Page 74 of Reinventing Cato
Vigge hesitated.
“Or a beer?”
“I have to drive back.”
“You didn’t bring your toothbrush?” Cato gaped at him.
Vigge laughed. “I didn’t think you’d want to speak to me.”
“It was a long way to come to tell me what you’d already told me. Unless you only came to ask me about dead guys stabbed with constellations.”
“I came because I wanted to try to put things right. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep until I’d tried. Quite an irony that my work doesn’t keep me awake. As long as I’ve done all I can to bring a case to its conclusion and I’ve got the best out of my team, then I let things go.”
“You hadn’t let those murders go.”
“No, well only one of them is in my area, but I don’t lie awake at night thinking about them. But this…whatever this is between us… is something I couldn’t just let go.”
“You could have lain in bed thinking about certain parts of me. I’m sure you’d have found something to do.”
“Not until I’d made things right.”
Cato gasped. “No wanking until I’d forgiven you?”
“No wanking off thinking aboutyou, until you’d forgiven me.”
“You wank off thinking about me?” Cato smiled.
Vigge shrugged.
“Did you in that motel once you realised I’d gone?”
“I drove home.”
Cato sat on his bed and hugged his knees. “Do you believe in second chances?”
“Yes. Unless you’re talking about certain members of the criminal fraternity. They need locking up forever. But people who make mistakes and regret those mistakes, yeah, they should get a second chance.”
“How many second chances?”
Vigge shuffled his feet. “It depends on the circumstances. I can’t tell you to give me a second chance… Third chance. I just hope you will.”
“Okay.”
“You’re forgiving me so easily?” Vigge’s heart thumped.
“Hey, I get that you’re sorry for overreacting and I’m not blameless. The moment I realised it wasn’t the bathroom, I could have gone into reverse. I didn’t. I’m too inquisitive.”
“I’m torn between being glad you saw the photos and wishing you hadn’t. Though I don’t care either way as long as you forgive me for being a dick.”
Cato shot him a smile. “It’s rare that I’m the one being apologised to. I’ve spent too much of my life being a bit of a git as far as other guys are concerned. Apart from my ultimately disastrous eleven months of Three-Go-Dating, which was preceded by a happy eleven months of Two-Go-Dating, if I was ever with a man or a woman—twice, it was by accident.”
Vigge leaned back against where Cato’s coat hung on the door, still unsure how Cato felt about him.
“Then, on New Year’s Eve, I had an epiphany. I wasn’t happy. Sleeping around wasn’t making me happy for longer than the time it took me to come and the afterglow to fade. I daresay it didn’t make some of the guys I’ve slept with, and walked away from, very happy either. I hardly spared them a thought, not so much because I’m a selfish bastard, though I can be, but because when Ididthink about what I was doing, I knew it was wrong. So, on New Year’s Eve, I didn’t have sex with a Roman gladiator called Paul. Instead, I went to bed, woke to a snowstorm of biblical proportions, and I met you. Fate. Karma. Luck. Serendipity. I want to believe in all of them.”
So did Vigge.
Cato shuffled back until he was leaning against the wall. “I know the sleeping around stuff makes me sound like a…slut. But I’m done with that. I was done with that before I met you. Then Ididmeet you and I dared to think that maybe that unexpected snowstorm had sent me stumbling into the new start I’d wanted. But I sort of missed that someone else’s feelings and life were caught up in this too. Someone who has a lot in common with me and yet in other ways very little in common. You’re not out. Not really. You have an important job that needs to be kept confidential. You’re not…experienced in ways that I am. I’m finding my way in an unfamiliar world too. Maybe we can learn from each other. Learn from our mistakes.”
