It’s an awkward way to end a conversation, but the firefighter has other places to be, and so do I. He shrugs again and walks off. I continue to the break room and finally lay eyes on my phone.
I’m prepared for a blank screen. For that wall of silence.
But Tam’s right there waiting for me.
Tam: you were everything I needed too
Tam: if it’s a one-time thing for you, that’s cool. nothing will ever be awkward, i promise. but...i really want to see you again xx
My heart skips. Tam doesn’t look like the kind of man who punctuates texts with kisses, but I’m the kind of man who likes it. And as for the rest of it…I want to see him again too, and maybe that dream of a fire and his warm arms isn’t as distant as it felt when I woke up alone this morning.
It’s just sex.
So?
Sex can be warm and comforting. It can be anything we both want it to be. And Tam…he’s my friend. We can make this work. I know we can.
I drive home with that mantra playing on a loop in my head. It’s dark already, more frost on the roads. Black ice that almost makes me think of Tam lying on a hospital bed with a faceless nurse pounding his chest. But despite the crazy day I’ve had, I feel good, and it lasts until I get home to find Tam’s van gone.
Yawning, I haul myself out of the car and shuffle past his front gate in a daze. His front door rips open and I jump out of my skin.
“Bordel de merde!” A man appears and thrusts Rudy out, brandishing him like a lion cub, turning him this way and that. “There’s no one fucking out here. Stop barking at your own farts.”
By the French cursing, I can only assume it’s Tam’s brother. And as he rotates back to the door, his dark hair and olive skin confirms it.
The knowing mischief in his gaze as it lands on me is different, though. “You’re the hot lodger.”
“Tenant,” I correct, leaning on the gate and scrubbing a hand through my hair.
“That what they’re calling it these days?”
“Calling what?”
“The daft grin you’ve put on my moody brother’s face all day.”
“Tam’s not moody.”
Sab grunts. “Give it time. You got plans tonight?”
“Uh. No.”
“Good. Come and have dinner with us.”
Sab spins and ambles into the house like it’s a done deal.
I hesitate. I know the aroma filtering from Tam’s house. It’s the meat and bean thing he cooks in a clay pot that’s as warmingas he is, and I want it in my belly as much as I want Tam. But he’s not here. And if he’d wanted to have dinner with me, he’d have said, right?
He hasn’t any other time you’ve wound up eating together.
Because he couldn’t. We hadn’t swapped numbers. But things were different now. If he wanted?—
“Come in and shut the damn door. This little rat is clawing the fuck out of me.”
Sab’s voice booms, making me jump all over again. I slip through the gate and into the house, shutting the door behind me.
I’m instantly hit by the scent of meat and garlic, and the heat of a log burner twice the size of the one in the annex, a scene I’ve walked into before. But the baby toys scattered around are new, and the Dubois brother waiting on me in the kitchen has shorter hair, broader shoulders, and a distinct lack of ink staining his fingers.
The way he moves around the kitchen is the same, though. “Who taught you to cook?”
