Kim nodded and leaned over to tap in his passcode. “There’s a couple of folders on there. Enough to keep you busy for a while.”
Perhaps I can love him after all.But as the errant thought crossed my mind, the train rumbled into Swindon, reminding me that only Reading stood between me and the city I’d sworn I’d never go back to. I opened a sketch of an old-school anchor-and-rope tattoo, similar to the one I’d seen on Kim’s chest. The design was classically flawless, and for the umpteenth time since I’d met him, Kim’s talent blew me away.I don’t deserve him.“I’ve cheated on every partner I’ve ever had.”
“That so?”
“Yep.” I swiped through the pages of tattoo designs. “All but one. Bet you can guess that karma caught up with me, eh?”
“It don’t always happen, but when it does, it’s good for us . . . It’s how we learn, how we grow.”
“Or how we realise what we deserve.”
“I don’t believe that.” Kim nudged me until I looked at him. “Fucking up doesn’t mean we deserve to be hurt.”
“No? Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that, in my case, at least. I was anarsehole, Kim. I can’t even— Shit, I can’t explain it. I had a different girl every week, blokes on the side, more girls. I wasn’t a liar, but I think that made it worse, because I just didn’t care. Drugs, booze, sex, it was all the same, you know?”
Kim nodded sagely. “They often come together. Makes it hard to know what to quit first.”
“Well, I quit it all when I found something—someone—who turned my life upside down.”
“Ah, you fell in love?”
“God, yeah. Hard, like a motherfucker.”
“Bloke or girl?”
“Bloke, which knocked me off my feet all over again.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “’Cause all the gay guys I knew up until that point were doing the same as me—fucking their way around Hoxton without a care in the world. No strings. No commitments. I guess I kind of assumed that’s all there was for them . . . forme. And then I met Rich.”
“The love of your life?”
“I thought so for a while. Four years, in fact.”
“That is a while.”
“Especially when you’re wasting your fucking time.”
I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Failed, and the sympathy in Kim’s kind eyes was hard to take. I preferred it when he gazed at me like I was the first naked man he’d ever seen. Which wasn’t going happen again, right? ’Cause I’d told him I just wanted to be friends.Dickhead—
Kim nudged me. “Tell me the punch line. Did he cheat on you?”
“Worse. He was cheating on someone else to be with me.”
Kim winced. “Wife?”
“Yup. Wife, two-point-four kids, the whole shebang. And when I look back on it now, it’s so fucking obvious. Shit, when I eventually found out, he’d been living a double life for our entire relationship—half the week with me at our flat, the rest of it in Northampton with his real family.”
I broke off as it abruptly occurred to me that this was the first time I’d told my tale of woe to anyone who wasn’t one of the handful of faceless blokes I’d fucked in the weeks of drunken malaise that had followed Rich’s revelation. And I was telling him on the train back to the scene of the crime, no less.Jesus.
“Go on,” Kim said gently.
I took a deep breath. “I caught him red-handed. A client invited me to a book launch close to where Rich was living with his wife. I never bothered to tell him I was going, because he was working away, like he always did on Thursdays. Which I guess worked out for the best in the end, because if I’d told him I was going, I’d never have walked into the event to catch him breaking bread with his wife, kids, and my big new client who just so happened to be his brother-in-law.”
“Ouch.”
I nodded. “Yep. I lost my life with him and a six-month contract that day. I care more about the contract now, but at the time—when I realised that everything we had was a lie, that I’d been nothing but a willing arse to satisfy his cock craving—it felt like the end of the world.”