The Hot Floor (2 page)

We watched the computer programmer tangle valiantly with the undergrowth, but eventually it bested him, and he fell back on the long grass, all milky-white skin stretched over gaunt ribs.

“You should run down and offer to rub in some sunblock,” I suggested.

Denise shoved me with her elbow so hard she almost knocked me into the sink full of washing up. “I’m not that bloody desperate, thank you very much.”

“What? He’s all right. Got a nice place, steady job, and he’s quiet. Bet he’d do whatever you asked him to.”

“You like him so much, you go for it.”

I tried to imagine rubbing lotion into his skinny chest. With the residual horniness left from overhearing the marathon sex session upstairs, I could probably get into the idea, but I doubted Cliff would be able to. “Nah, I’ll pass. We should warn him, though. It would be the neighbourly thing to do.”

“Oi, Clifford!” Denise bellowed.

Cliff sprang to his feet, his head whipping around.

“Up here.”

I shrank back as Cliff raised his head to find us.

Denise grinned like a shark. “You’re gonna burn that lily-white skin of yours if you fall asleep there. Josh just offered to come down and rub in some sunblock, if you’re up for it.”

My skin heated. “Did not!” I exclaimed indignantly.

“I-I-I-I’m fine.” Cliff looked even redder than I felt, the blush spreading down his neck and onto his chest. “Going i-i-inside now.”

He scuttled back inside like a frightened mouse, and Denise burst into her cackling laugh that always has people turning their heads.

“Poor Cliff,” I attempted before joining Denise in pissing myself laughing.

Another Denise-strength G&T later, and I wended my tipsy way up the communal stairwell to my stuffy, airless flat. I could think of a fair few other things I’d rather be doing on a Friday night, but the fact was, despite having had five months to get used to it, I hadn’t really been able to get in the spirit of going out drinking as a single man.

Denise had tried to persuade me out anyway, but I’d told her I was knackered after a busy week in the hot studio making paperweights. It’s a strain making the same piece hundreds of times in a row, especially only to realise that my own pieces still looked as wonky as a child’s drawing compared to Liam’s work. I knew he’d been doing it for twenty years compared to my three, but still, you’d think I’d be better by now.

The other thing weighing on my mind was the meeting his wife Shannon had called me in for the next morning and in typical tight-lipped fashion wouldn’t say what it was about. She and Liam had been muttering a lot about money and figures these last few months, though, so I didn’t have a particularly good feeling about it.

Thoughts of my impending stint on the dole filled my head as I tramped up the stairs, when they were interrupted by the door ahead of me opening.

Evan and Rai’s door.

“Hey, Josh, I was hoping that would be you.” Evan’s deep rumble instantly conjured memories of him grunting away earlier. It didn’t help that he was wearing nothing more than a towel wrapped around his waist, obviously straight out of the shower. Beads of water were scattered across his lightly furred chest, making those juicy pecs look even more biteable.

Shit, I was getting a semi-on, and Evan was giving me this weird look. I should probably say something.

“Hey, Evan. Hot enough for you?” Great. The weather. Staple, dull small talk guaranteed to bore the pants off people. Not that I’d have minded getting the pants off Evan. Or that towel.

I’d only have to take a couple of steps forward and pull…

I had to stop thinking that way. It wasn’t like I’d ever be bold enough to do something like that. Evan would deck me for a start, and I’ve always been a real coward when it comes to physical violence.

“Yeah, it’s bloody roasting,” Evan complained, stretching his arms so I got a view of his damp pits. Yum. “Spent all day stuck in a pokey cupboard with a piece-of-shite boiler too. I had about this much room to move in.” Evan braced his powerful arms against the doorframe on either side of him, and his biceps bulged.

Evan was a plumber, in case you’re wondering. He didn’t have a kink for hide-and-seek. Or if he did, I didn’t know about it.

“Hey, who’s that? Is it the cutie from upstairs?”

