Chapter 14

Fourteen

BHODI

I wake up on the rug. The fire’s still going. There’s a pillow beneath my head and the sheets tucked around me. But I’m alone, and anxiety seizes my chest before I even crack an eye.

He left .

I sit up, bringing a hand to my chest, as if I can slow the pace of my heart with my palm. But I can’t. The only distraction I have is the raucous bark coming from outside, and the realisation it’s already growing light.

Rudy .

Of course it is. He barks like no dog I’ve ever known. High-pitched and angry , even when he’s happy. Loud, first thing in the morning. Tam’s neighbours must love him.

You love ? —

Fuck.

No.

I scramble from the floor and stagger to the windows that are now concealed by blinds I didn’t know existed until last night. Until Tam came over and shut them so we could get naked without giving his brother an eyeful.

If that’s why he came over.

If it even matters.

At the last second, I remember to drag on some sweats before rolling up the blinds. Then I’m greeted by another picture-perfect day on Stardust Lane. Clear skies and trees heavy with snow, swaying in the kind of wind that turns your cheeks pink.

It’s a scene that demands pin-drop silence, but no one gave Rudy the memo. Or Tam as his deep voice rumbles an expletive I don’t catch through the glass.

I wish I could see him, but the fence divides us. I can see the upper floor of his house, and I know he’s not there, so I don’t bother looking. Instead I stand and listen to his noisy start to the day, forcing logic into my brain. He left because he has responsibilities. A dog, a job. A brother who needs him more than I do.

Can’t pretend it’s not jarring to wake up with nothing but the ghost of him left on my skin, though. It’s too familiar, and I don’t like it. It makes me want to go back to bed and pretend the day hasn’t started yet. Shame the universe has other plans for me in the form of the shrill beep of my phone.

I know that beep. It’s the alert tone I set for the hospital. Either I messed up on my last shift, or they need me in on my rest day to cover someone else’s, and I’m not sure which is worse.

My phone is buried somewhere on the bed no one slept in last night. The beeping has stopped by the time I dig it out, but Marla has left me a message that sends me trudging into the shower for a twelve-hour day shift .

It’s then that I notice the cursive script on my arm.

The numbers about to smudge and run beneath the hot spray.

“Shit.” I jerk away so fast I nearly brain myself on the tiles, and dash across the annex to where I’ve left my phone.

I type in the number and save it under Tam . Because it has to be, right? Unless a stranger crept in after he’d gone and graffitied my skin. But that would mean two people exist who write with the flair and beauty Tam does, and I refuse to believe that’s true.

Dazed, I drift back to the shower.

Tam’s handiwork washes away and I miss it. I stare at my arm as if the digits are embedded in my flesh, but alas, once they’re gone they leave nothing but blank skin in their wake, and I regret reacting to my phone and signing up for a shift I want to work as much as I want to stick my head in the oven.

Time isn’t on my side.

I get ready at record speed, thankful Tam installed a washer-dryer in the annex and the scrubs I dumped in there last week are good to go. And that at some point between him leaving me naked on the rug and me waking up, he’s scraped my car free of ice and drawn a message on the back windshield.

Drive slow.

The two swirly words are another piece of art I can’t keep, and I wonder if it’s fate trying to tell me what I already know. That however into me Tam was last night, it’s temporary. He doesn’t do relationships, and while I might’ve made an exception for him—or I will if we ever get that far, he’s not going to make one for me.

No strings. Why can’t you just enjoy that for once?

Heh. Maybe I can. And for him, I’ll try. I have to. I already know if he comes knocking again it’s beyond me to turn him away. I haven’t come like that in as long as I can remember. I get hard just thinking about it. While I’m driving . Which is awesome—insert sarcasm—since Tam’s cute gesture means I’m pulling up at the hospital in no time at all.

I’ve been called in because HDU and ICU are chock-a-block with the survivors of a fire on a city industrial estate. The hospital is filled with police and soot-covered firefighters, a sight that warns me the day to come is going to be long and busy, so I take a moment to open WhatsApp and thumb out a message.

Bhodi: please tell me this is you

The message blasts into the ether and the ticks turn blue before my eyes.

Tam: depends who you are

I can’t tell if he’s serious or flirting, but I don’t have time to find out. I type out most of what’s on my mind and fire it back.

