Hard Tail (23 page)

I’ve never had much appetite for food in the mornings, but God, Matt looked good enough to eat. His torso was lean yet defined, just as you’d expect of a cyclist, and those broad shoulders gave him a rangy, powerful look that did interesting things to certain parts of me. “Morning!” I called out a bit too brightly. “Have you found everything you need?”

Matt looked up and stretched, the boxer shorts riding down just a touch to show a teasing glimpse of his treasure trail. I realised I was holding my breath and let it out quickly before my face could turn red. If it wasn’t too late already. “Only…” He yawned widely. “Only just got up. What do you normally have for breakfast?”

I swallowed. “Just coffee. But there should be some bread, if you fancy eating something.”

“Yeah, I’d keel over if I didn’t eat breakfast.” Matt looked around and located the bread bin. Fortunately, my prayers were answered: there was indeed bread, and it was in a perfectly respectable condition. True, it was bog-standard white cut-loaf from Asda, but at least it hadn’t gone green.

Shoving a couple of slices in the toaster, Matt twisted around to look at me. “Sure I can’t tempt you?” he asked.

Toast. He meant toast. Focus, Knight. “Uh—no, thank you. I’ll put the kettle on.”

Mindful of the strength Matt preferred for his coffee at work, I made his mug with about half as much coffee as I used for mine and added lots of milk. “That’s great—thanks,” he said, having taken a sip.

I held my mug in both hands and inhaled deeply, my eyes falling closed. Coffee. There’s nothing like it, particularly first thing in the morning after a night disturbed by some
very
specific dreams. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Matt gazing at me with an odd expression on his face. I sighed. “Go on, laugh. I know I have a caffeine problem, and I’m just fine with that.”

Matt blinked. “Oh—no, I mean, I wasn’t going to laugh—” His toast popped up noisily, and he jumped, spilling some coffee on the floor. “Shit—sorry—I’ll wipe that up.”

“Don’t worry about it. Eat your toast while it’s hot, I’ll get the floor,” I insisted. I took a fortifying sip of the brown nectar and grabbed a kitchen towel, only to be beaten to it by Wolverine, who was lapping up the drips as if they were mouse-flavoured. “Scat!” I shouted, shoving him aside and mopping the rest up hastily. I didn’t know if coffee was particularly bad for cats, but I was fairly sure it couldn’t be actually good for them. And the prospect of Wolverine hyped up on caffeine was not one I wanted to live through.

Assuming survival would be on the cards in any case—I certainly wouldn’t have rated Adam’s chances if he’d happened to turn up at the wrong moment.

Wolverine stalked away, affronted.

“You know, you’ve got a weird cat,” Matt commented indistinctly, his mouth full of toast.

“Tell me about it,” I said in exasperation. “Punishment for my sins, I think.”

Matt grinned. “Been a lot of them, have there?”

If lusting after another man when I already had a boyfriend was a sin, I was going straight to hell. I cleared my throat. “Usual amount, I expect. Actually, now I think about it, the number’s probably depressingly low.”

“Yeah, well—I’m sure Adam’ll help you out there,” Matt said with a strange sort of tone in his voice. I didn’t quite know what to say.

Fortunately, Wolverine chose that moment to stalk into the kitchen and
miaow
at me pointedly. “I wondered where you’d got to, oh guardian of my morals,” I muttered as I fetched the can opener.

“You what?”

Bugger. Now I’d have to explain myself to Matt. “I, er—he sort of attacked Adam. At a rather unfortunate moment.” I tried not to cringe too visibly.

“Yeah? He looks such a softy.” Matt bent down to stroke him. I had a brief moment of panic—besides not wanting Matt to get hurt, how on earth would he do his job with no fingers? But Wolverine just leaned into Matt’s touch and purred in ecstasy despite the fact he still hadn’t been fed.

“Maybe it really is the ginger thing, then,” I mused, having brief and somewhat sadistic fantasies of inviting other redheaded people round to see if Wolverine would go for them the way he did for Adam.

“Doubt it,” Matt said. “Cats can be funny, though. What was Adam doing when he attacked him?”

