Chapter 4

Brix threw a tin of tomatoes into the meat sauce on the stove, watching Calum stare a hole through the back door from the couch. Anyone else would've thought him obsessed with the chickens, but Brix knew better. Calum's studied gaze was empty, and whatever he was seeing had taken him somewhere else entirely.

If the subtle distress in his dark eyes was anything to go by, it wasn't any place pleasant, and that was Calum all over—subtle—though that was the only thing Brix recognised in the shaken shell of a man he'd once counted among his closest friends.

Not his fault. You're the one who bailed.

The devil on Brix's shoulder also reminded him to nip upstairs and neck his evening meds.

When he came back, Calum hadn't moved.

Fuck this.

Brix got his biggest pot out of the cupboard and clanged it down on the stovetop.

Calum jumped. Brix felt bad for a moment, but the brief spark of life in Calum's tired gaze was a relief. It had been hours since he'd last spoken; he'd clammed up right after agreeing to stay the night in Porth Ewan.

"Sorry," Brix lied. "Checking you're awake."

"I am now."

"Good. You can help me massacre the spaghetti."

Calum looked at Brix like he'd grown four heads, but got up from the couch and drifted to the breakfast bar anyway. "What do you want me to do?"

"Nothin' really. Just fancied some company." Brix filled the pan with water and set it to boil. "And I was shitting it a bit that I'd lost you to the chooks."

"Sorry." Calum scratched his dark beard with a rueful twitch of his lips. "They're kind of absorbing."

Brix had lost more hours watching hen TV than he cared to admit, but he wasn't fooled by Calum's weak grin, and he didn't like it. Calum had always been quiet, but this was something else, and anger tickled Brix's veins.

Some douche bag's chewed him up and spat him out.

"Thought I was the one in a world of my own?"

Brix blinked to find Calum watching him, his expression a contradictory mixture of cautious curiosity and apprehension. "What's that?"

"You look pissed off."

"Nah, not me, mate. Just worried I'm gonna fuck up your dinner."

"Doubt it."

"Yeah?" Brix peered at the pan of bubbling meat. "I haven't made this for a while. Might've gone too hard on the garlic."

Bemusement creased Calum's face. "I can't cook for shit. Reckon I've got kebabs and fried rice in my blood."

Brix tried to conceal his displeasure. It hadn't been that long ago he'd lived on his own city diet—cornflakes, and lemon chicken from the all-night Chinese—but his life had evolved since then. Necessity, and the slower pace of Porth Ewan, had changed his ways, and cooking had become an activity he didn't mind too much.

The pasta water came to the boil. He threw in a packet of spaghetti. Calum didn't seem hungry, but Brix was hoping that would change when he had a bowl of food in front of him.

"I'll stir it if you want."

Brix startled. Somehow he'd missed Calum rounding the breakfast bar and peering into the meat pan. "Erm, thanks. I'm a fucker for that. Burnt so many pans I've got shares in Tefal."

Calum raised another weary half smile. "Multitasking, eh?"

"Aye-aye."

"Aye-aye?" Calum's grin widened enough to reassure Brix he was truly with him. "You sound like a pirate."

"In another lifetime, I might've been. My dad and all my uncles live on the sea, my brother did too, on the mackerel tugs and the lifeboats."

"How many do you have?"

"Uncles or brothers?"

"Both, I guess."

Brix swirled the spaghetti. "Three uncles, one brother. Most of them live around here somewhere, except my brother, Abel. He's in Belmarsh."

Calum nodded. "I remember you visiting him. How long does he have left?"

"Two years."

Brix picked up the olive oil, turning away from Calum so he wouldn't have to look him in the eye when he inevitably asked what Abel had gone down for.

But the question never came. Calum reached around Brix and snagged a strand of spaghetti. He tossed it at the tiled wall. "My nan always told me it was done if it stuck."

Good enough for Brix. He drained the pasta and tipped it in the meat pan. "Grab some bowls, will ya?"

"Okay." Calum glanced around the small kitchen and opened a few cupboards. The second one he tried dumped a stack of tattoo designs on his head.

"Shit, sorry. I keep meaning to collate those."

Calum gathered them up. "What are they? Flash for the studio?"

"Some. Most of them are just doodles, though. Lena, who runs the place for me, puts it all online. I don't have much flash in the studio anymore, unless it's custom—once it's gone, it's gone. I haven't done the same design twice in years."

"Lucky you. I wanted to scrap all the shit I had hanging around my place, but Rob—the, uh, person I worked with—had this idea in his head that the place should look like a scratch parlour."

Brix didn't miss the bitterness. Rob. Hmm. He filed it away for future reference. "Where's your place?"

"It's not actually mine."

"Okay, where have you been working?" Brix busied himself tossing the spaghetti. "You were destined for big things last I saw, but I ain't heard nothing about you since you left Dark Box."

"Maybe I haven't done anything."

Calum found the bowls and placed two on the counter. Brix served up, careful not to pile Calum's as high as he wanted to. He knew from experience that too much food when you were fucked up made the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach a hundred times worse.

He pushed Calum's bowl along the counter. "If you'd been doing nothing all this time, I reckon you'd have told me already. What studio were you at?"

"Black Star Ink." Calum accepted the fork Brix held out. "You won't have heard of it, though. I had a long waiting list, but that was probably because there were no other studios nearby."

"Where the hell were you? London's got more studios than I've had hot dinners."

"That's cos you're made of string. The studio was in Paddington."

