“Go on with you.”
The line crackles, and I hear the rumble of motorbikes before Nash comes back to me. “What’s up, brother? He break your heart?”
“Who?”
“The fella who had you moping last time I saw you.”
“You know him,” I blurt as fragments of conversations I’ve had with Sab come together. “His brother was one of yours back in the day.”
Nash pauses. Thinking, no doubt, finding his way to the same conclusion as me. “The Dubois boys are good people.”
It’s not lost on me that Nash is echoing Sab’s words about him. That the mutual respect goes both ways. “Hot feckers and all.”
Comes out grumpier than I intend, and this time, Nash laughs for real. “That they are, it’s true. And the younger one, eh? Filled out since I first met him. Grown into them big brown eyes.”
I groan. “Stop.”
Nash laughs some more. “What? You think I don’t know what it’s like to lose your mind to that shit? I have a woman with eyes like that, and a fella who makes me weak at the knees just existing. It’s a cursed life, to be sure.”
“Aye, you sound miserable as sin, you jammy bastard.”
“If you say so. What’s really going on with you, though? You don’t call me in the middle of the night for nothing.”
“It’s not the middle of the night…” I realise how wrong I am as I pull my phone from my ear to glance at the time.Goddamn. It’s gone midnight and I’m still up on Figgy Mount, choking on pouring my heart out. “Fuck.”
Nash waits.
And waits some more.
Then he sighs. “You’ve got it all mixed up, haven’t you?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
Nash snorts. “It means you’ve got the sex part of your identity down so well you forgot about the rest of it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you never had the same issues fucking fellas that I did, but the idea of loving one blows your tiny mind.”
Hearing someone else say it doesn’t unpick the catastrophe I’ve created for myself, and the fecking absurd urge to argue with Nash surges up my throat so hard I have to swallow it down. “I don’t know that I love him.”
“No, but you feel like you could.”
I exhale in lieu of answering.
Nash cracks on regardless. “How does he feel?”
“About me?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably that I’m a weapons-grade twat.”
“What did you do?”
I can’t find the words to confess that I ran out on Sab when all I wanted was to fuck him on his living room floor. Can’t admit,to myself or to Nash, that fucking him didn’t even come close to how I felt in that moment.
I wanted to make love to him under his Christmas lights.
