Fuck it.
Forgoing the cold walk that isn’t going to help me cross paths with a hot Frenchman, I nurse my car home, crawling through the streets slow enough that every man and his dog honk their horn thinking I give a shite.
I really don’t. Though, by the time I roll up outside my house, I feel like I could punch someone’s fecking lights out. Or fuck them silly, a mood that usually has me taking advantage of my looming rest days to cut loose and have some fun.
But I don’t dig out my phone.
Don’t poke around on FlingIt.
I take a shower. Clean my bathroom like a good boy. And I get my reward in the form of a message that flashes up as I’m smashing through six rounds of toast.
LeLionDuBois96:Are you free tonight? xx
I’m beyond fecking free.
I clear the crumbs from my unfinished kitchen and tear around the rest of the house, grateful I spent last week at least pretending to get some of the work done. Grateful to Nash that my bathroom no longer sounds like a bog monster lives in the pipes every time a tap turns on. Doors are still crocked, but I can live with that as long as the stench of tile solvent is gone.
Newsflash: it isn’t gone.
I make coffee in place of the scented candles I’ll never have in my house and open the windows, so by the time a quiet knock lights me up, my house is basically a baltic branch of Costa.
Doesn’t stop me answering the door with no shirt on, though. Or getting a kick out of the way Sab drinks me in, the nerves in his dark gaze co-existing with something that looks an awful lot like determination.
“Come in.” I back up and wave him forward. “Let me show you what real fecking mess looks like.”
After a beat of hesitation so brief I can’t be sure it happens, Sab steps into my house.
I shut the door behind him. Loiter there as I watch him take in the wreckage of my befuddled home.
“All right,” he concedes. “Yours is definitely worse than mine.”
“What gave it away? The floors or my shite carpentry?”
Sab shakes his head, turning to face me. Letting me know for sure, without words, that he didn’t come here to talk about DIY. That he doesn’t want to spend an hour pretending he did and risk losing the resolve he walked in here with. “You need a Christmas tree.”
“Noted.” I ease closer. “Remind me another day.”
I’m in his orbit now, barely a bible’s width of space between us. pinewood and vanilla scents the air and I have to consider if it’s even real, or if Sab’s a literal dream come true. “You smell good too, in case I’ve never told you.”
Sab bites his lip, an unconscious tic as his shoulders rise and fall with a soul-deep breath. “Right now, I can’t remember anything anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Where’s Esme?”
“With my brother. She fell asleep after dinner, so I put her to bed there.”
“So she’s safe,” I conclude, voice low, like I’m talking to a spooked animal. “And you can leave any time you want to go back to her.”
Sab nods.
“And your brother knows where you are? So he can find you if she needs you?”
“Tam has no fucking idea where I am. I told Bhodi instead.”
“Bhodi…your brother-in-law?”
“Yeah. You know him. He’s a nurse at the hospital.”
Bhodi.
