“Yeah.”
Reaching into Johnny’s bowl, Taylor grabbed a fistful of cherries and shoved them into his mouth. “Bastard,” he said with his mouth full.
“I know. I’ve a mind to drag him home next time he’s up in the woods. Tell his dad exactly what a little shit he’s raised.”
Taylor shook his head. “I meant Manders is a bastard. William’s just a kid.”
“Kids can be bastards.”
“I know, but if you do something like that there’ll be hell to pay for William. And Maman, probably. It’s not William’s fault his dad’s the scum of the earth.”
Johnny rubbed the back of his neck and sat up. “I wasn’t going to. I just really,reallywant to.”
“And what if your dad did that to me the first time we met?”
Johnny chuckled. “You mean when you punched me in the nose?”
“Yeah. Idefinitelywouldn’t be sitting here with you now.”
A small smile twitched Johnny’s mouth. “Nah, I invited you for dinner and then you never left.”
“Exactly. What goes around comes around. Sometimes you gotta meet violence with kindness.”
“Jesus, what self-help books have you been reading?”
“You know I’m right.” Taylor smirked.
Johnny stretched, nudging his knee. “Either Maman’s been on your case, or maybe thereissome sense in that noggin of yours after all. Now, settle down or fuck off back to your own room.”
Taylor sniffed, glancing over at Johnny’s bedside clock. “Film?”
Johnny rolled his eyes. “Fine, but we are notwatchingTropic Thunderagain.”
CHAPTER 4
DINGLY HEATH
Taylor
Taylor feltthat getting out of bed was very much like resurrecting the dead, and he groaned like a deflating corpse when his alarm went off the next morning. Then the second. Then the third, because there were three fucking alarms blaring at him from different points in his room.
If sonic torture was a thing, his room was Guantanamo Bay, and his inner wolf growled as it tried to pull him back into sleep.
“Fuck me,” he moaned, throat like gravel as he rubbed his face across the pillow.
First, he smacked the bedside table, almost smashing the phone from the force. Nothing happened. Squinting through the thin strip of light that came in from the gap in his curtains, he stared at the phone and realised there was an orange Post-it note stuck to the screen. It read ‘DO NOT SNOOZE’ in Johnny’s painfully neat handwriting.
Scoffing, Taylor scrubbed a hand over his face and ripped it off, silencing the phone. Next, he slid out of bed with all the grace of a fat slug trying to cross a dusty road. It involved a good amount of flopping and some awkward rolling until he foundthe ancient grey Alexa under his wardrobe. There was another orange sticker that said ‘I MEAN IT TAY, DO NOT FUCKING SNOOZE!’
Finally, he rolled across the floor with the elegance of a ninety-year-old commando and found Johnny’s old MP3 player under his overflowing wash-basket.
This one didn’t have a Post-it-note, but it did have a PIN lock which meant he couldn’t turn it off without getting into the fucking thing. Slumping into the pile of dirty washing, he tried Johnny’s birthday, 7th December, then his own, 12th April, then Gabriella’s, Clem’s and Marty’s. It finally opened on Maman’s birthday.
“Prick,” he sighed, resting the MP3 player on his chest and staring up at the ceiling.
He’d never seen the ceiling from this angle, and as he studied it he could have sworn Pitbull’s image was cast into the shitty plaster art. “Morning, Mr Worldwide,” he sighed.
Rolling again, he smacked his knee on the leg of his rickety desk before finally dragging himself into a sitting position. His bedroom was a fucking mess, and although it was the bigger of the two, clutter had invaded every square inch of space. Except the desk, where tinyLord of the Ringscharacters were all lined up along the green craft mat, with even tinier pots of paint and fine-line brushes.
