“A message, I think. I didn’t look.”
“Did it beep?”
“Just a vibration.”
Then I didn’t care. If it wasn’t Jekka or my brother, everyone else could wait.
Alexeicould wait. I’d heard his voice enough over the last few days. “Can I ask you something?”
Decoy nodded, waiting.
“After Paphos. Were there other dudes?”
“Are you asking if anyone else ever fucked me?”
“I suppose so.” Maybe. We’d had some semblance of this conversation before, but his answer had been vague enough that my sex-melted brain had forgotten it. “You don’t have to tell me. I just... I don’t know. I feel so close to you, but there’s so much I don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Like... where you grew up. Your family—I don’t even know if you have siblings.”
“I don’t.”
“No?”
Decoy slowly shook his head. “I don’t have anyone. When I was a few months old, someone left me in a flat in Croydon. They never came back, and the police picked me up when the neighbours heard me crying.”
My heart had been broken before, by Rocco, his wife, his mum. By the friends I’d left in pieces on other continents. I thought I knew that pain, but the flare in my chest now was something else. Something barbed and suffocating. “And you never had a foster family?”
“Not one that stuck. I came up in group homes before I enlisted when I was sixteen.”
It made no sense to me. Jekka and my dad were offered babies and toddlers to care for all the time. Every month. Everyweek. And they always struggled to give them back. How had Decoy fallen through the cracks?
Sensing my bewilderment, a humourless chuckle escaped him. “I wasn’t the friendliest kid. And as you get older, no one gives a fuck anyway.”
He said it like it was normal. To be thrown away and forgotten. But I still didn’t get it. Decoy was a grown man now, but the earnest good in him wasn’t something he’d learned as an adult. It had always been there. Why hadn’t anyone cared?
Because the world is a shit pit, bro.
Rocco’s voice was so loud in my head that I flinched.
Decoy frowned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to kill the mood.”
“It’s not you.” I reached for him, tugging him a little closer. “Sex makes me emotional. And I’m tired. It’s not the best version of me.”
“I like this version of you.” Decoy tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. It was the most he’d moved since I’d wiped come off his belly and he’d rolled over to face me. “And in answer to your other question, there was one dude I got this far with. Once.”
“He fucked you?”
Decoy shrugged, expression shuttering, and aggression flared in me before I could check it.
“He hurt you?”
Decoy sighed. “Maybe. It was a long time ago. I can’t really remember. I was pretty drunk and messed up. And I don’t think I cared what he did to me. Just that I didn’t want to do it again until you.”
Whoever it was, I wanted to maim them. But the rage was brief. A flash of fury that faded as fast as it arrived. The past was the past. Decoy was with menow.“I thought about you the first time I slept with someone after we met. It made me lose the habit of fucking people I didn’t care about, and I didn’t have many of those.”
“I wondered if you’d found your person. You always seemed like a mate-for-life kind of dude, even back then.”
