Page 12 of For Real

“Raised ground floors do my head in.” His footfalls landed softly on the wooden floor. “It’s like this is a basement, but it’s not a basement, and you’re not on the same level as the street, but you are on the same level as the garden. How the fuck does that even work?”

“Space-time dilation,” I told him gravely.

I was gratified, so ridiculously gratified, to hear him laugh.

He hovered by the staircase as I opened the door that hid my washer-dryer and fiddled with the programme wheel. “Uh, this is a really nice room.” He sounded painfully uncertain.

“Thank you.”

“And you’ve kind of got your pans on a…hangy thing.”

I nodded.

There was about a fraction of a second of silence, even more uncomfortable, if possible, than the conversation. Then he gasped. “Holy shit. Is that an AGA?”

“Hmm?” I glanced at the warmly slumbering behemoth, which was absurd because it made it look as if I didn’t know the contents of my own kitchen. “Oh. Yes.”

Wooed, perhaps by “iconic design, exceptional quality,” he padded into the room wary as a wild colt and, with a lingering look at the cooking range, finally made his way over to the washing machine. His fingers curled under the hem of his T-shirt and tugged. Then he froze. “You’re not going to watch, right?”

“God. Sorry. No.”

I spun away, a strip of pale skin seared across my vision like I’d stared straight into a camera flash. Then came the swoosh of fabric, the scrape of a zip, and finally the slam of the washing machine door and its slowly gathering hum. Turning back, I found him robed waist to ankle in towel and waist to neck in goose bumps, hugging his own elbows and shaking.

“F-fuck, it’s c-cold.” He made a dash for the AGA, one lean, lightly muscled thigh briefly exposed at the join of his makeshift garment.

Traces of rain glistened still on his chest, throat, and upper arms. There was a barbell in the shape of an arrow through his left nipple and a rash of fading acne marks across his collarbones. He looked unbelievably fragile just then, all bones and youth and awkward angles. But there was something else as well, a deep steady flame—conviction perhaps, or courage, an instinct of valour that too much living could so easily strip away. I wanted to be on my knees again. I wanted to let him burn, as free and wild as our hearts could bear.

“Can you stop staring? I know it’s not much to write home about, but it’s what I’ve got to work with, okay?”

“Sorry.” What else could I say? You’re beautiful. Please let me…please… When he was half-naked and trapped in some stranger’s house? “I think the spin cycle is about an hour. Would you like something? A warm drink? Another towel? Some clothes.” Good God, why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? “I’ll lend you some clothes.”

“Yeah, that’d help. Just need to get dry and warm up.”

A drop of water, silver-edged in the half-light, slid slowly from the tip of a clump of hair, hung suspended for a moment, and then landed on the side of his neck. He flinched, and it burst into infinite, infinitesimal tributaries, rushing this way and that across his skin.

“You could have a hot bath?” I offered. “If you wanted.”

He shuffled. “You don’t have to. I mean, I know you feel guilty and shit, but this is too much. You could just go to bed or whatever, and I’ll get my stuff when it’s ready and call that taxi.”

I propped my hips against the farmhouse table in the middle of the room. “I don’t think so.”

“Why? Do you think I’m going to nick your AGA if you leave me alone?”

He made me smile, and it felt so strange, standing there in my kitchen, talking to an angry boy in a towel, and wanting to smile. “If you managed to steal it, you’d deserve to have it.”

He huddled in closer, still shivering. It would have been so easy to fold him in my arms, and warm him with myself, but also utterly impossible. Wrong, even. And I couldn’t help internally cringing from whatever it was—my own hypocrisy, perhaps—that made kneeling naked at his feet acceptable, when a simple gesture of comfort was not. The truth was, it was easy to deny the intimacy of the first (though, in fleeing from him, I had failed to do so). Much less the second.

“So. Look.” His hands curled into fists. “This bath, right? Is there bubbles?”

It had been a long time since I’d taken a bath—I usually preferred, or perhaps defaulted to, showering—but I recalled some bottles tucked into a corner. “Probably.”

He gave me a haughty look. I had no idea how he managed it, my little, towel-draped prince, but he did. “Well. All right, then.”

So we trooped upstairs, and I ran him a bath and poured half a bottle of Radox Nourish into the water.4

“Dude.”

“What’s the matter?”

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