Page 10 of Kiln Me Softly

Energetic pop music was already blaring when Aiden and Luc turned onto Cartwright Gardens, strobe lights flashing from Tom’s house and painting the rain-slick path green and purple so that nobody could mistake which house the party was taking place at.

Instead, he answered cautiously, ‘Not everybody.’

A mangled noise of amusement left Luc’s throat, and they nudged him with a sharp elbow as the two of them continued down the crescent-shaped lane. ‘Just you and Tom?’

He didn’t exactly know how to reply to that.

Money wasn’t something he’d ever had to give thought to, which he knew was a mark of his privilege, but it also meant he wasn’t sure how to react when people brought it up.

Sometimes, he preferred how Juniper handled it: bluntly, without skirting around their differences.

He didn’t mind being the rich arsehole as long as he knew it.

It would be far worse to be judged as only that, or have friends reduce him to it behind his back, which had happened often at Elmington.

Juniper . He could only assume she’d be here tonight, ready and waiting with some more insults up her sleeve.

Maybe he liked that about her, too, even if they were becoming a little too personal for his liking.

She was the only person who didn’t feign niceties to get close to Aiden.

The only person whose intentions were abundantly clear – even if they were to murder him in his sleep.

‘Have you and Amir decided what your project will be?’ he asked Luc, absently tearing a leaf from its branch through the wrought iron fencing.

His fingers never resisted that drive to keep busy.

Without a paintbrush or a lump of clay, they were destructive, forever tearing at paper or wearing down the etchings of his thumb ring, or else picking at calluses on his hands until the skin bled.

‘Avoiding the subject.’ Luc tutted, but was gracious enough to move on. ‘No, we are meeting on Tuesday. How about you and Juniper?’ They waggled their brows. ‘I am imagining your exhibition to be rather angry and erotic.’

He let out a ‘Ha!’, though his stomach burned at the words. Angry and erotic weren’t too far from the truth, at least for him. Those venomous scoffs she loved to give him made his cock twitch, her glare pierced right into his flesh. It probably made him a masochist.

She was testing his patience now, though. If they had to do this project together, he wouldn’t sit and take all the insults much longer. The way she presumed all sorts of terrible things about him, the way she implied that he didn’t try …

Yes, definitely erotic, and also definitely angry. He just didn’t know how to change her opinion of him, nor what he’d done to deserve it.

Luckily, the noise of the party was enough to make him forget as they passed through the gate of the liveliest house.

They skipped up the low steps, and eagerness hummed through Aiden.

Eagerness, and something with a far more serrated edge.

Something that left him stopping for just a moment.

The last party he’d gone to had been at Elmington, and he’d been miserable in a sea of people who couldn’t see it, didn’t care enough to, at least not until he’d gotten bladdered enough to puke all over the carpet mid-panic attack. What if he lost himself again here?

‘Are you okay?’ Luc asked, blotting the dark lipstick from their mouth and leaving it to stain the pads of their fingers.

Aiden nodded. Swallowed. It wouldn’t be like that again. He didn’t drink to forget anymore. He was finally where he wanted to be, not caught pursuing a degree just to make his dad proud. There was no one else to let down but himself, and that made him freer than ever. ‘Yep. All good.’

He didn’t bother knocking on the door, instead heading straight into a hallway crammed with people. The bitter smell of beer and mingling aftershaves hit him like a wave, and he found himself high-fiving and shaking hands with people he’d never seen before in his life.

And then his name was yelled over the electronic beat of the music: ‘Fuck yeah, Whittaker!’

Tom stood on the stairs, pumping his arms as though he’d known Aiden for years rather than days.

‘Yikes,’ Luc whispered again, and tactfully disappeared into the first door, which Aiden assumed was the living room.

Since he’d been spotted, he smiled and waited for an already stumbling Tom to make it down the stairs.

‘All right, Timmy Tom?’ Aiden teased. Chris’s nicknames for them all seemed to be sticking. Aiden was sometimes referred to as Al by the lads as a tribute to his new name, Alex.

Tom’s grin was hazy, just like his eyes, as he slapped Aiden on the back. ‘Glad you’re here, mate. Let’s get you a drink.’ Much to Aiden’s mortification, he began to shout to the partygoers: ‘Move, everybody. Son of art royalty coming through!’

Maybe it wasn’t so different after all. Aiden kept his head down, face blazing, as Tom guided them through the crowd now ogling him and into a large kitchen. Drink bottles were lined up on every surface, and groups congregated around countertops to chat and take pictures.

‘What can I get you, mate? Beer? Lager? Whisky?’ Tom was already riffling through his collection, clearly eager to impress. At least, Aiden could only assume that’s what it was after the scene he’d just caused. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody had sucked up a little too hard.

‘Beer’s fine.’

‘Only the best for you.’ He picked up one of the more expensive brands, removing the cap with his teeth. ‘Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. One of my mates is at Elmington—’

Aiden’s heart stopped, the world slowing down around him as though everyone was wading through tar, including him.

