky didn’t do well on his own, and I was beginning to realise I didn’t either.
I left the rest of the tools where they were and scrambled to my feet. “Stop talking about shit you don’t understand. Let’s go get dinner.”
There was a Chinese place on the way home that served sweet and sour tofu Lucky seemed convinced was actually chicken. It didn’t take much to persuade him that swinging by on the way home and ordering enough for a small army was more fun than talking about the clusterfuck I’d created with Rae.
Or so I thought until we were flopped onto the couch and he was finally full. Lucky was a tactile fella. He put the telly on, turned the lights off, and cuddled me as if we were brothers far younger than I could ever remember feeling. It was different to how Rae laid with me. There was no heat in Lucky’s touch, only the friendship I so desperately needed.
I shivered.
He stole a glance at me. “Cold?”
“No.”
“Did you and Rae split up?”
It was quite a leap from my body temperature. I shook my head. “We were never together.”
Lucky shifted to look at me properly. I tried to lose myself in his pretty face—his long hair and high cheekbones—and pondered how different the last year could’ve played out if I’d been attracted to him. It would’ve meant no Lucky, and no Dom. No real friends who had my back however much of a moody bastard I’d turned into.
With Lucky’s gaze burning holes in the side of my head, it was a bizarre situation to consider, but that seemed to be my baseline right now. Wild comparisons that did nothing to move me forward.
I shoved Lucky’s shoulder. “Stop staring at me.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
Lucky blew a raspberry. “Bite me.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Says the bloke snuggled up with me when he’d rather be in a muddy tent with his definitely-not-my-boyfriend-partner-in-crime.”
“You’re wrong about that, too. Rae doesn’t have a tent anymore, and I don’t partner with him in the field.”
“I don’t know what the means, but whatever.”
He didn’t ask any more questions. Part of me was relieved, but the itch in me remained. I needed to talk, preferably to someone who understood me. Was that Lucky? Who the hell knew at this point? Sad fact was, he was my only option. Shame I couldn’t bring myself to take it.
A little while later, we went our separate ways, and it was a lonely walk to my attic bedroom at the end of the hall. Though I’d done it a thousand times before, pulling myself up into the loft seemed to rip my arms from my sockets, and the cloud that had trailed me for months now settled deep into my bones. After I’d left Cumbria, my uncle, sick of me flaking on his couch for days on end, had dragged me to a doctor. It had been such an extreme thing for a man like him to do, and it had woken me up a bit. The depression diagnosis had made sense, but I’d declined the prescription the friendly GP had insisted would help. Had I been wrong about that, too?
Probably. Lucky and Dom had made life better…lighter, warmer, but even those easy relationships felt tainted now. Like I’d ruined it so badly I’d never get it back. That whatever happened, I’d never be free of whatZanderdone to me. A violent shudder tore through me, and for a horrifying moment, I thought I’d puke, but the buzz of my phone distracted me.
Rae:Call me when you can.
***
Calling Rae immediately was easy, accepting his business-like tone, less so. But I deserved it. It wasn’t him who’d called time on whatever else we’d become to each other.
“There’s no official Beds hunt this weekend,” he said, “but we’re obviously unconvinced about that. The Bucks girl from last week—Petra—is watching out for Goon on their patch, but we’ve been in contact with the Hertfordshire crew too. It could be that the hunts join forces and jump from county to county for the rest of the season.”
I lay back on my bed and frowned as I struggled with geography. “How close is Hertfordshire?”
“Depends where you are, but the sabs we have contact with monitor a hunt eleven miles away.”
“That’s a long way to run if we’re in the wrong place.”
“You’re definitely coming then?”
