“Who do you think?”
“Your brother?”
“Yup. Apparently he’s upset I haven’t paid him a royal visit.”
“Are you going to go?”
“Fuck, no. I hate him.”
Relief rippled through Paolo, along with a hefty dose of shame. He had no right to will Luis away from his own family. But, god, it felt good to know Luis didn’t want whatever his brother was offering. And wrong. So fucking wrong. Luis was sweet and kind and funny. He didn’t deserve to be alone in the world. “Isn’t there anyone else? From before, I mean. I know you don’t want to see your mum, but—”
“There’s no one else.”
Luis’s tone left no room for argument. The conversation was dead. Luis took the grill back and spent the rest of the day cooking pristine, delicious plates of food in absolute silence, his face a mask of bland indifference as frustration ate away at Paolo’s gut. Luis was a man of few words at the best of times, but his quiet grin often spoke for him, his gentle smile. The little things he did to make Paolo’s life a hundred times easier.
His shifts finished at three. He often hung around till after closing, helping Paolo shut down the cafe, ignoring Paolo’s reminders that he couldn’t pay him for the extra time.“I don’t care. You pay me enough already.”
As if. Luis was still wrestling with the bank to get his account unlocked, so Paolo had yet to pay him at all. He tried to make up for it by sending Luis home with dinner every night, but that hadn’t happened since the night they’d first kissed. Other things had happened instead. Things that erased Paolo’s common sense and made him want to shut the whole world out so he could take Luis home and pretend that rolling around in his bed was all that mattered.You don’t have to do that. You can take him out. Buy him a beer. Let him talk.Resolved, Paolo shut down the dishwasher and wandered out of the kitchen.
But Luis had already gone.
* * *
After hanging around the cafe later than necessary to see if Luis would come back, Paolo went home. It was Tuesday, the day his cousin visited Toni and Nonna so Paolo could have a night to himself. Sometimes he went to the supermarket or the pub to catch up with the handful of people he vaguely called friends, but with Luis on his mind, he went straight home. He took a shower and searched the cupboards and fridge for dinner. There wasn’t much, just rice, chicken, and a jar of curry sauce that had seen better days.
He left the saucepan simmering on the stove and decamped to the couch with his laptop to pay bills and catch up on admin. Luis’s wages were stacked up in a separate account, minus the cash he’d set aside to pay him to pay him at the end of the week. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t much, but to Luis, they were everything. Paolo topped them up, including a raised hourly rate for the time he’d managed the cafe alone, but even with the added cash, it didn’t seem enough. Agitated, he shut the laptop and drifted to the big window that looked out over the city. Luis was out there somewhere. Perhaps he’d gone home, but Paolo’s gut didn’t believe it. The road man drive-by had changed everything. He didn’t know how, but it had.
Unable to rest, Paolo turned the stove off, pocketed Luis’s cash, and left the flat. He walked into the wind, hood up, hiding his face in his coat. On every street corner, the kids Dante Pope used to move his drugs rolled around on their bikes, eyeing every soul that passed them.
But they ignored Paolo, and for once he was glad to be a local. He wasn’t in the mood to tell a baby-faced slinger to go fuck themselves or deal with consequences. It had been a while since the cafe’s last broken window.
Luis lived on Crawley Road in the bedsits the council had made out of the tatty terraced houses. The exact address was in Paolo’s phone so he could register Luis’s tax, but he hadn’t memorised it, and as he approached the flats, he didn’t check. Instead, he forced himself to stare at the windows, some lit, some not, and imagine Luis safe inside, cooking his own dinner, standing under a hot shower, perhaps even tucked up in bed, and maybe he wasn’t alone. Maybe he was—
“What are you doing here?”
Paolo spun around. Luis stood behind him, leaning on a lamp post, his hair messy and damp. He looked tired, but not in the way of a man who’d been up all night doing anything fun. It was a different kind of weary, one that haunted a man and weighed him down. “I was taking a walk,” Paolo said.
Luis’s brow ticked up. “Round here? You’re brave.”
“Stupid, actually. I was going to drop your cash off too.”
“You’re walking these streets with a pocket of cash? Fucking-A.” Luis pushed off the lamp post. “Yeah, you are stupid. Why didn’t you just give it to me tomorrow?”
Because you left without saying goodbye, and I was worried about you.Paolo doled out his best Luis-style shrug. “Fancied a walk. And I thought you might need it. You’ve had no money since you got out.”
“Haven’t needed any. You feed me every day.”
“What about bills?”
“Not till next week. And I had enough cash from my discharge grant to top up the electric.”
“Fair enough.” Paolo fished the small roll of bills from his pocket and held it out.
Luis pushed his hand down and hissed through his teeth. “Not out here. Are you fucking nuts? One side will do you for dealing while the other will smash you up for slinging on their turf.”
Paolo rolled his eyes but let his hand drop all the same. “Whatever. You want me to take it home and give it to you tomorrow, or are you gonna invite me in?”
“You want to see my shithole of a flat?”