Bhodi: it’s Bhodi. thanks for last night—for trusting me. it was amazing and just what I needed xx

That’s it. All I can say. And maybe it’s too much, but I don’t have the kind of job that makes room for distractions. I pocket my phone before Tam can reply and boot him from my mind.

I’m a different version of myself when it’s this busy at work. On HDU, I barely think about Tam. Then I get bumped to ICU and I don’t think about him at all. I’m consumed with keeping my patient alive and I do it with a singular focus.

It’s not the easiest distraction technique out there. But it works, and there’s something about pressing your hands to a man’s chest to keep his heart pumping that puts things in perspective.

I’m not going to die if Tam doesn’t want to swap blowjobs again.

Or if he blanks me.

Ghosts me.

Life is worth more than sex, and so am I.

I’m on my way back to my phone to test how married to that theory I really am. It’s evening now, and the fraught atmosphere of a major incident has eased. Crackly Christmas music plays in the lift and the whole hospital is covered in festive artwork drawn by kids. I’m hungry. And tired. I want that fire back in the log burner and Tam’s arms around me again, but I’ll settle for another shower, a plate of hot food, and maybe, just maybe, a text message that doesn’t make me feel like warmed up shit.

“Hey.”

I spin around in an empty corridor. A firefighter stands behind me. He’s in plain clothes, but I recognise him from this morning, because he’s massive. Like, the tallest human I’ve ever met in real life. He’s worried, though, still , and for the first time today, I can do something about it. “Your friend’s doing well. I just took him to the main ward.”

“I know.” The firefighter gives me a half smile that does nothing to lighten his face. “I wanted to say thanks for everything you did for him. I don’t know what we’d have done if anything happened to Galen. ”

I nod. “You’re welcome. Did you get your shoulder looked at?”

“Nah. It’s fine.”

The way he shrugs it off is familiar, and it makes sense that the firefighter’s disregard for his own wellbeing reminds me of Tam, but it’s not that. “Did you ever work in Cornwall?”

The firefighter blinks. “No.”

“Oh. Well you must have a doppelg?nger down there somewhere. I swear I’ve met someone who looks just like you.”

It’s an awkward way to end a conversation, but the firefighter has other places to be, and so do I. He shrugs again and walks off. I continue to the break room and finally lay eyes on my phone.

I’m prepared for a blank screen. For that wall of silence.

But Tam’s right there waiting for me.

Tam: you were everything I needed too

Tam: if it’s a one-time thing for you, that’s cool. nothing will ever be awkward, i promise. but...i really want to see you again xx

My heart skips. Tam doesn’t look like the kind of man who punctuates texts with kisses, but I’m the kind of man who likes it. And as for the rest of it…I want to see him again too, and maybe that dream of a fire and his warm arms isn’t as distant as it felt when I woke up alone this morning.

It’s just sex .

So?

Sex can be warm and comforting. It can be anything we both want it to be. And Tam…he’s my friend. We can make this work. I know we can .

I drive home with that mantra playing on a loop in my head. It’s dark already, more frost on the roads. Black ice that almost makes me think of Tam lying on a hospital bed with a faceless nurse pounding his chest. But despite the crazy day I’ve had, I feel good, and it lasts until I get home to find Tam’s van gone.

Yawning, I haul myself out of the car and shuffle past his front gate in a daze. His front door rips open and I jump out of my skin.

“Bordel de merde!” A man appears and thrusts Rudy out, brandishing him like a lion cub, turning him this way and that. “There’s no one fucking out here. Stop barking at your own farts.”

By the French cursing, I can only assume it’s Tam’s brother. And as he rotates back to the door, his dark hair and olive skin confirms it.

The knowing mischief in his gaze as it lands on me is different, though. “You’re the hot lodger.”

“Tenant,” I correct, leaning on the gate and scrubbing a hand through my hair.

“That what they’re calling it these days?”

“Calling what?”

“The daft grin you’ve put on my moody brother’s face all day.”

“Tam’s not moody.”

Sab grunts. “Give it time. You got plans tonight?”

“Uh. No.”

“Good. Come and have dinner with us.”

Sab spins and ambles into the house like it’s a done deal.

I hesitate. I know the aroma filtering from Tam’s house. It’s the meat and bean thing he cooks in a clay pot that’s as warming as he is, and I want it in my belly as much as I want Tam. But he’s not here. And if he’d wanted to have dinner with me, he’d have said, right?

