I ignore it.
A little while later, comes a quiet knock at my door, and I know it’s Tam. It can’t be anyone else, and I ache for him something rotten.
But I ignore that too and sit alone in the dark until the sky turns from black to pearl grey with one question on my mind. How the hell did I let this happen to me again?
Eighteen
TAM
Knowing Bhodi’s upset cuts deeper than any injury I’ve ever endured. I’ll break my back a thousand times for him. I’ll carve out my liver and offer it to God before I’ll let anything hurt him.
You hurt him.
Did I? I go over and over it in my work-addled brain and I can’t figure it out. All I know is everything was great. Then it wasn’t—itisn’t—and, fuck me, I miss him.
Simmer down, son. It’s been twelve hours.
Twelve hours since Bhodi left my house and didn’t come back. Since he blanked my text and didn’t answer the door. And now I’m standing at my desk, staring at his closed blinds, and losing my fucking mind.
I need to sleep. Not just because I have a mountain of work to do and I can’t see straight, but because I have to drive to Manchester tonight and help Sab move out of his housewithout punching Charmaine’s new boyfriend—a tall ask, whether I’ve slept or not.
And I can’t fucking sleep. Ican’t. Not without seeing Bhodi, and honestly, it scares me. I haven’t been so locked-in to someone in years. If ever. I loved Grey, and he hurt me. But I never felt like this about him. Never felt as though a piece of me would die if he wasn’t okay.
I glide my pen across the piece I’m working on, unseeing, uncaring. I make an unholy mess and have to scrap it, and it joins the pile of crumpled card at my feet.
Merde.
I crouch to gather them up and a wave of fatigue batters the shit out of me. I’m not as tough as Bhodi. I can pull an all-nighter with the best of them, but not without a daylight nanna nap, and I’m reaching my limit of endurance.
Work has to wait.
I step away from my desk and tramp downstairs with every intention of knocking on Bhodi’s door first. But I sit on the couch for a minute and wake up three hours later to find Bhodi’s gone.
Harassing him with texts feels wrong while the one I sent last night sits unread. So I take Sab’s awful plastic Christmas tree and leave it on the annex porch. Then I drive to Manchester for the night, and in the morning, I boot Roidy Dwaine into a muddy puddle at the side of the road.
It’s not my finest hour, but at least Sab didn’t do it.
That’s what I tell myself hours later when I’m finally on my way home to retrieve Rudy from the neighbour he stays with on the rare occasions I’m not home. I don’t look at my phone. I drive with my mind whirring a hundred miles an hour, and bythe time I trudge into my house with Rudy tucked under my arm, I’m at my limit for that too.
Bhodi’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a hell of a long time. If he’s upset, I have to fix it. And I’m going to.
Unfortunately for me and my hard-won positive attitude, his car is still gone and I wish I’d stopped Sab flushing my last pack of cigarettes down the bog.
I wish I’d learned my lesson too about falling asleep on the couch. I lose another few hours to it and when I wake up, the tree I left on Bhodi’s doorstep is no longer there, but there’s no sign of his car. As if he’s been and gone while I slept, and fuckinghellwhy is everything so hard? Why can’t I just love someone and that be it?
I’m pacing my kitchen as that thought completes and I come to an abrupt stop, my brain lit up again with the two things that’ve been my constant companions for weeks now.
Bhodi andlove.
It should be a revelation, but it isn’t. Because I already know I love Bhodi, I’ve just never spelled it out to myself in literal terms. And I’ve never toldhim, and that’s the fucking epiphany.
I love Bhodi and he doesn’t know it. He thinks we’re just banging. Friends with benefits at best, and at worst, another entanglement that’s going to stamp on his heart when the heat dies off. Except…this thing between us, it’s not going to die off. It’s gonna grow, like it has every day, every hour, every minute, since we first laid eyes on each other.
It’s not just sex, and it never was.
More than that, I don’t want it to be. I want Bhodi in my arms—I need that.
I needhim.
