Chapter 10

Ten

BHODI

Come find me after turns out to be later than planned. By two days. I finish late on the first, and on the second, every time I look in on Tam, he’s gone.

We keep just missing each other, and for whatever reason, we’ve never got round to exchanging numbers, and digging it out of my tenancy paperwork feels kinda wrong.

“You have glitter in your hair.” Tam waves me into his house, his feet bare to the rustic floorboards.

“Better than blood on my hands.”

“Has it been that kind of day?”

“Actually, no.” I hang my coat and toe off my Vans. “I got roped into decorating the ward on my day off, and I stole you some Frosty Fancies to make up for airing you the other day.”

Tam takes the box and tears into it, stuffing a sparkly-white cake straight into his mouth. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That I ate all my Bakewells at lunchtime.” Tam wipes his mouth with the back of his tattooed hand. “And you don’t need to make up for shit. When you didn’t show, I figured you’d got stuck at work, and then you didn’t come back till the middle of the night, so I didn’t want to bug you.”

“You couldn’t bug me if you tried.”

“Sounds like a challenge.” Tam offers me the box.

I wave it away only because I’ve already eaten a hundred cakes today, snaffling up donations left by local charities most of the patients on the ward are too unwell to eat.

At least, that’s what I told myself, and three hours into lugging crap from storage to the ward, I’d stopped caring. “What did you want to show me?”

Tam ditches the cakes and points to the stairs.

I cock a brow.

Tam simmers his russet gaze at me. His amused gaze. “It’s way less exciting than whatever you’re thinking.”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

Bet he does. And the smirk Tam tosses over his shoulder as he leads me to the stairs says the same. But I follow him anyway, up the wooden staircase, taking in the art work and photographs that punctuate the walls, breathing deeper as that cinnamon scent gets stronger.

His bedroom is up here. And the door is closed. But the studio door is wide open and I’m as drawn to it now as I was the first time I came up here. “Wow.” I glance around. “There’s so much going on in here.”

Tam gives a weary chuckle. “Tell me about it. I don’t know where anything is anymore.”

“Was it better in the annex? It must be weird not leaving the house to go to work anymore.”

“I don’t miss tramping across the garden sixty times a day. ”

“Sixty?”

“Rudy turns into a massive wanker when he can’t throw himself at the front door every time someone walks past the house. Won’t shut the fuck up until I let him check they’re gone. When I’m up here, he can sort himself out.”

“Fair enough. What did you want to show me?”

Tam moves a stack of cards to one side and opens a drawer. From inside, he grabs a slim black box and what looks like a notebook. “Come here.”

It’s instinct to obey without question, and I don’t mind. Especially as where he wants me to be is right next to him. “Is that a schoolbook?”

“Nearly.” Tam flips the pages, revealing reams and reams of carol lyrics and festive stories printed in faint cursive. “You see these guidelines?”

I wince. “They look like the torture books from primary school.”

“Not far off, but it’s not torture, I promise. Come here.”

Again.

And of course, I obey as he steers me to a second desk that’s less cluttered than the one that seems to be his main workstation.

“Hold this pen. See how it feels.”

He’s serious. I purse my lips as he presses a red and gold stylus-type thing into my writing hand and manoeuvres my fingers into a position a world away from how I usually hold a pen. “What kind of pen is this?”

Tam grins. “Don’t ask me questions like that. I might answer, and you’re a busy man.”

“You like pens?”

“My job would be pretty shit if I didn’t.” Tam fills the space beside me and resets the workbook on the table at the very first page. Letters, not words. Loads of them. Line after line. Enough to make my head swim. “Can you write something here for me?”

“Like what?”

“Whatever you want. Or something you have trouble writing at work.”

“That would be everything. Even my own name.”

“So write that.”

He’s joking, he has to be. But I can’t think of anything else, so I scratch out the drug order I got in trouble for a few days ago, fighting with the odd angle of the gold nib. All with Tam watching over my shoulder, silent and still, his warmth seeping into me like a hug.

I love it.

I hate it.

I love it some more as I sign off with my name and he leans closer still. “That do you?”

“Write something else. A longer sentence.”

“Are you testing my grammar?”

“Fuck, no.”

“Thank the Lord.” I frown at the page and scrawl what’s on my mind.

Three words.

You smell nice.

Tam laughs. “Thanks.”

“It’s true. I thought it way back when I met you in the car park.”

“That’s funny. I thought you looked like a fucking angel, until I saw the hospital ID. Then I thought the devil had come back for me. ”

Tam speaks absently as he scrutinises the mess I’ve made on the pristine inside cover of the book. I hold my breath in case he says more.