He hasn’t any other time you’ve wound up eating together.

Because he couldn’t. We hadn’t swapped numbers. But things were different now. If he wanted?—

“Come in and shut the damn door. This little rat is clawing the fuck out of me.”

Sab’s voice booms, making me jump all over again. I slip through the gate and into the house, shutting the door behind me.

I’m instantly hit by the scent of meat and garlic, and the heat of a log burner twice the size of the one in the annex, a scene I’ve walked into before. But the baby toys scattered around are new, and the Dubois brother waiting on me in the kitchen has shorter hair, broader shoulders, and a distinct lack of ink staining his fingers.

The way he moves around the kitchen is the same, though. “Who taught you to cook?”

Sab glances up from the walnuts he’s shelling for what I’ve come to learn is Tam’s favourite salad. “Aunty Maron. She’s a big believer in child labour in the kitchen. And she’s a childhood nutritionist, so we got all the good stuff when we went to her place every summer.”

“How did Tam end up a sugar nut then?”

“Dubois boys have addict genes. He got lucky with his vice.”

No resentment colours Sab’s tone. But he opens the fridge anyway, concealing his face for a moment, leaving me to hover by the counter, one eye still on the front door.

I don’t know if I’m waiting on Tam or planning an escape, and the dilemma messes with my head. I want to be here, but what if Tam doesn’t feel the same? What if his hookup from last night is the last person he wants to see when he comes home?

“Mon pote, take your coat off.” Sab’s mixed dialect throws me. “Take your coat off,” he repeats. “Tam keeps this place like a furnace.”

I haven’t noticed, too distracted by everything Tam to pay much attention to my surroundings. But I take my coat off anyway and hang it on the hook, leaving my shoes at the door, knowing Tam will see them before he sees me— warning him that I’m here.

“Are you always this quiet?”

“Hmm?”

Sab leans his elbows on the counter, watching me drift back into the kitchen. “My brother doesn’t make you sound like the quiet type.”

“I’m not quiet.”

“Long day?”

“Yeah. Unexpected too, I was supposed to be off.”

“I know how that goes.” Sab slides a beer in front of me. “Not sure my job is as important as yours.”

“You do something with wood, right? Like the worktops that fell on Tam?”

“That’s what happened to his wrist?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

Sab scowls. “He said he knocked it about a bit in the garage.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

Sab rolls his eyes to the ceiling, muttering something French, and it’s so like Tam that my heart aches with longing. For my landlord. My friend . And the dude who sucked me dry last night before I zonked out on him.

“If it’s any consolation, I think it’s healing okay.”

“You think ?”

“I don’t have X-ray vision, but it’s following the trajectory I’d expect for a healing fracture.”

Sab absorbs this, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “I still can’t believe you got him to go into the hospital. He wouldn’t drive by that place for years after the crash.”

“I didn’t get him to do anything. He made the decision himself.”

“Merde. You really are good for him.”

I don’t know what to say to that, but I’m saved by a squawk from the baby monitor by the stove.

Sab disappears upstairs. It leaves me alone in the ground floor of Tam’s cosy house, and I take a moment to glance around without his biblical hotness to occupy me. The wood floors and squishy couch are already seared in my memory, but I see other things now—family snaps I haven’t seen up close, pens— so many pens—and a photograph of a bike.

I wonder if it’s the one he crashed, but contemplating that takes me back to how I felt when I thought about him in ICU, and I can’t handle any more of that today.

“You’re standing where I put the Christmas tree.”

For the second time tonight, I startle like a newborn deer, and spin around to find a Dubois brother clutching a tiny dog. But it’s the right brother this time—it’s Tam —and he has frost flakes in his shaggy dark hair. “You want me to move?”

Tam stares, like he’s drinking me in. “Only if I get to come with you.”

It’s in this moment that I know, for tonight at least, everything is okay. The way he looks at me, the way his voice wraps around those words. The zero hesitance in the single long stride he takes to erase the distance between us. There’s no room for doubt and I’ve run out of the will to search for it.

Tam sets Rudy down and draws me into a hug. “How did I get lucky enough for my dinner to be cooked and you’re in my house already?”

