It feels so good to hold him like this. To watch his face as he breaks concentration and tips his head to smile at me.
This isn’t what friends do. It’s something else. I know it and I don’t want to push it away. I don’t want to run from it, and merde, I have to kiss him. So I do, and it’s deep and long, and I can barely breathe through the sweet force of it. That I’m hard—so fucking hard—for him seems secondary, and there’s so much I need to say to him right now. So much he needs to hear before real life catches up with us and he leaves my arms thinking he’s just a casual fuck to me.
You told him that’s all you ever want—from anyone, not just him.
I did say that, and I’m an idiot. But as I open my mouth to say so, Bhodi’s phone buzzes up a storm on the desk. “If that’s your boss, tell her to go jump in the canal.”
“It’s not my boss.” Bhodi licks my cheek, then wriggles out of my hold. “It’s my mum. She wanted to see the annex. I’ll be back, okay?”
He’s gone in the blink of an eye, and he doesn’t come back before it’s time for me to head out on deliveries.
I get caught in traffic.
All of it.
Then my van gets a flat tyre and I have to change it by the side of the road in the fucking rain. Wet and cold, it puts me in afoul mood and it’s late by the time I stomp home with the fury of a thousand gods in my veins. With the way the latter part of my day has panned out, I expect Bhodi’s car to be gone. Him at work or whatever.
But he’s not gone. He’s sitting on my wall with a cup of tea and an outstretched hand. “Come home with me?”
I say yes in every language I know.
Seventeen
BHODI
We fuck every night I don’t work for ten days straight. It’s not planned or even co-ordinated, it just happens. We cross paths on the driveway and barely make it inside before we’re naked and tumbling onto my bed.
I try not to think about why it’s always my bed, and when Tam’s naked beneath me, his gritted moans all I can hear, not thinking is easy. Whatever it is between us, in bed, on the rug—on the hardwood floor when we don’t make it that far—it works, and it’s so close to perfect I almost forget it’s temporary.
“…I don’t do relationships anymore. Or even hookups unless it’s with someone I know for sure doesn’t want anything else.”
Heh. On my rest day, I tag along with him to buy his Christmas tree from the farm in the next village. We go in the afternoon when it’s already getting dark, and on the way home, I notice a spinning glow at the summit of Firefly Hill. “What’s that?”
Tam has a mini roll half stuffed in his mouth. He takes a giant bite andeats it before he’s fit to answer me. “That’s the hot jewellery maker who lives up there. He’s a fire dancer too.”
“A fire dancer who lives onFirefly Hill?”
Tam grins. “Yup.”
“For real?”
“It gets worse. He’s shacked up with a real lifefirefighter too.”
“That’s almost as bad as having a star tattooed on your face and living on onStardust Lane.”
Tam scowls. Kinda.
I laugh and steal the remaining half of his cake from where it’s dropped into his lap. It’s delicious and it shouldn’t be, but I don’t care. I eat it anyway and drowse to the tinny Wham! filtering out of the van’s radio, an unpredictable contraption that’s as knackered as I am after staying up all day after a night shift. The sickly-sweet sugar and Tam’s company are a good distraction, but a frayed feeling loiters, ready to strike if I don’t go to bed—to sleep—soon.
We pull up outside Tam’s house. He goes for the tree in the back of his van, ready to hoist it inside by himself, but I’m there before he gets his hands to it, sharing the load. Tam might think I haven’t noticed that the wild sex we’ve been having has aggravated his back injury. But I have. Because I spend way too much time gazing at him, and I’m not even remotely sorry about it.
I know where the tree goes—by the motorcycle photograph I find myself transfixed by every time my gaze lands on it. “Do you miss it?”
Tam slides up behind me, not touching, just there, warm and solid. “The bike or the life?”
“All of it.”
“That’s a tough question.”
