Dante crouched in front of him, hair damp and pushed back from his face, hazel eyes glimmering with amber flecks in the light from the solar lamp on the porch.
It’s dark. Shit. How long have I been out here?
“I don’t know.”
Sid blinked. “What?”
“I said I don’t know how long you’ve been out here. Did you fall asleep?”
“Um . . .” Brain fog descended on Sid, hard and fast. Suddenly, he had no idea about anything, let alone what he was doing slumped on the wooden deck of his porch with an unconstructed spliff in his lap.
Dante seemed to know it too. He rescued the joint fixings and deftly rolled them into a fat jazz fag. “You want to smoke this? Or I can help you inside?”
“I don’t need help,” Sid grumbled.
“Fair enough.” Dante brought the joint to his lips and lit it, inhaling a deep drag of herbal smoke.
He blew it out slowly, as if teasing Sid with the scent, but there was nothing humorous about his keen gaze as he ran it over Sid. His stare was as intense as the rest of him. And he was close—so close Sid could smell the sandalwood shower gel from the gift shop on him. Mixed with the natural scent of a man who worked with dirt and sunshine all day, Dante was pretty much Sid’s wet dream.
If his body was up to dreaming, which today it probably wasn’t.
Dante claimed another pull on the joint, then handed it over.
Sid took his turn, sucking down the smoke and relaxing, nerve by nerve, as the slow buzz hit him in all the right places. Post-work fatigue wasn’t going anywhere, but the weed combined with Dante’s presence was enough to make him feel brand new.
He let out a slow breath and ran his gaze over Dante again, taking in every facet of him in case he’d missed anything the first thousand times he’d studied him.
Shower-wet hair was a good look on him. So were the faded T-shirt and cargo shorts he now wore. He has nice legs. “You’ve caught the sun,” Sid said. “On your face and your arms.”
Dante smiled a little. “I haven’t been outside this much in my life.”
“Not even when you were growing up?”
“We lived in a flat.”
“You didn’t play out?”
“Not during the day. We ran riot at night, though.”
Sid smoked more of the joint, then passed it back to Dante. “You were always a wrong-un then?”
“Pretty much. Maybe I started out with good intentions, but it’s hard to remember that now.”
“I get that. No, you finish it.” Sid waved the joint away as Dante offered it to him. “Sometimes I forget I wasn’t always this person who walks into things and falls over, that I lived without second-guessing every movement, you know? It’s annoying.”
“You don’t deserve that.”
“How do you know?”
Dante stubbed the joint out and tucked the butt into the tiny clay pot Sid kept behind the solar lamp. “That you don’t deserve a chronic illness? Why would you deserve something like that?”
“You don’t know me.” Sid accepted Dante’s outstretched hands and let himself be gently eased to his feet. “I might be a right bastard who deserves a slow, painful death.”
“Are you?”
“What do you think?”
Dante flushed and looked away.
Startled, Sid forgot himself and squeezed Dante’s hands instead of letting go. “Sorry. I’m a chatty weirdo when I smoke before dinner.”
“You’re not a weirdo, and I like that you talk.” Dante stared hard at something before he brought his gaze to Sid. “It’s too quiet when I’m on my own. I, uh, it kind of scares me.”
Sid was still clutching Dante’s hands. He rubbed his thumbs over Dante’s knuckles as if holding hands was something they did all the time. “Because you were never alone in prison?”
“Probably. And before that too. I mean, I was by myself a lot, but there were always people around. Road boys don’t sleep.”
“Road boys?”
“Gang shit.” Dante tracked Sid’s thumbs as they made a second pass over his knuckles. “It’s not exactly office hours, and I never slept alone.”
“Girlfriend or boyfriend?”
“Both, or someone else’s. I already told you I’m a piece of shit.”
“You were a piece of shit.” Sid forced himself to release Dante’s hands. “Past tense, dude.”
Dante said nothing, perhaps tired of having the same conversation multiple times in the space of a week, but Sid wasn’t tired of it at all.
“I can do this all night, you know,” he said.
Dante’s brows cinched. “Do what?”
“Correct your shitastic opinions of yourself.”
“They’re not opinions. They’re facts. Ask my brother.”
Sid opened his mouth, but Dante’s stricken expression silenced whatever he’d planned to say. Instead, he rubbed Dante’s newly tanned forearm and jerked his head at the front door. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
He didn’t wait for Dante to answer. With the furnace in his nerves quieted by the joint he’d smoked, he took advantage of his steady legs and slipped inside to face the bread dough he’d abandoned when it was still daylight.
It was huge, with air bubbles bursting from the top.
Sid laughed as Dante came up behind him.
“What’s so funny?”
Sid pointed at the bread. “That’s, like, three times as big as it should be. I forgot about it.”
Dante frowned. “What is it?”
“Bread.”
“You made bread?”
“No. Rhonda made bread. All I had to do was leave it half an hour before sticking it in the oven, and I forgot.”
“Because you fell asleep on the porch?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Okay.” Dante stepped around Sid, his socked feet silent on the tiled floor, and peered at the bulging bread dough. “What are you going to do with it now then?”
“Bake it anyway and hope for the best. You want some soup while we wait?”
Dante shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
“Did you eat already?”
“No.”
“Then I mind you going hungry.”
Sid threw the bread in the oven, then lit the burner beneath the soup pan and set it to a low simmer to heat. He felt Dante’s gaze on him the whole time but kept his own to himself while he toasted pumpkin seeds in a dry pan and found the olive oil in the wrong cupboard as if a stranger had put it away. It wasn’t a stranger. It was you. “Tell me something I don’t know,” Sid muttered.
“What?”
Sid glanced up to meet Dante’s frown. “Sorry. I was grouching at myself.”
“For what?”
“For putting things in the wrong places. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think I’ve been burgled.”
“You don’t have that problem in the tool shed.”
“No. But I have limited resources in my fucked-up brain, so by the time I get home I’m a walking—or limping—master of disaster.”
Dante watched Sid tip the toasted seeds into a cup, lips pursed, keeping whatever he wanted to say locked up tight.