I made more tea and took it upstairs with the noodles.
Billy was drowsing, eyes barely open. I wondered if I should leave him alone, but he heard me coming and pushed himself up on his good arm, face brightening as he caught sight of the steaming bowl I’d balanced on my upturned wrist. “Noodles? Fuck, I really did forget about those.”
His enthusiasm caught me off guard. Feeding him was usually a depressing exercise in him nibbling a tiny portion of whatever I was eating, and me wolfing his leftovers like a carb-addicted vulture. I’d never seen him look at anything the way he was looking at the noodles.
I passed them over and retrieved the fork I’d tucked in my back pocket. “They smell like stock cubes.”
“So? What’s wrong with that?”
I couldn’t think of a sensible answer, so I settled in to watch Billy hoover up the yellowish, gloopy noodles like a child with a bag of sweets. It was endearing, and...hot, though I couldn’t say why. All I knew was my gaze zeroed in on his fingers as he sucked them clean, and then his tongue as I caught the barest glimpse of it, darting out between his full lips.
Billy had the best lips. If I closed my eyes, I could still recall how they’d felt crushed against mine all those years ago, but I was trying to quit that. No good ever came of it, save a grand old time with my right hand.
Yeah, that’s right. I wasn’t above jacking off over my vulnerable houseguest.
Not that Billy would ever confess to being vulnerable, but that’s what he was. Pale, underweight for his strong frame, and crippled by chronic pain. And that was only what I knew about. Lord knew what he’d been through the last ten years. But maybe I did. If he’d grieved for his dad like I had my mother, and missed his brother like I had my sister, times had been tough.
“Are you falling asleep on me?”
I blinked. For the first time ever, Billy was waving an empty bowl at me. I took it and set in on the bedside table. “Asleep? Me? Never.”
“I’ve noticed that,” he said. “Apart from that one night you dropped my bed cover on me, you’re always awake, if you’re here, I mean. I don’t know what you do when you’re not.”
Nothing, since Billy moved in, save a few aborted Grindr trips up the A road, but I wasn’t going to get into that with him. He didn’t need to know that he occupied my thoughts so entirely I’d forgotten how to get excited by any other man. Then he really would have cause to call me a creep. “I don’t sleep a lot,” I confessed. “I got out of the habit when my mum was ill, and I never really got it back.”
Billy nodded. “I get that. I remember the long nights with my dad. Being so scared I’d doze off and he’d die when I was asleep.”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Drinking helps,” he said. “With a lot of things. But in the end, even that stops working.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“In what sense?”
I passed Billy a mug of tea, claimed my own, and shifted further onto the bed, closing the distance between us another inch with little conscious thought. “I know you got into drugs after Luke left. Not on purpose, but everyone knew.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “No, everyone said they knew. That’s not the same as anyone knowing jackshit about me. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
If I believed everything I’d heard about Billy, there was no way I’d have ever let him set foot in my house. The Rushmere rumour mill had him painted as everything from a burglar to a violent crackhead, and, as I’d learned from Barry Keane, a scumbag who’d done hard prison time. I knew that wasn’t true, so who was the real Billy? And why did my chest burn at the prospect of finding out?
So many questions. No tangible answers.
I sighed. “I didn’t mean it was true. I guess I was asking what you did to cope if getting drunk stopped working.”
“How do you know I didn’t do what you did?”
“What did I do?”
Billy said nothing. Just stared at me with drug-fogged eyes that were somehow razor sharp too.
Or maybe it was my imagination. I often saw things that weren’t there when someone tried to flay me open. Warmth that wasn’t real. Attraction that didn’t last. “I didn’t get drunk,” I said when Billy’s silence dragged on. “I got laid. A lot. And I carried on long after it stopped working, so maybe we did do the same thing, just in different ways.”
Billy shifted slightly, a wince threatening his hazy expression. “We’re not the same people, though. You still managed to be a functioning adult, so maybe I should’ve joined the Grindr train instead of banging coke round the back of the Sugar Loaf.”
“That place closed down years ago,” I said absently as I fought a wave of horror at the thought of Billy on Grindr. Of him in anyone’s bed but mine.Idiot.“And do you even want to be a functioning adult? A nine-to-five job with a mortgage and two-point-four kids?”
“What do you think?”