Tom’s words were drowned out by the alarm bells in his ears, but he imagined the possibilities: And he said you had a nervous breakdown and walked out in the middle of an exam.

And he heard you stopped getting out of bed to go to your lectures.

And he was wondering why the fuck you’d turned your whole life into something barely recognisable.

‘Whoa,’ Tom said with his mouth around his own beer. ‘Am I out of line? Sorry, Al…’

Dizzy, Aiden tried to tune back into the conversation. Tried to look like he was a normal person, not that broken shell he’d become last year.

‘Sorry, I missed that. What did you say about your mate?’ He leaned closer, feigning interest even as the bottle in his hands began to quiver.

In his ear, Tom shouted over the dance music: ‘He was wondering if you could put in a good word with your dad about that apprenticeship he’s running. Dead interested in the dealer business he is!’

‘Right.’ Aiden might have felt relieved if the question didn’t make him feel so numb.

This was why he hadn’t wanted people to know who he was.

There was always someone who needed something, usually from his dad, which left him as nothing more than pawn, a go-between.

‘I think the position has already been filled, but I’ll see what I can do. ’

It was a lie. He wasn’t even talking to his dad right now – or, rather, his dad wasn’t talking to him.

Not after he’d turned down that apprenticeship himself, among a few others.

He’d gleaned from shameless social media stalking that Jonathan had hired someone else over the summer, a young lad not too dissimilar in looks from Aiden.

Probably a nice replacement now the heir to the business had been unofficially disowned.

‘You’re a top bloke!’ Tom said, clinking their bottles together. ‘Cheers, mate.’

‘Cheers,’ Aiden said, and then, when Tom got pulled into another conversation, muttered, ‘I’m not your mate.’

He leaned against the kitchen table, trying to gather his composure.

It would have been easier if, at the same moment, his eyes didn’t drift around the room and inevitably land on Juniper’s.

His first instinct was to straighten, reassemble his composure before she caught a chink in his armour.

Hers was to look away, as always, which at least gave him the opportunity to admire her form in the bright lights.

Her hair was down, curls slightly more organised, and her face glittered with more makeup than usual.

Her eyeliner tapered into a point beyond the smoky corners of her eyes and velvety cherry-red lipstick accentuated her plump mouth.

She wore a black leather skirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination, pleats draped over irresistibly wild hips and ending midway down her overwhelmingly curvy thighs.

Her mesh top was just as generous – too generous.

Something lurched inside Aiden at the sight of her cleavage, and kept lurching when he noticed a tattoo curling around her shoulder like vines.

Fuck .

He was so enchanted by her that he hadn’t even noticed who she talked to, not until she laughed straight from her belly when her friend whispered in her ear.

No, not just a friend. Amir.

Why was it that he was the only person she couldn’t stand? The only one who couldn’t make her laugh like that? The only one she didn’t even want to look at.

The room seemed to expand, leaving him a lonely dot floating at the centre of it, and he couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like if his lips got as close to her as Amir’s were, hovering just above the soft hinge of her jaw.

‘Staring isn’t cool, man.’ Luc’s black-painted fingernails were suddenly clicking in Aiden’s face, and he tore away quickly.

‘Not staring. Just observing. That’s what artists do, isn’t it?’ He handed Luc a drink, but they nudged it back to the table.

‘No thanks. Smells like piss, just as I’d feared.’

Aiden didn’t care. He was going to need something stronger than the beer he currently sipped to get through tonight. Maybe he would fall into old habits, after all. He gestured with his head to the living room. ‘What’s it like in there? Any better than out here?’

‘If you like David Guetta, which you shouldn’t.’ Luc grimaced. ‘Why are we here again? To see if you can exchange dissing for kissing with your high school nemesis over there?’

Aiden’s brow furrowed. ‘Am I supposed to know what that means?’

Luc’s sigh was withering. ‘Why don’t you just go over to her?’

‘Why would I want to?’ he snapped, and then regretted it.

Luc was about the only friend he’d made, or at least the only one who seemed to see him as more than just a Whittaker.

It wasn’t their fault that everybody else in this room, bar one very fiery classmate, had already decided he was only worth what his surname could offer.

Luc seemed oblivious to his frayed temper, only shrugging. ‘That, dear friend, is a mystery to me. But it beats ogling her from the other side of the room, does it not?’

Frustration bubbled in Aiden at the prospect of another terse conversation with her. He already felt on the edge of his limit after the conversation with Tom, though he’d hoped to be stronger than that. Hoped he was finally recovering. ‘I can’t get through to her. It’s pointless.’

‘Her drink is running low,’ they noted. ‘Get her another one.’

He looked over again. Amir had disappeared and Juniper now chatted with Tilly, back pressed against the wall as she nursed an empty bottle of cider with a pink label that he assumed made it berry-flavoured.

A Strongbow-flavoured olive branch…

It wasn’t the worst idea in the world