Page 107 of Home Grown Talent
His voice was hoarse with the remembered pain.
“What?” Lewis breathed.
“And she didn’t know you weren’t there,” Owen went on. “She was already unconscious when I went in.” There were tears at the corners of his eyes, and he dashed them away with the heels of his hands. “It didn’t matter that you weren’t there. She didn’t know; you didn’t miss anything.”
Lewis let out a wet, shuddering breath. “Fuck. Fuck, I—” He turned to Aaron. “Did you hear that?”
Aaron nodded, his concerned gaze fixed on Lewis.
For a while, they just sat there, Aaron rubbing Lewis’s back as he slowly calmed.
None of them said anything, but the silence felt okay.
Eventually, Aaron stood up.
“I’m going to make some tea,” he said quietly. Moments later, he was busying himself with filling the kettle and getting out mugs.
At length, Lewis said, his voice husky with emotion, “We should talk about this more, but can we do it after my next appointment with Grace?”
Owen nodded. “We can talk about it whenever you want. I’m sorry if you ever thought otherwise.”
“Don’t say sorry,” Lewis pleaded, shaking his head. “I’m the one who—” Then he stopped and took a deep breath. “Damn. I’m supposed to stop saying stuff like that about myself.” He gave a short, rueful laugh. “This is why I need to talk to Grace before we do this.”
“Take your time,” Owen said gently. “I’ll be here whenever the time’s right.”
Lewis nodded gratefully. After another short silence, he said, “God, what were we even talking about before I hijacked the conversation and made it all about me?” He shook his head as though to dislodge something from his brain, then blurted, “Oh, fuck. I’d just been asking you about breaking up with Mason, hadn’t I?” He groaned. “I’m such a self-absorbed arsehole.”
Aaron appeared then with three large mugs of tea. He set them down and dropped a kiss on top of Lewis’s head. “True, but you’re my self-absorbed arsehole,” he said fondly before wandering back to the kitchen.
“Do you want to talk about Mason?” Lewis asked then. “I promise to listen properly. You know, like an actual functioning grown-up.”
And strangely, Owen found that he did. He began hesitantly, but soon found he couldn’t stop. He was still talking when Aaron re-joined them with a plate of toasted, buttered crumpets. He talked all the way through two more mugs of tea and told them pretty much all of it, right up to that last terrible argument at the RPP studio.
He even told them about Mason saying he loved him.
“You really don’t think he meant it?” Aaron asked carefully, when he was done. “For what it’s worth, I thought he seemed genuinely into you, that time we came over to yours to watch Weekend Wellness.”
Owen shrugged. “Yeah, well, I thought that too, but—” He broke off, unable to say the next part aloud. That he wasn’t sure whether any of it had been real for Mason, not in the way it had been for him.
He’d been thinking about that a lot since their awful argument in the RPP car park. And the truth was, he just… didn’t know. From the start Mason had made it clear that he was only too happy to go along with Misty’s suggestion of teasing a romance between them as a hook for the show. And yeah, he’d wanted to post pictures of them constantly, seeming delighted with all the likes and comments he got in response. But despite all that, there had been times when Owen would have sworn that Mason really did like him.
Maybe even more than that.
When he thought about the time they’d spent together, how soft and vulnerable Mason had been with him, how right it had felt between them, it was impossible to believe that none of it had been real. But didn’t that just make Mason’s betrayal worse? Because even if some of it had been real, even if Mason hadn’t deliberately set out to fake a relationship with him, he certainly wasn’t above sharing all the details of that relationship on Instagram. The brutal truth was that, for Mason, the main value of their relationship had always been as… well, content fodder. A story to share, to tease at. A stream of pretty pictures, carefully filtered and curated. So, it wasn’t really a surprise that, in the end, Mason had prioritised content over honesty. He’d prioritised content over everything. Because for Mason, all of that—the likes, the reactions, the comments—were more important than anything else. More real than anything else.
More real than anything he had—or could have had—with Owen.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t thought it was a big deal to go behind Owen’s back and film that extra footage, despite knowing how strongly Owen felt about it? Because ultimately, it was the story that mattered most to him. Not the messy stuff that went on behind the scenes. The boring real-life stuff.
“The thing I can’t get my head around,” Lewis said, interrupting Owen’s depressing train of thought, “is Mason saying all that stuff about growing pineapples in a week after what you’d told him. I mean, he can be a pain in the arse, but I wouldn’t have thought he’d be deliberately dishonest.”
Owen shrugged, even now trying to hide just how painful he found talking about this. “He claimed they edited it to look like that.”
“Oh? How did they edit it?” Aaron asked, his brow creased in curiosity.
Owen flushed. “I don’t know. I didn’t hang around to find out.”
“No?” Aaron said. “Didn’t you want to at least hear his side of the story?”