“It’s weird sometimes,” Luis said. “Sometimes I feel like I’ll be looking over my shoulder forever. Then something else happens, and another one of us sees the fucking light, and I remember that once upon a time, we were just kids trying to survive.”
“Even me?”
“Especially you. I have no clue how Benito came to be up in our ends causing shit, but I know how you did. You just wanted to pay for stuff in the shop instead of conning it out of Mrs Roffe.”
“Yeah, well, those morals didn’t last long, did they?”
Luis shrugged. “Hey, I’m not making excuses for you. I definitely didn’t come here for that.”
Quiet fell over them. It wasn’t loaded, it was just... there. Dante’s gaze drifted along the path they’d trodden to get to the lake. Sid’s bungalow was in the distance with him and Paolo still inside. He wondered what they’d found to talk about that didn’t involve Paolo calling Dante a prick and Sid telling him to go fuck himself. Of all the scenarios that ran through his head, that seemed the most likely.
“You should tell him again,” Luis said.
“Hmm?”
“The gardener.”
“He has a name.”
“Sid, then. If you mean it, tell him again. He must feel the same way about you if he went to all the trouble of dealing with Paolo while you were gone.”
Dante sighed. When he’d emerged from the bedroom to find Luis and Paolo on the doorstep, it had taken him approximately six seconds to piece together how it had happened, and it was still making him shudder inside to know Sid had been so worried he’d contacted Paolo.Stress is bad for him. You’re bad for him—
Fuck off. He doesn’t think so. “...being around you makes me feel like I’m living again.”
Dante believed him. Sid knew his own damn mind.
“Anyway.” Luis shifted away from Dante, his own gaze flicking to where he’d left his soulmate behind. “I’m gonna go.”
“Go where?”
“Home.”
“You just got here.”
“So?”
“So, it’s a fuck-off drive to make without eating and resting, and I guarantee you, unless they’ve fell out already, Sid isn’t going to let you go without feeding you.”
“He doesn’t have to do that.”
“That won’t stop him.” Dante started walking, trusting that Luis would follow. “Come on, I’ll show you the garden on the way.”
* * *
Sid drew the knife through the pile of rainbow chard he’d rooted from the fridge. He felt the gaze of his companion on him, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, just different. If he looked at Paolo, he knew he’d find open curiosity that was nothing like Dante’s intense, inscrutable stares, and he could handle that.
He could handle anything as long as he knew Dante was okay.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” he wondered mainly to himself.
Paolo let out a dry laugh. “Nothing we want to know about.”
Sid finished hacking up the greens and chucked them in the pan with the onions and garlic he’d already cooked. “I say stuff like that, then I make him tell me everything anyway.”
“Yup. That’s how it works, but it gets easier the further from that life they get. When Luis talks now, it feels like an old TV show he’s seen that I haven’t. Until yesterday, we were kind of detached from it.”
Sid thought on that, then tried to stop. His brain was too close to overload and he was already feeling the effects.So much for sexy time.His left leg repaid his terrible humour with a shot of nerve pain that travelled from the tips of his toes to the base of his spine. He bit the inside of his mouth, suppressing a wince.