“It looks like you already ate it.”
Sid laughed. “What happened to I’ll eat anything?”
“Maybe I lied.”
“Do you do that a lot?”
“What?”
“Lie.”
“Not anymore.” Dante took another bite of his apple and his eyes grew distant.
Sid reclaimed his bowl and emptied it at record speed, then sat back contemplating if he had the balance and energy left to fetch himself seconds. Food was life—fuel for his faulty body—but consuming it was a trip. The fucking irony. Some days Sid thought that was how he would die, by a lightning bolt of wry bad luck. Others, it was the synthetic thump in his chest.
He rubbed at it, wishing it away, and this time Dante noticed. “Indigestion?”
“Nope.”
“Still hungry?”
“Maybe.”
Dante scooped Sid’s bowl from the table and rose. He disappeared before Sid could take a breath, and Sid instinctively didn’t draw attention to him by swivelling around to track him. He wouldn’t like that. Sid didn’t know how he knew that; he just . . . did.
Instead, he waited, still rubbing the sting in his chest and taking deep, measured breaths until Dante returned with two bowls of pasta and another apple.
The bowl he’d brought for himself was half the size of Sid’s.
“You know,” Sid said. “You’re gonna need your strength working in the gardens. That cereal bowl of spaghetti ain’t gonna cut it.”
Dante twirled spaghetti on his fork. “Maybe I need to work my way up to giant bowls of weird pebble-shaped shit.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
“Okay.” Dante took a bite. His face remained expressionless as he chewed, but he went back for more, so Sid claimed the win.
He polished off his second lunch while Dante picked through his first. The carb coma hit hard and fast, but he fought it and propped himself up on his elbow, as fascinated by Dante now as he had been since his ID photo had sent Sid’s body into the best kind of overdrive.
I’m glad I didn’t wank over him. That would’ve been awkward, right?
Sid couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t deny he regretted not making the most of the first decent boner he’d had in weeks. It hadn’t happened since—probably because he’d made a point of ignoring his laptop—but now Dante was here, animated and real, there was promise in the heat simmering in Sid’s full belly. I don’t know what it is, but this dude makes me feel.
The lunch hour came to an end. Dante took their bowls to the wash-up and came back with two bottles of water. He handed one to Sid without looking at him. “Does your chest still hurt?”
“What?”
Dante scanned the lake beyond the greenhouses. “You’ve been rubbing it since the orchard. You pull a muscle or something?”
“Oh. Fuck. No. I . . .” Sid scratched his head. “I have to take medication a couple of days a week that makes my heart go bananas. I’m rubbing it like I think I can bully it into submission.”
Dante snorted, and the closest Sid had seen to a grin warmed his face.
It was gone in a split second, though, and Sid wondered if he’d imagined it. He waited for Dante to ask what the medication was for and formed the words he usually went out of his way to avoid saying aloud. But Dante didn’t ask. He stood silent and still until the moment passed.
Sid battled through brain fog to regroup, searching his weary synapses for enough coherent thought to remember what he’d planned to do with the rest of his day. “You don’t officially start till tomorrow,” he said to Dante. “If you’ve got stuff you want to do at your place, we can link up in the morning.”
Dante shook his head. “I have nothing to do.”
“You don’t need to unpack?”
“Two pairs of jeans and a T-shirt? Nah, mate. I’m good.”
“Wow, you sound mad London. I never noticed before.”
Dante’s eyes gleamed and yet somehow seemed darker. “I guess you can take the boy out of the city and he sounds exactly the same four years later.”
“That’s how long it’s been?”
“Since what?”
“Since you were—actually, never mind. You don’t have to talk about that.” Sid tried to focus on the greenhouses. Pot on the kale plants. And the chard. Fuck, the tomatoes need juicing up too.
“My sentence was seven years,” Dante said. “They let you out halfway through if you don’t kill anyone else while you’re in there.”
“Anyone else?” Sid blinked, then registered another faint spark of humour in Dante’s honeyed gaze. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Maybe.”
Dante’s half-grin widened a touch. Sid considered him and the evidence. The fact that he was here at all was the biggest clue that he hadn’t killed anyone. Whatever sinisterness Benjamin had alluded to, there was no way he’d have employed a murderer or a pervert. No way in hell. Sid stood his ground. “You never killed anyone.”
Dante shrugged. “If you say so.”
Sid did. Times a thousand. Some shit he just knew. Like the fact that the longer he stood still in the warm spring sunshine, the more another round of heavy conversation was beyond him. Keep moving. Use it or lose it. He pointed at the greenhouse. “I need to go in there and pot on the seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago. Come with me if you want or meet me at the barn tomorrow for breakfast. Unless you’re busy planning your next murder, that is, in which case you’re on your fucking own.”
He took off before Dante could reply.
Dante followed Sid out of the barn and trailed him across the yard to the polytunnels nestled behind the greenhouses. There were four in total, double what Dante had left behind at the prison.
They were crammed with four times as much produce too. Dante stuttered to a stop in the first and gazed at row upon row of young plants—tomatoes, spinach, chard, courgettes. There were even sapling peach trees. Dante touched the healthy leaves and crouched to inspect the juvenile trunks. They were strong and unyielding and for some reason reminded him of Sid.
Because that makes sense.
Not.
Dante snapped a picture of the peach tree he’d already decided was his favourite and turned to find Sid watching him. “Therapy.”
Sid nodded as if it made sense.
Perhaps to him it did.
Perhaps he was the one person on earth who would understand the hope Dante felt every time he watched a plant thrive and grow.
Or maybe he thought Dante was a bizarre human being and he was super accomplished at hiding it.
Whatever.
Dante drifted to where Sid was already gathering the plastic trays of kale plants from the raised platforms. He took them to a table built from pallets and disappeared out of the tunnel before returning with a giant bag of compost on his shoulders.
Broad shoulders that made Dante look twice.
Three times.
Until he couldn’t look away.
He watched Sid heft the compost against his torso and open it with a Stanley knife he produced from his pocket.
“Benjamin didn’t tell me to hide the knives.” Sid shot Dante a droll smirk. “More evidence that you’re not a serial killer.”