“Not true. You can make omelettes.”
“So can you, but we don’t have eggs.”
Gus grunted and shut the fridge. “I guess we can order pizza, but my creeper brain wants you to eat something real.”
He really was trying to kill me with kindness, a kindness I didn’t deserve. And I couldn’t let him spend any more money on me. There had to be another way.
I rarely thought about my dad. I’d loved him so much it was easier to pretend he’d never existed than face the fact that I’d never see him again. But sometimes my heart caught me off guard. Sights and sounds. Scents. I couldn’t walk past an Indian restaurant without remembering the lentil soup he used to make when him and my mum were searching the couch for spare change. I had no idea how to recreate it, but Gus had Wi-Fi so I could google that shit. “Hang on.”
Phone in hand, I traipsed upstairs and upended my bag on the bed. Grey watched me from the windowsill, but he’d seen me do stranger things, so he made no comment.
All kinds of crap fell out of my bag: dust, dead grass, screws, bolts. A handful of coppers. And then I struck gold—a two pound coin, and a handful of silver shrapnel. I didn’t know if it would be enough for the lentils and spices the internet said I needed, but I’d die trying.
Gus was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m going to the shop,” I said. “Are you coming?”
I had no desire to have him witness me counting out coppers to pay for lentils and a loaf of bread, but the prospect of being away from him right now made me want to puke, and I wasn’t in the mood to unpick that bullshit. Or anything else that came with being in close proximity to Gus. We’d kissed a million years ago, and now we’d spent the night together, snuggled up like old lovers, and I couldn’t make sense of how I felt. The cynic in me had the loudest voice, and told me he was just being nice because he loved my brother, but there was a tiny devil starting a rave in my gut, my heart, and every other organ in my body. A devil crying out for Gus to touch me again, to invite me into his bed and wrap his arms around me, despite knowing full well I had nothing to offer him in return.
Gus got his kicks on Grindr with men who’d given more than two blow jobs in their entire life. Men who knew how to give him the pleasure he deserved. Not—
“Billy?”
I jumped, startled to find Gus in my personal space, waving his hand in front of my face. “What?”
Gus stared me down for a moment, then shook his head. “Never mind. Come on, I’ll drive you to Tesco.”
Chapter Nine
Gus
Billy made thick lentil soup spiked with curry powder, and served it with buttered white bread. Then he fell asleep on the couch, apparently exhausted by creating something so simple and amazing.
With a protesting heart, I left him downstairs, because the alternative was throwing him over my shoulder and carrying him back to my bed, and he already likely thought I was off my rocker.
Somehow I slept, and I woke in the morning to find him standing over my bed, face twisted in a fiery scowl.
“I want to know something,”
I sat up, squinting in the dim light of the dawn. Billy leant closer—close enough for me to kiss him in a world away from this convoluted mess. “What do you want to know?”
“Who looked after you?”
“What?”
“When you had your surgery. Who looked after you?”
“No one.”
“Why not? I know Mia wasn’t here, but Luke was. Why didn’t he take care of you?”
“I didn’t need him to.”
“You mean you wouldn’t let him.”
“What?”
“Thought so.”
Billy turned on his heel and stomped out of my room. Bemused, I flopped back on pillows my imagination told me still smelt of him. Did that really just happen? Or had my Billy-fuelled dreams seeped into my consciousness? Because, damn, had I dreamt of him. Benignly for the most part, but there’d been sequences hot enough that I was glad I’d woken up half on my stomach.
When my morning wood had subsided, I hauled myself out of bed and searched out Billy.
He was in the shower, naturally, so I trudged downstairs in search of caffeine and found Luke sitting at my breakfast bar looking so like Billy that my sleepy self did a double take. “What are you doing in my house at six a.m.?”
Luke eyed me over the rim of a cardboard coffee cup. “Same reason I’m ever in your house at six a.m.”
“You’re coming to work?”
“Course I am. It’s been nearly a month. Did you think you’d got rid of me for good?”
Billy had me so wrapped up I hadn’t given Luke’s extended break much thought at all. “Um. No. Just not sure we need you with what we’ve got on this week.”
“Why don’t you take the day off then?”
“Because I have nothing better to do and I need the money.”
“Since when? You hoard money under the mattress just like your mother did.”
I gave him the finger and helped myself to the paper bag of pastries he’d dumped on the counter. It was true that I was frugal with whatever I didn’t spend on eating, but what was wrong with that? My mum had rebuilt her dilapidated house with her own bare hands and paid her mortgage off ten years early on the wage of a teaching assistant. So what if she’d kept shoeboxes of cash in the attic? “Tell me why you’re really here? Are you bored?”
Luke smiled as much as he ever did when my sister wasn’t around. “A little. Mia’s got a busy week
