It was the first time he’d spoken. His voice was raspy, but present, and relief flowed through Shay. Last night, when he’d been talking about the… accident, he’d sounded so distant Shay had irrationally wanted to shake him. As though Ollie detaching himself from something so horrific was somehow unreasonable. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.” Ollie moved deftly to draw blood from Shay’s finger and feed it onto the test strip. “But I reckon you must get fed up with it.”
“Not as much as when I was growing up. I used to drive my ma mad back then. My fourteen-year-old self would rather have risked a hypo than stop what I was doing for this rubbish.”
“Sounds legit.”
“I thought so. The hospital said I qualify for an insulin pump, but I haven’t got around to thinking about it properly.”
“Why not?”
“I’m busy. And lazy. And I’m not sure I want a permanent reminder of my wonky system attached to myself. At least the old-fashioned way I get a few hours where I can forget about it.”
“I never thought of it like that. Your reading is 4.1. Is that okay?”
Shay nodded. “It’ll do. I should probably eat soon, though.”
“Soon?”
“Yeah. As in I’m not getting out of bed until I absolutely have to.”
Ollie grinned faintly. “Sounds good to me.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, Shay. It does.”
* * *
“You’re staring,”Jumbo said.
“Am not.”
“You bloody are. Everything okay?”
Shay tore his gaze from where Ollie was preparing to set off in the van for the next tour stop in Sunderland. He looked considerably more cheerful about it than he had any other leg of the journey, and now Shay knew why, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I’m fine.”
“I didn’t mean just you, mate.”
Shay rolled his eyes. Jumbo, still buoyed by guilt over fucking the roadie situation and being a general pain in the arse, had been glued to his side since Ollie had left the bus. “What did you mean, then?”
“Nothing specific. I saw Ollie rolling out of your bed for the second day straight this morning, and now you’re being all emo and shit, so….”
Shay scowled. He’d spent the last few weeks accusing himself of the same thing, but he wasn’t about to take it from Jumbo, even if the big man did seem to have his hooligan heart in the right place. “Forget what I told you the other day, okay? I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you want a hug?”
“Piss off.”
Jumbo grinned and shuffled away, and Shay continued to study Ollie. It was lunchtime, and after a hectic schedule the previous day, the entire bus had spent most of the morning in bed. Shay and Ollie had holed up behind the curtain, watching the news play on a loop while they held hands, gazed at each other, and hardly spoke. It had been perfect but, as ever, had left Shay pondering what the hell would happen next. Was Ollie going to slide so easily into Shay’s bed every evening? Last night he’d swapped his jeans for sweatpants, and there’d been no repeat ofthatblow job, but nothing else had been different. They’d still held each other like lovers all night long.
Ollie glanced up. He wouldn’t be able to see Shay through the blacked-out bus windows, but Shay felt his gaze on him all the same, and sat down so he couldn’t see Ollie either. Somewhere on his bed, his phone rang. Shay searched half-heartedly for it and found it beneath his pillow as the call rang out.
Dammit.He’d been meaning to have a proper conversation with his dad for days, and right now, with a thirty-minute trip to Sunderland to kill, he had time to speak for longer than the usual three-and-a-half minutes.
He called his father back. “Hey.”
“All right, lad?”
