Page 47 of Refrain
The last one would actually have been amusing if it was in anyway representative of the truth, not that any of them had the facts remotely straight. Some would say that was his fault. Silence was practically a licence for people to make up shit.
Then, there she was, Allegra Hutton, near naked, tugging at the hem of his shirt, which barely covered her arse, standing outside his hotel room door in Cannes. The hail of raw emotions that drummed through him took him completely by surprise.
It all came back. That night. Warming her arse. Playing make believe. Doing her with that ridiculous replica of his cock. Those images were quickly followed by other memories—her voice on the phone, endless mixed-media late night chats, spooning cornflakes into her mouth an hour before it all came to a crushing end. Most of the milk had ended up down her front, and he’d licked it off, chasing droplets into all sorts of interesting crevices. She’d been dressed by the time he left the cabin, her back to the window, face in shadows, though her smile had still been wide enough for him to recognise it over by the door.
They’d planned to be together again that night, and for a host of nights thereafter. The Download Festival lay on the horizon.Bang!’s article hadn’t yet dropped. No one had seen the lovely bruises on her arse except him and her. She’d winked at him as she’d examined them in the mirror and mouthed “I love you.” He hadn’t said it back. Not then. It’d been on his lips, but he hadn’t formed the words. Loving people was hard. You had to hand over a piece of yourself into their keeping. He only ever seemed to say it at the wrong moment, when it was wrung out of him.
Had she agonised over that moment as much as him during the intervening months?
It’d started going wrong from the moment he’d left the cabin. His world exploded, one detonation following another—theBang!hammer, Flynn, and pain, theplick plickof oily raindrops, bright lights, then the beeps of monitoring machines. Leaving was a blur, only snatches of it still alive in his memory. The sun had been too bright. He could barely stand. The cab driver shaking his head when he had to ask him to pull over so that he could vomit in a bush at the side of the road. And later, the cold sting of surgical spirit, followed by him scooping bent staples out of the sink.
After that, the days bled one into another, until Xane’s arrival.
He made a half dozen loops of the kitchen island, hands in his hair, his skin too tight for his body. He shouldn’t have looked. He knew that. Out there was nothing but poison.
Day was beginning to break outside. Traces of daylight peeping under the edges of the curtains. Spook scuttled back to the bedroom. Here the gloom remained more tangible. He hit his knee as he stumbled around the bed, then crawled back under the duvet. Barely a moment passed, before Xane rolled over and swaddled him in a protective cocoon.
“Where’d you go?” he asked, sleep slurring his words.
“Nowhere. Go back to sleep.”
“I am asleep.”
“Actually, do you think I can have a fraction more of the bed?”
Xane obligingly shuffled backwards across the mattress, allowing him room to bump towards the centre too. They lay spooned, neither asleep.
Spook wet his lips. “I don’t think she had anything to do with what Flynn did.” Had he truly ever believed that? “It doesn’t change anything though. They’re her family, and I can’t…”
“You can’t?”
“They won’t ever accept… Even if I let myself…”
“Grown woman. None of their fucking business,” Xane grouched. “Siblings, fucking dreadful invention, although they have their occasional use.”
He had wondered how Xane had found him. The answer was clearly Art’s dubious business connections. “He thinks he’s Mycroft Holmes,” Xane had once joked. “A fat spider at the centre of a web.”
“Does that not make him Moriarty?”
“Moriarty’s a criminal. Art is a defender of the faith.” Xane hadn’t been talking religion, rather his brother’s dedication to libertarian capitalism.
“Hold up,” Xane left off holding him to scratch his head, then splayed his hand across the centre of Spook’s chest. “You weren’t naked before. Where’d your clothes go?”
“Floor.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Too hot.”
His hand slid downwards, so that he rested on Spook’s hip. “Yeah, must have been. You even took off your pants.”
“Problem?” he asked, echoing their conversation of the previous night.
Xane sat up, taking the duvet with him. “I need a shower.” He got to his feet in the centre of the bed, before striding across the mattress and onto the floor.
“Is it a shower or a wank you’re planning?” he asked.
Xane looked back at him over his shoulder, not even a hint of embarrassment about him. “I was thinking of multi-tasking, why?”
