Sab glances up from the walnuts he’s shelling for what I’ve come to learn is Tam’s favourite salad. “Aunty Maron. She’s a big believer in child labour in the kitchen. And she’s a childhood nutritionist, so we got all the good stuff when we went to her place every summer.”
“How did Tam end up a sugar nut then?”
“Dubois boys have addict genes. He got lucky with his vice.”
No resentment colours Sab’s tone. But he opens the fridge anyway, concealing his face for a moment, leaving me to hover by the counter, one eye still on the front door.
I don’t know if I’m waiting on Tam or planning an escape,and the dilemma messes with my head. I want to be here, but what if Tam doesn’t feel the same? What if his hookup from last night is the last person he wants to see when he comes home?
“Mon pote, take your coat off.” Sab’s mixed dialect throws me. “Take your coat off,” he repeats. “Tam keeps this place like a furnace.”
I haven’t noticed, too distracted by everything Tam to pay much attention to my surroundings. But I take my coat off anyway and hang it on the hook, leaving my shoes at the door, knowing Tam will see them before he sees me—warninghim that I’m here.
“Are you always this quiet?”
“Hmm?”
Sab leans his elbows on the counter, watching me drift back into the kitchen. “My brother doesn’t make you sound like the quiet type.”
“I’m not quiet.”
“Long day?”
“Yeah. Unexpected too, I was supposed to be off.”
“I know how that goes.” Sab slides a beer in front of me. “Not sure my job is as important as yours.”
“You do something with wood, right? Like the worktops that fell on Tam?”
“That’s what happened to his wrist?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
Sab scowls. “He said he knocked it about a bit in the garage.”
“That’s true, I suppose.”
Sab rolls his eyes to the ceiling, muttering something French, and it’s so like Tam that my heart aches with longing.For my landlord. Myfriend. And the dude who sucked me dry last night before I zonked out on him.
“If it’s any consolation, I think it’s healing okay.”
“Youthink?”
“I don’t have X-ray vision, but it’s following the trajectory I’d expect for a healing fracture.”
Sab absorbs this, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “I still can’t believe you got him to go into the hospital. He wouldn’t drive by that place for years after the crash.”
“I didn’t get him to do anything. He made the decision himself.”
“Merde. You really are good for him.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but I’m saved by a squawk from the baby monitor by the stove.
Sab disappears upstairs. It leaves me alone in the ground floor of Tam’s cosy house, and I take a moment to glance around without his biblical hotness to occupy me. The wood floors and squishy couch are already seared in my memory, but I see other things now—family snaps I haven’t seen up close, pens—so manypens—and a photograph of a bike.
I wonder if it’s the one he crashed, but contemplating that takes me back to how I felt when I thought about him in ICU, and I can’t handle any more of that today.
“You’re standing where I put the Christmas tree.”
