“How?”
I reached for a biscuit and set about crumbling it into sticky dust. “Me and Kim . . . we, um—”
“Hooked up? I read about that too, inHeat.”
“Ma!Heatmagazine, seriously? But, yeah, if we’re being millennial about it, we met at that hippie fest a while back, and then at a gig in Bude. We hooked up and things have been, uh, complicated ever since.”
Laura poured tea. “Because of his drinking?”
“He doesn’t drink, Ma, I told you, and it’s me, not him.”
“Ah.” Laura stirred milk slowly into a rose-adorned mug that was older than me. “Does this have anything to do with what happened with Rich?”
I cast her a sideways glance. I’d never gone into detail with my family about why Rich and I had split, but I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I’d hidden the resulting carnage from them. “Kind of. After Rich, I didn’t think I was ready for more than sex, and I liked Kim too much to just have that with him, so we agreed to be friends.”
“Friends is nice,” Laura said. “What went wrong?”
“Oh God.” I flung my elbows on the table. “Everything, really. For one, we kept having sex, and then there’s Red to consider.”
“Red?”
“His missus, well . . . ex-missus, but they’re still—”
“Hooking up?”
Hooking upseemed a crass way to describe the lingering relationship between Kim and Red, but I nodded anyway. “He says he hasn’t since he met me, but they’re still close. He loves her.”
“I see. Is that a bad thing?”
And that, right there, was why I’d come to Laura. Her unconditional love for my father was the reason my childhood had been so full and bright, instead of tinged grey by the monotony of living with a woman who’d barely tolerated the space I’d taken up in her lonely life. “No, actually, and whether he fucks her or not doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.”
Laura sipped at her tea. “Would you like to sleep with her too?”
“I don’t think so.” And of that I was almost certain. I’d been sexually attracted to women in the past, and Red wasstunning, but my fascination with her was all about Kim. “I don’t know her, to be honest.”
“But you like her?”
I nodded, because it was true. My encounters with Red had endeared me to her, even if she had left a vicious bruise on my shin. How could it not, when it was clear her frustration had stemmed from a primal instinct to protect Kim? “I just don’t know where we go from here. I’m a mess, Ma. What if I screw his life up? Mess with his recovery? Or him and Red?”
“What makes you think your presence in his life will be negative? What happened with Rich wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No, it bloody wasn’t.”
I blinked. Laura rarely swore, even in a house full of blokes who cursed like sailors. “Why are you so sure?”
“Because, Jasper, I raised you every summer your mother saw fit to let me, and I know you only show your affection when you truly mean it. You loved that man, and he hurt you. Thatwasn’tyour fault. My concern now is that you’ve taken it to mean that’s all you’re good for.”
“. . .all my junkyard heart is good for. . .”
“I don’t think that.”
“No? Then what’s keeping you and Kim apart?”
I shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. I don’t know if he wants to be with me, I just know that what we have at the moment is hurting him.”
“Because it’s making him feel like he’s not good enough.”