Page 60 of Skin and Bones

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to say sorry for… I should have stopped. And I should have stopped talking earlier too. I shouldn’t have asked about Lewis the other day in the canteen, in public. It’s just been bugging me for ages, and it makes me really angry, but I should have known better than to just come out with it like that. I’ve been pushing too hard, and I know it.”

“You mean…about why I…Lewis…what?”

He looked as confused as I felt.

“Yeah. None of my business, but we said…yousaid I could ask you things.” I had no idea what was going on in my head. All I knew was that his hand was still in mine, and I was not letting go.

He breathed. Stared at our hands. Breathed again.

“You can ask me things,” he whispered. “It’s actually helpful in a way. It makes me think about things differently. Yeah, it’s triggering, but perhaps if I get used to talking about it, it can be less so.”

I nodded, understanding where he was coming from. “I had to do a lot of that when I was younger. Talk about things that were really not easy to talk about.”

“Talking is good.”

Okay. And we were talking—almost normally. We could do this.

“I don’t want to go to bed on my own, Hugo. I don’t mean that I want you to come rip my clothes off and have rampant sex. I don’t want that.”

Now he was doing that tiny smiling thing, and that barrel of panic in my stomach was starting to ease.

“No,” he whispered. “That would be…bad.”

“Yeah.”

I tugged at the blanket, tried to get him to let go of it, but instead ended up with it bunched in my arms with his hand in the middle.

“Can you please lie next to me? Just until I fall asleep.”

“We’re not children, Ben,” he said with a half-smile.

“No, we’re not. But I think you need it. I know I do. I need you next to me holding my hand. You always make me calm.”

“Just to sleep?”

“Yeah. Just to sleep. I’m honestly not ready for anything else. I mean, kissing you freaked me out. And for the record, you’re already doing a goodjob of ruining my life because now I’ll never be able to kiss anyone else. You’ve ruined kissing for me forever.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Amen.”

He smiled properly now, and I slowly backed away, listening to the shuffle of his feet as we moved. He bent down and switched the Accident Light off. I reached out and killed the kitchen light. Then we clumsily sailed through the kitchen with the blanket between us and crawled onto my bed, him kicking his legs under the weighted blanket, me trying to tug another blanket over my shoulders.

“I never brushed my teeth,” he murmured.

“Neither did I, but the world won’t end because we’re both disgusting.”

“So both of us being disgusting evens that out or something?”

“Yeah.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and my heart was once again beating far too fast. I reached under the blanket and found his hand, tangled my fingers with his.

“You don’t have a duvet,” he observed.

“No, I prefer blankets. Another of my grandma’s influences. She always piled blankets on me. I got used to it.”

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