She flitted from the room.
Folk finished his lunch and got up and washed his hands at the sink. He came back with two glasses of water and passed one to me.
“Thanks. Sorry, I forgot to do that bit.”
“Seth, stop apologising.”
“Why do you call me that?”
“What? Your name?”
“Before you came here, only Lauren ever did, and she never says it like you do.”
Folk drank his water, eyeing me over the rim of the glass. “It’s who you are to me. I try to call you Decoy in my head, and it’s fine when we’re around other people, but when it’s just us... I don’t know. It just happens. Like other things.”
Like us kissing on the doorstep and in the bin yard outside the bar. I pushed my plate away. “I like it when you say it, in case I’m making you think the opposite. It just surprises me that I do. I haven’t been Seth since I left school.”
“Did you go straight in the army?”
“Yup.”
“Sixteen?”
“How can you tell?”
Folk drank more water, then set his glass down. “You remind me of the boys I knew who were in that young.”
Probably because we all had the same story. No one else wanted us. “What about you?”
“Eighteen. My parents made me do A-levels first, in case I changed my mind.”
“Why did you leave?” Tension rattled Folk’s easy posture. I reached for him without thinking, closing my fingers around his forearm. “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Nah, it’s okay.” Folk traced a finger over my knuckles. “I just forget sometimes how something can snowball so fast that you wind up here. You know when life drags, then you wake up and wonder where the time has gone?”
“Every day.”
Folk breathed a slow breath, still running his fingertips over my hand. “I got out six months after I met you. Medical discharge.”
“Injury?”
“Illness. I found a lump when I was on the ground in Syria. Took a while to get it looked at, but by the time I got to a medical centre, I already knew what it was.”
Dread squeezed my heart. That Folk was healthy and whole in front of me didn’t seem to mean much when I knew he hadn’t been. “It was cancer?”
Folk nodded. “Testicular. I was lucky—it was a non-aggressive kind. But it was stage two by the time I got to it, and the treatment was pretty harsh—surgery, chemo, radiation. I was a mess by the time it was done with me. There’s no way I could’ve gone back.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m one nut short of a picnic, and I picked up a gold-star opiate addiction along the way, but I’m all right.”
Ivy breezed back into the kitchen, the TV remote in her hand. “Can we watchThe Little Mermaid?”
Dazed, I nodded and pointed at the snack cupboard. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
She opened the cupboard, glancing at me and correctly diagnosing my distraction. My kid was a good girl, but it wasn’t beyond her to sneak by me with a whole packet of Penguins when I was focused on something else.
It was Jaffa Cakes this time.
