“It still is.” Harry squints at me. “Were you planning on coming?”
No, I wasn’t. I swerve telling him so. This is more important. “How the fuck did I end up in bed with you two, and why am I sticky?” The leather around my wrists pulls tight before I can scratch my hot chest. “And itchy.”
Harry shifts a little and frees me. “The stickiness will be the red wine. By the time we found you, you’d drunk so much you kept missing your mouth. Then you made us stop off on the way back here for an emotional support kebab. Most of that missed your mouth too. The reins were to stop you from slipping out for more booze.”
At least that explains part of my situation. And my dehydrated hoarseness. I’m not usually a heavy drinker, a lightweight despite my bull-in-a-china-shop build, but there’s no denying I’m hungover. “What about the itching?” I scratch my chest, then itch a little lower. “Don’t tell me your nickname is true.”
“Crabs? No.” Harry laughs, the gust blowing away some post-booze fog. “I mean yes, I did catch them once, but that was a long, long time ago. Your itching is nothing to do with me.” Hesobers. “Besides, why ruin a really good thing by having sex with an ex?”
He doesn’t mean we used to be together—Harry and me were never boyfriends. I’m Mr. One-And-Done, remember, and I barely know him beyond the fact that Harry is the reason our group chat morphed to real life. Like every other man who attends those monthly meet-ups, our only connection is someone else Harry mentions. “But I am almost tempted to ring Charles Heppel. Or Charles Heppel-Eavis, I should say, now that he’s married.”
That’s who added hired muscle like me to a group made up of city bankers, lawyers, and other high-flying professionals. None of the other members would sound as thick-headed as I do. “Why would you ring Charles?”
Harry smiles so hard his laugh lines become trenches. “Because if he hadn’t added all his ex-hookups to one big group to let us know he was off the market, you wouldn’t have been able to reach out to us last night, would you? If Charles hadn’t set up that chat, none of us would have got your SOS message.”
I blink. “I sent a message to the whole group?” I’d never, ever do that.
Harry doesn’t agree. “I’m glad you finally reached out. Because you don’t do that easily, do you, darling? Like you don’t join in much at meet-ups. Or come to many of them. But you couldn’t have asked for help from any better people. Charles always was a good judge of character. Every single man he added to our group would want to help you. I’m just sorry I wasn’t in London when you got on the struggle bus in the first place.”
“Struggle bus?” Nothing loops my wrists now. Regardless, my fingers suddenly feel thick and clumsy. “What the fuck did I type?”
“Just that you desperately needed some TLC.”
Tender loving care?
Mushy softness isn’t an East End survival tactic. It makes me growl just like my cousin, whose number one rule is to never show any weakness. “There’s no way I wrote that in the chat.”
“Well, no,” Harry accepts. “You didn’t type out those exact words, but we all heard it in your voice note.” He reaches under the pillow for his phone. “Listen.”
For a moment, all I hear is my shower running in the bathroom and a soldier singing. Then I tune into my own voice explaining why I guzzled more booze last night than I have since my aunt’s wake.
“Kev?” I hear myself rasp. “Flynn’s had the whole house cleared.”
Shit.
I must have meant to send this voice note to my cousin. Instead, a whole lot of Charles Heppel’s exes heard what I discovered last night after work. Just like that, I’m at the front of a classroom, cringing myself inside out at hearing myself say, “He got another removals firm in to take every stick of furniture, Kev. Every single piece that I bid on for him at auction and then restored is gone.”
That’s what I’ve spent the last four months doing part-time instead of sitting beside my cousin full-time in a van painted withStacey & Son Removals. Kev wants to change the names on that paintwork toKevin & Cousin, but after the last four months of finding and restoring antique items, I can’t face it. Turns out those teachers who thought I was a dull knife instead of a sharp blade just didn’t give me the right material to work with. The right tools. This winter of intense focus has fired up an interest in learning that I’m not ready to give up.
Now I’m gonna have to, and Harry is right, I do sound like I need some tender loving care of my own as my voice note continues.
“All they left was a bed and my things. They even…”
A pause extends, and I replay the moment I walked into this Kensington townhouse to find strangers had packed up a life that someone smarter might have guessed was only ever temporary.
I sound broken.
“And they even took the desk. The very best piece I found for Flynn. So fucking pretty.”
Jesus.
I’m suddenly glad I got this gobby in the wrong chat—Kev would lose his rag at me confessing this weakness in public, but I did love that little desk. Stripped layer after layer of paint and varnish to find the dark-red fire of mahogany and the liquid gold of satinwood inlays. Gorgeous. I’m gutted to have lost it.
Harry must hear how much. He winces from his half of my pillow as drunk-me keeps confessing.
“You were right about Flynn, Kev. I should never have moved in here to look after this place for him. And maybe I shouldn’t have cut my hours with you to almost nothing to make this place look swanky as fuck to impress his investors.”
Harry winces again.
