Sam kicked a smooth rock. It skittered along the cobbled pavement until it collided with a lamppost. “It’s really fucking shitty that they disowned you when you came out. That’s some archaic fuckery.”
He always used the best words. Sometimes I tried to keep up, but my limited vocabulary always showed me up in the end. “To be fair, I think it was more about the game than the orgy thing. Playing football was the only thing I ever did that they could be proud of. Without it, I’m just the idiot that would’ve been kicked out of school if the academy hadn’t snapped me up.”
Sam grumbled under his breath. It shouldn’t have been funny, but I grinned a little anyway. I loved it when he got ragey about stuff, even if that stuff was my clusterfuck of a personal life, and the cold wind was making my limp a hundred times worse than it ever was in the city.
I spotted a café up ahead, the kind that served filthy breakfasts and builder’s tea. I grabbed Sam’s arm and pointed. “I’m hungry.”
He nodded and took my arm, guiding me around a bus stop and inside. I didn’t need his help to stay upright, but I couldn’t deny his fingers wrapped around my elbow felt almost as good as holding his hand. So I covered his hand with my own.
Surprised coloured Sam’s gaze. He glanced between our hands and my face in rapid succession while I stared resolutely ahead. I didn’t give a fuck. I might’ve been piss-poor at verbalising anything beyond a couple of curse words, but now I knew how this felt, I couldn’t give it up.
We sat at a table by a condensation-soaked window. The bloke serving the tea and frying the bacon gave us a long look as he delivered our tray, but I couldn’t decide if it was because he recognised me and/or Sam or the fact that two dudes holding hands freaked him out. And I didn’t care about that either, until I had to let go of Sam to let him eat. I watched him squeeze brown sauce into his bacon roll. “So it’s true. Northerners really do eat that crap. You have ketchup at home. Who are you putting on a show for?”
Sam licked his fingers.
He licked his fucking fingers.
“I’m not putting on a show. I guess I have different tastes depending on my environment. When I was a kid, I only ate ketchup with pie and mash when my granddad took me out. Up here, it’s brown sauce all the way. Always has been.”
“But brown sauce is disgusting.”
“It’s really not.”
“It really is.”
And just like that, our easy banter was back. Stress faded. He was Sam, I was Micah, and together we were two idiots who bumbled through life together under the same roof. ’Cept, of course, I was an actual idiot, and he was a fucking masterpiece of a human being.
We ate in comfortable silence. Under the table, his knee barely brushed the thigh of my bad leg. My scars throbbed, but for once not with the burn of simply existing, but with the excitement of his unwitting touch. It was a strange sensation, kind of like holding my breath for no reason. But I clung to it all the same.
When we were done, it was time to go back. Sam had plans to help his dad at work, and I, the interloper, had plans to do absolutely nothing. I had workout schedules for my new clients I could’ve worked on, but my brain felt too mushy. I wanted to take the reclaimed peace I’d found with Sam and savour it for a while.
We were outside his parents’ house when he trailed to a stop. I mirrored him, naturally. “What’s up?”
Sam turned to face me. We hadn’t held hands since the café; the moment had passed. Again. But he reached for both of my hands now and gripped them so tight my knuckles clicked. “I just wanted to say thanks.”
“To who?”
“To you, idiot, for this morning. For a while there, I was terrified we’d never get back to normal, you know?”
Normal. Was he kidding me? We were holding hands outside his parents’ house in a place that was a world away from our city life. Even when we eventually went home, every instinct I had told me that nothing between us would ever be the same. As if knowing how Sam felt about me had altered my DNA, and I wouldn’t be whole until I was worthy of whatever the fuck that meant.
9
Sam
I came back from my dad’s plumbing shop to find Micah asleep on the couch in the den. My mum had covered him with a blanket and was creeping around the kitchen like a serial killer.
“I didn’t want to wake him,” she said.
I rolled my eyes and flicked her radio on, tuning it to her usual community station and setting the volume just below deafening. “Don’t worry about that. He’s a light sleeper, but only when it’s too quiet.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I live with him, Ma. How do you think?”
My mum fished a jumbo tray of sausages out of the fridge. “I think there’s an odd dynamic between you two if you’re not having a bit of how’s your father when no one’s looking.”
“You think we should be doing it when peoplearelooking?”