Rai stuck his head under Evan’s arm and grinned impishly. Damn it, he was only wearing a towel as well. That was totally unfair. I wilted a little against the banister rail as I took in the picture of happy coupledom. Evan, with his shaved head, trimmed dark-brown goatee and workman’s build, was the epitome of masculine power, whereas Rai… Well, Rai was beautiful, no two ways about it. Not feminine, but his slim body looked wonderfully flexible, and his smooth, hairless skin was a lickable colour, like an amber bottle filled with milk. And then there was his face…

Yeah, I was a sucker for Rai’s face. Even his thick-framed glasses couldn’t hide the appealing Asian tilt of his dark eyes, and the flat planes of his cheeks were offset perfectly by the shaggy mane of soot-black hair. Hair that was right now dripping water over his shoulders. Oh God.

Did he just call me a cutie?

“We wanted to ask you a favour,” Evan said.

Please let it be drying them both down. I’d do ever such a thorough job. Get in all their little crevices.

“We’re off out for the day tomorrow, so we can’t get into town to do Stella’s shopping. Would you mind grabbing her a couple of bits?”

“Town, tomorrow?”
Yeah, way to sound like a moron, Josh.
I had to get the image of towelling two naked hotties out of my head, I really did. I tried to concentrate on Stella instead—our downstairs neighbour.

“It’s not much,” Rai chipped in. “We’ll go get what we can from Sainsbury’s this evening, but she likes some stuff from the farmer’s market, and we won’t be here for that.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I can go in for her. I’ve got to head out that way anyway.” It was on the way to the studio, so I could stop there on the way back from my meeting. “I’d be happy to help out.” I liked Stella. She lived on the ground floor between Cliff and Denise, and although she was in her eighties and suffering from a dodgy hip, she still always had a conspiratorial smile for me. I wasn’t quite sure what we were conspiring about, but I liked the roguish glint in her eyes.

And oh God, I liked the glint in Evan’s blue eyes too. Was he checking me out? Nah, probably just enjoying the afterglow from their marathon sex session earlier. I surreptitiously tried to adjust my thickening cock so it wasn’t so obvious, but judging by the way Rai and Evan’s eyes flicked down, I’d only ended up drawing their attention.

“So where are you off to?” I asked. “Anywhere fun?”

Evan snorted. “Hardly. It’s one of Rai’s bloody number-crunching conferences. Full of eggheads who think ‘gross domestic product in developing economies’ is a fascinating topic for discussion.” Evan even made the quote marks as he put on a clipped, Oxbridge accent.

“Hey, one of those eggheads is in the building.” Rai elbowed Evan in the side. I didn’t know exactly what Rai was doing his PhD in, but I knew it had something to do with economics. Whatever it was, he was a whizz with numbers. “You don’t have to come, you know. If you’d rather stay here, I could always get the train.”

“I don’t mind, pet. You need someone to keep an eye on you, anyway. Can’t have you getting into trouble again.”

Rai smirked, and this look passed between them then, like they both knew exactly what the joke was.

God, I wanted that so badly—that ability to read someone else’s mind. Never quite had it with Kenny. Well, obviously, or I’d have seen the writing on the bloody wall a mile off. He could have just written
You’re boring in bed
on the side of the house, and then I’d have been able to do something about it. Maybe. If I’d had the guts, that was.

Then again, maybe some desires were best left locked away inside where no one could laugh at them or call you a freak.

I curled my lips in a tight smile. “Why don’t you just leave the list in my post box and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“Great, thanks, Josh,” Rai said, fluttering his eyelashes. “You’re not just a pretty face, are you?”

“Give over, pet. You’re embarrassing him.” Evan gave Rai an affectionate smile. “I know what you mean, mind.” He turned and gave me the once-over.

Jesus, my face felt hotter than a blast from the furnace at work. “I, um, I’d better go. Need to crash out.”

I could feel their eyes following me up the top flight of stairs. It made me blush harder, but I couldn’t help hoping they were checking out my arse.

Hey, a bloke can dream, can’t he?

I unlocked my flat door, contemplating attempting to cook or merely snacking on crisps and watching telly. As the door swung open, a wave of stale heat escaped. Great—that was even with me leaving the window open all day, so the room stank of traffic fumes too.

