Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3) Page 13

  Aidan frowned. “You could kiss me again if you’d like. I don’t mind.”

  And again it threw James. It seemed a peculiarly childlike, innocent way of looking at it. Did Aidan have no desire of his own urging him to close the distance between them? Did he not actually fancy James at all? Was he . . . straight? But then why would he have come and sat so close?

  Their position made the kiss awkward. Aidan had to twist his head backwards. James leaned over his shoulder, craning forwards until their mouths could meet. “Mmm.” He murmured at the dry, chaste press of Aidan’s generous mouth against his. Warm and soft and . . .

  He pressed closer, licking along the seam of it, asking for entrance, and Aidan went rigid against him, like a startled and nervous virgin.

  James drew back, wondering what he’d done wrong, found Aidan looking at him with wary eyes, as if worried about what he would do next. And perhaps it was too soon for any of this. How many times had Aidan been forced into sex by a lover who hurt him, who thought of him as property to be disposed of at will? Of course he would have some issues about surrendering freely.

  “Or you could kiss me,” he whispered, torn between pity and fury. “How about I just lie here and you do whatever you would like to do to me?”

  Aidan’s frown cleared into a look of worshipful joy that made James’s bones sing. No, he wasn’t wrong about this. Aidan liked him; he would stake his career on it. Aidan liked him, so the weird, nervous skittishness around anything vaguely sexual must be a factor of abuse. That made a kind of hideous sense, made James want to rewind the universe and change all of causality so that such things did not happen. Certainly made him willing to wait, to be as patient and as careful as it would take to heal Aidan and restore his joy in making love to someone who loved him in return.

  Aidan wriggled a little as he settled, seemingly unaware of the way every touch of his arse and hips was sending a pulse of pleasure through James. Having got close enough, he brushed a tender kiss along James’s cheekbone, set one hand around the nape of his neck and one on his chest, put his head down in the hollow of James’s shoulder, and fell asleep.

  James relaxed back against the cushions, the heat of arousal slowly subsiding into a warmth of comfort, of intimacy almost postcoital in its heaviness. The TV showed news at ten. Then at eleven.

  Sometime after that, James half roused from sleep to find that Michael had come in, put a duvet on top of them both, and was switching off the TV. There were a thousand doubts reflected in Michael’s eyes, but what he said was, “Night.”

  “Mmm,” said James, with no doubts at all. “Good night.”

  The next day began when James woke to a litany of, “Fuck the stairs, fuck the furniture in this fucking house,” as Finn lurched blearily across the living room in the dim hour of half six, clipped the settee with his hip as he passed, and ricocheted off towards the kitchen.

  Given permission to help, Aidan cooked everyone breakfast, James smiling at how sweet it was to watch him fuss, Michael and Finn—visibly unhappy at not being alone in their own home—exchanging slightly uncomfortable glances when they thought James wasn’t watching.

  They went to work soon after, leaving James to phone the museum and spend a long time explaining the situation to his assistant. “Involved in a murder inquiry,” sounded a great deal more grand than it felt. He took advantage of the offer to use Finn’s computer and worked on some reports stored in Dropbox.

  Normally even the dry write-ups of digs absorbed him enough that he forgot meals, forgot breaks, and came to himself eight hours later with aching hands, sore shoulders, gritty eyes, and a terrible thirst. But today he seemed to have a magically refilling cup of tea by his elbow. Twice there was something with the drink—a plate of grapes and sliced melon, a bowl of carrot sticks with tzatziki in the well of it. And once Aidan shook him out of his reverie and dragged him downstairs to eat lunch, where James sat grinning like a lunatic over his plate, feeling ridiculously blessed.

  These were easy hieroglyphs to read, after all. There wasn’t a culture in the world that didn’t regard the providing of food as an act of love.

  In the afternoon, he accompanied Aidan out into the garden, keeping a watch in case Piers was hiding in the bushes. Aidan cut daffodils and sprigs from the fir trees, brought them inside to make an arrangement in an empty wine carafe. Once installed in the window, the spray of flowers turned the milky light of the misty spring day gold as it passed.

