Page 8 of Second Song

That ghost smile flickers. “Go get your job, Row.”

And for once?

I actually want to follow orders.

4

LIAM

I don’t miss the army. I miss the people. At least, I do until moments like this. Matt spots me exiting the alley from the driver’s seat in my van, and by the time I’m halfway across the car park, his grin is feral.

This is the problem with sharing blood, sweat, and tears with someone I’d think was half wolf if I didn’t know better. Not because Matt’s hair is shaggy now that dress regulations don’t apply to us. And not because he’s got a nose for sniffing out all my secrets. After close to ten years of living and working with him, I can’t keep anything from him. But surely Matt has to be partly feral to get out of the van, tip his head up at a nonexistent moon, and howl?

I’m expecting exactly what he shouts next; he’s such a predictable tosspot.

“Sexy, you dirty, dirty dog.”

I jog the rest of the distance and snatch the keys he dangles before he can howl again. He clambers in as I start the van and scan the rest of the car-park spaces. Part of me is glad that Rowan’s car is already gone. Another sliver of me whispers that I should have driven him the rest of the way to his interview. He had to be in shock. I should have made sure he got there with no more disasters, but I’ve got a meeting of my own to get to and less time to prepare for it than I’d planned.

But Rowan was really frazzled, wasn’t he?

He must have been to dart back like that and kiss a total stranger. And what does it say about me that I’d been fully on board with kissing him back, right where anyone could see us?

A final, unthinking part of me must be on autopilot. I touch my lips while Matt’s watching, which is fatal.

“You dirty, dirty dog,” he repeats, only this time with rough admiration. “Did you really bang that jumper?”

“Bang him? Fuck off. I took him back to where he was staying, that’s all. To get cleaned up, like I need to right now. And he wasn’t a jumper.” Rowan might have zero survival instincts but he didn’t do it on purpose. “He was trying to do the right thing. Bit off more than he could chew, that’s all. We’ve all been there. Or do you need me to remind you about that time in Estonia? Seem to recall you throwing yourself into a fight you should have stayed out of.”

I glance Matt’s way, then pull out of the car park to take the steep hill out of this village. Bunting strung between fishermen’s cottages flutters, waving us goodbye. I barely notice, too busy gripping the wheel because Matt isn’t even close to distracted.

“That fight was for true love,” he says as if he’s affronted. “For one night with the hottest medic on the planet anyway. You can’t compare that with you banging some civilian muppet in”—he checks his watch—“five minutes flat. What were you attempting? A sex-related land speed record?” He shakes his head. “You’re letting down our half section’s reputation.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not still in it.”

My seat belt doesn’t press me back into my seat when I brake at a junction.

It’s Matt’s forearm.

“Sexy.” He keeps me pinned, and there haven’t been many people who can do that or make me face what I always want to avoid. Matt’s one of the few left, so I meet his bare gaze. “Your half section never leaves you.”

He’s evidence of that. “Yeah,” I admit. “I know that.”

“So come home for the next meetup. It’s during the May half-term break. All the kids will be there.”

I don’t answer. Instead, I follow the same stretch of coast road I last took at high speed for Rowan. This time, I don’t gun the engine, going hell for leather, sure I’d reach him too late to save him. I pass that lay-by where my tyre marks still gouge the gravel and keep going without answering until Matt says, “Liam?—”

That’s when I do pull over, stopping in a different lay-by to stall him, because Matt using my real name instead of calling me Sexy is a signal that he’s about to launch into a conversation we can’t keep having.

“Hold that thought.” I get out and cross to the other side of the coast road. That’s where I flag down a farmer on a quad bike and tell him about the wire I twisted to close a gap in one of his fences. “Not sure it will hold for too long. You might want to check it if you don’t want to lose another lamb.”

“A lamb?”

“Yeah. A little one. Looked newborn. Went over the cliff, the daft beggar. It’s back with its mum now.”

“This one?” He fishes out a phone to show me a photo of a redheaded teen beaming with pride, his arms full of a familiar woolly menace.

“Could be.”

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