Jevon blinked. “Sorry. Yes, of course it has. Are you hungry? I can cook while you grab a shower?”
Aside from diving head first into Jevon’s kiss again, a hot shower sounded like the best thing in the world. Jevon showed Rhys the bathroom, passed him clean towels, and left him to it.
Under the scalding spray, the steamy solitude was more welcome than Rhys had realised. He stood with his head bowed a while, then he gave in and sank to the floor, his favourite way to brood for as long as he could remember. Jevon was fucking wonderful, but what did they do now? Pick up where they’d left off before summer? Or have dinner as strangers and part again in the morning, leaving things to fate once more?
If someone had asked Rhys yesterday, he’d have told them his intention was to screw Jevon’s brains out. To teach him how to feel good and own it—tobelieveit—but kissing Jevon had blown his fantasies out of the water. Suddenly it seemed that whatever happened next, it would never, ever be enough.
The hot water ran cold. Rhys hauled himself out of the shower and dressed in the scruffy jeans and Stone Roses T-shirt he kept in the chopper for overnights like these. In Jevon’s colourful house, he felt kind of scuzzy, but it was all he had, and it suited his mood.
But when he got downstairs, Jevon’s smile turned the world upside down. The cloud that followed Rhys when he wasn’t sharp enough to evade it evaporated.Goddamn, he’s so fucking beautiful.
Jevon beckoned Rhys into the narrow kitchen and sat him on a stool at the counter. “I’ve got the rice on, but I wasn’t sure what you’d want with it. You like spicy food?”
“Love it.”
“Winner. That’s all I can cook. You want jerk chicken? Or fish? I’ve got some plantain around here somewhere...” Jevon wandered off and came back with the biggest bananas Rhys had ever seen. “Plantain,” he corrected when Rhys said as much. “You white boys are all the same.”
“Sorry.”
Jevon chuckled. “Don’t be. I’m taking the piss. I didn’t know what they were either until I was fifteen and my auntie Pearl came to stay.”
“Stay where? Where did you grow up?”
“A tiny village just outside Reading.” Jevon stirred the rice. “I was the only black kid in my school, but then we moved to Brixton when my parents got back together, and my world got real. I met all my dad’s family and made friends with kids who looked like me. It changed my life—it really did.”
Rhys could listen to Jevon talk all night. He folded his arms on the counter and rested his chin on them. “Do your family know about your sexuality?”
“Kind of. My grandparents in Jamaica don’t, but I’m okay with that. My parents though... that was weird.”
“How so?”
Jevon opened the fridge and retrieved chicken, salmon, and prawns, offering them to Rhys to choose.
“Fish all the way,” Rhys said. “I don’t eat chicken.”
“No?”
“Nah. My brother was obsessed with it when he had an eating disorder. I gave it up to show him that life went on without it. Never wanted to eat it since.”
Jevon chucked the chicken back in the fridge. “Valid. You’ll have to tell me about him when you’re done grilling me.”
“Do you feel like I’m grilling you?”
“Of course not. I’m a clown, remember? I say silly things.”
Jevon brushed a soft kiss to Rhys’s cheek and went back to cooking. The gesture was so lightly intimate that Rhys couldn’t speak. For long minutes, he stared, lost in Jevon—his flawless skin and elegant neck, the graceful way he moved around the tiny kitchen. It was a while before he remembered what they’d been talking about.
“So... what happened with your parents?”
“I got it wrong.” Jevon poured something spicy looking onto the salmon and prawns. “As in, misjudged them. I figured my mum would be okay with whatever and my dad would lose his shit, but it was the other way around.”
“Your mum freaked?”
“Totally. We got past it, but it took her a while to give up the hetero-normative future she’d planned for when I finally stop messing around for a living.”
Rhys cocked an eyebrow. “That’s what she thinks you do?”
“Probably. We don’t talk about it much.”