I return his embrace, fighting with all I have not to sink into his arms and never come out. “Sab caught me outside and dragged me in. He asked me to stay for dinner, but you don’t have to?—”

Tam kisses me. Like, really kisses me, stealing whatever breath he hasn’t already claimed with his frosty hair and big hug. “Bhodi, you being here to have dinner with me is the stuff of my fucking dreams. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

I can’t lie and tell him I’ve been thinking about him all day too. But then, maybe things don’t have to be literal to be true. The firefighter who nearly died from smoke inhalation. I wasn’t thinking of Tam when we brought him back from a crash. Or when he opened his eyes and laughed at his stressed friends. But I felt… something I might not have done if I’d never met Tam. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.”

Tam grins.

He’s so beautiful.

I kiss him again, he kisses me back, and we sway from the force of it. Of how good it feels to live in this moment and not think of the past or the future. Maybe it’s the answer I’ve been searching for my whole life.

Or maybe I’ve been searching for Tam.

The thought intrudes on the peace I find in his lush mouth. The kiss stutters and I pull back as Sab clears his throat from somewhere behind us.

“Get a room.”

Tam ignores him till he spots the dark-haired, dark-eyed baby on Sab’s hip and his expression lights to one I’ve never seen. “Ma chérie. Why are you awake?”

Sab gives him a droll look. “All the snogging woke her up.”

“Ta gueule.” Tam takes the baby and glares at his brother.

Sab just grins and slides back to the stove, and it doesn’t take long for Tam’s features to soften again.

He spins the baby in a slow circle. Then he crosses the room to an old chest and opens a drawer, rummaging around until he finds a board book that’s unlike anything I’ve seen on the paeds ward.

Even from where I still stand by the photo of the motorbike, I can see how beautiful this book is, each page etched with the style of writing I am, by now, as familiar with as I am Tam’s lips.

I venture a little closer. “You made this, didn’t you?”

He nods, eyes on the baby. “For Esme. Give her something to do when her dad won’t stop talking.”

I don’t need a translator to understand the growl that emanates from the kitchen. I laugh. The baby—Esme—does too, and Tam’s smile?

My god. I’m in so much trouble.

The book is written in French. Tam settles on the couch and reads it to her while I watch, trying not to feel as though I’m intruding on an intimate family moment. But it’s as easy as it is entrancing to see how much he loves that baby. How much Sab loves the pair of them as he peeps at them from the kitchen.

Esme eventually falls asleep on her uncle .

He takes her back to bed and we eat the meal Sab’s cooked at the kitchen counter.

It’s livelier than the dinners Tam and I have shared before. Sab’s exhausted by the turn his life has taken in recent days, but he’s chatty too, as if the quiet Tam often prefers gets under his skin, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself when the evening draws to a close.

“You should go to bed .” Tam all but pushes him towards the stairs. “I swear you’ve been awake for three days straight.”

Sab slips me a smirk. “Is he trying to get rid of me?”

“Not on my account.” I’m already in the hallway, stepping into my shoes and rescuing the bag I abandoned by the door. “But he’s probably right about you needing some rest.”

Sab grunts and I take my cue, leaving the Dubois brothers to figure it out themselves.

I step out of Tam’s house and face the frigid night air. Sab’s right about Tam’s place being a furnace, and I’m unprepared for the bitter wind that blasts me as I head for the annex with my coat unzipped and flapping in the winter gale.

The shower calls my name. I seek sanctuary in the blast of hot water and steam, then I remember the ball of scrubs in my car that need to come in and be washed. Getting cold all over again holds little appeal, but I’ve let adulting slip recently and I need to step up.

I make the mad dash in the wind and hurry back to the annex, already resenting the six seconds it’s going to take me to load the washing machine.

“Bhodi!”

I spin around to find Tam jogging after me. For once he has shoes on, but his hair is as damp as mine, and there’s a wildness in him that I feel to my core. “What’s wrong? ”

Tam reaches me, not hesitating before he draws me in, sliding his big, warm hands along my jaw. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t have to leave.”

“It’s late.”

“That’s not why you scarpered.”

“Sab needs you.”

“Sab needs to sleep.”

“What about you?” His lips are too tempting. I steal a kiss. “What do you need?”

Tam takes a slow breath. I see the conflict rage in his complex brain before he floors me with the truth. “I need you .”