“She was a...” I strain for a word I heard at a meet-up. “A maximalist?”
“Something like that.” He draws a deep breath, then sighs, “She definitely left me a massive muddle.” He comes with me into the living room, turning in a slow circle under another bare bulb, then follows me into the kitchen where there’s no avoidingthat I can’t even offer him a cuppa. The cupboard I open out of habit to grab mugs is empty.
“No,” he decides. “You’re moving out.”
“Not me.” Might as well bite this bullet. “The guy I shared this place with did.”
“Today?”
“No, before Christmas.”
“But it’s February.” His gaze lands on me, and yeah, he’s got a baby face, but his forehead creasing is more proof Charles wasn’t a cradle snatcher. “And you’ve lived like this ever since?”
“What do you mean,like this?” Christ. I’m as abrasive as my cousin. I must be—Alasdair holds both hands up in a don’t-shoot gesture, but it isn’t his hands that snag my attention. It’s the way his brow creases again, so fucking sympathetic. Even if I couldn’t see that as plain as day, I hear it.
“I mean, it looks like you’ve been robbed, Vincent.” His lips press together like Harry’s did before he described Flynn so perfectly. “Your ex left you with nothing? That’s the worst.”
Given what I heard earlier this morning about a will being contested and him needing a house cleared pronto, I guess Alasdair does know that feeling. Or at least, he soon will, when his own place is empty.
Thank fuck Kev isn’t here to witness me unbuttoning my lip this quickly. He’d put me in a headlock and walk me all the way back to where I come from. The problem is, I don’t want to keep my silence. It feels right to share this with someone about to take a walk in my shoes, if for a different reason.
“He wasn’t my ex. And Flynn didn’t take everything right away. Just his clothes at first, because he was travelling. Everything else got taken a couple of days ago. To be honest, it was a relief. Means I won’t have to see him ever again.”
“A relief?” He blinks under another bare bulb. “I can’t imagine ever feeling relieved about that.”
The kitchen light is bright. So are his eyes. Suspiciously so. I realise he’s teary just before he does his best to hide it by taking a good long look around my kitchen, which is pointless—every surface is bare apart from that solitary whiteboard surrounded by inspo pictures.
He studies that collection, and I join him to see him squinting at Flynn’s drunk-spider handwriting, so I tell him what should never have surprised me. “He was hardly ever here. And he never intended to stay in England for long. This was always just a temporary staging post, that’s all. Someplace to wine and dine investors to convince them he came from the kind of background they could trust with their money.”
“He was a con man?”
I shrug. Flynn certainly conned me. I got no idea what he’s doing with the cash my work scored for him. “All I know is that I helped him by sourcing and restoring the furniture here to make him look like he came from old money. Like Charles.” And like Harry.
Alasdair nods, and I unclip the dry-erase marker pen attached to the whiteboard and check off a final box for Flynn in his absence. I have no idea what that wanker lost and wants to get back, but I can confirm this. “The one thing he was serious about was scoring some cash.”
“He wasn’t serious about you?” He sounds surprised, and I can’t lie, it makes a nice change for my chest to heat for a flattering reason instead of shame.
“It wasn’t like that. We wouldn’t have been compatible.” He blinks at me, doe eyes widening as I get explicit. “I mean in bed. Would have been like trying to push the same ends of two magnets together.”
He flushes, so I think he gets it, but he also smiles a little, so I keep going.
“Flynn having everything taken away did me a favour. Knocked me out of a holding pattern. I was hanging on here. Waiting. Expecting him to keep his side of our bargain, I guess, about selling up everything I found and fixed and splitting the cash. Might as well get back to my real life.” That’s what Kev wants, I know. It’s still tough to say, “This place finally being empty means I can draw a line under what I wanted to do with that cash.” I do that under Flynn’s list—I draw an actual line in thick black ink—and I tell the whole truth about the man who filled this vision board with his goals for the future. “He never intended to keep his side of our deal.”
As if summoned, my phone pings.
It won’t be Flynn.
No grey ticks have turned blue on messages I sweated over before sending, trying to get the tone right. It’s too late to care about his opinion. I’m busy telling Alasdair another truth, and this one is about me.
“The only serious relationship I was ever in was with his furniture.”
Alasdair snorts, but he smiles a little. It’s watery. No doubt because I stomped my size twelves through what must be real and recent grief to make him teary. No one from my neck of the woods would ever well up in public like he did. I don’t know why seeing that and hearing him sniff makes my fist curl around the whiteboard pen. I have to unclench to draw another line in thick black ink. “That was then. This is now. It happened. He left, and I felt...”
So fuckingstupid not to see it coming.
I don’t want to dwell on the bad, not when someone suffering real loss is right here in my empty kitchen. “It’s actually a blank page, innit? So what if I won’t get the cash I expected or get to pivot in a different direction. It’s still a fresh start for me. And you’ll have a fresh start soon as well.”
Don’t ask me why I add the single good thing Flynn did for me before leaving.
