Dante shook his head. “Don’t. Leave me here and I’ll get help quicker. Go, Luis. Now.Run.”
Luis backed up and staggered to his feet. Blue lights were already visible through the escape door the others had left open, narrowing his options to the front or the fire door on the side, if he could even find it.
With one last look at Dante, he turned and fled into the dark club, chasing an instinct that led him past a defunct bar and into what looked like a storeroom. He tripped over an empty box. In the gloom, he threw out a hand, and it hit the cool metal bar of a fire door.This is it.Luis listened hard for the sound of footsteps behind him, but even with adrenaline-sharp senses, he heard nothing but the roar of his own heart.
Fuck it.
He pushed the bar down.
The door opened with a whiny screech that reached even Luis’s ears. He cringed, bracing himself, and squinted into the daylight. The door had opened onto the bustling pavement. He stuck his head out, glanced swiftly in both directions, then melted into the crowd, head down, hood up. He followed the flow, jaw clenched, gaze darting, steeling himself for a heavy hand on his shoulder. To be tackled to the ground and cuffed.
But it didn’t happen. He walked and walked and walked until he found himself alone in a city that wasn’t his home without a clue what to do next.
21
Luis had been gone,again, for less than a day by the time Paolo lost his shit and went looking for him. The recurring theme of him banging on unanswered doors with no fucking clue was driving him up the wall, but somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Maybe if they hadn’t fucked, it would’ve been easier. But they had fucked, and it had been the final puzzle piece that now tied Paolo’s soul so entirely to a man who came with a camel’s back of baggage.
He had no regrets, though. Just a razor-sharp fear that wouldn’t fade until he knew for sure that Luis was okay.
There was no answer at the bedsit. Paolo wandered the nearby streets for an hour, hoping that Luis would appear, as he so often did, around the next corner, but eventually, he gave up and returned to the bedsit to wait.
The exterior door was still broken. Paolo slipped into the old house and felt his way back to Luis’s door. He knocked again for good measure, but there was still no reply.
Luis’s front door was made from the cheapest wood and secured by a lock that looked like it had come from the Argos catalogue. Paolo was no gangster, but he knew the credit card trick as well as any face from the neighbourhood. He slid his maxed out Mastercard between the doorframe and the lock and forced the lock back into the door with a quiet click. The door swung open a half inch. Paolo pushed it the rest of the way and quickly flicked the lights. “Anyone home?”
No reply came, but with Luis’s damaged hearing, silence didn’t mean much. Paolo shut the door behind him and listened for signs of life. There were none. He ventured further inside and found the bedsit as empty as Luis’s fridge.
Defeated, Paolo sank down onto Luis’s meticulously made bed, then jumped back up and turned the lights off to preserve Luis’s electric tokens. Darkness swamped him, in more ways than one, and he shivered against the draughty chill of the bedsit.Jesus. How does he live here?
It was a rhetorical question, but the answer came to Paolo all the same.Because he has to. Without Toni and Nonna, where would you be?
Paolo wrapped his arms around himself, tipped his head back against the wall, and chased the bliss he’d found with Luis less than twenty-four hours before, when he’d been buried deep inside him and Luis had whispered sweet, desperate pleas in his ear. Paolo had never fucked anyone like that. Had never been so consumed by pleasure and emotion that, when it was over, he could barely remember the details, only how it had felt. How itstillfelt. His body thrummed with too many feelings to catch, but most of all, it was awe and wonder. Luis was so fucking beautiful he made Paolo’s soul ache.I miss him.
He closed his eyes.
Somehow, he dozed off, not entirely asleep, but not conscious either.
The squeak of the front door roused him sometime later. Dazed, Paolo lurched off the bed and staggered to the hallway just as Luis stumbled inside. Paolo’s eyes were already adjusted to the darkness. He edged forwards, arms outstretched. “Luis?”
Luis jumped. His head jerked up like a puppet and his tortured gaze dragged in the shadows until it landed on Paolo. He blinked hard, started forwards, then stopped and shook his head hard enough to give himself a seizure.
Alarmed, Paolo closed the distance between them and pulled Luis fully into the flat, letting the door slam shut behind him. “Jesus. What’s the matter?”
Luis stared, intense and yet somehow distant. His eyes darted between Paolo’s face, and his hands gripping Luis’s wrists. “You’re not here. You can’t be here.”
“Of course I’m here. I was worried about you.”
“No. You can’t be. You were never real.”
“I was,” Paolo whispered. “Iam. I promise.”
Luis took a breath as if to speak, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back, and despite Paolo’s hold on him, he fell to the floor.
* * *
Paolo had always hated the sight of blood. Childhood nosebleeds had often sent him to the deck, and when it happened, Toni had always carried him to bed and left him to wake up on his own. Nonna? Not so much. Paolo couldn’t count the number of times she’d panicked and chucked cold water in his face.
He’d never understood it. Not until now as he held Luis in his arms and willed him to wake up. “Come on, come on.” He pushed Luis’s wet hair back from his face. “Come on.”
