Page 27 of Cosy & Chill
Leo licked tomato sauce off his lower lip. “Nope. She was pleased I had a new tenant for her. One of the guys I know from the market has been looking for a place and I promised him first shot if I’d ever moved. I called him at lunchtime, and he met me when I dropped off the van, so I could introduce him. He likes the place, and my landlady is chuffed she doesn’t have to go hunting for a tenant at this time of year.”
“Networking in action.”
“He’s the guy helping me move the freezers on Monday, so… yeah.”
They flopped onto the sofa in front of the fire, replete with pizza, mellow with red wine, and exhausted from the day’s labours.
“Pinch me,” Finn said after a moment of companionable silence.
“What?”
“Pinch me. Please. Maybe then I’ll start believing that this is real.”
“You’ll start believing it soon enough. I’m sure you’re not used to sleeping on an airbed!” Leo chuckled. “I know what you mean. If anybody had told me that you can enquire about a rental and move in three days later, I’d have called them deluded.”
“Yeah. I’d have said the same if that someone had suggested I’d share a place with somebody I’d only met five days earlier. Then I thought it’s no different than going to uni, right?”
Leo’s gaze sharpened. “Second thoughts?”
“Not yet. I’m still waiting for a full-blown panic attack. Do you know how out of character all this is for me? Making decisions—especially big, important ones—isn’t my strong suit. My gran kept telling me forever that I should sell my knits. I didn’t even think about it seriously until after she’d died.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Finn swirled the wine in his glass, wondering if he was sharing too much. He’d already told Leo about his father’s drinking, and now…
“You don’t have to—”
“My father never liked me knitting,” Finn said quickly. “I was afraid that if I opened a store, and earned money from the things I made, he’d go at me even worse.”
“Did he? Get worse, I mean.”
“Not because of the store. Seems he’d been holding back so he wouldn’t annoy my gran. After she died… almost everything that came out of his mouth was an insult. And that was before he lost his job and started drinking.” Finn swallowed the rest. “At that point, I thought it couldn’t get much worse, so I started Cosy Corner.”
“You didn’t think of moving out?”
“All the time. I was saving. Waiting for the right time. I kept telling myself that I’d leave if he got really… you know… violent. But insults seemed all he ever had to throw at me.”
“It’s amazing what one can put up with,” Leo said, almost too softly for Finn to hear.
“Exactly. I didn’t like it, but until I met you, I was too… I dunno… too chicken to change. Now I feel as if I stepped out of my front door and got sideswiped by a hurricane.”
“Should we have taken this more slowly?” Leo sounded worried now. So worried, that Finn placed his hand over Leo’s where it lay on the sofa cushion between them.
“Don’t look like that. I said Ifeltas if I’d been sideswiped by hurricane, not that I minded.” Leo’s hand was warm against his, the skin soft. Finn slid his fingers between Leo’s and gripped just a bit tighter. “I was in the solicitor’s office this morning to sign the rental agreement, just as you were. I could have said stop any time these four days. There was also no need for me to move in today. I did everything I did in the last week because I wanted to. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Leo didn’t remove his hand. Finn didn’t let go.
They went back to watching the fire and enjoying the silence.
“This is the first time I’ve seen you sitting somewhere without needles and yarn,” Leo said a long while later.
“I’ve given myself a day off. Seeing we had other things to do and all that.” He plucked at a loose thread on the sofa cushion. “It feels strange, though. Just sitting here, idle.”
“Do you literally knit all day?”
“If I can. There’s more to it than just knitting. In the mornings, I wash and block finished pieces and set them out to dry, take customer orders to the post office and pick up new materials. Afternoons are for knitting. I stop around dinner time to check the orders on the store and wrap anything that’s ready. Then I settle down to knit until I fall asleep.”
