Nausea rolled through Luis. He forced himself upright and trudged to the bedsit. The front door of the old house was half hidden by the overgrown trees by the porch. It took him a moment to notice the blood-red spray paint covering the battered wood—another faceless clock, this time with a crude interpretation of the Italian flag blotted into it. A marker or a warning, it didn’t matter. Dante’s message was clear: fuck this up and I’ll kill him.
Luis didn’t come back. It was becoming such a theme, Paolo was almost bored, but this time felt different. He locked the cafe without wondering if he should wait in case Luis returned, and went home. Shut the door behind him. Bolted it. Only then did the magnitude of what had happened hit him full force.
Trembling, he sank to the floor to sit with his head in his hands, his back to the door. What the hell just happened? He pictured Luis’s face as he’d driven his fist into the wall, the desperation, the fear, all twisted up to make a man Paolo didn’t recognise.
A sob coughed out of his chest, dry and pointless. The fuck are you crying for? You pushed him into it. You laid hands on him first. As if that made it better. Luis had wanted Paolo to be scared of him, as if manhandling him and punching the wall would prove he really was the man Paolo had naïvely feared him to be.
But it didn’t work. Paolo was scared, not of Luis, but for Luis. Something had happened to push him like that, and as guilty as Paolo felt for tipping him over the edge, he knew it wasn’t him. He was a catalyst, not the source. Nah, that was Dante. It had always been Dante.
Paolo lifted his head from his hands and banged it against the door. White powder from the plaster Luis had pulverised drifted down from his hair and landed on his knees. He drew a clock face into it, then scrubbed it out. Anxiety like he’d never felt flared hotly in his chest. He was bone tired, but at the same time buzzing with enough nervous energy to power a space station.
The temptation to chase Luis down was so strong he almost choked on it. He clenched his eyes shut and banged his head again. God, I wish I didn’t love him.
But Paolo did love him, more than he could ever say. I need to help him. But how? Short of murdering Dante, there was nothing Paolo could do.
A humourless snort broke the silence in the empty flat. Paolo imagined himself storming Dante’s Moss Farm tower block and throttling him as he slept. It was a comforting image, but only for a moment. Hurting Dante—as if eating bacon every day had given Paolo the superpowers he’d need to take on a drug lord—would make him no better than the world Luis needed so desperately to escape. It would make him one of them, forever, and there’d be no coming back. No safe place for Luis to lay his head when it was all over. No warm arms to let him know how much he was loved. That he mattered. And that nothing he’d done, or could ever do, would change that.
He needs to know I love him, now more than ever. But as hard as he tried, Paolo couldn’t see a way he’d ever get to tell him.
17
The flat smelt the same as it always had: of boiled eggs and weed smoke. Luis hadn’t noticed the last time he’d been there, but as he traced the road map with a pencil, marking out escape routes if Dante’s exchange went south, it choked him.
“Why are you even doing that?” Dante called from the sofa. “You know we’ve got Google Maps and shit these days, right?”
Luis ignored him. He didn’t know how visible Dante was on the police radar, but he didn’t fancy carrying an electronic log of every search he’d made in his pocket. He could burn physical maps before he set off. Buy his train ticket with cash and his hood obscuring his face. It wasn’t a fool-proof plan, but it was better than nothing. And more than Dante had offered him. “Why Coventry?” he asked suddenly. “I thought the Albanians got their link from the Leicester boys.”
Dante kept his gaze on the TV. “They do. But only cos no one’s offered them a better price.”
“That’s because no one’s stupid enough to take on a crew that big.”
Dante grunted.
Luis eyed him from the kitchen table. “Please tell me you’re not that stupid?”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t care about you. But you’re not the one carrying, are you? You haven’t got the balls to run that shit yourself. You never have.”
“Don’t need to, do I?”
“If you did, you’d be working at McDonalds by now.”
Dante hauled himself from his couch and sauntered to the table where Luis sat. He peered at the maps with stone cold disinterest. “What’s the matter? Missing your boy toy? Fucking sap. You’ve only been apart a few hours.”
If only. It had been six days since Luis had walked out on Paolo, and he missed him so much he felt physically sick every moment he was awake. Sleeping forever seemed the ideal solution, but his brain wouldn’t play ball with that either. For days and days, he’d paced the bedsit and roamed the streets at night, but still he couldn’t sleep. Some nights, he passed the cafe and watched Paolo lock up and leave. It took strength he didn’t know he had to stop himself following him home. Only the fear that he’d be seen stopped him. Evidence to discredit the lie he was about to tell. “He’s not my boy toy anymore. I stopped banging him a week ago.”
Dante’s grin turned lizard-like. “That so?”
“Yeah. And don’t pretend you don’t already know. I know you’ve got eyes on me.”
“What about your cushty job?”
“What job? I quit like you told me to. Besides, don’t need a job, do I? I got you.”
Despite Luis’s best efforts, sarcasm weighted every damn syllable, but Dante didn’t flinch. “That’s right. You’ve got me, and I’ve got you. That’s what families are for, right?”
“If you say so.”
Luis went back to scanning the map. He was only there because Dante had insisted he needed to be to learn the details of the clusterfuck the next phase of his life was bound to be, but so far, he’d toyed with Luis for hours and told him nothing except the city where the kilo of coke would be exchanged. No when or why. Another day wasted.
A day Luis could’ve spent with Paolo.
The map blurred as he let his mind drift to the last time they’d been together and Luis had been present enough to enjoy it. Swathes of smooth olive skin stretched out before him, sheened with sweat as Luis explored Paolo with his tongue, absorbing every shudder and moan, committing them to memory. Deep down, he’d always known the day would come when those memories were all he had left, but fuck, he wasn’t ready. He’d never be fucking ready.
Eventually, Dante deigned to tell him the muling op was set up for two days’ time. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to get your shit together. Then I need you at the pick-up by four.”
“In the morning?”
“Yeah. You can blend in with the commuters that way, right?”
“As opposed to the drunks at night?”
“If you were a copper, which train would you search?”
“If I was a copper, I’d have dropped you in the sea.”
“Liar. You love me really.”