Coming from me, the sentiment would’ve sounded like a Waitrose fortune cookie. From Kim, it was poetic and made me want to forget his girlfriend and drag him into the nearest outbuilding.
But I couldn’t forget Red, and as the barn appeared in front of us, I knew that, sooner or later, the time to pretend I could would be over.
I led Kim inside the barn. It was a mess of dust and tarpaulin, but the potential of the space was plain to see. At the back, Gaz and his builder mate—Bob, no joke—had begun to install the kitchen, and the roof was finally secure and leak-free.
“This place is awesome,” Kim said.
“It’s on its way,” I replied. “I keep changing my mind about whether we’ll pull it off, though.”
“Why’s that? Apart from the décor, you seem to have a clear vision of what you want.”
I shrugged. “I thought I did, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I’m looking at it the wrong way, like a Londoner, perhaps? Maybe Gaz does know best.”
“He was wrong about the wicker.”
“True, but what about the rest of it? I was thinking last night about a shoot I did last year for a company who are, like, the fucking masters of concept restaurants. Seriously, they open a new place every year, and each one is so crazy-amazing the whole city stops and takes notice.”
“And that’s what you want to do here?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I thought we should, for a while, but I was wrong. Gaz and Nicky—all my family—have dedicated their whole lives to this. That should speak for itself.”
Kim smiled. “It is the Porthkennack way.”
His wisdom gave me a clarity I’d been lacking. I shelved the fancy plans I’d drawn up in my head and gazed around the barn, again imagining it filled with Kim’s original furniture, and the scents of a lifetime of my family’s best-loved recipes. Kim was right: thiswasPorthkennack, and the barn had a soul that couldn’t be moulded to fit whatever hipster lunacy I’d brought home from London.
That settled, I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room any longer. I drifted to a stray hay bale that seemed to keep finding its way back into the barn and sat down, absorbing the prickly texture that had horrified me so much as a young city boy. “So . . .”
“So . . .”
Kim trailed to a stop in front of me, his hands loosely at his sides, like he had these awkward conversations all the time. Perhaps he did. I regarded him through my fingers as I shielded my eyes from the stream of sunlight filtering through one of the new windows Gaz had installed. “Tell me about Red.”
“‘Red’?”
“Lena. Sorry. I called her Red when I was shooting her at the gig.”
“And you still do?”
“Well, not to her face, obviously.”
Kim smirked a little. “Shame. I think she’d like that.”
“You’d know, I suppose.”
Kim’s humour faded. “I never lied to you, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
That Kim hadn’t lied to me, I couldn’t deny, and the first time we’d fucked at the gig—atRed’sgig—we hadn’t exactly stopped to ask each other any pertinent questions, likeAny chance your girlfriend is gonna walk in on us?And, as my drunken internet stalking had made me realise, it was actually Kim who was due an apology. “I’m sorry too. I made assumptions I shouldn’t have.”
“Assumptions about what?”
I shrugged. “The usual crap—that where you’re putting your dick at a particular moment defines your whole identity. I’m fucking mortified that it was in me to be something I’ve spent my whole life fighting.”
Kim sat down beside me, stretching his long, biker-jean clad legs out in front of him. “So you thought I was gay? And single?”
“It’s not like I bothered to ask, but yes. I kinda let myself assume.”
“And now you think I’m straight and taken.”
“Not quite.” I averted my gaze, unwilling to admit to my Facebook spying. “How wrong was I?”