Page 32 of Vine

I huffed a laugh. “No. I don’t think I will, either. I think this is me. There isn’t a cure. I’ve tried… doctors have tried everything. I’ma lot. I don’t see a way out of it.”

He said nothing for a while, though I sensed him mulling over my words. I could get used to his silences. They calmed me more than my meds ever had.

“I won’t ever change either,” he said. “I’m not ill, though.”

Lifting my chin from its perfect pillow, I looked up. I couldn’t see much of him in the dim light, just an outline of a big head. “I don’t think you need to, Max.”

“My mum used to say that.”

He sounded wistful and very past tense. I didn’t press him. Our quick handjob had already somehow slid into a much longer snuggle and dissection of my inner psyche; add in the loss of a parent and we’d kill the mood forever.

“What do you do in the television programme?”

“I’m one of the presenters. But… what’s that got to do with it?”

“Do you like it. Are you good at it.”

“Are those questions?”

“Yes. I don’t always ask them properly when they’re important.”

“Oh, okay. Well…um… yes, I am good at it. Or at least people say I am. My agent has lots more job offers coming in after the filming here ends, which tells me something, I guess.”

“You’re famous, then?”

“Hah! A bit. Not really. I get recognised back in England by people who watch the show. If I took up the work my agent is offering, then I’ll probably become more well-known.”

“But you don’t like it.”

I leaned up on an elbow. “What makes you say that? I didn’t say that.”

In reply, he pulled away from both my embrace and the bed, walked naked to the bathroom, then returned with a couple of damp cloths. Kneeling on the bed, he held one out. “For you.”

The second cloth he used on me too, dabbing carefully around the dried blood on my thigh he’d pointed out earlier, and the answer to his question.

“Oh, I see what you mean and how you might jump to that conclusion. But it’s not solely due to the job, although that doesn’t help. It’s a stressful environment sometimes. It’s me, and the people I work with don’t help. I’ve got myself in a bit of a hole. It’s a long story. I won’t bore you with it.”

“I’m not bored.”

Max’s big fingers were surprisingly tender, and I squeezed my eyes shut, turning my head away. I did not deserve this. This man’s unfussy, methodical care.

“Do you have lots of friends, Max?” If we talked any more about me, I might cry, and he didn’t need to see that. “I get the impression you do.”

He’d been with two very hot guys in the pub, head-turningly so. Jonas would have been over like a shot trying to butter them up.

He shook his head. “No. But I have family.”

Crouching over me, Max’s nakedness didn’t seem to bother him, his impressive dick swinging loose against his big hairy thigh. Above, his gut hung free and loose too, the belly of a man who enjoyed his food. He reached across me for a tissue to dry the skin.

“Those fit men in the pub, they’re family?”

He nodded again. “Yeah. Brother and brother’s best friend. I’m lucky.”

He’d said that before. Lucky. I hadn’t felt that way in a very long time. The stroking the gentle words, the kindness. It was too much too soon, already moving away from the holiday fling Emma had mooted and I’d come to think wasn’t a bad idea. I couldn’t cope with romantic attachments, the highs and the lows, yet here was my brain conning me into believing I’d met someone who might not mind all the shit I dragged along with me.

But it was too soon; if I let it pull me any deeper, it would all end in tears, mine, not his. I made myself move. “This has been great, really. But I should go. We’re filming early in the morning. Catching the avocets on the nests over at La Phare. I’m doing a piece to camera.”

“There are a pair nesting half a mile down the beach. Don’t need to go all that way.”

---