Page 87 of Tell No One
He drained the pasta, divided it into large and small portions, and added pesto and parmesan. Delaney put two glasses of water on the table and they sat down to eat.
Tag needed the subject changed. “What did you want to grow up to be when you were little?”
“A lot of things. Racing driver. Downhill skier. I wanted to win an Olympic medal. Invent something amazing. Be a millionaire before I was thirty.”
Even Delaney’s dreams were bigger than Tag’s had ever been.
“What about you?”
“When I was really little, I wanted to be a postman.”
He braced himself for Delaney’s laugh but it didn’t come.
“I thought delivering letters was a brilliant job. I don’t think I thought about people getting bad news. I didn’t know about things like bills and fines. I was just imagining birthday and Christmas cards and letters saying you’d won some competition. And when I was older, before I discovered clay, I wanted to have lots of fruit trees. Cherries and plums and apples. Probably because I liked eating fruit and didn’t often get to eat it. Then I got sent away and all I wanted after that was to survive.”
Tag twirled his fork in the bowl to get more pesto onto the pasta, then forked it into his mouth. Pasta with pesto was his go-to meal. Fast and easy.
“How many boyfriends have you had?” Tag asked, conveniently ignoring the fact that he’d already told himself a bloke like Delaney didn’t have boyfriends.
“I had a couple when I was a teenager.”
“What sort of things did you do?”
“Cinema. Bowling. McDonald’s. Parties.”
“Did you do a lot of kissing? Give each other hand jobs? Blow jobs?”
“Not at first, no. We were always edging around what each other wanted, neither of us willing to make the first move.”
Tag laughed. “Youdidn’t make the first move?”
Delaney smiled back. “Mostly I did.”
“But no boyfriends now, right?”
“Thirty-seven-year-olds, in my sort of job, don’t have boyfriends.”
Tag steeled himself not to react. He’d asked a question to which he already knew the answer. Served him right that he was disappointed. No boyfriends, just hook-ups. Some lasting longer than others.
“What about you?” Delaney asked.
That served him right too. Why start a conversation he didn’t want to continue?
“I had a boyfriend once, but it didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
“He wanted an open relationship and I didn’t. Only he didn’t tell me that. He just let me find him with his cock down the throat of another guy. In a pub toilet. And not even a nice pub. So you can guess what the toilet was like.”
“How long had you been going out with him?”
“A month.”
Tag pushed to his feet, cleared the table and started to wash up. Delaney came to his side with a tea towel.
“He never took me anywhere other than the pub or bed,” Tag whispered. “I don’t really like it when people drink too much. He drank too much. But…he liked me. Well, I thought he liked me. Obviously not enough.” Why did that still make his chest ache? He didn’t give a shit about Jorge anymore.
“You okay?”
