Page 17

I didn’t know what it was this man did to me, but I liked it. I liked that he let me look after him, that I was sitting in his kitchen scrolling on my phone while he talked shop with the two suits who’d turned up with large rolls of plans and big words.

Dylan had big words too and made sweeping gestures as he turned to the windows, holding out his arms as he described his ideas when one of the suits pointed to something on the table and questioned it .

I didn’t understand it all, but maybe I didn’t need to. He’d been a bit of a mess lately, and he still was, but we had turned a definite corner today, and for the first time, I felt like I belonged here, in this house, that he perhaps wanted me here as much as I wanted to stay. Just for a while.

I kept staring at him, wondering what it was that stirred up feelings right there in my guts.

It was a strange thing because I’d never experienced anything of the sort before.

I’d been the kind of person who had turned to…

Well, let’s just say I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t always in the right, and God knew, I had made mistakes.

I had also tried to bury those mistakes, hidden them behind alcohol and lies, hoping nobody could see through the cracks. But people had seen right through them, and I’d turned myself around. I’d found my son, made us a good life, and here I was.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and I turned and found him standing right next to me. I’d been so deep in thought, I hadn’t even noticed the suits leaving.

I didn’t get up. Just sat there like a giant lump, trying to figure out what to say. How to behave .

“How did it go?” I asked, trying to make light of my mood, hoping he’d just answer. Should I make another cup of tea?

“You look tired,” he observed.

I was. I was drained. Exhausted. In my past life, I’d worked whole weeks without a day off, double shifts running into night shifts, with a few hours’ rest in between. I’d still managed. These days, I did very little, yet here I was, struggling to get up.

“I’ve never done this. Not properly,” I said, realising how odd that sounded.

“Done what?” he questioned softly.

“This.” I gestured with my hand back and forth between us.

“Friendship?”

“Is it?” I had to ask because I didn’t know myself.

He walked around and pulled up a seat. Stupid bar stools. They were similar to what we had upstairs in the boys’ kitchen. My boys. God, I missed them. Missed normality, where I wasn’t so full of questions and doubts.

“Stewart.” I liked it when he said my name.

“Yep. That’s me.” Stupid. God help me.

“I like that you’re part of my life.”

That was one way of putting it.

“We said we’d be honest,” I stuttered out.

“We are.” He loosened his tie and took it off. “Aren’t we?”

“In another life, I would have poured myself a stiff bourbon and downed it in one for bravery. I’m not always good with honesty, even if I maybe sound like it’s all I do.” What was I on about?

He laughed gently. “I know what you mean. I’ve never told anyone about what I told you earlier.

Honesty is not easy for me either. I inherited that from my mother, I think, who did everything she could not to upset my father.

He wasn’t a bad man or anything like that.

She just didn’t like drama, kept everything peaceful and quiet at all times.

I guess I did the same with Veronica, trying to suffocate everything to keep the peace. ”

“That’s not a good thing.”

“No. I’ve realised that. But it’s not an easy trait to just let go of. It’s weak. I’m weak. You can’t get worse than me.”

“Stop putting yourself down,” I said sharply. “You are who you are, and I can’t sit here and claim to be some kind of saint either. I’m someone who turns to alcohol in a crisis, and whose only go at a relationship was a woman I paid by the hour.”

He looked a little taken aback by that comment.

“Was that your son’s mother?” he asked, twirling his tie around his fingers.

I nodded.

“Tell me.” He had such a nice voice. Light. Calming.

“Not much to tell. She was kind and beautiful, and for someone like me, just what I needed. I was inexperienced and overexcited and very naive, but she looked after me and made me feel good, and I kept going back to see her. I wanted more, and then she told me to go away. Said she didn’t want to get close, that punters like me would start to demand things and she had bills to pay.

She had a certain reputation to uphold with her other clients.

She told me I wasn’t special. Not in any way. ”

I shook my head. What a fool I’d been.

“Then years and years later, I saw her photo in the papers. Said she’d been done for gang-related criminal activity, drugs and violence.

Had a son who had been handed over to the authorities.

And you know when you read something, and it suddenly feels like someone has shot electricity through your veins?

I didn’t know why or how, but something was wrong, and I started looking into things and rang social services and offered myself up as a potential father. They just laughed at me.”

“That must have been hard.”

“But I refused to give up. Then I finally got hold of the right social worker, and she agreed to meet me. A year later, I picked up my son from the group home he’d been living at. That was the most terrifying day of my life.”

“Gosh.”

“Indeed.” I had to smile. “We’d met a few times, with appropriate people present, but he didn’t know me.

I didn’t know him. Not at all. I knew nothing about who he was or what he liked or his hopes and dreams. He was just a scrawny kid with a massive, unkempt mop of hair, and he was flighty and terrified with this gigantic attitude, like he was going to get up and cut me if I didn’t do as he said. ”

He laughed, Dylan Scotland. Funny how I laughed too.

“I bet you curbed that attitude pretty darn quick.”

“No. I was so scared of him that I locked my bedroom door.”

I loved that I made him happy, the sound of his laughter matching mine.

“It took a long while for us to get to know each other, a day at a time. Good days and bad days. Very bad days. But we learnt to trust each other. I started to read him. He would come to me and sit down, tell me things he’d done, like he was testing me.

And I’d sit there with my heart in my throat, anger raging.

I wanted to shake him, shout in his face.

But I didn’t. I told him I wasn’t about to give up on him.

That I was his father and he was stuck with me. ”

“That’s why you’re a good dad.”

“I wasn’t always. I was still drinking.”

“What made that change?”

“He told me it frightened him, when I drank, and I hated that it did. I was so terrified of losing him that I hadn’t noticed that he was equally scared of losing me. We came to an understanding. It took years. Years, Dylan. That was a lot of damage to undo.”

