“I need my car,” Mickey said absently.
“Not tonight, you don’t. Or this morning. Whatever fucking time it is.”
Mickey had no idea. He’d left his house after hours of pacing the kitchen, tugging at his hair, and opening and closing his message thread with Benito, all the while imagining himself tapping the local shithead for a gram bag. Actual time had ceased to matter. And fuck if he didn’t still crave that dirty, tainted high. “I don’t know why you want to be with me right now. I keep telling you no, then doing shit that pulls you back in. Why are you okay with that?”
Benito’s gaze darkened. “Is this the part where you tell me you’re a shit human again? Because I’m fucking done with that.”
“Why, though? It’s all true.”
“So? What if none of it matters right now? What if it’s just you and me for a while? It’s all still gonna be there tomorrow.”
“That’s kind of my point, mate.”
“Is it?”
Mickey shook his head. “Fucked if I know. I’m not as drunk as I need to be.”
“For what?”
“To stop thinking. My brain hurts.”
Benito’s expression softened. He narrowed the distance between them again and took Mickey’s hand. “Trust me,” he whispered. “Just for tonight . . . please?”
Something buried deep inside Mickey crumbled. He found Benito’s other hand and tangled their fingers together. His lips ached to kiss him again, but he just nodded. “Let’s go.”
Fresh air sobered Mickey up. Perhaps he’d never been that drunk in the first place, Benito couldn’t tell. All he knew was he couldn’t stand the vibrating tension that made Mickey’s hands shake and his eyes wild.
He drove them to Mickey’s house in Northamptonshire, glad Mickey had shown little interest in a grand tour of Benito’s Milton Keynes flat. It wasn’t the worst place he’d ever lived, but he hated it anyway. Perhaps he’d have gone home with just about anyone to avoid it.
No, you wouldn’t.
Only Mickey.
Two simple words that made Benito’s head spin too hard for him to stop and make sense of what they were doing. Only Mickey’s hand on his thigh kept him grounded as he drove, and he latched onto the warmth of his palm. Bathed in it, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
It was almost too easy to forget how he’d spent his evening before he’d meandered into Freefall.
The night was fading when he pulled up outside Mickey’s house. He parked on the kerb and switched the engine off. “You don’t have to invite me in. I can come back later and give you a ride to your car.”
Mickey snorted softly. “As if that’s happening.”
“Which part?”
“The part where I leave you in this car and go inside without you. We can worry about the rest tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow.”
“Later, then.”
“Works for me.” Benito tried for a smile, but it hurt.
Mickey nodded and got out of the car. Benito followed suit and trailed him to his front door and inside.
He shut the door behind him, like he had the last time he’d been here. In fact, every time they’d been together until real life had caught up with them. But in the dreary early morning, Mickey didn’t pounce. And neither did Benito. Instead, they stared at each other while a clock that looked too old to be anything Mickey had bought in the last century ticked like a metronome.
Benito took slow breaths, fighting for a handle on every want and need that spun through him.
I want to kiss him.
I want to hold him.
I need him to be okay.
The last one confused him most. They weren’t friends or lovers. There was no tangible reason for the ache in Benito’s chest as he took in Mickey’s pale face and reddened eyes.
It hurt all the same.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Mickey said eventually. “You want anything to drink?”
“Water?” Benito was hungry too. He’d been too keyed up before the ill-fated raid to eat, but he kept his growling stomach to himself and accepted the bottled water Mickey fetched from the kitchen.
“Come on.” Mickey jerked his head at the stairs. “You can chill in my room. I won’t be long.”
It was the best offer Benito’d had in years. He followed Mickey upstairs and stretched out on his bed while Mickey stripped and tossed his clothes at a basket in the corner of the room.
Naked, he was almost more than Benito could bear, but he grabbed a towel from the airing cupboard on the landing and covered himself before the boner Benito had carried halfway home from the club came back. “Dude, get in the bed,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
It didn’t sound like a sexual proposition, so Benito left his underwear on and crawled under sheets that smelled of Mickey while Mickey disappeared into the bathroom. A TV hung on the wall opposite the bed. Benito found the remote and flicked it on, navigating through Netflix until he found reruns of Shameless.
He lay back and fought his heavy eyes as he watched Kev and Veronica fight and fuck—each other as much as the system—while everyone around them did pretty much the same. It was rough background noise that suited Benito’s mood while he drowsed and tried not to hawk-eye the bathroom door.
Mickey took long showers, apparently. Benito envied his hot water tank. Then he took to cataloguing his surroundings. Distracted by other things, he hadn’t taken much notice of Mickey’s bedroom the last time he’d been in it, but it was a nice space. The old house had bay windows and high ceilings, and the original features were still intact. Mickey’s weathered furniture suited the aesthetic. The Man City scarf pinned to the wall, not so much, but Benito didn’t care about football.
“Still awake?”
Benito blinked as Mickey padded back into the room, hair damp and sticking up, skin sheened with moisture. “Think so.”
“Sure about that? Pretty sure I could hear you snoring from the landing.”
“Fuck off.”
“You’re in my bed, mate.”
“At your invitation.”
Mickey smiled a little and opened a drawer for underwear. He pulled black briefs up his muscular legs, then slipped into bed. His gaze flickered to the TV, and another half-smile warmed his face. “I can’t fall asleep to this. I dream of it and wake up thinking I’m somewhere else.”
Benito shifted onto his side and eyed the football scarf again. “You’re from Manchester?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever go back there?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Old ghosts?”
“Nope. I brought them with me.”
“Burned bridges then,” Benito guessed. “Unless you didn’t like the weather.”
Mickey snorted. “You were right the first time, more or less. I can’t go back there because I fucked up enough that people I care about would get hurt the second I showed my face. Don’t tell me you don’t know how that goes.”
Benito said nothing. Couldn’t, with his tongue wedged to the roof of his mouth and a cinderblock wedged in his throat. He lay a cautious hand on Mickey’s chest, absorbing the still muscles and the steady thump of his heart. He’s calm. Maybe he needs this . . . to talk.