"Paddington?" Brix let the string jibe slide. "What the fuck's in that craphole that made you settle there?"

"Fuck all . . . that I was interested in, anyway, but the place did okay. I just didn't see much return. My ex handled all the money stuff."

"Rob?"

Calum grunted and studied his bowl of food.

Now we're getting somewhere.Not that forcing Calum to talk when he didn't want to held much appeal, but Brix couldn't deny he was curious. More than that, and had been ever since he'd found Calum huddled on that damn fucking bench. "What kind of work have you been doing? Traditional is still big down here, but we get a bit of abstract and watercolour through the doors, and some of my guys are bang into their neo shit."

Calum's gaze fell on the stag on his hand. "I've done a lot of dot-work sleeves this year, and some geometric stuff. Did a pretty cool portrait a few weeks back."

"Can I see?"

"It's on my phone."

The faint light in Calum's gaze faded like it had never been there at all. Brix touched his arm. "I've got a bunch of pads upstairs. We can sketch after dinner, if you want? I could use fresh eyes on a dagger piece I'm doing for a biker chick."

Calum shrugged absently, and Brix let him be. It wasn't like he didn't know what it was like to be trapped in his own head.

* * *

Brix woke early the next day, acutely aware that Calum was on the other side of the wall.

He sat up, listening for any sign of movement from the spare room or downstairs, but there was none, save Dennis yowling on the landing for breakfast.

Brix swung his legs out of bed and padded to the bedroom door, avoiding the creaky floorboard that sounded like another dying cat first thing in the morning. Zelda, came with him, weaving between his legs, doing her best to trip him up.

"Stop it." Brix draped her tiny body over his forearm, a re-creation of a black-and-white photograph Lena had snapped of him last summer when a biker had brought Zelda to the studio door and persuaded Brix that his home was meant to be hers too. Zelda gave him her patented death stare, but her rumbling purr gave her away. Beneath her scathing belligerence, she was the sweetest cat in the world.

Brix tickled her chin, then set her down as he came to the spare room. He eased the ajar door further open and took a tentative peek inside. Zelda followed his gaze and sashayed forward, leaping soundlessly onto the bed, sniffing the empty space where, by the rumpled sheets, Brix assumed Calum had been.

Not there now.

Brix went back to his own room and threw a vest over the faded sweats he'd slept in, then he darted downstairs, struck with a stomach-churning fear that Calum had slipped away in the night.

Or worse.

The notion was grim, but Brix couldn't deny the cloud of despair he'd sensed around Calum. Rock bottom was a tough place to be. And if you couldn't see a way out, Porth Ewan offered plenty of scenic places to carve your own.

Numerous nights Brix had considered doing just that flashed into his mind. He stumbled, saving himself on the banister he'd only painted the week before. The smooth satinwood was cool against his palm, but the blue shade bothered him, like it had since he'd stepped back and studied the finished project. Shame he still couldn't say why.

He bounded off the last step and strode through the open-plan ground floor. Calum was nowhere to be seen, and his shoes were gone from the door. Movement in the garden drew Brix outside, barefoot and shivering against the early-morning chill, and he found Calum by the nearest hen house, holding Bongo to his chest and gazing out at the sea.

"I didn't notice yesterday that you can see the ocean from here," Calum said without turning round. "Didn't notice much of anything."

Brix closed the distance between them and followed Calum's stare. "The seafront is a five-minute walk away. I'll take you there later, if you want?"

"Is it near your studio?"

"They're pretty much one and the same."

Calum nodded and petted Bongo.

"How is she?" Brix asked. "Sometimes the upheaval of being rescued does 'em more harm than good."

"I don't know jack about chickens, but she's doing the same shit she was yesterday. The others seem okay too."

Brix glanced at the bald hens pecking around their run, gobbling up seeds and worms, and looking for all the world like they'd lived like this their whole lives instead of being crammed thirty to a cage and fed on the remains of their siblings. "Bet they've laid too. Never known a battery chook not give me an egg a day. They're good girls."

"I'll take your word for that. I fed your tiny devil cat this morning, by the way. She kept biting my face."

Brix winced. "Er, yeah . . . she does that. Zelda don't mean no harm, though."

"That right?" Calum shot Brix a disbelieving stare before the barest hint of a smile brightened his features. "I didn't mind it, actually. At least you know what you're getting."

The loaded sentence did savage things to Brix's heart. Calum's dark eyes were soulful-deep, and he was in danger of getting lost in them. In Calum's inky hair, chiselled cheekbones, and brawny forearms. And the beard that hadn't been there all those years ago?—

Behave yourself, twat.Calum had always been beautiful, but he'd had a girlfriend when they'd first met, and then later, when he'd confessed his bisexuality, Brix had been tied to someone else. Someone who'd left a darker mark on his soul than any ink ever could.

"I used your phone again."

Brix blinked. Calum was staring at him, like he'd spoken already and got no response. "No worries. Who'd you call? Your sister?"

"Fuck no." Calum shook his head. "She's more useless than I am. I called the bank. They gave me an overdraft on an old account that I can live on until I sort myself out. It's gonna cost me a kidney in fees, but it's a lower price than before."

Brix wondered if that meant Calum was staying, and then why he wanted him to so fucking much.

Arsehole. You want his whole life to fall apart?

God, no. But whatever was wrong in Calum's life had already happened. Why else would he be here? And why else would fate have taken Brix past that bench yesterday? Everything happened for a reason. Brix believed that more than anything.

He had to. Or he wouldn't be here to show Calum the way.