Nah, it was too hot to cook. That’s the trouble with attic studios on sunny days, I was discovering. God help me if the rest of the summer was this hot. It was only the second week of May—how was I going to cope with another three months of this?

I grabbed a giant bag of Salsa and Mesquite Kettle Chips and flung myself down on my futon, not even bothering to put it back up as a sofa. Too hot to move. Instead, I booted up my laptop, laid it down next to me and crunched on spicy crisps as I tracked grease all over the scratchpad.

Porn, that was what I needed. A nice little three-way to distract me from the idea of racing back downstairs and hammering on Rai and Evan’s door, offering my services as a sandwich filling or a spit-roast.

Yeah, like I said, a bloke’s got to dream…

Chapter Two

The next morning found me staring out of my tiny sash window. The traffic was already backed up as far as I could see, and Evan’s blue van was conspicuously absent from his usual parking spot across the road up Thomas Street.

I stuck my head out of the window to get a good look at the sky. Yep, clear again. Looked like we were in for another hot day. My blue-and-purple glass bauble thunked against my head as I moved back inside. It was the first one I’d ever made and had been deemed not quite good enough for sale, what with the trapped bubbles and the overly chunky hanging ring. Still, the swirls of colour caught the light beautifully, and I liked seeing it there.

Today, though, it reminded me of my impending meeting with Shannon. Doubt flared up inside me. What if I really was being given the sack? But no, Shannon would’ve given me some kind of clue, wouldn’t she? And last I remembered hearing, Sulis Glass was doing really well. Shit—I hoped they weren’t relocating somewhere. I didn’t think I could face having to start all over again with making friends in a new town. It had taken me long enough in Bath, and I swear most of my friends were really Denise’s. No, let’s face it, they all were.

Useless speculations swirled in my mind as I got ready to go out, and it wasn’t until I’d tramped down the stairwell and found the note in my pigeon-hole that I finally smiled. The list of Stella’s shopping was longer than I’d expected, but there at the end was a note for me, scrawled in spiky handwriting:

Cheers, love, you’re a darling for helping out. Do you fancy coming round for a drink this evening? We’ll be back by eight. Rai xoxo

Suddenly, life didn’t feel quite so lonely. An invite to Rai and Evan’s place was the stuff of my fantasies. It wasn’t going to be what I daydreamed about, obviously, as I figured we’d be wearing far more clothes, but even just a drink would be fun.

Either that or it would be excruciatingly embarrassing as I tried my hardest not to let on the effect they both had on me. What if I sprang a boner just from sitting next to one of them? Or what if the words just dried up in my throat and they took me for an idiot? Or if I blurted out how much I wanted them to shag me stupid? I practiced innocuous topics of conversation in my head as I headed across town towards the studio.

I’d have to hope they were interested in talking about the weather and/or the mechanics of making glass, as I didn’t have anything else to offer.

“Is that the lot?” Liam asked, casting an assessing gaze over the rows of yesterday’s paperweights we’d arranged on the work surface. He looked like an aging hippy with his long ponytail, John Lennon specs and greying moustache, and he had the laidback demeanour to go with the image. Odd, then, that to hear it from him, he’d spent the seventies and eighties slaving away in an office before finally using his savings to set himself up in his dream career as a glassblower.

I wished I’d had his dedication. I pretty much fell into the job after dropping out of art school because I couldn’t afford to eat properly. A sympathetic tutor who happened to be an old friend of Liam’s put in a good word for me, and the rest is history. I’d been scared shitless of the furnace to begin with and had been tempted to go and get a supermarket check-out job instead, but once Liam started teaching me how to blow glass, I fell in love with the craft. Well, most of it, anyway. Paperweights were still my least favourite thing to make. I was more of a vase man.

“Just two more to come.” I headed back to the lehr—the giant, slow oven where the glass had cooled and hardened overnight. I always loved that moment: opening the heavy door to see the glass revealed in its true colours and being able to touch my creations for the first time. Today, though, I was too jittery to really enjoy it, and I kept noticing how the weights I’d made weren’t as perfectly spherical as Liam’s. Was I up to scratch? Or had the two of them decided I just hadn’t made enough progress in my years as Liam’s assistant?