The opposite of love is indifference, child. Hating that boy is as tragic as loving him.
At the time, I’d had no idea what my mother had meant, but it kind of made sense now, even if nothing else did.
What the hell are we doing?
I had no idea. All I knew was that we’d fallen into a vortex of substituting sex for communication, affection as comfort, and the weight of our unspoken conversations was suffocating.
Like he’d heard the chaos in my mind, Luke stirred and opened his eyes. In the darkness, he stared blankly at me a moment, then his expression morphed from relieved to wary and back again in the space of a split second.
I was growing used to that, the way he woke suddenly and didn’t seem to quite believe where he was, or who he was with. Moving our late-night encounters back to his house seemed to help, but he was still...unsettled. We both were.
Luke blinked again and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Just after midnight.”
He groaned. “Again? Girl, you gotta stop letting me pass out at eight o’clock every night. It’s fucking with my head.”
I poked him in the side. “And you have to stop calling me girl. I’m a woman, you fool.”
“I know. I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just habit.”
Habit. Right. After ten years of silence—
Stop it. Christ, that was getting boring. I’d gone to sleep with a resolution to stop fixating on the past, and here we were. He’d been awake half a second and I was already there. Maybe I was the fool.
Luke flopped onto his back. “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Do you think we should start eating dinner before we go to bed?”
He cracked an eye open and gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Then he sighed and sat up again. “Come on. I’m sure I can find something.”
I doubted it, as snooping around his kitchen the last time I’d been here had revealed an empty fridge and cupboards that held far more cleaning products than any normal bachelor was permitted to have. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and swiped his abandoned T-shirt from the floor. “Lead the way, sailor.”
That earned me another look, but I let it slide and followed him downstairs, trying not to drool at how edible he was in nothing but sweatpants.
I failed, obviously, because it didn’t matter how my heart felt about him, no red-blooded human could be unaffected by him. From his strong shoulders to his perfect feet, he was flawless.
And a magician, apparently.
I scrutinised the handful of ingredients he’d dumped on the counter. “How are you going to make dinner out of one packet of microwave rice and a couple of eggs?”
“I’ve got hot sauce too. And onions.”
Like that made it better. I hopped up on the counter to watch him work, enjoying the cool marble against my bare thighs. It reminded me of our town hall encounter, and even though we’d fucked twice tonight already, heat pooled between my legs.
Luke chucked a wok on the stove and smirked at me.
I raised an eyebrow, but he left the bait hanging and cooked up a storm instead, while I watched, and drooled over both him and the food.
Ten minutes later, he presented me with a bowl of perfect egg fried rice, complete with chilli sauce on the side and some bashed up prawn crackers. “You did not just cook that,” I said.
He shrugged. “I was pretty skint when I bought this place. Lived on rice and canned tuna for months, which was still better than the slop we’d been eating on the ship.”
“The ship? Were you on the same one for a long time?”
“Yeah.” Luke nudged the bowl closer to me, his expression guarded, but I was done being afraid of the huge gaps in each other’s lives. He’d been a sailor for nine years and I wanted to learn every moment he was prepared to share with me.
I snagged a prawn cracker and scooped up a mouthful of spicy rice. It tasted as good as it looked, and I crammed in another mouthful before I gave voice to one of the million questions burning my brain. “What kind of ship were you on? Was it big?”
Luke wiped something from the corner of my mouth with his thumb. “That’s what you wanna know?”
I shrugged. “Right now? Yeah. I don’t know anything about navy ships, or any ships, actually, that aren’t a P&O ferry.”
“It felt like a ferry at first—you know, the lower deck parts that smell of metal and car fumes—but trust me, it’s nothing like going on holiday.”
“You never went on holiday.”
He laughed. “True, but living on a destroyer was nothing like how I imagined a holiday to be.”
He’d answered my question, but I was none the wiser. A destroyer? Damn. It sounded like death.
I ate more rice and pondered my next question. “So what was it like? Were there lots of people on board?”
“A few hundred,” he said, finally helping himself to some of our shared feast. “But I spent most of my time with my gang on deck, or in my cabin. The only other place I really went was the mess hall, but I tried to spend as little time there as possible, because the smell of the crap they fed us was fucking rank.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You always had a thing about smells.”
“Good ones, usually, like your hair, but there wasn’t much of that while I was crammed in with a bunch of sweaty blokes.”
“You didn’t hook up with any hot comrades then?”
“Nah, boys don’t do it for me.”
“There weren’t any girls around at all?”
“What are you actually asking me?”
I had no clue, but now we were on the subject, the dog in me wouldn’t quit. I devoured a last mouthful of rice and shoved the bowl at him to finish. “I guess I’m asking you if you ever had a girlfriend, not that it’s any of my business.”
“It’s not my business that you married some French twat, but I’m still glad you told me.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Not really. I want to kill him.”
“Why?”
Luke shrugged. “He hurt you.”
So did you. I cleared my throat. “Noted. So tell me about the girls.”
He shook his head and ate the last of his magic rice. “What do you want to know? Who? Where? How many?”
All of it.
A ghost of a smirk crossed Luke’s face, as though he was privy to my every thought. “There weren’t many, and no one at all for the first few years. I was too busy and fucked up about my dad. Work helped, you know? I didn’t really look up until two years in.”