It was a lot to think about, and with Folk steady and quiet beside me, I felt strong enough to let it happen.
It helped that he slid his hand down my forearm and laced our fingers together. I’d never held hands with a man before. Never seen it until it had become a habit of Saint’s to take Alexei’s when the storm clouds over the club got too dark, even for them. These days it was a lighter gesture, but I still found myself watching it happen, wondering how it felt.
Now I knew and it was hard to think beyond Folk’s warm palm pressed against mine. His strong fingers. The steady beat of the pulse point in his wrist.
“You don’t have to make a decision.” He brushed his thumb over my knuckles. Once. Twice. “That’s not why I came. I just needed you to know that it could—that it can, if that’s what you need, and that we can come back to the rest of it afterwards... if that’s what youwant.”
In this moment, I didn’t know what I needed more than I needed him. But the man in me—Ivy’s dad. Cam’s brother—was stronger than the live wire he’d lit between us. It had to be. “I need to talk to my solicitor again. Tell her I might have a boyfriend and see what she says.”
“It won’t give you grief that I’m a fella, not a bird?”
“Nah.” I shook my head. “Lauren would go nuclear on any woman I brought into this mess. She doesn’t know what to do with the gay thing. It freaks her out enough that she shows her true colours. Hopefully she’ll do it in court one day.”
“Is that how you identify these days? Gay?”
Now there was a question. The people I spent the most time with didn’t care much for labels, but given my lack of attraction to Orla and Juana, two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, maybe the time had come for me to own mine. “I think so. I don’t have a lot of experience with any gender, but after you... it’s always been dudes.”
Folk nudged me with his shoulder. “A lot of dudes?”
“What do you think?”
“Lots of things that I shouldn’t. Mainly that I should probably leave now I’ve said what I came to say.”
He didn’t move, though. And still gripping his hand, I was glad of it. “I don’t know where I’m going to land on this. On any of it.”
“Does that scare you?”
“Chaos doesn’t suit me. I’m a planner.”
A slow smile warmed Folk’s face, lighting up his features one by one.
I nudged him back. “What?”
“I’m wondering what you hadplannedwhen I saw you at that bar all those years ago. You never got round to telling me.”
“Pretty sure you never asked.”
“Are you?”
“No. It’s not the conversation that sticks in my mind.”
Folk hummed a low laugh. “Me neither. Never thought this life would bring you back to me, though. It gets me thinking about fate. Then I remember what happens to dreamers and I have to stop.”
“Stop what? Thinking?”
“Dreaming.” Folk squeezed my fingers, then released my hand, rising to his feet in one fluid movement. “When I look deep enough, I know it saved me, but most days I’m not in the mood to accept the things I want most are already dead.”
I didn’t need his eyes on me to know he wasn’t talking about us anymore. About him and me. But I felt his words like a kick to the gut. Because he was right in that context too. We’d been different people when we’d spent those precious moments together in Paphos, and we’d never be those men ever again.
Folk hopped off the porch. His boots hit the grass and the soundless impact tugged me to my feet.
“Wait.”
Folk waited. Then he came back to me, pausing at the foot of the porch, face tilted up to me, streetlamps and moonlight casting light and shade across his features. Beneath the light scruff on his jaw he had cheekbones that could cut glass. Full lips. Was it weird that I thought his ears were some kind of perfect?
Probably. I liked his hands too. The scuffs and scrapes. His capable fingers.
I stepped down to meet him, coming to a stop a level above him, towering almost, but it didn’t feel that way. Folk was never the biggest man in the room, but he had the kind of presence that didn’t need to be, even now.