  James slipped his arms around Aidan’s waist as Aidan stood at the sink, set his chin on Aidan’s shoulder, not pushing, just loving the way Aidan felt against him, trying to enjoy the sweet yearning of being close to him without wanting more. Aidan turned in his arms, smiling, and kissed him on the mouth.

  It was a brief, dry brush of lips, about as passionate as a handshake, but it was progress. James wanted to tilt his head, fasten their mouths more firmly together, plunge in deep, and turn it into something filthy . . . but he didn’t. He just stood quietly, holding Aidan’s arms by the elbow as Aidan clasped him back, close inside each other’s personal space and breathing together as if they were one creature.

  “Thank you,” Aidan said, addressing his words to the floor. “I was so frightened and so alone. I don’t think I would have made it without . . .”

  That was too much gratitude for James to bear. It made him look back on his life with Dave and realize he could not place a single moment in the last five years in which he and Dave had shared a moment as intimate as this. He’d been either ignored or used for casual sex, and he had missed this kind of companionship. Sex without it was a poor substitute for the real thing.

  He tried not to get angry on his own behalf, but the realization was heavy with disappointment, as though he was resigning himself to a loss. “No,” he insisted. “No. Thank you. I feel . . . I’ve been in a holding pattern for years, and now perhaps I have somewhere to steer toward again. Thank you for that.”

  James went back to his reports after that, and Aidan spent the afternoon cleaning everything that could be cleaned. Finn returned at six and Michael left wherever he was hiding to come in too. Then WPC Clarke arrived at eight and the evening had been spent giving witness statements.

  “Well, of course we don’t recommend this kind of action in general, Mr. Hulme,” she said, looking severe in her black uniform with her hair shaved close, a radio and a truncheon at her belt. “I know we worked together catching those arsonists, but that doesn’t mean we want to see you making a habit of vigilantism.”

  “It’s my fault,” James offered. “When Aidan phoned me, he was in such distress I couldn’t think what else to do but to go there and get him myself. Then I thought I might run into Piers, and I asked Michael and Finn along for moral support.”

  “At least one of whom should have known better.” She flipped her notebook closed and laid a hand on top of it, her engagement ring like a small sun on her fourth finger. Leaning back, she put her booted foot on the stretcher under the table, crossing her legs. “All right, I’ve got all your statements. I’ve warned you against trying to handle this kind of thing yourselves next time. Seriously—going up against a murderer is bad news, even if you are trained for it. Mr. May, I’m looking at you.”

  “I got it.”

  She smiled at him, very regal all of a sudden, like Grace Jones. “Right. Well, I am able to inform you that though we have not been able to apprehend the suspect, we do know he flew out of the country yesterday. He must have gone straight to the airport after your confrontation. We are taking his departure as suspicious, and the airports have been alerted to the fact that he’s wanted in a murder investigation. If he does try to come back, we will catch him.”

  “So they’re safe to go back home?”

  That was Michael. James liked the guy, he did, but it was fairly clear that Michael was not the world’s biggest extrovert and was suffering at the imposition of company. To give him credit, he did try to hide it, but he didn’t do a great
job.

  “Yes, they are.” WPC Clarke got to her feet and everyone else rose in sympathy. “We’ll keep you informed if anything changes, but for now I think you can consider going about your daily business.”

  Michael and Finn returned from seeing her out and stood in opposite corners of the room looking down thoughtfully on Aidan’s bent head. In response, James shuffled his chair closer so he could take Aidan’s hand in his own.

  Aidan whispered something too quiet to catch.

  “What was that?”

  He could see Aidan thinking, recalibrating, deciding it was safe to look up and then making the extra effort to do it. “What is my daily business? I . . . I don’t want to go back to that house.”

  James pictured waking up every day with Aidan stretched beside him. Imagined giving him gentle encouragement, lavishing him with so much praise that one day he might actually half believe some of it. James was good with broken things, good at piecing them back together, restoring their shape even though they’d been pulverized by centuries of neglect. He might be good at this too—he wanted to try at least. “You should come and live with me. I would look after you.”

