By the ramp was a set of steps where residents who didn’t want to smoke in their flats caught a few moments of peace. A lone figure sat there now with Mickey’s favourite set of gym-honed shoulders.
Benito.
Mickey’s heart skipped a beat. He jogged forward with little conscious thought, as drawn to Benito’s cigarette as he was to the man himself.
He dropped down beside Benito and plucked the smoke from his fingers. “Cheers, man. You read my fucking mind.”
Benito nodded, as if he’d heard Mickey coming and sensed his hours-long craving for nicotine. “I saw your car.”
“And you waited for me?”
Benito shrugged. “I didn’t know if I should, but somehow I couldn’t leave before I saw you.”
“You’d have seen me a lot quicker if you’d come inside. I was just talking to your mum.”
“You just missed me then. I was there five minutes ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. She likes me at the moment.”
Mickey took a deep, soul-clearing drag on Benito’s cigarette. “How do you feel about her?”
“Depends how much sleep I’ve had. Right now, I’m running on an eight-hour nap, and she made me the best sandwich I’ve ever had, so we’re pretty tight.”
“That’s the way to your heart, eh? Feed you?”
“Like you didn’t already know that.”
Mickey said nothing. He couldn’t deny he’d known for a long time now that presenting Benito with something to eat was a sure-fire way to put a smile on his face. But his heart?
Man. Mickey wasn’t ready for that conversation. Or maybe he was, and he just didn’t have a fucking clue where to start.
Benito nudged him. “What did you need to speak to her about? She hasn’t missed a rent payment, has she?”
“Nope. She’s all square. I needed to tell her about some maintenance work happening in a few weeks. Actually, she asked me to give you the date and time so she didn’t freak out about it, so I’d have been calling you soon enough anyway.”
“That’s the only reason you were going to call me?”
Mickey grinned, letting his mind drift back to the scene he’d conjured up in his dreams the previous night. Putting short-term brakes on their physical relationship had done wonders for his imagination and absolutely nothing to cool the current that thrummed between them. “As it goes, I was going to invite you for a sleepover.”
Benito raised a brow. “A sleepover? With horror films and popcorn?”
“If you like. I’ve got the catering and accommodation covered, but feel free to take charge of the entertainment.”
“You might be sorry you said that.”
“Doubt it.” Mickey finished Benito’s cigarette, stubbed it out, and flicked it into a nearby bin with perfect aim. “You’ve never let me down yet.”
“What about the chilli noodles I bought you that burnt your lips?”
“That entertained you, which is good enough for me.”
“It shouldn’t be. I want you to have fun too.” Benito’s gaze flashed with heat.
Mickey absorbed it as it travelled through him like wildfire, setting light to the temporary gates they’d silently constructed over the last few weeks. “You know what I like,” he said. “I trust you to bring your A game.”
Benito nodded slowly, as if his mind was stoking the flames. “I can do that. When?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I can’t. I have to work, and the next day too. I can do Friday?”
It pained Mickey to wait that long, but he tried not to let it show on his face. After all, a Friday encounter had the potential to last the whole weekend, but it still felt like a lifetime away. As if the world could change before then and snatch it away from them. “Friday is good,” he said after a beat of tense silence. “You like pizza, right?”
Benito smiled a little. “You’re not going to cook for me, Larwood?”
“Probably not. I have other plans.”
“Thought I was in charge of the entertainment?”
“You are, but . . . not that much.”
A full-on belly laugh escaped Benito. Mickey laughed too—a reflexive reaction that seemed to kick his heart free of whatever hill it had been stuck on until now. “I should go,” he said. “I need to fetch something from my car, then visit the other block before I can go home.”
“I have to leave too,” Benito said. “Work.”
Neither of them moved. Then Benito sighed. “Can I walk you to your car?”
“If you like.”
They rose together and made the short walk to where Mickey had abandoned his car by the garages. He opened the boot and rummaged around while Benito hovered. “What are you looking for?”
“Fire safety leaflets. Mr Morris put the wind up me, so I’m going to stick them through every letterbox before I go.”
“He’s the one with the gun under his pillow, right?”
“What?”
“I’m messing with you.” Benito held up his hands. “It’s just when he first moved in, everyone said he’d shoot you if you tried to fuck with him, because he was a soldier.”
“I don’t know about that, but I get the feeling he could handle himself back in the day.”
“This was twenty years ago. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen back then.”
“He’s still big,” Mickey said. “But he’s pushing seventy, so I reckon you could outrun him.”
Benito snorted and dropped his gaze to the leaflets Mickey had rooted out. “Has this got anything to do with the maintenance you were talking about?”
Mickey shifted the stack of leaflets to the front of the boot and grabbed a handful. “Indirectly. DOSHA did a cladding inspection a while ago and turned up some missing fire breaks in the cavities. Not enough to make the building lethal—I hope, at least—but it’s still fucking criminal.”
“Cladding? You mean, like Grenfell?”
Mickey understood why Benito’s mind went there. Anyone who’d seen that tower block burning would never forget it. “It’s not the same cladding as Grenfell. Trust me, it was the first thing my bosses checked when we took these flats on. But the firebreaks are just as important, so we’re having them installed at the end of the month.”
“What if there’s a fire before then?”
Mickey held up the leaflets. “I’m making sure everyone knows to get the fuck out.”
Real worry creased Benito’s handsome face. Mickey felt terrible. He stole a glance around, saw no one, then stepped into Benito’s space. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you. The building is safe; I wouldn’t leave my tenants here if it wasn’t.”
“Bet the Grenfell housing officers thought that too. How do you know those corrupt fuckers aren’t lying to you?”
Mickey didn’t, and they both knew it. All Mickey could do was kiss the worry from Benito’s lips.
Actually, there were plenty of other things he could’ve done, but he kissed Benito anyway, trusting the shadows to hide them from the outside world.