She’s faking a panic attack, her mate egging her on. I’m usually good at diffusing nonsense like this, but I’m not in themood tonight. Haven’t been since I made it back on rotation after eighteen months out. Seems like I left my patience on the scorched ground of that warehouse fire way back when and I haven’t tried that hard to find it.
I walk on by the women hanging out of their snazzy Mini Cooper. Follow the grotty stink of smoke even though it sparks a phantom burn in my chest. I don’t have PTSD. I’ve checked a hundred times. My brain is fine. But this thrum behind my ribs…it’s always fecking there, and I don’t know how to shift it.
Focus on something else.
Easy enough. The white van is fifty feet from me. I can’t see the driver’s side window, but I pretend I can. Then shift gears and imagine the fella inside as I last saw him a few weeks back, sitting in the rain like a sad poppa bear, and how it was the first time, like, ever, I didn’t think about fucking him.
I’m not thinking about fucking him now, either. I’m thinking about the fresh-cut pinewood and vanilla scent that hit me from his open window, and the tired hurt in his big brown eyes. And blow me if it doesn’t make the knot in my sternum thrum harder. My scarred lung isn’t far off full capacity, but apparently I’m not ready for a big fat dose of wounded-heart lumber-swoon.
Who the feck knew?
Mulling it over takes me most of the way back to the white van. I’m three vehicles back when the rumble of a couple dozen engines restarting cracks the night air. Whenhisvan starts to roll forward and my heart does a weird flip, disappointment sinking my mood into my boots. This is the first time I’ve seen this lad in the wild and fate is already taking him away from me?
Feels uncalled for as he drives off, his rear lights disappearing to the other end of the street where he lives. Beneath it all, I’m glad—I’mrelieved—the rogue chip shop blaze hasn’t reached his house and turned his life upside down. But watching him leave with no guarantee I’ll get to hear hisdeepBrummie voice again? With nothing but memories of how he looked behind that wheel, lit up by something he’s clearly trying to hide?
Nope. It sits wrong in my chest, and that blasted thrum shifts to a low pull in my gut, one that almost slows my steps.
Almost. I keep walking because I have to. Because the scene is still hot and I have a job to do—a job I’ve fought till I’m bloody and raw to find my way back to.
But I don’t stop thinking about Van Man, and as curiosity melds with the kind of uncertainty I hate, I don’t know what unsettles me more.
That I want to encounter him again.
Or how easy it would be to make it happen.
Way too easy, as it turns out. Even though I tune Van Man out for the rest of the night, leaning into the busy winter night shift until it finally calms down in the early hours of the morning.
I take a nap on a recliner without looking at my phone. Drive home with it burning a hole in my pocket.
I’ve showered at work.
Pilfered breakfast from Green Watch and I’m all tea-ed out.
I need my bed—the mattress on the new carpet in the half-decorated room at the top of the stairs. There’s no reason for me to be loitering in the carnage of my kitchen, nursing a lukewarm brew while horrible Christmas songs filter from the radio I pinched from my best friend before he moved down south. No reason at all save the lone figure sitting on his back porch with his phone clutched in his hand, that same earnest concentration on his face, and it’s the fight of my life—the most recent one, anyway—not to pick up my own phone and see if he’s perusingthe app I downloaded for him. A fight I know I’m going to lose, but hey, at least I’m trying.
Wham! comes on the radio.
Instant irritation grips me.
It’s barely November, and I itch to turn it off. There’s a reason I choose to work Christmas every fecking year, and thinking about that reason dulls any yuletide spirit I have to negative levels. But just when I feel like booting the radio to feck, my handsome neighbour glances up from his phone to crack his neck and scrub a hand through his short hair, and I’m lost in every minute movement.
The arch of his throat.
The flex of his muscles.
He’s notbig, like my AWOL BFF. But he’s strong, I can tell. A gym rat once, even if he’s not now, and his broad shoulders do things to me they have no business doing when he doesn’t know I’m peeping on him.
Go to bed.
I really should. Though my brain won’t shut the hell up, my body is tired, and I know I need to listen to it if I have any hope of ditching light duties for good.
But, Christ, this fella.
He’s so hard to look away from, and now I know how he smells. How he sounds. And the fleeting preoccupation he’s gifted me over the past few months has expanded to low-key obsession.
It’ll pass.
Everything does. But I’m enjoying the view too much to give it up. It’s down to him to break the spell, and he does a few minutes later, stretching that killer bod before he slopes inside and shuts his back door.