  Aidan glanced back down again before James could tell if his smile was watery with gratitude or with something more painful. He drew in breath, opened his mouth.

  “What about Dave?” Michael asked, his arms crossed, not even the light through daffodils managing to draw any softness from the black of his hair.

  “What about him?” James shrugged, annoyed at interference stretched beyond what was required. “He’s sleeping his way around Toronto as we speak. He’s made it very clear that my emergencies are of no interest to him. We’re almost certainly over. If he wants to object, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “‘Almost certainly’?” Michael looked away. “How about you wait till you’re completely certain? You want to help Aidan, right? Then you don’t want to do it by messing him up in some kind of high-profile rock divorce. Get your shit sorted out first before you start trying to fix anyone else.”

  “Besides.” Finn had a little smirk on. It made some sense that he found Michael’s overbearingness amusing—trying to pressure Finn was like trying to rest a brick on water. Even the attempt was laughable. “The last thing Aidan needs right now is another protector. What he should do is to have a year alone to work out who he is: To learn to be his own man for a change. He doesn’t want to go to your house and end up your boy instead.”

  God, they were a merciless pair when they got going. James supposed he’d known that when he’d asked for their help, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Fuck them and their scruples and their common sense. He wanted Aidan in his life right now. Right now, damn it.

  “I’m sure you’d be kinder as a master,” Finn sneered, “but is that the arrangement you want? Even if it is, you can’t have it until he’s sufficiently his own man to be able to consent. I tell you this, if you take him in now as he is, it’ll be abuse, no matter how nice you are about it.”

  And of course the worst thing about them was that they were right.

  They had bent his head with their browbeating. Now he raised his gaze off the tabletop and met Aidan’s eyes. Aidan looked hotly embarrassed and perhaps a little excited. Excited like an actor about to go on stage for the role of a lifetime—terrified and exalted all at once.

  “I think they might be right,” James admitted gently. “Would you like to try to make your own life? Get a job, find . . . maybe a room in a shared house? What would you want to do with your life? Because you have the choice now.”

  Aidan laughed. Then he rose and fetched the cleaning fluid from under the sink, scrubbing down the table as he thought. “I’d like to have my own studio. Make pottery, sell it, maybe run courses. You know? Children’s days and ‘beginners’ wheel’ days and so on. And maybe . . . maybe get good enough to exhibit my sculptures.”

  James’s heart sank. He had no doubt that Aidan could sell his pieces for a lot of money, but starting up his own studio with no money and no experience? He couldn’t see that ending well.

  “That’s your long-term plan, then,” he said, trying to be more encouraging than he felt. “But something like that will take a while to get off the ground. What about supporting yourself for now, earning money to buy clay? What did you used to do before Piers?”

  Aidan gave him a bewildered look that shifted slowly into nostalgia. “I worked for a little while in a coffee shop. I quite liked that. And P . . . we always had the latest machines at home. I’m good at making coffee.”

  “Well, there you go, then.” Finn wrinkled his nose in approval. “I happen to know the owner of a very fine tea shop in this great city, whose coffee is nothing more than mediocre. It is a blot on the face of a venerable establishment. Let me put in a word for you, and we’ll see what we can turn up.”

  “What do you think? Pretty outstanding, if I say so myself.”

  Aidan was talking to people. More accurately, the owner of the tea shop Finn had mentioned was talking to him. Finn had brought him to this kitsch little place and shoved him inside and left him. James had regretfully but firmly gone back to work and to his own house. The piece of paper with his phone number and address on it crackled under Aidan’s fingers as he shoved a hand in his pocket to touch it for reassurance and strength.

  And yes, he agreed it was important he should establish a life all for himself. Perhaps—at some high-pitched end of the emotional spectrum concealed by the feeling of dread—he was even thrilled at the prospect. But that didn’t mean it was easy to be in this wood-panelled temple to a bucolic ideal he wasn’t sure had ever existed. To stand here alone and be expected to talk to people who were going to be telling him what to do.

