Page 32 of Hard Tail
Chapter Ten
Wednesday morning was, if possible, even quieter than a week ago. Odd to think I’d been here only a week; I already felt like my old life in London had just been an unusually long and, frankly, uninteresting dream.
I felt a twinge of guilt at dismissing all my years of marriage this way. But it was only a small twinge, and I seemed to recover from it rather quickly.
Matt seemed a bit distracted—or maybe he just hadn’t slept well. Thinking of what he might have been doing instead, I realised from the ache in my jaw I was grinding my teeth. Coffee. I needed coffee. If nothing else, it’d give me something to do with my mouth that wouldn’t involve an expensive trip to the dentist.
We—that is, Jay and Matt—kept a small kettle in the back room, together with a jar of Nescafé (Matt) and some dodgy-smelling teabags (Jay). “Fancy a brew?” I asked Matt, interrupting him as he wrote up a repairs invoice in his messy-yet-legible hand.
“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks. Coffee for me, please,” he added as usual. I wasn’t sure if it was natural diffidence making him doubt I’d remember his beverage of choice, or if he did occasionally come over all masochistic and have some of Jay’s herbal tisane. I wasn’t even sure tisane was a word; I certainly wasn’t going trust it as a drink.
“Okay. Do you mind if I…?” I waved the coffee jar in Matt’s direction. “Sorry—I keep forgetting to bring in a jar of my own.”
“Nah, don’t be daft. You’re welcome to mine,” Matt insisted. He still seemed a little subdued, and I noticed, when I handed him his coffee, that he drank it carefully out of the less swollen side of his mouth.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah!” Matt stared into his mug. “’M fine.”
“I mean, if you wanted to nip down to the chemist’s and get something to put on that, or some painkillers, that’d be fine.”
“It’s okay,” Matt insisted, giving me half a smile.
I hesitated—and then the doorbell jangled and I had to get back out front.
It was probably just as well. It clearly wasn’t a good moment to sound Matt out about where one might go to experiment with being gay—and anything else I might have felt the urge to say to him right now was probably best left unsaid.
Grown men definitely didn’t offer to kiss each other better.
***
“Right,” I said briskly, striding into the back room on the dot of one before Matt could disappear. “Where are we going for lunch?”
Matt turned to look at me sharply, a sort of “you what?” expression on his face. “Lunch?”
“Yes—you promised me New Forest pub lunches, last Wednesday—don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?” I mentally crossed my fingers and prayed for some selective amnesia about my general git-ishness that day.
“Oh! No—no, right. Um. Well, there’s the Oak out past Lyndhurst—fancy that?”
“Sounds great,” I said heartily. “The Oak it is, then.”
Matt looked a bit wary at the prospect, as well he might, based on my behaviour in the café last week. “Er, are we both going to drive?”
I nodded. “Probably best. We’ll be going in opposite directions afterwards.” Plus, he didn’t want to be worrying about getting stranded if I stormed out in a snit again. “Have you got the postcode of the place for the SatNav?”
“Sorry—don’t use one.”
“Okay—directions?”
Matt looked worried. “Um, well, we start by going to Lyndhurst, but I’m not very good at giving directions—always seem to miss bits out. How about you follow me?”
That was a recipe for disaster if ever I heard one. “Fine,” I said and made a mental note to Google the place on my phone as soon as I got to my car.
Of course, when I got to where I’d parked and tried it, I got the little red triangle telling me there was no service around here. Damn it. I’d just have to hope Matt remembered I was tailing him and didn’t go shooting off at junctions, like a certain brother of mine I could name tended to do.
A horn tooted, and I looked around to see Matt waving at me from the window of his Ford Focus. I waved back, and we set off in our miniature convoy.
We took the A35 out towards Lyndhurst, where we drove down the one-way system past any number of perfectly nice-looking pubs and restaurants (my stomach grumbling loudly in protest) and then out the other side. It soon felt like we were in the forest proper, the roads bordered by woodland. I was so busy admiring the countryside and trying to remember what little I’d ever learned about identifying trees that I nearly missed it when Matt turned off onto an unmarked side road. There were a few houses here, mostly of the large, expensive variety, with big, well-kept gardens. I wondered if Steve’s house was this imposing.
