Ten minutes later, he presentedme with a bowl of perfect egg fried rice, complete with chilli sauce on the side and some bashed up prawn crackers. “You did not just cook that,” I said.
He shrugged. “I was pretty skint when I bought this place. Lived on rice and canned tuna for months, which was still better than the slop we’d been eating on the ship.”
“The ship? Were you on the same one for a long time?”
“Yeah.”Luke nudged the bowl closer to me, his expression guarded, but I was done being afraid of the huge gaps in each other’s lives. He’d been a sailor for nine years and I wanted to learn every moment he was prepared to share with me.
I snagged a prawn cracker and scooped up a mouthful of spicy rice. It tasted as good as it looked, and I crammed in another mouthful before I gave voice to one ofthe million questions burning my brain. “What kind of ship were you on? Was it big?”
Luke wiped something from the corner of my mouth with his thumb. “That’s what you wanna know?”
I shrugged. “Right now? Yeah. I don’t know anything about navy ships, or any ships, actually, that aren’t a P&O ferry.”
“It felt like a ferry at first—you know, the lower deck parts that smell of metal andcar fumes—but trust me, it’s nothing like going on holiday.”
“You never went on holiday.”
He laughed. “True, but living on a destroyer was nothing like how I imagined a holiday to be.”
He’d answered my question, but I was none the wiser. A destroyer? Damn. It sounded like death.
I ate more rice and pondered my next question. “So whatwasit like? Were there lots of people on board?”
“A few hundred,” he said, finally helping himself to some of our shared feast. “But I spent most of my time with my gang on deck, or in my cabin. The only other place I really went was the mess hall, but I tried to spend as little time there as possible, because the smell of the crap they fed us was fucking rank.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You always had a thing about smells.”
“Goodones, usually, like your hair, but there wasn’t much of that while I was crammed in with a bunch of sweaty blokes.”
“You didn’t hook up with any hot comrades then?”
“Nah, boys don’t do it for me.”
“There weren’t any girls around at all?”
“What are you actually asking me?”
I had no clue, but now we were on the subject, the dog in me wouldn’t quit. I devoured a last mouthfulof rice and shoved the bowl at him to finish. “I guess I’m asking you if you ever had a girlfriend, not that it’s any of my business.”
“It’s not my business that you married some French twat, but I’m still glad you told me.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Not really. I want to kill him.”
“Why?”
Luke shrugged. “He hurt you.”
So did you. I cleared my throat. “Noted. So tell me about thegirls.”
He shook his head and ate the last of his magic rice. “What do you want to know? Who? Where? How many?”
All of it.
A ghost of a smirk crossed Luke’s face, as though he was privy to my every thought. “There weren’t many, and no one at all for the first few years. I was too busy and fucked up about my dad. Work helped, you know? I didn’t really look up until two years in.”
“Then what?”
