“Stop swearing. You’re freaking me out.”
“Sorry.”
I shake my head. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean then?”
“That it doesn’t seem like my perception of you when you speak in a way I’m not used to.”
Ludo snorts. “That sentence doesn’t sound likeyou.”
He has a point, but being around him has broadened my vocabulary. What can I say? Wordsmith, innit? “Whatever. I need to get that rosemary in the ground before it dries out. Are we cool?”
“Aidan, I’ve never been cool.”
I don’t agree with that either, but I bite my tongue as I tug him to his feet and follow him downstairs. Talking isn’t my bag at the best of times, and I’ve said enough for one day.
Later, I wash our dinner pots and pans and put them away. Then I rinse the plates and stack them in the dishwasher. Ludo, pissed off because I won’t let him wait on me, has disappeared.
It takes me a while to find him, mainly because my knee, sore from a day in the garden, can’t handle the stairs at a pace faster than a slow death.
I ease myself onto the landing and glance around. His bedroom door is closed and he’s not in the bathroom, so I poke my head round the door to the spare room. It’s small, just big enough for a two-seater couch and some shelves and, unlike the rest of the house, is plainly decorated. Ludo is curled up with a book clutched to his chest, completely and wonderfully asleep.
The sight of him takes my breath away. I’ve watched him sleep a dozen times, but it was different in the hospital. That place was a hellhole. Here, while I know he has good food in his belly and no surgeon’s stitches holding him together, a quiet peace steals over me.
He’s resting, and he’s beautiful.
Ignoring the searing protest in my knee, I kneel and push silky dark hair back from Ludo’s face for no other reason than I want to. My lips burn with the desire to kiss him goodbye, but I swallow it and squeeze his hand instead.
He doesn’t stir. I find a scrap of paper and a pencil. My handwriting is shite, but I persevere and scrawl him a note. Then, with a yearning in my heart that fucking drowns me, I lock his house up and leave him.
Seventeen
Ludo
“What if I become dependent on him? What if I already am?”
Rita watches me as I pace her office. There are no biscuits on her desk this time, no cake wrapped in paper for me. Because this isn’t my regular appointment. This is me invading her day and disrupting her hard-earned lunch break. “Being friends with someone doesn’t make you dependent on them.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No, Ludo, it really doesn’t. I have lots of friends I miss when they’re not around. It just means I love them.”
I stop pacing and wheel around. “I don’t love Aidan.”
“I never said you did. I’m talking about how I feel about my friends and how it’s probably not that different to how you feel about yours.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Aidan is your friend. You do nice things for each other, and you enjoy spending time together.”
Aidan is my friend. Aidan is my friend. Aidan is my friend.
But even as I repeat it over and over, it doesn’t feel right. Nothing has, ever since I woke up to a dark spare room, screaming into an empty house because Aidan left.
You had a bad dream, like you always do in that room. It had nothing to do with the fact that Aidan did what any normal person would do when their host fell asleep—he went home.
My long-maligned rational side knows this. How can I not when Aidantexted me to tell me? But the anxiety I woke with has dug its claws in, and now real, deep-rooted, and yet totally unfounded fear is threatening the first new friendship I’ve made in this godforsaken town.
