“That’s the type of MS I have—relapsing and remitting. It’s supposed to mean it comes and goes, but some symptoms are permanent.”
Dante nodded slowly. “I don’t know anything about MS.”
“Don’t google it. My sister did that and now she thinks she’s the wiki of every weird thing that happens to me.”
“I’ve never googled anything,” Dante said. “Reading to learn is new to me, so it doesn’t always occur to me to do it.”
“You’re not a bookworm?”
“What do you think?”
That you’re too complex for me to think anything and be right. “I think you could be if something interested you enough.”
Dante laughed. It was short and sweet but lit up Sid’s world all the same. “I read books about gardening when I was inside. Nothing else, though. I told you, it’s a new thing. I couldn’t read, actually, until I was eleven.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t go to school much. My dad died, and my mum kept me and my brother at home for company until she got bored and fucked off.”
“That’s . . .” Sid shook his head. “I don’t know what—is it heart warming? Or awful? Sorry if that sounds bastardy. I’m sure your mum’s lovely.”
“She isn’t.” Dante dunked his hand in the water again, this time without looking. “But I haven’t seen her for a long time, so it doesn’t matter anymore. And don’t worry, I won’t google your shit.”
Sid let his head thunk back against the tree trunk. “I’m sorry about your dad. How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“Was he ill?”
“No, he was a soldier,” Dante said distantly. “How long have you had MS?”
Deflection, much? But Sid could take it, even if he knew Dante had absorbed the information the first time. “Two years… . . . nearly three, I suppose, though it’s probably longer, I just didn’t notice.”
“No one else did?”
“Not that they’ve ever told me, but I know I’m different now. My sister—we’re twins—she says my personality changed, like, my DNA altered or something, and she doesn’t like it.”
Dante opened his mouth, then shut it again, clearly changing his mind about whatever he’d planned to say.
Sid raised a brow. “Whatever it is, you won’t offend me.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Dante pulled his hand from the lake and studied the dripping water again. “I like your personality. I can’t imagine you different or being better for it.”
“I was less of a moody twat before.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know what a smile means if you’ve never seen someone frown.”
“That’s pretty philosophical from someone who doesn’t think much of themselves.” Sid tried for a smile of his own.
Dante’s gaze blanked out as if the sun had gone in. “I’m a piece of shit, mate. You just don’t know it yet.”
“You can’t be that bad. Not a murderer, remember?”
Dante let his hand drop and turned to face Sid fully, his lean shoulders casting shadows over where Sid sat. “I fronted a drug gang out of a tower block on the estate where I was born. I made my baby brother be my second, and then I let it destroy him and everything else I’d ever cared about.”
Sid swallowed thickly. “Okay . . . but that was before prison, right? So it was years ago?”
“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was, some things never heal. Like the scar my brother has on his brain from getting beat to shit in prison because of something I did. And you know what? Even after that, I didn’t stop hurting him. If that isn’t evil, I don’t know what is.”
Dante stood with leonine grace.
Sid’s heart jolted with the fear that he would walk away without looking back, but he didn’t. He stepped closer to Sid and held out his hands.
Sid took them and hauled himself to his feet.
Let go.
His fingers disobeyed him and wrapped tighter around Dante’s. “I don’t believe you’re evil.”
Dante’s answering smile was as empty as his eyes. “Then you don’t know me.”
This time he did walk away, leaving Sid with a pounding heart and tingling hands that had nothing to do with lesions on his brain and everything to do with the spell Dante Pope had cast on him.
The spring sunshine gave way to rain that afternoon. Hard, pelting rain that soaked Dante to the skin. He didn’t mind, though. He stood beneath it, face tilted to the sky, and let fat drops splat him as goosebumps spread across his exposed skin.
“You’re going to catch a cold.”
Dante jumped, though his heart knew it was Sid before his soft northern brogue registered. “That’s a myth. You can’t catch a virus from the rain.”
“Good job, too.” Sid grinned and gestured between them. He was as wet as Dante, though his golden skin was smooth and goosebump free like it had been that first night when he’d come up on Dante shirtless with his pockets stuffed full of spinach.
Right, it’s the spinach you’re thinking of when you’re alone at night.
“You look freezing,” Sid said, pulling Dante from the haze of the long nights he’d spent in his new bed, thinking of Sid, his weed stash, and his swathes and swathes of perfect skin.
“I am,” Dante said. “But I like it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t remember the last time I was this wet.”
“You never got rained on in the prison garden?”
“Not really. They made us go inside, like school kids.”
Sid’s face scrunched up, making him look far younger than the twenty-eight years Dante knew him to be. “That’s shit.”
“Yeah, well. We weren’t school kids, so . . .”
“So come and have dinner with me tonight.”
Dante blinked. “What?”
“Dinner,” Sid repeated.
“I got that, but why?”
Sid stared. The rain hammered harder and he shivered, which seemed to surprise him. Maybe he wasn’t immune to the cold after all.
Or maybe it was Dante making him shiver for all the wrong reasons. It struck him abruptly how close they were standing. Despite the rain and cool evening breeze, Sid’s body heat seeped out of him and into Dante, and—
I don’t deserve how he makes me feel.
Dante stepped back.
Sid didn’t move. His stare deepened, hooking into Dante’s soul with the piercing blue that made the sky seem dull. Raindrops rolled down his face. Dante tracked one as it hit his lips and pooled there before it fizzled out. “I—”
“What?” Sid twitched, as if not narrowing the distance between them was killing him.
Or, more likely, that hanging out in the rain was getting to him more than he cared to admit.
Or, most likely, that his body was misbehaving. Since their lunchtime confession session, Dante had found himself watching Sid more than usual, analysing every movement that seemed off. Some were obvious—he’d seen them before—but others were subtle enough that Dante couldn’t be sure they’d even happened.