“The sandwich?”
“The fact that you made it. Here, of all places.”
A fog between us seemed to shift. I stared at him as if seeing him right now for the first time. God, he was right. And it wasn’t just weird, it was like somewhere between my front door and his broken car I’d been dropped onto another planet. Or maybe the moon. The silver light filtering through my kitchen window looked good reflected in his molten gaze.
Too good to be true.
Hmm. Maybe it was the whisky after all.
“Fen?”
I blinked. Rami was closer than he’d been before, on the other side of the counter and standing beside me. “What?”
“What do you think?” Rami gestured around them. “Last I heard, this place was run by a dude forty years older than you, though admittedly that was a while ago.”
“You don’t get up here much?”
He shot me a guilty wince. “I haven’t even met my sister’s youngest kid.”
“Lalla’s a sweetheart. Blonde hair like her dad and big brown eyes like yours.”
“We get them from my mum.”
“I know. Safia told me.”
“She’s never mentioned you.”
“Why would she? I’m guessing you didn’t have much call for Christmas trees and firewood in Manchester.”
“No, but she knew I spent time at HMP Manchester. If she knew you worked there, she’d have asked us about each other.”
Rami’s dark gaze bored into me, and I wondered how much he knew. If he was testing me. Or if he was just understandably curious about the macabre event that had brought me back to my family home.
“She never asked me where I was before, and I never told her.” I reached for my sandwich and ate half of it in two bites, holding Rami’s steady gaze. “I might’ve done if I’d known she was your sister, though.”
“Why?”
I shrugged and ate more food. “Because I missed you.”
3
Rami
“Because I missed you.” Of all the random, head-fucking things that had come my way on this crazy day, why were those four little words the only thing that seemed to make any sense?
Fen hadn’t missed me. He couldn’t have. We hardly knew each other. We’d never exchanged numbers and I hadn’t looked him up on social media because no one who worked in the prison system ever had accounts in their real name. We were invisible.
Untraceable.
And somehow we were both here, and…yeah. I’d missed him too.
How? You only saw him, like, twice a month for a snatched few minutes. But it wasn’t just him I’d missed. It was the soothing drum beat my pulse became whenever he was close. His warmth. His smile. His playful gaze, even though I was fairly sure he was hiding the fact he didn’t want to talk about getting stabbed at work behind his perpetual good humour.
Maybe I should’ve told him that knowing he was alive and well was all I’d ever wanted.
I’d have been a lying fucking liar, though.
I wanted to see him. I wanted to put my hands around his and tell him I gave a fuck.
That I still gave a fuck, but my soul was a crowded place right now, and I lacked the spoons to dissect it.
As if he’d heard my heart, Charlie sighed in his sleep. My gaze drifted to him and my mind to the madness that had led him to be curled up on an armchair in Fen’s kitchen. I wanted to tell Fen I’d missed him. That it was okay if he didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him and it always would be, but the words stuck in my throat. Until I got Charlie to the top of Christmas Mountain, he needed my undivided attention.
I put my hand on Fen’s strong forearm and squeezed it, revelling in the unyielding flesh that answered me. Then I stepped back and picked up the supper he’d made me. “This looks amazing. Thank you.”
Fen nodded and turned away to put his empty plate into the sink. I ate the sandwich in record time and he grinned when he looked back to find it gone. “Knew you were hungry.”
“It’s that damn fucking cheese. I’d forgotten how much I liked it.”
He smiled. “And I’d forgotten this about you. Not the cheese, I mean how you speak. Like a sailor in a pub kitchen when you’re not being all professional, like.”
“‘Professional’?” I snorted out a laugh. “I have a meeting in—” I checked my watch—“Four hours and I’m not going to be there. There’s nothing professional about me right now.”
Fen’s grin widened. “You’re wrong. I always found it cute as hell how you’d tear the guv’na apart with big words and mad-long sentences, then call him a twat when his back was turned.”
“Maybe I’m just gutless.”
Fen glanced at Charlie, then back at me, his eyes darkening like the sweetest storm. “Never.”
“That’s cute.”
“You don’t like cute things, Stone?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t call me that.”
“Not denying it then.”
His flirtation was as gentle as it had ever been, but in this moment it was somehow lighter, as if he knew in this upside down place we’d found ourselves in, I needed him to be something I recognised.
I played my part. “I never denied it.”
His grin morphed into the smirk I’d seen in my dreams more often in recent months than I cared to admit. This was the Fen Hawthorne I remembered—the man with the wicked smile and eyes that seemed to dance no matter the light in the room. Because he was the light in the room, especially when his epic gaze snared me like it had right now.
Repressing a shudder, I blew out a breath. We’d come full circle. He was flirting and I was loving it, but the fact remained that we hadn’t seen each other in more than a year and here I was, somehow marooned with him in the last place on earth I’d ever have thought to find him. Life is fucking weird.
Fen took my plate and dumped it into the sink with his. He seemed to sense I’d run out of brain power and he pointed at the stairs. “There’s a spare room up there with a bed big enough for you and Charlie. Why don’t you get some sleep?”
It took me a minute to compute that meant going to bed in his house. As if I hadn’t quite grasped that it was hell o’clock and my car was fucked, and even if it hadn’t been, the relentless snow had probably buried it up to the wheel arches by now. “You’re offering me a bed for the night?”
A complex mix of emotions passed over Fen’s features, each one too fleeting to catch. “Course I am. And not just because I already know your pretty face. Your sister’s been good to me since I came back here. I’d put up any brother of hers.”
Not Damon. I didn’t say it, though. What was the point? Fen would’ve given the shirt off his back to a stranger and he didn’t deserve my bitter self-pity.
Shit, I didn’t either, but bad habits were the hardest to break. “We’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”
Fen snorted. “Sure you will.”
I didn’t want to think about what he meant by that. So I didn’t. I scooped Charlie from the armchair and tucked him under my chin.