  But he had been asked a direct question. Dutifully, he raised his head and looked around. The tea shop wasn’t open yet, so he saw empty mahogany tables covered in embroidered table cloths. A window to one side of the room let in a view of a slightly shabby garden under a rainbow of crocuses and celandine, grape hyacinth and speedwell, with the branches and cerise flowers of an elderly cherry tree framing the scene.

  In the corner of the room a lit fire was just beginning to settle into heat. Next to it, a door opened into the largest of the guest rooms where the till sat on a table piled with souvenirs.

  “I can do whatever needs to be done,” he said, as softly as he could while still being heard.

  “Ah, that wasn’t what I asked you.” Idris Malakar was the proprietor. A round-faced British-Bangladeshi man in his thirties, wearing a suit with a subtle purple check pattern and a pristine white apron around his waist, he was friendly and chatty and he scared Aidan to death.

  Aidan didn’t know how to do human interaction not based on fear. And perhaps that was why he was here—so he could learn to. He made an effort. “I think it’s lovely. It’s very . . . erm. It’s very much more tea than coffee, though.”

  “This is true.” Idris swept an arm around Aidan’s back. He didn’t touch, but the knowledge that his hand was an inch away drove Aidan forward nevertheless. They passed through the second sitting room and entered the kitchen.

  “But you see, it occurs to me that there are tea drinkers who will deprive themselves of my glorious medley of teas because they cannot bring their coffee-drinking companions. And it also occurs that I have heard Finn call my coffee ‘that godawful watered-down shite,’ one too many times. If I’m going to do coffee at all, then I want to do it splendidly. I want to offer my customers the best coffee money can buy.” He gestured at the room of lace doilies and faded chinoiserie wallpaper through which they had just come. “I know my decor is not sophisticated enough for the pretentious wanker that is the average imbiber of high-class coffee, but I’ll put up a few French posters and they can imagine they’re in a gîte somewhere. What do you need to make that come about?”

  Gosh, he could see why Idris was a friend of Finn’s. They both seemed to share the same sesquipedalian smok
escreen. But Aidan liked that. He liked not being sworn at, and he liked that Idris hadn’t blamed him for anything yet. Eager to please, he dredged up the combination of knowledge he had retained from his old employment and the new information he had researched last night on Finn’s laptop when James had gone home.

  He missed James already, but that was another thing he was here to learn to do without.

  “Well, first of all, good beans.” Aidan took down the dusty sacks of robusta beans from the shelf above the kitchen’s sink. “These are . . .” nasty “not great beans, and they look like they’ve been stored for a long time, getting warm and cold, wet and dry all the time. You want arabica beans, really, bought fresh every week and stored in Kilner jars to keep them fresh. You only grind them immediately before they’re used.”

  Idris leaned back against the oven, from which the scent of freshly baking scones rose like very wholesome incense. With the oven on full, the room was already warm and set to become hotter, so the back door was open. Aidan heard footsteps and ducked behind the cover of the fridge to hide, but it was only two youngish women coming in, unwinding their scarves, shucking their coats, and chatting.

  Aidan eased slowly back out of hiding, feeling terribly exposed and surrounded.

  “Well, you certainly seem to know what you’re talking about.” Idris’s expression of goodwill hardened into sternness. “So I am going to trust you with the task of improving our coffee to match the standard of our tea.” He gave Aidan a moment to feel glad and grateful and trusted, before going on, equally seriously. “I should say that while I will always do a favour for my friends—and I have taken you on in that light—I expect you will want to prove to me that you are not a charity case, but that I am lucky to have you.”

  Aidan bit his lip, a little terrified, wondering how he could prove it immediately, but Idris’s grin had already reemerged as he turned on the spot, sweeping out an arm to indicate the women. “Just as I am lucky to have these ladies. Aidan, this is my cousin Lalima, who is the genius in charge of our cakes. And this is Molly West, head of our crack team of waitresses. Ladies, this is Aidan Swift, who is going to turn around our disappointing coffee. And also do whatever other jobs need to be done—cleaning, washing up, waiting, kneading the bread, pruning the plants, disentangling errant boats from our moorings, you name it.”