“I’ve noticed that,” he said. “Apart from that one night you dropped my bed cover on me, you’re always awake, if you’re here, I mean. I don’t know what you do when you’re not.”
Nothing, since Billy moved in, save a few aborted Grindr trips up the A road, but I wasn’t going to get into that with him. He didn’t need to know that he occupied my thoughts so entirely I’d forgotten how to get excited by any other man. Then he really would have cause to call me a creep. “I don’t sleep a lot,” I confessed. “I got out of the habit when my mum was ill, and I never really got it back.”
Billy nodded. “I get that. I remember the long nights with my dad. Being so scared I’d doze off and he’d die when I was asleep.”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Drinking helps,” he said. “With a lot of things. But in the end, even that stops working.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“In what sense?”
I passed Billy a mug of tea, claimed my own, and shifted further onto the bed, closing the distance between us another inch with little conscious thought. “I know you got into drugs after Luke left. Not on purpose, but everyone knew.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “No, everyone said they knew. That’s not the same as anyone knowing jackshit about me. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
If I believed everything I’d heard about Billy, there was no way I’d have ever let him set foot in my house. The Rushmere rumour mill had him painted as everything from a burglar to a violent crackhead, and, as I’d learned from Barry Keane, a scumbag who’d done hard prison time. I knew that wasn’t true, so who was the real Billy? And why did my chest burn at the prospect of finding out?
So many questions. No tangible answers.
I sighed. “I didn’t mean it was true. I guess I was asking what you did to cope if getting drunk stopped working.”
“How do you know I didn’t do what you did?”
“What did I do?”
Billy said nothing. Just stared at me with drug-fogged eyes that were somehow razor sharp too.
Or maybe it was my imagination. I often saw things that weren’t there when someone tried to flay me open. Warmth that wasn’t real. Attraction that didn’t last. “I didn’t get drunk,” I said when Billy’s silence dragged on. “I got laid. A lot. And I carried on long after it stopped working, so maybe we did do the same thing, just in different ways.”
Billy shifted slightly, a wince threatening his hazy expression. “We’re not the same people, though. You still managed to be a functioning adult, so maybe I should’ve joined the Grindr train instead of banging coke round the back of the Sugar Loaf.”
“That place closed down years ago,” I said absently as I fought a wave of horror at the thought of Billy on Grindr. Of him in anyone’s bed but mine. Idiot. “And do you even want to be a functioning adult? A nine-to-five job with a mortgage and two-point-four kids?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything. I don’t know you.”
Billy’s gaze flickered. “And yet here I am off my nut on trammies in your bed. Strange how life works out.”
It really was. Billy got up and drifted to the bathroom. It crossed my mind that he wouldn’t come back, but I tidied the mugs and his bowl away all the same, and shifted over so he had more room. Wishful thinking? I had no idea, and I was out of spoons to think about it. My brain was noisy at the best of times, but some days with Billy, it quieted to a dull roar. Angsting over whether he’d come back to my bed wasn’t exactly peaceful, but it beat being alone. Like, really alone, with nothing for company but silence and shadows.
“You have the strangest face.”
I glanced up as Billy came back to the bed. “Uh, thanks? I guess? Unless it’s giving you nightmares.”
“As if. No. I meant that you have this chilled-out smile that doesn’t match the rest of it.”
“I’m not going to ask what that means. How’s the shoulder?”
“It’s there.”
“And the pain?”
“Same.”
“Same answer? Or it hurts as much as it did before?”
“The first one.” Billy shivered. “And it’s cold out there. Or maybe it’s that muscle relaxant shit you gave me. I’ve never taken them before. How do you say it? Amo-trippo-what?”
“Amitriptyline.” I jumped up as Billy swayed. “I gave you a half dose, but it can be pretty poky if you’re not used to it.”
Billy shivered again. Without thinking, I rubbed my hand up and down his good arm, massaging warmth into his cool skin. “Come on. Get comfy. We can watch something, if you like?”
“Watch what?”
“Uh...” I searched my limited knowledge of Netflix for something he might enjoy. “Vikings? Hot dudes, powerful women, fighting and fucking. Culture. Something for everyone. Ever seen it?”
“I don’t watch TV. Haven’t had one for years.”
I was still rubbing his arm. I forced myself to stop and moved back so he could get on the bed. Movement caused the duvet to bunch up by my knees. I let it be, and when Billy was settled, cautiously pulled it up and over him.
He eyed me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. “You don’t have to tuck me in.”
“I don’t want you to be cold.”
“That’s sweet, man. But at least get in the bed with me so we haven’t got some weirdo taxi situation going on.”
“What?”
“You know, like, if you give your mate a ride and they get in the back so you look like a taxi.”
He wasn’t making much sense, but if he wanted me in the bed with him, I wasn’t about to argue.
I slid under the duvet and cued up Vikings on the TV. My bed had a memory foam mattress that sucked in anything of any weight and held tight all night long. I was hoping it would do Billy some
