Cash rolled his eyes. “As much fun as you can have in fucking Thorston.”
I disagreed. Over the past few weeks, I’d had more fun in Thorston than I’d had in years. I wasn’t about to tell Cash that, though.
* * *
Jude
Rae was back, and for once he wasn’t annoying me. He’d brought Cash with him for the afternoon, and I was enjoying the company, even if it was keeping me away from my phone.
My phone. Isha. Same difference.
Plus, Cash made better sandwiches than Rae. They were so good, I began to seriously consider setting up home above the shop. If Cash could make perfect fried egg butties on a camping stove, so could I. What more did I need?
“Um…maybe a couch? A TV, a bedroom?” Rae said when I idly put the idea to him. “Jude, mate. I know you aren’t into material shit, but you work eight days a week as it is. If you lived here you’d never stop.”
“Eight days a week? That’s some interesting maths, and hypocrisy considering you squatted in a field for three years. Don’t remember you having much of a bathroom.”
“Yeah, and I was fucking miserable. I just didn’t know it.”
Cash cleared his throat. “I think what Rae’s trying to say is unless living in a storeroom is what you really want, there has to be another way. Is the shop doing that badly?”
I thought back to the vague version of the truth I’d given Isha. “The shop does fine, it’s the overheads that kill me. At home, I have no money left after I’ve paid all the bills, and over here, once I’ve paid the mortgage and business rates, I can barely keep the lights on.”
Cash exchanged a meaningful glance with Morrissey, who was happily eating lettuce off his shoulder. “I nearly bankrupted myself when I bought my house. To be honest, if Lucky hadn’t come to live with me, I’d probably have had to either sell it or rent it out. Dom pretty much pays the mortgage at the moment, motherfucker always puts three times the rent in my bank account.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to make a bitter quip about rich fairy godfathers, but the name caught my attention. Dom Ramos was Isha’s business partner. An ex top flight football player who’d given up his career when he’d come out as gay. Given it up and gone into business with Isha.
And Dom lives with Cash and Rae. Super.
The added complication made my head swim. Rae hadn’t mentioned Isha since his last visit, and I hadn’t either. And I wouldn’t. If Isha wanted to tell them he was fucking me that was on him. He wasn’t out, for whatever reason, and I wasn’t about to change that.
“So,” Rae said when I failed to respond to Cash’s offer of solidarity. “Did you ever hook up with that Grindr bloke again?”
His timing was ridiculous. I finished my lunch and wiped my mouth. “Which one?”
“Whichever one you were mooning over last time. Has there been someone else since?”
“What? No.” Not that I’d have been ashamed if there had been. Before Isha, I’d gone through phases of using Grindr every week, and long periods of not bothering at all. In between, there’d been occasional organic encounters, but all of them seemed a lifetime ago. “I’m, er, still seeing the same one.”
“’Seeing’?” Rae arched a dark brow. “As in, more than hooking up?”
“We do that too, it’s—” I stopped as I realised that even if I’d wanted to explain whatever was between me and Isha to Rae, I wouldn’t have had a clue how. We were still hooking up, if the last time he’d been to my house was anything to go by, but the texts we were sending each other had nothing to do with sex.
I missed him because I craved his company as much as his dick.
More.
And perhaps he was starting to feel the same.
Rae’s sharp gaze drilled holes in the side of my head. I hid in the sanctuary of Cash’s knowing grin and shrugged. “It’s complicated, okay? And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.” Rae took my plate and dumped it into the sink. When he came back, his arm around me was brotherly and warm, and nothing like the cheeky hand jobs we’d once traded many years ago. “Be careful, though, man. There’s all kinds of weirdos out there.”
Despite the half dozen times I’d called Isha exactly that, the idea that he was remotely dangerous to anything but my sanity was hilarious. I returned Rae’s embrace with a snort. “Trust me, mate. I’ll be fine.”
The conversation moved on, and with it, so did the day. Rae and Cash left after helping me out with the usual after-school rush, and before I knew it, I was locking the doors.
I hadn’t checked my phone for hours. With hard-won resolve, I did the feed round first, and my reward was the text I’d been waiting on all week long.