Chapter Nine
Gus
Billy made thick lentil soup spiked with curry powder, and served it with buttered white bread. Then he fell asleep on the couch, apparently exhausted by creating something so simple and amazing.
With a protesting heart, I left him downstairs, because the alternative was throwing him over my shoulder and carrying him back to my bed, and he already likely thought I was off my rocker.
Somehow I slept, and I woke in the morning to find him standing over my bed, face twisted in a fiery scowl.
“I want to know something,”
I sat up, squinting in the dim light of the dawn. Billy leant closer—close enough for me to kiss him in a world away from this convoluted mess. “What do you want to know?”
“Who looked after you?”
“What?”
“When you had your surgery. Who looked after you?”
“No one.”
“Why not? I know Mia wasn’t here, but Luke was. Why didn’t he take care of you?”
“I didn’t need him to.”
“You mean you wouldn’t let him.”
“What?”
“Thought so.”
Billy turned on his heel and stomped out of my room. Bemused, I flopped back on pillows my imagination told me still smelt of him. Did that really just happen? Or had my Billy-fuelled dreams seeped into my consciousness? Because, damn, had I dreamt of him. Benignly for the most part, but there’d been sequences hot enough that I was glad I’d woken up half on my stomach.
When my morning wood had subsided, I hauled myself out of bed and searched out Billy.
He was in the shower, naturally, so I trudged downstairs in search of caffeine and found Luke sitting at my breakfast bar looking so like Billy that my sleepy self did a double take. “What are you doing in my house at six a.m.?”
Luke eyed me over the rim of a cardboard coffee cup. “Same reason I’m ever in your house at six a.m.”
“You’re coming to work?”
“Course I am. It’s been nearly a month. Did you think you’d got rid of me for good?”
Billy had me so wrapped up I hadn’t given Luke’s extended break much thought at all. “Um. No. Just not sure we need you with what we’ve got on this week.”
“Why don’tyoutake the day off then?”
“Because I have nothing better to do and I need the money.”
“Since when? You hoard money under the mattress just like your mother did.”
I gave him the finger and helped myself to the paper bag of pastries he’d dumped on the counter. It was true that I was frugal with whatever I didn’t spend on eating, but what was wrong with that? My mum had rebuilt her dilapidated house with her own bare hands and paid her mortgage off ten years early on the wage of a teaching assistant. So what if she’d kept shoeboxes of cash in the attic? “Tell me why you’re really here? Are you bored?”
Luke smiled as much as he ever did when my sister wasn’t around. “A little. Mia’s got a busy week in the shop and I’m too annoying to help her out, apparently, so you get me instead.”
“You sure that’s a good idea? What about Billy?”
“What about him? You think we can’t work together?”
