Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (10 page)

When they sat, they were brought two menus, the first with a choice of light lunches, the second with 108 varieties of tea. Finn was trying to calculate the odds on whether Michael would go for Number 1: Ordinary Tea, or whether he would be more adventurous than that.

“The owner is one of my book club members—Idris,” Finn said, enjoying the return of Michael’s slight smile. “They told him the town wasn’t big enough for another coffee shop, so he came up with this.”

“And blew the competition out of the water?”

“Exactly.”

Molly, the waitress, returned to take their orders. Finn lost a fiver to himself when Michael ordered the tiger tea—black tea laced with ginger. His raised eyebrows must not have been as subtle as he thought, because Michael gave him that look of challenge again. It dried his mouth right out and made his body sing like a taut string.

“What? You figured I’d play it safe?”

“I admit the thought had occurred to me. You seem a man who’s comfortable with convention.”

Michael snorted. “I’ve always tried to be.”

Finn watched the waitress put down a china teapot on a tray with a milk jug and a pot of hot water, a strainer, and a lace-covered sugar bowl with silver tongs for each of them. A teacup and a plate for cakes came next, followed by a cake fork and a five-tiered cake rack with a selection of sandwiches and sweets. The table shrank to crowded patches beneath the onslaught of delicately flower-patterned tableware.

Michael poured himself tea and looked at the kitsch with a disbelieving eye.

“I can’t believe we’re having a talk about how macho I am about my tea.” Michael’s smile spread into the crow’s-feet around his eyes. “I don’t know what the hell has happened to my life.”

“Ah, well.” Finn relaxed, pouring his own Lady Grey and smirking. “I’m like the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody expects you?” Michael’s speaking voice was a pleasant low growl, his laugh a few tones higher, more boyish.

“And I take care to keep it that way. So tell me all about yourself, Michael May. Why do you live in a house of horrors? What is the tragedy that shadows you? And more importantly, why has some discerning boy not snapped you up already?”

Away from the house, the vague sense of danger Finn had been getting from Michael was ebbing slowly away, leaving him oddly comforting to be around, like a big dog flopped on a hearth rug, dozing.

Michael filled his plate with a selection of sandwiches and lived down to Finn’s expectations by putting milk in his tea, still with a faint, almost ironic smile.

“I don’t know where to start on all that,” he admitted, with a quick glance up to check if Finn was still looking. Shy didn’t seem the right word for his mannerisms, but it was close. He shrugged one shoulder. “But you should probably know I’ve been bisexual passing as straight most of my life. So, no discerning boys because I’ve been married ten years, and divorced and bitter for another three.”

“And then one day you decided, ‘Sod that for a lark. Time to come out’?” Finn wasn’t quite sure how a man could go half his life fighting against who he really was and then turn it about in three days, but perhaps it had been boiling under the surface for a while, like a long-expected volcano.

“I wish I could say it was that deliberate.” Michael frowned at the tabletop. The expression made him look five years older, scored deep gashes in his forehead and his brows. His face had grown so used to stress it had remodelled itself around the expression. “But no. I lost my job. I was with the Met? And antiharassment laws aside, it wasn’t a good move to be openly queer in the force. I’d been gradually resenting that more and more over the years, so when I left I thought, ‘Fuck that. Fuck that. Why am I even bothering anymore?’ And I stopped.”

The Met? Finn dropped a slice of cucumber sandwich on the floor, dipped his face out of sight until he could control his expression. The Met was the force that knew him in his old life. God, they were the enemy. What the fuck was he doing, consorting even with an ex-member of the Metropolitan police?

Some of Michael’s rage made sudden sense to him. If it had scared Finn shitless to be in their hands for a day, what must it have been like trying to be one of them, hiding your differences all your life in an environment full of judgemental people, every one of whom was trained to meddle?

But why would you try? Why wouldn’t you run as far away as fast as you could?

“You okay?” Michael asked as he came back up. And of course the man had noticed his flinch. Of course he had. That was what he was trained for. Part of the bulldog breed. Get their jaws in, and you’ll never pry their teeth out of you again . . .

