While they’d talked, Luis’s gaze had drifted back to the ceiling. Paolo felt like gripping his chin and forcing him to look at him, but he didn’t want to be that person in Luis’s life. Fuck, in anyone’s life. “I want to know what you did.”
“When?”
“When you went to prison. Toni knows, but he won’t tell me.”
“How come you don’t know?”
“I don’t read the local papers or watch the news.”
“We literally just watched the news.”
“If you were watching the news, I need to suck your dick better.”
“I’d combust if you sucked my dick any better.”
Paolo loved how Luis talked about sex, deadpan and yet so fucking filthy. And he understood the sentiment. Luis’s wicked mouth blew his mindandhis cock. He didn’t care for the deflection, though. Was it so hard for Luis to tell him to mind his own business?
Then again, perhaps Google would’ve been easier than making Luis relive whatever had landed him a six-year stretch.
Paolo laid his head down again, assuming the conversation was over.
Luis slid his hands into Paolo’s hair and tugged him back up. “It was armed robbery in the end, and a GBH charge that should’ve been worse.”
“GBH?”
“Yeah. The CPS wanted attempted murder, but the dude we hurt shouldn’t have been there, so they couldn’t prove that we had a premeditated plan to kill him.”
“You killed someone?”
“No! God no. But we could’ve done. And that’s why I think I should’ve got the worse charge.”
“You said ‘we.’ Who else was there?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
It didn’t. Luis was all Paolo cared about, but the burning need to know everything made Paolo’s skin itch. “What happened? Weren’t you making enough money in the tower blocks?”
“Of course we were making enough. But what happens to people when they have more money than sense?”
“They don’t all nearly kill someone.”
“But they all get greedy. And they start to believe what other people say about them. You hear yourself called a king enough times, eventually, you think it’s true.”
“I can’t imagine you ever thinking like that.”
“I didn’t say it was me.”
Dante.Of course. It had to be.
As if he’d heard the penny drop in Paolo’s mind, Luis sat up, dislodging Paolo from his chest. He swung his legs out of bed and stood, then sat down again, for once, wearing his emotions like Paolo did. “It was fucking stupid, and I told him it was never going to work. That we weren’t cut out to be hustlers like that, but he didn’t listen. He’d got cosy with some crew in Liverpool, and they’d made him feel like a big man. It didn’t matter what I said. It was happening.”
“Who did you rob?”
“Attempt to rob. We fucked it up, remember?”
Paolo’s hand hovered over Luis’s rigid shoulders, but he bottled it and let it drop. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know. You’ve said that already, but... I want to. I want you to know who’s visiting your grandparents and sharing your bed at night.”
