“You’re far less trouble than you think.”
“Amen.” Tanner goes back to the stove and relights the flame. “Why don’t you trial it with Joss, okay? Day at a time.”
I’m beginning to think I need that phrase tattooed somewhere I can see it. Like my dick.Or your hand, jackass. Unless you plan on jerking off every ten minutes.Tempting, but…no. It’s been months since I had a sexual thought about myself. That part of me feels dead, and I’m okay with it. Can’t think of a single reason a girl would want to date me right now, and trying too hard zones me out while Tanner and Jax discuss my new roommate over my head.
I come back in time to learn his name is Joss—which I kinda knew already—and that he’s British as fuck, like Jax. “Is he a surfer too?”
“Nah, that’s how I met him, though. Crazy bastard used to cook at a clifftop burger shack in Fistral Bay. Nothing but an oil drum and a spatula to his name. It was just one summer, but, fuck, we ate well.”
Jax slaps his ripped stomach. His T-shirt rides up, revealing a sliver of the scars he bears from a legit shark attack. The kind of scars that put everything in perspective. Jax and Tanner. Tanner and Jax. They both went to hell and back before they found each other.
If they can survive it, maybe I can too.
2
JOSS
“It’s like Newquay. You’ll love it.”
Jax was bladdered when he told me that, but dickhead that I am, I believed him. It’s not until I’m taking a cab from the airport to downtown Burlington that I realize he’s full of shit. In a good way, cos as far as I can see, Vermont pisses all over the Albany Road bedsit I left behind when I was twenty-one.
Man, this place is pretty. Green grass, blue skies, quirky buildings once we leave the countryside behind. It’s like Stoke Newington on ’roids, which sounds like a bad thing, but it ain’t.
The street I’m gonna be living and working on is pedestrianized. The cab drops me in a car park and the driver points to an alleyway. “Hang a left and you’ll see V&V straight ahead.”
V&V.
Vino and Veritas.
The bookshop-slash-hipster wine bar that’s in such desperate need of a chef they’ve bet all their chips on me.It’s fries, dickhead. Get your head in the game.
I pay the driver and shoulder the bag I stuffed all my worldly belongings into when I left Hackney yesterday. One toothbrush, two cargo shorts, three T-shirts, and a pair of sweatpants older than the sun. A jar of Branston and my favorite whites. Next-level packing, mate.I’m a professional, don’t you know?
Nope. Not even close. I forgot my knives and I’m walking into a job where I haven’t even seen the kitchen and I couldn’t give less of a fuck. Call me rootless if you want, I go where the wind takes me.
Or my battered boots.
The cab driver was bang on. I follow his directions and find myself outside V&V. With its dark decor and subtle rainbow flags, it’s everything I expect it to be, and I relate. Kinda. Cos, you know, wherever I am, my brain still works too fast for me to have a fucking clue where it will land.
This time, as it happens, it lands on a tall dude leaning against a wall, texting on his phone, tattooed guns a dream in the midday sun.
Tanner.
I’ve never met the bloke, but I paid enough attention to the wedding picture Jax chucked on Instagram last week to know that this is his new husbandandmy new boss.
Also, he’s hot.Go Jax.My old friend deserves some happy, and he’s on my mind as I approach Tanner and find myself appraising more than his looks. I shouldn’t—Jax is a big boy, he can make his own mistakes—but I love him to death, so I do it anyway.
I stop in front of Tanner, and he glances up at just the right moment.
He has eyes as dark as the ink on his skin.
Nice.
And a smile that’s as forced as it is genuine.
Weird.
“Joss?”
