I turn to face him. “Why?”
Tam gives me the same frown he’s been giving me for days now. Like there’s something he wants to say, but he doesn’t quite know what. “It was a great life while I was living it, but it’s killed and hurt people I care about. And it took me away from Sab too much. I might’ve caught him before he fell so far if I’d been around more.”
“Bet he doesn’t see it like that.”
“He doesn’t.”
Tam’s hands twitch, as if he’s thinking about reaching for mine. At least that’s what my brain imagines, and then lights on fire. Tam’s super tactile with everyone. The more time I spend with him, the more I see it. He gave the postman a hug yesterday.
You’re not special.
It’s just sex.
Friends, remember?
I step away and move to the boxes Tam’s stacked on the coffee table while Rudy tries to attack them from the floor. Decorations I persuaded him to let me retrieve from the attic for him after we fucked in the annex before first light this morning. “La Rochelle.” I read the heart-shaped ornament. “Is that where your family’s from?”
“No, it’s where we used to go on holiday. My dad’s family are Parisian.”
It takes me a second to compute what that means. “Paris?”
Tam nods and reaches over my shoulder to take the ornament. “My mum’s lot are Scottish, but she speaks better French than any of us.”
He kisses the back of my neck, grabs another bauble, anddrifts back to the tree as if a full-body shiver didn’t just wipe my brain clean of all thought. But Iknowhe knows. Because I told him a few nights ago, when I was buried deep inside him, that his touch casts a spell on me. What can I say? Bomb sex makes me chatty. But I regret it. Opening my big mouth, not the sex. Spilling my feelings means acknowledging them, and I’m not ready to admit that fucking Tam was a wonderful and terrible mistake.
It’s just sex.
Right.
“Bhodi.”
“Hmm?”
“Come here.” Tam holds out his hand—the casted one, the fibreglass dented and dinged. He doesn’t look at me, because he knows I’ll come. That I can’t resist his addictive affection. He doesn’t know how scared I’m becoming of the day when it’s gone.
It’s just sex.
I go to him and wrap my arms around him from behind, as if that gives me more control. And maybe that’s how I’ve settled in to fucking him so easily. Because it’s easier to believe he wants me for more when he hooks his legs around my waist and begs me to stay inside him. As he slides a casual hand over my hipnowand shows me a handwritten decoration made of cardboard and clay.
It’s cute. “Did you make this when you were little?”
“I was eighteen and drunk. See how bad my writing used to be?”
“When you weredrunk.”
“It was like that when I was sober too.”
I bite my lip as he leans against me, his back to my chest,every contact point sparking a heat in my blood that should be sated already, but isn’t, and it’s starting to feel like it won’t ever be. That I could fuck Tam ten times a day and it will never be enough. “How did you get into art therapy?”
Tam takes a breath and slowly lets it out. Not quite a sigh, but close. “I had a lot of anxiety after the crash. I kept hearing all the alarms going off when my heart wasn’t beating right, feeling those hands on my chest, people shouting at me to live. And I didn’t have the road to escape to anymore when I could barely fucking walk.”
“How long did it take to work?”
“It was a few months before I woke up without being catapulted into my day by a panic attack. Then a year went by and I was still doing it, and now it’s as much a part of me as riding my hog ever was.”
“And at least it’s something you enjoy. I hate running.”
Tam straightens. “You run when you’re anxious?”
