“You don’t get up here much?”
He shot me a guilty wince. “I haven’t even met my sister’s youngest kid.”
“Lalla’s a sweetheart. Blonde hair like her dad and big brown eyes like yours.”
“We get them from my mum.”
“I know. Safia told me.”
“She’s never mentioned you.”
“Why would she? I’m guessing you didn’t have much call for Christmas trees and firewood in Manchester.”
“No, but she knew I spent time at HMP Manchester. If she knew you worked there, she’d have asked us about each other.”
Rami’s dark gaze bored into me, and I wondered how much he knew. If he was testing me. Or if he was just understandably curious about the macabre event that had brought me back to my family home.
“She never asked me where I was before, and I never told her.” I reached for my sandwich and ate half of it in two bites, holding Rami’s steady gaze. “I might’ve done if I’d known she was your sister, though.”
“Why?”
I shrugged and ate more food. “Because I missed you.”
3
Rami
“Because I missed you.”Of all the random, head-fucking things that had come my way on this crazy day, why were those four little words the only thing that seemed to make any sense?
Fen hadn’t missed me. Hecouldn’thave. We hardly knew each other. We’d never exchanged numbers and I hadn’t looked him up on social media because no one who worked in the prison system ever had accounts in their real name. We were invisible.
Untraceable.
And somehow we were both here, and…yeah. I’d missed him too.
How? You only saw him, like, twice a month for a snatched few minutes.But it wasn’t just him I’d missed. It was the soothing drum beat my pulse became whenever he was close. His warmth. His smile. His playful gaze, even though I was fairly sure he was hiding the fact he didn’t want to talk about getting stabbed at work behind his perpetual good humour.
Maybe I should’ve told him that knowing he was alive and well was all I’d ever wanted.
I’d have been a lying fucking liar, though.
I wanted to see him. I wanted to put my hands around his and tell him I gave a fuck.
That Istillgave a fuck, but my soul was a crowded place right now, and I lacked the spoons to dissect it.
As if he’d heard my heart, Charlie sighed in his sleep. My gaze drifted to him and my mind to the madness that had led him to be curled up on an armchair inFen’skitchen. I wanted to tell Fen I’d missed him. That it was okay if he didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him and it always would be, but the words stuck in my throat. Until I got Charlie to the top of Christmas Mountain, he needed my undivided attention.
I put my hand on Fen’s strong forearm and squeezed it, revelling in the unyielding flesh that answered me. Then I stepped back and picked up the supper he’d made me. “This looks amazing. Thank you.”
Fen nodded and turned away to put his empty plate into the sink. I ate the sandwich in record time and he grinned when he looked back to find it gone. “Knew you were hungry.”
“It’s that damn fucking cheese. I’d forgotten how much I liked it.”
He smiled. “AndI’dforgotten this about you. Not the cheese, I mean how you speak. Like a sailor in a pub kitchen when you’re not being all professional, like.”
“‘Professional’?” I snorted out a laugh. “I have a meeting in—” I checked my watch—“Four hours and I’m not going to be there. There’s nothing professional about me right now.”
Fen’s grin widened. “You’re wrong. I always found it cute as hell how you’d tear the guv’na apart with big words and mad-long sentences, then call him a twat when his back was turned.”