He doesn’t. At least, not about that. He points to the first row of letters on the page. “Try tracing these.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to see which part of configuring the words glitches for you.”

“My whole brain glitches.”

“No, it doesn’t. You do these combinations just fine. See here?” He points to the word you . “That’s pretty fucking perfect.”

“You have strange ideas of perfection.”

Tam says nothing. Just watches my cack-handed attempt to string letters together with a frown that should maybe feel critical, but doesn’t.

He reaches around me, his chest to my back, and grips my wrist, adjusting the angle of the nib, guiding me across the page. It takes a few lines. More than a few. Then something clicks and the pen seems steer itself, gliding over the paper like butter.

I find myself spellbound. And gobsmacked letters that neat came from my hand, even with Tam’s soft grip on my wrist. “Wow. That’s almost legible.”

Tam makes a sound low in his throat.

That’s it. No admonishment. No praise. Just a low rumble of shut the fuck up and write.

So I do. I turn the pages and keep going, even after he lets go of my wrist and steps back. I keep writing until I get to a poem about Santa needing a new reindeer.

It makes me think of Rudy. I scan the room for him and find him on Tam’s shoulder, his sharp gaze trained on the garden while Tam works, and it’s quite the view. My idea of perfect. So I let myself stare and stare and stare, until I find myself drawn in by the casual dichotomy of Tam’s rough, tattooed hand and the elegant art that flows from it.

Intricate.

Delicate .

It shouldn’t fit, but it does.

I ease away from my desk and pad up behind him, hypnotised by the dance of his pen across the parchment, and the inky beauty left in its wake. The swift dance. He pens a verse onto a greetings card in the time it takes me to form a single word. Then he’s onto the next, over and over, a production line that doesn’t come up for air. “You should’ve been a surgeon.”

Tam pauses. “Blood makes me puke.”

“Is that why the hospital freaks you out?”

Tam takes a breath and carries on writing—a subtle hint for me to shut the hell up, or he’s too busy to stop while I poke at him. Either way, I don’t expect him to answer, and I’m halfway back to the other desk when he does. “I don’t like that hospital because I died there a couple of times after a bike crash.”

I freeze, horror squeezing my heart, the flash of that scar on his back invading my mind. “When?”

“Six years ago.”

“What happened?”

“Can you come here again?”

I return to the space behind him. “Where do you need me?”

Tam’s hot smirk returns, fainter than usual, but pronounced enough that I know he’s still in there. “Right there would be good, but for this, I need to see you.”

There’s no room to consider the implications of right there . I move to Tam’s side, eating up the inches between us until we’re touching, until he can feel me. Then he takes another breath, his pen still weaving across the page, and the words seem to flow with every dip and swirl of the nib.

“I was riding home from a messy break-up. It was around this time of year, actually, and the weather was all over the place. Snow one day, sunshine and showers the next.”

“Black ice?”

Tam hums. “Yeah. And I knew it, but I was distracted—I was angry , and I was driving like a prick.” He stops to scrutinise the sentence he’s just written. Goes back and extends the tail on the letter Y . “I mean, everyone was, but if I’d had my head screwed on right, I’d have seen the taxi burning up the slip road behind me.”

I lean closer, instinct, not a conscious decision, and it narrows the paper-thin space between us to nothing. My shoulder eases against his, and it’s a perfect press of flesh and bone. Solid. Warm. Like the soft smile he sends my way, even through the hurt simmering in his gaze.

Tam starts writing again. “The taxi took me out. Sent me flying into the path of another car already on the motorway. Fucked my back and mashed my liver.”

“Your liver?”

He sets his pen down mid-word and tugs his shirt up. I’m expecting the road burn scars. The faded white line of a liver resection catches me off guard.

I reach for it without stopping to make sense of what I’m doing. Trace it with my fingertip as Tam shivers at my touch. “That’s some major surgery.” One that lets me know he really did almost die. How lucky I am to have ever met him. “Any after-effects?”

“Not often. About twice a year I get so tired I pretty much fall into a coma for a couple of days, but I don’t know for sure that it’s related.”

“Probably is.” I trace the scar again. Another shiver skitters through Tam’s torso. “It’s sensitive?”

“Not that I knew of before you fucking touched me.”

I let my hand drop.

Tam grips my wrist and brings it back. “I like it.”

I like it too, and it’s a struggle to keep my head in the game. If we’d been talking about anything else…

But the gravity of that white line and what it means isn’t lost on me, and I let myself glance over the other marks on his body. There’s a tattoo on his back too marred by surface scars to be recognisable. My fingers skim it, and this time, Tam groans.

