“None if I can help it, but that’s a recent thing. I used to spend every night in the Red Lion.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It really wasn’t.”
“Then why did you do it?”
He shrugs and swings his gaze with Bella as she darts after a squirrel. “Habit. I grew up in pubs, keeping my old man company. I feel at home in them, so it’s hard to stay away when I don’t feel at home anywhere else.”
It makes sense, considering the sterile nature of his bedsit. I can’t fault him for cleanliness, especially from a man who claims not to care about anything, but then, there’s nothing in Aidan’s home to get cluttered or dirty. “Did you finish the soup?”
Aidan’s eyebrow twitches, as though the banality of my question amuses him. “Of course I did. I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until it was all gone.”
A laugh bursts out of me, and the awkward cloud hanging over us dissipates. Bella returns from squirrel hunting with a stick in her mouth. She presents it to Aidan. He tosses it into the wilderness, and we follow as she crashes after it.
We hike in silence for a while. With Aidan by my side, the vast forest seems less daunting, and it’s... nice. Despite his spiky personality, his predilection for gruff quiet has always comforted me, a stark contrast to the noise and chaos I often need to feel calm.
I don’t know what he’s thinking, though, if he’s enjoying the sun-dappled tranquillity as much as I am. As ever, he’s impossible to read, so I don’t try and, instead, turn to recalling a million different things about his beautiful lips. How they press into a thin line when he’s in pain, the snarl he pulls when he’s annoyed, and how wonderful they felt when he pressed them against mine.
It’s been years since a boy kissed me. My last serious relationship was with the most beautiful girl in the world, but she never kissed me like Aidan did. She was made of glass—too precious to touch—and I scared her away.
Aidan isn’t scared of me, perhaps because he doesn’t understand how destructive I can be, to my own life and anyone unlucky enough to get close to me, but none of that mattered when he kissed me. His lips made me feel like his most treasured thing, and I want, more than anything, for him to kiss me again.
We reach a clearing with a circle of fallen trees, each with patterns carved into the trunks. I’ve always found them bewitching, but what about Aidan? Trees are his life’s work, his passion. There is nothing that lights his face more. “Do you think they’re defaced?”
“Hmm?”
“The trees. I like them, but I sometimes wonder if they should’ve been left in their natural state.”
Aidan sits on one of the trees in question. He stretches his legs out in front of him and massages his thigh. I want to do it for him, but I don’t know how, so whether he’d want me to or not seems irrelevant. “They’re not defaced,” he says after a while. “But I’d flip my shit if I saw someone doing it to a healthy tree.”
I believe him, and I don’t want to think too hard about what he means byflip my shit. Even with his bum leg, Aidan is built for scrapping. “We can go back, you know... if you’ve had enough walking.”
“Go back where?”
“My house.”
Something indecipherable flickers in his dark gaze. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to come over again.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t like people in your house, and I pounced on you when you came to mine.”
So we are talking about it. The anxiety-ridden monster in me kind of hoped we could pretend the kiss never happened and is permanently at war with the rest of me that wants to do it over and over again. “I told you already that you’re different, and I really didn’t mind when you pounced on me.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.” It pains me that he’d think so, but I can’t find the words, so I twist on the fallen tree and grab the hand that’s not rubbing his thigh. I bring his fingers to my lips and kiss them gently. “But I’m not very good at having normal relationships, so I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Normal relationships.” Aidan echoes me with a bemused expression. “The fuck even are they?”
For the second time today, I laugh without care, and it feels so good that for a moment, I can’t stop. “I don’t know,” I say when I’ve composed myself. “Does it matter?”
“Not to me. I couldn’t give a shit what’s normal, mate.”
I like it when he calls memate. It makes me think of wolves and foxes and swans and an entirely different kind of mate to what he probably means. It’s primal andso fucking normalin a way most humans don’t think anymore. “I want to kiss you again. Like, properly, you know? Without one of us leaving.”
Aidan makes a sound low in his throat. “I could get on board with that.”
