Awkward.“Sorry. You just seem so chilled and sensible against the shambles of my own life.”
Kim snorted. “Trust me, mate—me and shambles are old friends. But you’ve got me curious now. What’s so shambolic about you?”
“Everything.” I scraped my plate clean and then pushed it away. “I was trouble from the day I was born.”
“How so?”
I shrugged. “I told you the swingers’ party story, right?”
“Aye. Didn’t sound like it defined you, though.”
“It doesn’t, but I guess it set the tone for the rest of my life. I’ve always been a pain in the arse. I reckon my dad knows he dodged a bullet when my mum took me back to London.”
Kim said nothing, apparently engrossed in the task of tipping the last of the rice onto his plate. When he looked at me again, his gaze was measured. “What did your brother tell you about me?”
“Gaz? Erm . . . nothing, really. Just that you work at the cool tattoo place on the seafront. I got the impression he didn’t know you very well.”
“He doesn’t, but you know what this town is like . . . People talk.”
I didn’t know Porthkennack all that well anymore, but I remembered enough to know that Kim was right. “What do people say about you?”
“The truth, I’d imagine. That I’m a pisshead . . . an alcoholic. It ain’t no secret.”
“Oh.” For the first time since I’d spotted my boyfriend and his wife across a crowded room, I was truly lost for words. “I thought you were going to say you were a freegan or some shit.”
Kim laughed. “Would that have been worse?”
I considered it and nodded dazedly, still processing Kim’s revelation and trying to match it with the composed man sitting beside me. “I fell asleep to a documentary on freegans once. Dreamt about Biffa bins for weeks.”
“Fair enough. I’ll take that as an assumption that raiding wheelie bins for my dinner would have been exponentially worse than drinking myself into a coma for most of my twenties.”
I took a long sip of the lemon-laced water Kim had put on the table with the curry. It was fairly obvious he was testing me—laying it all out to be sure I could handle it—before this, whatever it was, became something neither one of us wanted to give up. Did he do this with every new person he met? I hoped not. Whatever his past, he deserved better than that.
“I drink,” I said. “Sometimes I drink a lot and get drunk. Is that going to be a problem for you?”
The roll of Kim’s eyes was so minute there was every chance I’d imagined it. “Abstinence isn’t avoidance.”
Fair enough. I took my cue to shut the fuck up in the hope that Kim would elaborate. In return, Kim leaned forward and brushed the pad of his thumb along my cheekbone. The touch was gentle, and unexpected, and so subtly erotic that a lump formed in my throat. I swallowed, my fingers itching to wrap around his wrist and tug him closer, so I could fuse my lips to his and put to bed any fear that our previous encounter had been a fluke. But he dropped his hand before I could break the thrall he had over me, and the moment passed. “How long have you been abstaining for?”
“A hundred and seventy-five days.”
I did the maths. Kim had been dry less than six months. “So—”
“It’s an ongoing thing,” he said. “I haven’t lost my mind on it for a while, but I have slipped a few times—more than a few.”
I sat back in my seat and tried to imagine my life without the comforting burn of a shot of whiskey, or the refreshing buzz of an ice-cold beer. “How long have you been in recovery for?”
“Four years, off and on. I’d been dry for eighteen months before I fucked up last.”
“Was there a trigger?”
“For fucking up? Man, there’s always a trigger, an excuse. That’s what AA’s for . . . to learn better ways of handling them.”
I’d always pictured AA as a place for old men—a last stop for the winos who lived in the shop doorways on Oxford Street. In my ignorant imagination, young addicts fried their brains on Mkat and got sent to cushy rehab centres. “Thank you for telling me. You didn’t have to. I wouldn’t have lost my shit if I’d found out later.”
Kim smiled. “I believe you, but I don’t like hiding it. It’s not healthy for me. Besides, if I hadn’t told you, someone else would have. You can’t hide anything in Porthkennack.”
“Sounds like you’ve tried.”