But this freak-out was not helping. Finn forced himself to laugh, scrambling for a way to turn Michael’s attention away until he could get himself under control. “Just. Well, just recalibrating my expectations. I never met a forty-year-old virgin before. I should have handled you more carefully.”

Michael laughed. “I’m not—”

“Ah, ah. Women don’t count.” He waved aside Molly’s narrow glance with a quick, “In this context. How many men? Go on, you can tell me.”

Michael bowed his head, looking hugely amused, a little embarrassed, and very definitely distracted from Finn’s business. His hair was growing out of what must have been a very short cut. Rebellious wisps of black curls had begun to stray over the nape of his neck and his ears, but they could not quite hide the blush.

“I. Uh. I don’t have to answer that.”

And Finn couldn’t help it, he was charmed.

He didn’t make an excuse to leave, though he probably should have done. Michael was a long way from London, apparently hacking himself out of his old life with a machete. Finn was here to celebrate leaving his own. So maybe it wasn’t time to run quite yet. He did, however, change the subject. “So tell me about the house? Was someone murdered there?”

Michael lifted his head and skewered Finn with a gaze like he was driving an icicle through Finn’s eyes.

God, they were?

“You can feel . . .?” When smiling, Michael had sensuous lips, but they thinned to white lines under the pressure with which he cut off this thought. “‘Murder’ is not the right word.”

Outside, the light dimmed to grey and a faint spatter of rain hit the panes of the windows. Molly came out of the kitchen with an arm full of logs and knelt to light the fire in the grate, while Idris leaned in the doorframe and waited until Michael was watching the flames. Then he gave Finn a subtle thumbs-up.

Finn waggled his hand in return. Undecided. “So if ‘murder’ is the wrong word, what would be the right one?”

Michael was all gentleness again by the time he looked back. A big, gentle puppy of a guy. “‘Neglect,’ I guess,” he said slowly. “Or, I don’t know. What would you call a cat that played with its prey but never actually harmed it? That was what he was like, my dad. You could hardly call it abuse. He was just having fun, lying, jerking you around, you know? I mean, yes, he had a temper, but he never
hit us
or anything. I always think I’m remembering it worse than it was, but then I go back there and I can’t breathe.”

Or maybe not gentle at all, but soft—like a garment that’s had all the stiffness beaten out of it. Finn swallowed against an upwelling of pity so strong he hadn’t known he had such sympathy in him. He remembered calling Michael
bereaved
—the sudden collapse the word had caused—and adjusted all of his assumptions again to take into account the fact that this was Michael alone, raw with loss and having a succession of bad days. He was meeting a Michael who was at his lowest ebb, and he was still all but hooked. How much better would it get when the man began to recover? “Your father’s the one who recently died?”

“Yeah.” Michael watched the flames catch in the grate. One eye gold in the light, the other dark. “I should be happy he’s finally gone. I don’t know why I’m not.”

Finn gave up on trying to figure out the pluses and minuses of pursuing this relationship, let his instinct take him. He reached out and closed his hand around Michael’s square fingers. “The human heart isn’t well-known for doing what it should.”

Michael’s head turned. His deep and thoughtful gaze locked with Finn’s. And yes there were edges and hardness in it that scared him, but there was such a sweetness underneath that came welling up slow and warm and strong to spill like honey over Finn’s skin. His breath caught and the hollow of his chest filled with exultation. Before he knew what he was doing he had pressed Michael’s hand into the table, immobilising it, leaned across the stacks of chinaware, the porcelain cups, and brushed a first, exploratory kiss over Michael’s closed lips. The flare and dazzle of arousal was like a firework going up.

Michael gasped and pulled away. Reflexively, Finn thought. Reflexes built up from years of playing straight. But he didn’t take his hand from under Finn’s. He caught Finn’s eye and licked his lips as though he was deliberately trying to sample the taste.

To their left, a tableful of teenagers burst out in giggles. From the kitchen doorway, Idris gave Finn an
I told you so
look. Even Michael was smiling. What could Finn do but give in? “And if the heart is going to err,” he finished his thought, “it’s surely always best to err on the side of love.”