“And you say I’m a fucking tease.”

“Not on purpose.” I grit my teeth and tug his shirt down, though I don’t back up. “You had a spinal injury too?”

“Fracture at the bottom somewhere. It’s fine now unless I sit down too long. That’s why I work at standing desks.”

“I thought you were just trendy.”

“Really?” Tam’s brows knit together in a dry frown. “I wouldn’t know trendy if it bit me in the arse.”

“Don’t put biting you in my head.”

I’m joking. Mostly. Or, not at all as Tam stares me down. Knowing how bad he was hurt isn’t easy, but if there’s one thing that can pull me out of picturing him half-dead on a hospital bed, it’s imagining how the hot skin of his throat would feel beneath my lips. How he’d taste. How?—

Stop.

I try, I do, but Tam doesn’t play ball. He just keeps staring, and we’re drawn together with the same voracity as all bad ideas. The same compulsive thrill. Our lips brush. Once. Twice. A third time that cranks up the heat to a dangerous swelter as his hands come to my face and mine return to his perfectly imperfect torso.

I’m knee-deep in tugging him against me before I get a hold of myself. “Shit. Sorry.”

Tam rumbles that low sound again. Then lets me go. “I’m not fucking sorry.”

“No?”

“Why would I be sorry?”

“Because—” Actually, I have no idea. About anything, save the fact that it’s probably time I left.

“Come and have a cup of tea with me.”

Say no . Go home.

Doesn’t happen. We wind up on Tam’s couch. He breaks out the Mr Kipling I brought him earlier and goads me into eating them too.

“I’m not sorry I kissed you upstairs.” He leans back on the couch, shifting a little in a way I now recognise as someone with a grumpy lumbar spine. “But I won’t ever do it again if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“The only uncomfortable thing is my jeans.”

His gaze darts to my groin.

I flick his knee. “Made you look.”

He laughs and it breaks any lingering tension. Not that there was much, and I realise I’m not sorry either.

I correct the record.

Tam laughs some more and I feel myself relax in ways I didn’t the whole time I was with Skylar.

You were never with Skylar. And you’ll never be with Tam either.

Because he doesn’t do relationships, and I’ve sworn off them for good, even if the mere thought of it turns the sugar coursing through my veins to scratchy dust particles. So I don’t think about it. I think about something else—about what people who don’t commit to relationships do instead.

I think about sex , and it’s a mistake. A hard one, pushing against the zip of my jeans.

Jesus Christ.

Tam nudges me. “You okay?”

“Yep.”

“Really? You look stressed.”

“I have resting stress face.”

“T’as des beaux yeux.”

“What?”

“No, you don’t.”

I remember enough of school French to know he absolutely did not say that. But I’m distracted by the arch of his neck as he stretches it, and that overwhelming need to kiss him there.

Resisting takes a marathon effort and a hassled sigh escapes me.

Tam cocks his head. “What are you thinking?”

“Thinking?”

“You have a hundred thoughts raging in your head. I can see them.”

“Then you should already know what I’m thinking.”

“Be better if you told me.”

“Why?”

Tam licks sugary icing from his thumb. “Lots of reasons. You want them all?”

“Give me one.”

“It’s a selfish fucking reason.”

“Selfish of me?”

“Fuck. No. Definitely me.” He’s suddenly closer again. “But you’re a tough crowd for bullshit so I’m going to tell you anyway.”

I wait.

He cracks his knuckles and shrugs. “I was thinking about you fucking me and feeling guilty about it. So I was wondering if that missile in your jeans means you’ve been thinking about it too.”

I choke on my tea. “Me fucking you?”

“What makes you say it like that?”

“Er…” But that’s it. I have nothing else coherent. Just a thousand more wild thoughts fighting for dominance in my already crowded brain, and none of them do the cramped space in my jeans any favours. “I was thinking about you fucking me,” I eventually admit. “I haven’t topped in a long time.”

“Me either.”

It shouldn’t surprise me. I know better than to judge a man’s sexual preference by how he looks. But I do it anyway and my head spins off my shoulders. “Thanks for the new imagery.”

Tam laughs. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we’re never going to fuck, eh? We won’t have to fight over it.”

“You’re wrong,” I say slowly.

As slowly as Tam’s dark brow edges up. “Wrong about what?”

“The bit about fighting over it.” I press my fist to his thigh and rise, knowing I really do need to leave before I combust. “Because if we were fucking? Trust me, I’d make an exception.”