I froze in the middle of forking out the tuna into Wolverine’s bowl. What the hell was I going to tell him?
Oh, he was just about to shove his cock in my virgin arse
? I swallowed, and straightened slowly, forcing myself to look at Matt. “I, er, can’t remember,” I lied, probably excruciatingly badly.

Matt stared at me for a moment. “Oh. Okay,” he said and, looking down, took a bite of his toast.

A few crumbs fell to his chest and were caught in the fine hairs there. I swallowed. If I’d been starving for a month, I couldn’t have wanted to lick them off more than I did already. I stared at them ravenously for a long moment—and when I looked up, found Matt’s gaze on me. My cheeks were so hot, if I stood there any longer I’d probably give the poor bloke sunburn. “Um,” I said intelligently. “Better go and get dressed.”

I hoped Matt wasn’t anything like as distracted as I was at work that morning, or we’d be sending out bikes with the wrong number of wheels and no brakes. I misheard requests, gave people the wrong change, and more than once had total strangers give me funny looks and ask if there was anyone home. It was a blessed relief to shut up shop at one o’clock.

“Lunch?” I asked, poking my head around the door of the back room.

Matt had already packed up for the day and was looking at his phone with a puzzled frown. “Yeah… I think that wine last night must’ve been stronger than I thought—there’s a load of text messages here marked “read” I don’t even remember seeing.”

My stomach flipped. “Ah.” I cleared my throat as Matt looked at me guilelessly. “I may have accidentally looked at some of your messages. Sorry.” I tried to smile, but judging from Matt’s expression, it wasn’t an Oscar-winning attempt. “Don’t suppose you’d believe I mistook your phone for mine?”

“Did you?”

“Er, no.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I swear I won’t do it again. I was just worried Pr—Steve might turn up at Jay’s, and the phone was just sitting there, and a text came through, and before I knew it, I was checking the messages. I’m really sorry. It was—well, I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Okay,” Matt mumbled. I felt like a total arse. He looked up. “It’s not that I mind you seeing them, really… It’s just, Steve used to do that sometimes. You know, the jealous thing—sometimes he got it into his head I was seeing another bloke.”

God, I was an idiot. “I’m an idiot. Matt, I swear to you on…on Jay’s leg, that I won’t ever do it again. I’m really sorry.”

Matt gave a weak smile. “You know, you could apologise for England. It’s okay,” he said earnestly. “I know you only did it because of Steve.” He shoved both hands in his pockets. “Guess I did the right thing leaving him.”

“God, yes!” It burst out of me with possibly inappropriate force.

“Thanks,” Matt said. “For, you know, supporting me and all.” He wrapped his arms around himself, as if he’d like a hug. I wished, more than anything, I could give him one.

So to speak. “Don’t be daft,” I said briskly. “Of course I’m supporting you. What kind of a b—of a friend would I be if I didn’t?” I crossed my fingers behind my back that Matt wouldn’t have noticed the slip.
Not your boyfriend yet, Knight, and he might never be.
“So, er, where do you fancy going for lunch? Pub again?”

“Are you busy this afternoon?”

I shrugged. “Not really. Why, did you have something in mind?”

“Well… I just sort of thought, you haven’t been to the beach since you’ve been down here, have you? So I thought maybe, if you want, we could grab some stuff from Asda and head off down to the coast for a picnic?”

“Sounds great.” I felt ridiculously happy at this firm evidence he wasn’t mad at me for reading his text messages. “Do you want to drive, or take the bikes?”

“Depends how hungry you are—it’s a fair way, getting on for ten miles, and we’ve got to shop first.”

“Maybe we’ll go the lazy route for once, then,” I said as my stomach rumbled in horror.

We grabbed a few things from the supermarket—all right, Matt grabbed a few things while I pushed the trolley—and set off down the A326 in Matt’s Ford Focus, because the BMW just didn’t seem like a seaside sort of car. We bypassed Marchwood and Hythe, then skirted the edge of the oil refinery at Fawley, a cyberpunk forest of chimneys belching out (hopefully clean) smoke and steam into the air next to Southampton Water. One or two showed flickering flames on top, like candles from a giant’s birthday cake.

“Russell works there,” Matt commented, nodding in that general direction. “He’s a chemical engineer.”

