He doesn’t. He tugs a vape from his pocket and takes a drag, his gaze more serious and more like Logan than I’m prepared for. “Sounds like you have a lot to teach each other.”
“Right. I’ll teach him how to suck dick. What’s he supposed to teach me?”
“How to stick around. How to have a mate you’re also banging and not leg it before the sun comes up.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Yeah, you do. Logan’s told me all about you?—”
“Logan can shut the hell up.”
Nash does grin this time, but it’s still laced with thought, and it fades a little as he reclaims his bike keys from the box stack he dropped them on to have this conversation. “Look, brother. Even if you don’t wind up getting serious with this fella, take it from me—when you’re new to the game, having someone nice to hold your hand is worth so much more than a handie from a bloke you never see again.”
“Talking from experience, eh?”
“Yeah. Big time. I didn’t step into my sexuality until a few years ago. Couldn’t until I found that person for myself. And you’re worthy of being that person for someone, Gale. Youwantto be, you just don’t know it yet.”
“All right. Off you fuck.”
I wish Nash a merry Christmas and see him to his bike. Watch him rumble away on a machine that almost got him killed the night I met him. How he rebuilt it after that smash, I’ll never know. And I don’t like thinking about it.
Lucky for me, ten years on the job has made me good at shoving things out of my mind. Trauma, death, unimaginable pain. Doesn’t matter if it’s mine or someone else’s, it all goes in the same box. Only thing I can’t shunt out of my brain is Sab,and I blame Nash for that. It’s easier than brooding over his misguided theories.
I’m a nice guy.
I’m fun at parties.
I don’t cling to people I fuck because I don’t need to. I don’twantto?—
You’re not fucking Sab.
Heaven’s sake.
I expel another noisy breath and go back inside, shutting out a perfect winter day to retreat to the couch Nash had seemed so impressed with and play chicken with my phone.
FlingIt calls to me.
Eventually, I open it up and reply to a couple of messages without looking at my thread with Sab. If he’s replied to my weak response from a few days ago, I don’t see it—I make sure of it, and spend the rest of the day convincing myself the jagged rock in my stomach is because I’m hungry and too lazy to do anything about it.
That raw feeling, though. It’s still there the next morning, even after I eat an entire box of Cadbury’s Animals I stole from the festive stash at the station and chug a protein shake.
I escape to the gym.
Leave my phone at home.
Work hard with a shoulder that’s looser and stronger than it’s been since I went back to work full-time, and it’s a feeling I’ve been waiting on for weeks. Months. But it doesn’t hit as sweet as I expect. It’s just kinda there, and I’m grumpier than ever by the time I go home and contemplate the never-ending list of DIY I need to get done if I want to sell this fecking house and make some money back.
I’m not Nash. Not an indomitable jack of all trades with mind-boggling competence, but I can turn my hand to most things. Joinery is my Achilles heel, though. Fitting a new framein the bathroom doorway drives me to distraction for the rest of the week, and I’m fecking over it by the time I go back to work.
And I still haven’t messaged Sab.
Fool.
Me. Not him. And I’m still a fool when Saturday rolls around and a dull dayshift livens up with a shout to Hollymist Hall, the stately home on the outskirts of town.
Primary fire call. Fryer blaze. Outside catering unit at the Christmas fête, an event that draws thousands of visitors from all over the county and beyond.
We blue light it, and after a year behind the wheel, I’m still adjusting to sitting in a crew seat further back. To enduring the grind of anticipation without the distraction of driving the engine. It’s a different focus, less intense, and somewhere between me scanning the horizon and checking gauges and gear, Sab fills my brain like he owns it. Leaning against the wall, watching me step into my shoes, bewilderment simmering beneath a heat that tightens my chest even now, almost a week later, a thrum in my belly that has nothing to do with the rumbling engine beneath me.
