Page 25 of Only Ever You

Bash was good at restraint but eventhatmight push the extent of his limits too far.

“Not really.” Her answer was a tired drawl. “I’ll wash the sheet tomorrow anyway.”

Nodding absently, Bash sat on the edge of the bed and turned up the cuffs of his trousers to hide the dirt regardless. He went to his belt next automatically but paused just short of unbuckling it, maybe because it wasFaye’sbed which he gradually left an indent in the mattress of. There was something significant –suggestive –in taking off his belt, at least in his experience, and he wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

Wrong idea.What was he talking about? Of course she wouldn’t. Faye was the one who’d invited him to sleep in her bed, not the other way around. This sharing agreement was purely for the sake of the health of his neck.

“What are you doing?” She sounded wary.

Losing my mind.

“Debating if you’ll hit me with one of your hundreds of pillows for taking my belt off.”

“Just take it off.” A command which wasn’t aided by the fact that Faye wasright thereand he wasright hereupon her bed, undressing.

“In a rush, are we?” Bash teased over his shoulder, met by Faye’s rolling eyes. Maybe he should’ve taken those frozen onions after all? They’d be a sure way to kill his eager mood.

He rolled the belt up and left it on the nightstand before falling backwards and making himself comfortable amongst the sherpa and pillows. With some shuffling around, Faye forced him to accept the fact he would sleep under the duvet when he should’ve perhaps stayed on top. It’d be colder, yes, but that would’ve been a minor consequence to resisting temptation to cuddle up to her in her sleep.

With a click, the room went dark.

They lay next to each other, a safe two feet between them since they were well past the stage of building a pillow wall, but Bash felt anything but sleepy. The obnoxiousness of his own breath sounds annoyed him after only half a minute. He tried to silence himself, which was far more uncomfortable than he’d have thought. The entire length of his side was completely aware of Faye exhaling her own quiet breaths into the silence.

“Is this weird?” Her question was a hoarse whisper.

“We’ve shared a bed before.”

“Passing out drunk at uni doesn’t count.”

Bash could tell by the way she spoke that she smiled. He turned his head on his pillow and looked at her in the darkness, finding the outline of her nose and chin with the light her curtain didn’t quite filter out. “What about that night in Amsterdam?”

“It’s not my fault the window broke and my hotel room was freezing.”

“And still you came knocking on my door like a lost puppy.”

“Youansweredthat door,” Faye pointed out, the sardonic lilt in her voice catching somewhere between Bash’s chest and his gut. “Atonea.m. I could’ve been anybody.”

She could’ve been. Anyone could have been knocking on his door to their cheap hotel, but Bash recalled that somehow he’dknownit was her, like a premonition. Perhaps he’d just gotten lostin his dreams that night of having Faye one day turn up at his door.

They’d been young, dumb, and fresh out of university on that trip. The two of them, Maisie, Freddy, and Sienna. Their one last big hurrah before peeling away to find their jobs and build their lives. By coincidence, the five of them had stayed within London, and sometimes at their get-togethers, Bash felt as if he was back in time to those days.

An old familiar lump lodged itself in his throat. “Well, then I’m lucky it was only you,” he said around an unwarranted chip of disappointment.

He was here now, wasn’t he? Years later, he was still Faye’s best friend. She was still in his life. What more could he ask for? He should be happy and grateful for how things were because this way, as friends, he was never going to lose her.

He was never going to lose her.

Faye was quiet for so long Bash thought she’d fallen asleep. He’d returned to staring at the blank greyness of the ceiling, too awake to fall asleep himself. Sprinting straight after scoffing a burger meant the burger was still lodged uncomfortably somewhere between his stomach and his throat. Perhaps he could slip out to Faye’s kitchen – she was bound to have indigestion relief somewhere.

“Do you ever miss those days?”

His breath hitched at the unexpectedness of her question, her voice even quieter than before yet holding so much weight. By the sounds of it, her mind tossed and turned too.

That trip to Amsterdam had been half a decade ago, when summers and years seemed to go by so slowly. He and Bennet had been on the cusp of landing the big client who’d secured their standing amongst the ranks of luxury design. He’d had little to worry about except for carpet colours and bespoke furniture, and one particularly problematic cut glass chandelier from Milan, he recalled.

Hestillhad those things on his mind all of the time, only now,timewas the pivotal point. The epicentre. He knew realistically and hoped that he still had a long life left ahead of him, but the things he’d always brushed off as saying would happen for him ‘later’, felt like they should be happeningnow.Bash didn’t know how to describe it.

He wet his lower lip, preparing for his admission harbouring a depth only a conversation in the dead of night could do.

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