“Oh?” I said intelligently. “How do you know those two—is it from, um, gay bars? Or just from the shop?”

“Bit of both, really—saw them in the pubs and recognised them when they came in to buy stuff, so we sort of got talking. It’s great, what they have together,” he added a bit wistfully.

I nodded, gazing out of the window as Matt turned off the main road, leaving the chimneys of progress behind us and heading once more into the countryside. Open fields soon gave way to housing developments and local shops; then we were out of the town and back into the country again. The lane narrowed and became enclosed by trees, their dappled shade producing a sort of strobe effect with the June sunshine. With the view obscured, it was my nose more than my eyes that told me when we passed a pig farm.

“Nearly there now,” Matt said, and all of a sudden, we rounded a curve in the road, and I could see the sun glinting off the sea ahead of us. We parked in a car park right on the sea front, overlooking a narrow shingle beach.

I breathed in deeply as I got out of the car. The air smelled like summer, and everything looked naggingly familiar. I did a slow turn, taking in the grassy parkland, the line of straggly evergreens, and across the water, the low, misty shape that had to be the Isle of Wight. “You know, I think my gran and grandad used to bring me down here,” I said with dawning wonder. “Grandad used to skim stones across the water, but I was always rubbish at it. But then, I can’t have been more than ten. And Gran used to pack a picnic…” I turned to Matt, a huge smile on my face. “I can’t believe you brought me here—I didn’t even know I remembered it until now.”

Matt answered my smile with one of his own, and my heart stuttered, my whole body filling with warmth that had nothing to do with the sunshine. We stood there for a moment, and maybe I just imagined it, but Matt seemed to hold his breath while I struggled to find the words to tell him how I felt… But no—it was too soon. I had to speak to Adam first. It was the only decent way to do things. I swallowed. “How about that picnic, then?” I asked in a voice gone husky.

It was as if Matt woke from a trance. He started and shook himself. “Yeah—course. I’ll get the stuff.”

We sat on the shingle looking out to sea, eating sandwiches Matt made up there and then using rye bread, Roquefort cheese, smoked salmon and guacamole in various indescribably delicious combinations. We had the place almost to ourselves—just the occasional old couple strolling past, or shrieking children too young for school, who quickly dragged their young mums off to the playground. Boats sailed past and gulls cried out mournfully, probably because we refused to share our sandwiches with them.

“You get windsurfers here, at the weekend,” Matt said. “Ever tried that?”

“No, but it always looks like fun. You?”

Matt laughed. “Who, me? You know what I’m like—I tried it once, but I spent more time falling off the board than I did on it.”

“Doesn’t everyone at the start?”

“Well, that’s what the instructor said, at first. By the end of the hour, he was begging me to try sailing instead—like he said, you can do that sitting down.”

I swallowed my last bite of the tangy Roquefort. “Is it an inner-ear thing?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t think I was being too personal. “Or something like dyspraxia?”

“Diss-what-sia?” Matt shrugged. “Nah. I’m just a klutz, that’s all.” He smiled and picked up his Diet Coke.

“Cheers,” I said, clinking bottles with him. “Here’s to klutzes everywhere.”

As we finished, the breeze coming in off the sea seemed to pick up—or maybe it was just so long sitting still that made me feel a bit of a chill. I stood, wrapping my arms around myself. “Want to skim some stones? Bet you manage to get more bounces than I do.”

“Bet I don’t,” Matt said cheerfully, scrambling to his feet.

He won that bet. Matt was unbelievably, awfully, spectacularly bad at skimming stones. Most of his efforts just plopped into the water and sank like, well, stones. I, on the other hand, seemed to have finally got the knack. “Yes!” I shouted after one particularly good effort, punching the air for good measure. “Did you see that? Nine bounces! We have a winner!”

“Right, that does it. I’m conceding defeat.” Matt clapped me on the back in congratulation, and even that casual contact was enough to derail my mental processes completely. “Fancy a bit of a walk? We could go round the coast a bit.”

I collected my scrambled thoughts. “Sounds good.”

As we crunched through the shingle, Matt nodded to the Isle of Wight. “Ever go over there?”