Which was surely far too strong a sentiment for a first date, if this meeting could even be called such a thing. Finn prepared to backpedal for comfort, but Michael’s smile just sweetened a fraction as, with a strange diffident tact, he let the matter drop.

A half an hour later, they had finished their tea. Michael glanced up as the sun struggled out once more and gave the flowers hanging over the window an air of being preserved in amber. “I’d better get back to clearing out the boat. If I can get that sorted this week, I’ll at least have a bed to call my own.”

He eyed Finn warily, obviously wondering if Finn would turn the observation into some kind of double entendre, but Finn despised the double entendre as juvenile, and besides, this one was far too obvious. He just rose and accompanied Michael to the door. An awkward moment, when neither of them could decide what was appropriate. He held out his hand to be shaken, and Michael took it.

Brief disappointment turned into a delighted mixture of embarrassment and shock when instead of shaking it, Michael raised Finn’s hand to his lips and kissed his knuckles.

“Oh,” Finn said, taken aback and touched all at once. How old-fashioned, how unexpected, and how offbeat. “Oh, you’re delightful.”

“Will I see you again?”

It wasn’t a question he could answer right now, for all he wanted to say yes. Deciding he’d been a widower long enough was one thing; deciding to take up with a guy with so many problems of his own was another. “Whenever you’re least expecting it.”

One of the advantages of them both being grown-up: Michael took the ambiguous response without melodrama, simply nodding and walking away. Finn watched him amble along the riverbank, his black jeans, black T-shirt, and black hair stark against the silvery sheen of the water, until he was swallowed up in the shadow of a bridge. Then he went back inside to pay the bill and field Idris’s enthusiastic curiosity.

“Come into the kitchen and tell us all about your mystery friend,” Idris said, catching him by the wrist and pulling him into the steamy warmth. Idris’s cousin Lalima waved a spatula at him in acknowledgement as she smoothed lemon icing over a newly baked drizzle cake.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, feeling unusually tight-lipped. “He’s just moved into town and knows no one. I felt sorry for him, so I thought I would invite him to the book club.”

“And kiss him, in public, in my highly reputable tea rooms.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I bringing down the tone?”

Idris stepped back, raised his hands. “Defensive
and
evasive. What do you think, Lalima? I think it’s serious.”

“I think you should mind your own business and get those scones out of the oven before they burn.”

“My friends’ happiness
is
my business,” Idris protested. But he gave Finn a sympathetic glance nevertheless. “Is he coming to the book club? Because if he is, I don’t think a lot of literary criticism is going to get done tonight. Eligible bachelor comes to town, and you snap him up before the rest of us even get to lay an eye on him? That’s going to cause a stir.”

Lalima looked at Finn’s face and smacked her cousin on the back of his hand with a wooden spoon. “Leave it. I’m not joking.”

It worried him a little that she could see the uncertainty on his face. “I’ll tell you what’s going on when I have it worked out myself,” he offered. “It’s . . .”
Too fragile, too frightening. I wish I knew what Tom would think of it. I wish I could ask him. Apologise to him. I haven’t been so nervous, so full of butterflies and dread and desire since I was in my teens.
“It’s too early to say anything for definite.”

Idris took pity on him and let him go after that. He walked back into the centre of town along the towpath, with wet gardens sloping up from him on one side and the slow push of the river on his other. He had a good life, such as it was, alone in his little flat, with no one to tell him what to do. Master of his own fate and king of his own little kingdom. He wasn’t sure if he had it in him to sacrifice that after all this time. But increasingly when he thought of Michael, it was with a tug and current as strong as the river, desire rising through him as irresistibly as a flood.

He went back to work annoyed at the poets who had neglected to mention how distracting and irritating and disruptive this falling-in-love lark could be, and annoyed at himself for being unable to manage a simple flirtation and potential roll in the hay without getting all . . . involved.

He shut the door on the last customer and ushered Kevin out with a feeling of liberation. Two hours to calm down before book group. He should make some dinner and—

The bell rang just as he was switching off the lights in the shop. He raised his eyes to heaven and unlocked the front door again, throwing it wide. “What?”