“Fine,” he said. “We’ll call a taxi. I can swing back for my car and—”
“No.”
“Mum, I can’t leave you alone.”
Ally pursed her lips and made a rude sound. “Please, Nate. I fell down in the middle of town. There’s already a line of gossips forming at the front door with cake and theories on whether I’m dying or have taken up drink. I won’t be alone.”
“Hardly the same.”
“Nathan.”
He knew what it meant when she said his name that way—end of discussion. She used it when she forbade him to sleep over at the Granshire or take off with Max for one of the St. John family’s four-week-long summer vacations. She refused to brook any discussion.
Of course, that was when he was a teenager. He was a grown man, and she couldn’t even throw “while you’re under my roof” at him anymore.
But it still worked.
SUMMER WASon its last legs. The sun was bright enough, but there wasn’t much warmth in it. Nate slouched in the alley behind the row of shops and tried to suck the day’s heat from the brick wall through his shoulder blades.
His head was full of to-do lists—find a venue, call the nurse, chase up the canon, find better crutches online. The longer he dwelt on them the more things he added to the list. Yet somehow his brain still had enough processing power left to run through a dark little play called “imagine if your mum died.”
It was brutal the first few times he saw it—the pessimistic underpinning to his relentless external confidence. But he’d gotten numb to the basics of grief, and his mind’s eye had resorted to pulling “last season ofLost”tricks to elicit a reaction from him.
Imagine if Ally… dies in a car crash on the way home. Because you wouldn’t give her a lift.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled. The smoke was hot as it trickled over his tongue and still warm as it reached his lungs.
“Most people have a stab at giving up when someone in their family gets cancer.” Flynn motioned toward Nate’s cigarette as he stepped out through the gate. He’d shrugged the top of his overalls off and knotted the arms around his chest. The old gray T-shirt underneath clung to his shoulders and arms. It was a V-neck, even if it hadn’t started that way, and Nate could see the scruff of hair that dusted Flynn’s chest.
“It’s not like it was lung cancer,” Nate said. Even before Flynn did a slow eyebrow lift at him, he knew that was a shitty thing to say. He exhaled and fogged the air between them with smoke. “I had quit. Years back. Then I started again.”
This time he expected Flynn to pluck the cigarette out of his fingers, but he let him do it. Flynn stubbed it out against the wall, and a fresh smear of ash joined the gull shit, graffiti, and moss that already spackled the brick. He tossed the butt into a battered old bucket shoved against the wall, where a half-dead plant grew out of a pyramid of filters.
“Your mum going to be okay getting home alone?” Flynn asked.
Nate had wondered the same thing. It still put his back up to hear it from someone else.
“It’s Bernard,” he said. There wasn’t that much call for taxis on the island—drunks had a bad habit of just driving themselves home—but he also drove the school bus, ran tours around the island for the Granshire, and organized a delivery service run by the council. “He’ll help her inside, make sure she’s comfortable. I’ve already called the nurse to check on her. What more do you expect me to do?”
Flynn braced his arm against the wall. The sleeve of his T-shirt crawled up his arm to show off the lines of ink that followed the curve of his bicep. Nate had dug his fingers into the tattoo that night in the boat house, but he hadn’t paid attention to what it actually was.
“You could stop lying to her.”
“No,” Nate said. “I can’t.”
You couldn’t live with someone without arguing with them—even if it was just about putting the toilet roll on the holder wrong way around—and arguing with a parent as an adult was… fraught. During one fight over his refusal to date her hairdresser’s son, he’d thrown some old childhood grudge in Ally’s face—something he’d said a dozen times as a bratty teen. It made her cry.
It might have made her cry back then too. He was a kid, though, and that had shielded him from knowing what a shit he was.
“Really?” Flynn asked. “Because she doesn’t seem that bad.”
“Yeah. She said the same thing about you.” Nate ran his hand up Flynn’s arm and peeled the gray sleeve back from the tattoo. The skin was warm under his fingers. It wasn’t fresh. The ink was faded and smudged under the tanned skin, but it was still legible. A cracked skull made of smoke, wrapped in a Maltese cross made of barbed wire and a tattooist’s needle. He rubbed his thumb over the image. “Maybe you should try and get in touch with the guy that did this. Because right now you aren’t holding up your end of our bargain. I’m paying for a bad boy, remember, not Mr. Reliable.”
If Nate had rubbed just a bit of the edge out of his voice, it could have passed for flirting. Except he hadn’t, and so it couldn’t.
Flynn’s jaw clenched, and a muscle jerked under the gray stubble on his jaw. He braced his other arm against the wall to make a cage of hard bone and muscle and leaned in. There was more heat coming off him than there was in the sunlight.
“You saying that you have a problem with my performance?”
