And I didn’t have to. My wallet containing my train ticket was stuffed into my back pocket.
Fuck it. I was going home.
Nineteen
Isha
“I see you’ve gone back into shithead mode.”
I glowered at Dom. “Excuse me?”
He met my malevolence head on. “You heard. I knew it was too good to be true.”
“What was?”
“That you were actually happy.”
“Happy?”
“Yeah. As in, not working twenty-four-seven, and walking around with a smile on your face. I mean, I can’t deny the business has suffered without your superhuman diligence, but…” He trailed off as my glare turned murderous. “What?”
I shut my laptop with a bang. “Fuck off, Dom. What are you saying? That I have to be miserable to keep your pockets lined?”
“Are you being serious right now?”
“Are you? Because last time I checked my state of mind wasn’t high on your list of priorities.”
It was a low blow. Dom had always been as good a friend to me as I’d allowed him to be, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with his sardonic approach to being a mate. My patience for just about everything—even him—was scraping empty, and I needed to get shit done and go home before I killed someone.
Dom said nothing. Just stared at me as I swept paperwork off the table and stuffed my laptop into my bag, and it had been that way all day, all week, and however long before that it had been since Jude had told me to do one and bolted from my house. Since then, I’d called him twice a day, and sent him about a thousand messages on every platform I could think of, and he’d ignored me every single time. And then he’d stopped coming online too. As of now, he hadn’t been on WhatsApp for three days, and if I hadn’t been crazy for him before, I was losing my damn mind over him now.
It hadn’t helped that I’d been too busy to drive to Thorston and harass him in person. Problem after problem had kept me in London, and now it had been so long I honestly had no clue what I’d say when I inevitably showed up on his doorstep. Telling him I loved him had seemed easy, even though I’d never got the chance to say it. Trying to figure out how I’d driven him so far away from me was harder.
I grunted at Dom and left the Tottenham house, fully intending on spending my evening staring at WhatsApp, and thinking up a plausible excuse not to go back tomorrow. The drive home took me past the burger bar we’d eaten in after our trip to the zoo. Jude had been uncomfortable even then, but I’d put it down to the noise. He’d told me before that crowded places made his head buzz. But perhaps it hadn’t been that at all. Perhaps it had been me all along, and I’d fucked it up way before he’d walked out on me.
Depressed, I parked my car and trudged into my house. It was late—Dom and I had been working eighteen hour days all week. Otherwise I might’ve given into temptation and hit the M1 northbound. As it was, I barely had the energy to grab a bottle of water from my fridge and flop on the couch.
I tried to convince myself I could smell Jude on the cushions, despite the fact that he’d spent less than an hour sitting on them more than a week ago. My phone was in my hand, fingers itching to open WhatsApp, but for the first time in days, a sense of how pathetic I’d become was too tangible to ignore. This couldn’t go on. Even if Jude told me to fuck off for good, I had to see him one last time. Work could go to hell. I was going to Thorston tomorrow.
Oh yeah? To say what? That everything he said was true, but you love him, so it’s okay?
My inner demons taunted me like a broken record. The last conversation I’d had with Jude, if you could call it that, was a blur, but two things Jude had yelled at me stood out.
“This can never work.”
“You don’t want my life, and I don’t want yours.”
Was that true? Knowing the answer to the first would’ve saved us both weeks of heartache, but it was the second that cut me deeper. Jude’s life wasn’t mine, but I envied his focus and passion. I believed in the work I did with Dom, but I was the money man—the one who made the numbers work. There was no passion there, only logic.
I envied his outness too. I’d never seen him be open about his sexuality in front of anyone, but he didn’t need to be. He was just…out. And I wanted to be too. I needed to be, if I had any hope of fixing this mess.
Just do it.
I turned the idea over in my mind, imagining how the few people in my life I gave a shit about would react if I told them I was queer—my kids, Dom, Lucky, Cash and Rae.
My mother.
A shudder rippled through me. I rarely spoke to my mother. After my dad died, I’d bought her a house in Leeds, close to her sister, so she could live out her days in the tight-knit community I’d stayed in London to avoid. She was westernised enough to have abandoned most of the ideals she’d been raised with, but rocking up at her yard with a boyfriend in tow?