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“And after that I would like to take you to bed.” Hopefully by then the floors would have dried and the stink dissipated. And some colour would have returned to Charles’s face.
“Bed sounds even better.”
“Where I shall unwrap you like a birthday present.”
“Does Papi know you’re gay?” he asked a while later.
A restless soul, I patrolled the pebbly shore, skimming stones, whilst Charles lay on his expensive coat spread across the damp sand, his face uptilted to the watery late afternoon sunshine. Watching him stretched out, so relaxed and content and fucking rational, it was hard to believe he was the same man who’d woken screaming with terror for the last three nights in a row. I bent to pick up a flat, perfect stone, then turned to him. “Yeah. I came out to my grandparents and my mum when I was sixteen. Although I think my mum had already worked it out.”
A major clue had been opening my bedroom door to discover me and the lad I was doing ‘homework’ with sprawled across my bed and sucking each other’s faces off.
“And how did Papi react?”
Drawing back my arm, and with a practised flick of my wrist, I released the stone. Seven bounces. Not bad. I scoured the rocks at my feet for another. “Difficult to say, actually. But his attitude and behaviour toward me never changed afterward, so I guess he’s okay with it. It’s not come up in conversation since, probably because I’ve never brought anyone home.”
I twisted round to smile at him, inexplicably embarrassed. “Except you.”
There, it was out. The proof that I liked him more than I’d ever liked anyone else. And now he knew. In response, Charles just smiled in that sexy, abashed way he had whenever he received a compliment, which was almost as hot as when he swore in English the nanosecond before he was about to climax.
“Does he know what I am to you, then?” he asked, as I resumed hunting for stones. “Or does he think I’m just a friend?”
I kicked at a loose pile of pebbles. I don’t think even Charles knew what he was to me. In a short space of time, he’d become the source of my joy, the reason my heart beat quicker, the last thought in my head when I went to sleep at night and the first when I woke. I wasn’t going to share that, obviously.
“I can’t tell,” I said, which was the truth. “And he’s still convinced you’re Belgian, by the way. He likes you, though. When you didn’t join us for dinner last night, he asked me where you were. And he’s planning on beating you at boules.”
I skimmed another stone. Six bounces this time. Charles applauded anyhow and I gave a silly little bow. Excluding the bleached floors episode, which I’d decided hadn’t signalled anything after all, the last few hours might have been the most perfect afternoon of my life, the only grey cloud on the horizon that it would come to an end.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” I began, “What we have.”
Mon dieu, how was someone expected to reply to that? Charles’s slate-grey eyes, the same colour as the smooth pebble in my hand, locked onto mine. His mouth that had kissed me so beautifully all afternoon curved into another small smile. “Yes,” he agreed in a quiet voice. “It’s buttery yellow.”
CHAPTER 19
CHARLES
“I like this sketch of me the best,” said Florian. “You’ve made me look wise and sensible. But still drop-dead gorgeous, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
He’d walked up behind me on silent footsteps; I hadn’t known he was there until his sweet lips landed on the back of my neck.
“It’s the look you had on your face last night, just before you ordered me to strip down and join you in the shower.”
He laughed. “See? So wise and sensible.”
Two weeks had passed in the blink of an eye. We’d spent almost every night in my bed; we’d either both dined with Papi, or Florian had crept out once his grandfather was settled for the evening. Marcus was on holiday, so he’d stopped plaguing me. Orange had receded and taken its shadowy grey edges with it. What with green and silver and yellow vying for prominence, it was no wonder. Perhaps the shadows hadn’t been there at all, and I’d imagined them.
I still mopped the floors daily anyhow, just in case, because I couldn’t be too careful. But not in Florian’s presence. Knowing he witnessed the nightmares was bad enough. And they hadn’t got any worse, had they? They hadn’t disappeared either, but maybe I was going to have to learn to live with them. At the end of the first week I ran out of one of my meds but was having far too much fun to drive into Saint-Martin and replace them. All the proof I needed that they were now superfluous to requirements.
A row of newly cleaned paintbrushes were laid out in the sun to dry, and Florian picked one up, twirling it between his fingers. I’d used it earlier, on preliminary sketches of a watercolour that, if it turned out decently, I was going to give to him as a present. Perhaps when I returned to England, as a souvenir of our time together. When that sad day came, it was going to be au revoir, not goodbye. Already I’d planned for him to visit me in London at the end of the salt harvesting season, because even if our relationship fizzled out, which, living in separate countries, was inevitable, then we could remain good friends. And I wanted to holiday here again when work became less busy, maybe I’d buy a small place of my own. Somewhere I’d come to paint, to unwind, to ogle Florian working on his tile.
Damp bristles tickled under my chin, making me giggle and squirm and reflect on how far I’d travelled. A few months ago, the play of the brush over my skin would have had me rocking in a corner, my head buried in my hands, drowning in ugly charcoal and convinced a swarm of demons was intent on eating me alive. Now, as Florian swirled the brush across the ridge of my collar bone with one hand, and with the other deftly unbuttoned my shirt, all I saw were silver and green entwined in perfect harmony, and all I felt was a desire to let this man strip me bare and bury me underneath him.
He stroked the brush over a nipple, a sensation much more thrilling than it had a right to be, and had everything to do with the man wielding it. I rolled my eyes at him. “Which part of me are you planning on tickling with that thing next?”
“Your balls.”
Already Florian was unzipping my fly and dragging me over to the sofa. He pushed me down before performing a sexy striptease, the brush held between his teeth, like a lover presenting a single red rose. Christ, my salt harvester was stunning; my mouth dried as he hooked his thumbs under the waistband of his jeans and wiggled them over his narrow hips until his long, slim dick sprung free. With a suggestive look, accompanied by an exaggerated pout, he swept the fine brush up the underside of it, along the length of his shaft, pretending to writhe with unbridled passion. His other hand massaged his inner thigh and he groaned in fake ecstasy. I let out a snort. This man could make me come from laughing.
