“And now?”
“Now I’m an idiot who needs to pay rent, so give me some fucking money.”
Dante kept his gaze locked with Luis’s as he slid his hand into his pocket. He came up with a thick roll of notes that made Luis’s heart leap and sink at the same time. A fraction of that sum would’ve set him for a year, but the knowledge of where it had come from made him want to die. He didn’t want Dante’s money any more than he wanted his love.
“How much do you need?” Dante asked.
Unable to speak, Luis shrugged. Dante peeled off an amount that was more than Luis would need for the next three months. He held it out. “This do you?”
Luis took the money and shoved it in his pocket. “It’ll do. Now move.”
Dante stayed put. “I’m not moving till you give me some honesty about that dude you’ve been tapping. Is he something I still got to worry about?”
“I already told you it’s done. Why are you so obsessed with him? You wanna bang him too?”
“Would you care if I did?”
Rage blazed through Luis, sharp and true, and he fought to swallow it down. Dante was as straight as he’d once thought Asa to be, but he’d fuck anyone to get what he wanted. Shame he didn’t seem to know Paolo would set himself on fire before he let Dante into his bed. Luis too, for that matter, considering their last encounter had seen Luis’s fist break a wall that didn’t belong to him.
Shame replaced the fury bubbling in his chest. He hadn’t frightened Paolo—fuck no—but he’d hurt him and tainted every moment they’d ever spent together by regressing to the stupid boy who’d followed Dante all the way to a fucking prison cell. And now here they were, about to go back in time and do it all over again.
Genius.If it hadn’t been so tragic, Luis might’ve laughed. But there was nothing funny about the leer twisting Dante’s face. It shot arrows through Luis’s armour, shattering his tenuous grip on his self-control. Anger rose again. He gripped Dante’s shirt and hurled him away from the door, far harder than he’d shoved Paolo more than a week ago, but nowhere near hard enough.
Dante stumbled, shoulder colliding with the wall. He slid to the floor, amusement and pain fighting for dominance on his smug face. “So you would care? Funny that, when you’re saying he’s sacked you off and kicked you out of his bed. Maybe I can’t trust you after all.”
“I never said you could trust me,” Luis ground out. “Get Asa to put a bullet in my head for all I care. I don’t give a fuck anymore.”
Leaving Dante on the floor, he wrenched the door open. Asa stood on the other side, face a study in apathy, but Luis remembered taking him apart well enough to see the signs that he’d heard every word. The creases beneath his ocean-blue eyes, the tick in his strong jaw. Luis had liked him once, cared about him even. But now he knew he was no better than Dante; the sight of him fed the beast Dante had awakened.
Luis barrelled into him, crowding him against the balcony railing. “What do you want, Asa? You want to bend over for me, or my brother?”
Asa easily had two stone on Luis, but he didn’t fight Luis’s hold on him. His gaze darted to the end of the corridor. “You need to get out of here, man. If Martell comes back, he’ll cut you up, no questions asked.”
“I’m not that lucky. My brother doesn’t want me dead. It would spoil his fun... you know, the kind of fun that has him send cash-hungry motherfuckers to my bed?”
Asa swallowed thickly. “It wasn’t just about that. But you know how he is, I didn’t have a choice.”
There was nothing Luis didn’t understand about that. It was his entire life wrapped up in one sentence. But Dante had bled him dry. He had nothing left for Asa. He slammed him against the railings again. “I don’t give a fuck why you suck my brother’s dick, metaphorical or otherwise, just stay the hell out of my way.”
He let Asa go and strode down the corridor until he came to the stairs. Martell stepped onto the landing. He shot Luis major side-eye. Luis ignored him and jogged down the stairs and out of the building. Let Martell chase him down and stick a knife between his ribs. Luis wouldn’t hear him coming, and he didn’t care. Heaviness dragged in his gut. His legs slowed.
Fuck, I really don’t.
With shaking hands, he pulled the cash Dante had given from his pocket and dumped it in a nearby bin, but even without it burning a hole in his pocket, it still followed him as he walked away. The fresh air of the outside world became a suffocating cloud of invisible smoke. Acrid and thick, it filled his throat, closing it off like he was breathing through a straw of an orange Capri-Sun, the only thing him and Dante had ever drunk until they’d figured out how to break into Ma’s gin cabinet.
Luis’s lungs heaved. He was a mile away from the bedsit, and his legs weren’t working.
The cafe was around the next corner. The temptation to stumble back into Paolo’s life was so strong Luis could taste it, but the memory of Dante’s leer won out. Staying away from Paolo was the only way. Perhaps one day, after—
No. Don’t you get it? You never fit with his life in the first place. He deserves better than you.Luis thought of Nonna pottering around her room at the nursing home with no clue half the time who Paolo was. Of Toni scowling at any soul who dared to come near him, saving his good humour for Paolo and Luis.Fuck, they all do.
Somehow, Luis made it home. The exterior door had been busted down a few nights before—a police raid on the ganja dude upstairs—and was still wide open. Luis ducked into the house and hurried to his own front door. The bedsit was the same spartan piece of shit it had been since he’d moved in, but without Paolo keeping him warm, the barren walls had become his only sanctuary.
He shut the door behind him and leant against it, closing his eyes. The battered wood was warm to his numb skin. Paolo’s storage-heater sorcery had worked, and the bedsit was no longer as cold as it was outside.
Neither was Luis’s heart. Or his nerves as they jangled and buzzed, alive with a fear that had nothing to do with the imminent drugs run.
He pushed off the door and drifted to the kitchen. His legs still felt weak, and his hands still shook.You need to eat. He opened the cupboard and stared, unseeing, at the handful of provisions leftover from the last time he’d shopped.When was that?Damn, he had no idea. And he wasn’t hungry. Hadn’t been since the last meal he’d shared with Paolo.