“But you did it. So you’re a good dad.” He nodded, to emphasise his words .

“So are you. We just need to love these kids and hope that one day they will realise how much they love us back. Because they do. That’s who we are.”

“And you never had a relationship?” He had an eyebrow raised, like he didn’t believe me.

“I had my son. I was so busy with him and working and…it wasn’t something I needed. I was happy. I still am, and now I am sat here like a big old potato wondering what the hell I’m doing with you.”

Another pause. Him just looking at me. He’d dropped the tie, his fingers now tapping against each other.

“Like, you and me?” he questioned.

I nodded, flames rising up my cheeks.

Perhaps I had this all wrong. Perhaps I was still as naive as the young me had been, ringing that doorbell with a twenty-pound note clasped in my hand, hoping to kiss a pretty mouth, longing for the feel of another body against mine.

Only here I was, thirty-odd years later, and the person I wanted to feel was no woman.

He was a scrawny, tieless mess of a man, who was biting his lip, a small, amused smile on his face.

“Sorry. I got this all wrong,” I stuttered out, trying to get up.

I wanted to flee, run back home where everything was familiar and settled.

Where my kettle and sofa and TV were my solid companions, and where I needed to feed those goddamn cats who had no doubt tipped over their automatic water dispenser and broken into the cupboards and stolen food again.

What had I been thinking?

But he grabbed my hand and held on to me. I stared out the window, his gaze piercing the side of my face like a laser.

“Stewart,” he said, full-naming me like my mother once had—something that was very him. He’d never called me anything else. “I like that you feel it too.”

“Feel what?”

He laughed. I had to join in.

“Isn’t it funny that in all this misery and despair, we laugh?”

“There’s been a lot of crying going on lately,” I said gruffly, hoping he got my point.

“Yup,” he said softly, his hand in mine. What was it with this hand-holding we had going on?

“I used to watch you,” I admitted, trying to get back on the honesty train. I wanted it—more of his secrets. All of them, maybe. “Barefoot out there in the grass. ”

“It’s a thing my therapist said. Connecting with nature. It’s supposed to soothe your soul.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Not really. But it seems to have made you…” He stopped and waited, like I was supposed to finish his words, understand all of this when I had no clue. Just…

“I like…” He was looking down at our hands rather than at me, sat there like a fool.

“I’ve never had feelings…for anyone like you.” He spoke quietly. “But there is something here, isn’t there?”

“I’m not gay.” It came out of my mouth automatically, and he snatched his hand back, or tried to. I caught it, held on tighter than perhaps necessary, but I was panting.

What was I saying? The thoughts were racing through my head as I tried to compose myself—standing up, then sitting myself back down, and then grabbing both of his hands. I held on for dear life.

“I don’t know anything about bisexuality,” I admitted. “I have no idea what I am doing here, Dylan, but I like you. So much.” I was almost exhaling the words. “I like what we have, the way we function, and everything we’ve built over the past weeks. Months. It’s been almost two months, hasn’t it? ”

“Seven weeks,” he said quietly.

He wouldn’t look at me.

“But there’s something here,” I agreed.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Good,” I said, finally letting myself relax. My shoulders ached with the tension I’d carried…for a while. Too long.

“I don’t know how this will work,” he said. “This is all…very strange.”

Smile. A small one. I liked those. So much.

“I like it when you smile,” I admitted.

“You make me smile,” he said. “I haven’t smiled this much in a very long time.”

Silence. Just the two of us breathing. Him, so incredibly calm. And me?

“Where do we go from here?” I asked, my voice barely there.

“We just keep going,” he said, finally looking up. “Like this. We keep getting to know each other and see where we end up. ”

“I keep doubting myself. Doubting everything in my head. How I enjoy spending time with you, and I wake up and hope you’ll be awake. I like it when we sit in the garden.”

Rambling.

“Why do you doubt yourself?” he asked.

“Don’t you?”

He was looking straight at me.

“Every second of the day. But that’s just the way it is.

I doubt my feelings. I doubt my future. I wake up every morning screaming because my kids are no longer here.

I dream about them. I can hear them calling for me, and I wake up crying.

That won’t ever stop. But the one thing I don’t doubt is that you’ll turn up with a cup of tea.

And you have no idea how much that helps.

That I’ve got you. You make the screaming stop, if only for a few hours. ”

“I don’t want you to feel like that.”

“I will. It’s not something that will go away.”

“I get that. I miss my family every second of the day too.”

“So we’re just lonely?”

“Lonely and desperate,” I agreed with a smile .

“Pathetic, Stewart. You can do better than me.”

“I was thinking of asking Jean out for a drink,” I admitted with a wink. I was joking. He knew that.

“She’d love that. She calls you the silver fox.”

“I am a silver fox,” I said proudly. “Handsome. Got all my own teeth.”

“Good teeth here too.” He gave me a toothy grin. “Not sure about the sanity.”

“God, who needs sanity?”

“No one. It’s terribly overrated.”

“So…”

I didn’t know what I was asking.

“Yes?”

I felt like his hands belonged in mine. Like they were what had been missing. For a long, long time.

“Do you want to…come over for dinner? Give me an hour or two to whip something up, and then we can sit down and…perhaps—”

“Hang out?” he rescued me.

“Yes.”

He said he was weak. Here I was, lying to his face. Because yes, hang out. But I wanted more. I wanted to try, I think, I wanted to touch him. Damn it.

“That sounds lovely,” he said. Then he reached over, inch by inch. The way he was looking at me… I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. My whole body was shaking as he gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

The disappointment on my face must have been devastating because he simply laughed.

“Oh, Stewart,” he said.

I couldn’t have said it better. Oh, Stewart, indeed.