“I’ve got it. Why?”
Rupert handed it over. Jodi took it and pressed a few buttons. “Because I’m setting the timer. An hour, he said. I’m not staying a bloody minute longer.”
“You have to stay until they’re sure you’re all right,” Sophie said. “Don’t be a dick.”
Jodi rolled his eyes, then rubbed his head. “I’m not being a dick. I just want to go home. This place is bad for Rupert. Look at him. He’s aged a hundred years in the last ten minutes.”
“Hey!” Rupert glared. “Don’t take the piss out of me. We thought you’d had a fucking stroke.”
“Well, I didn’t. I know it’s shit, Rupe, but this is what my life is like now. We can’t change that, but we don’t have to let it define us. I don’t want to spend every day waiting to die. I just want to go home ... with you and look at the photo album I found in the office. Can we do that? Please?”
How could Rupert refuse? Since the accident, pessimism had become his baseline, invading his soul like the old Jodi had never chased it away all those years ago, but this new Jodi—fuck, thiswasJodi, and Rupert loved him as much as he always had. Perhaps more.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, the future looked as bright as it had ever been.
Twenty-One
“I’m okay, Rupe, honestly. You don’t have to follow me around.” Jodi wrapped a towel around his waist and left the bathroom with Rupert trailing behind him.
“I’m not following you around.”
“No? So why sit on the bog the whole time I’m in the shower, then?”
Rupert shrugged. “Because you’re naked?”
“Nice try.” Jodi turned away and tried to maintain his irritation as he flipped through his stack of colour-sorted T-shirts. Despite the hospital’s assurances that his brief stay with them had been nothing more than a blip, Rupert had been his shadow ever since they’d come home. “I’m fine. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”
“I know.”
And so it went on. It was two p.m. when Jodi finally ran out of patience. He went out into the hall and found Rupert’s shoes, then took them back to the living room and threw them at Rupert’s chest. “I’m hungry. Let’s go.”
They left the flat. Rupert started to turn right. Jodi tugged his arm. “Let’s go this way.”
Rupert frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Rupert didn’t seem to have an answer, so they turned left, away from the Tube station and toward the open-air market. Jodi sniffed the air. “Can we get some of that falafel shit from the Israeli dude?”
“Hmm?”
“Falafel,” Jodi said. “I don’t want to sound too much like a hipster in a quinoa shop, ’cause I know you hate that shit, but I kinda feel like hummus.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lunch.” Jodi glanced at Rupert. He’d had a thing for Middle Eastern food since their Moroccan dinner, and judging by the number of spicy flatbreads Rupert had brought home since, he had too. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Jodi.”
Rupert’s tone stopped Jodi in his tracks. “What?”
Silence.
Jodi frowned. He hated it when people did this—left big gaps in conversations and expected him to catch up. When would they learn? He wasn’t asking for an easy life, only for people to just tell him when he missed something really fucking important. “Rupe, please. I’m not going to guess, because I don’t know how.”
Rupert closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, his gaze was so tortured that Jodi’s heart skipped a beat. “I never walk this way.”
“This way?” Jodi glanced around. “What do you mean ‘this way’?”
