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“Why not me and Squeezy?”
This was said with a little too much enthusiasm for Ben’s taste.
“Oh…you know…I said you’d probably be too…overwhelming for him.” He was tempted to mention the knitting reference, just to deflate Nik’s ego a little.
“Uh-huh. I‘m not sure I entirely like the direction your conversations with that moron invariably take these days.”
“Anyway…” Ben rose up with difficulty, distracting Nikolas by overplaying the mess a little. They headed towards the shower, shedding clothing as they went.
“I want to buy a few new clothes for the holiday. You’ll have to let me know whether I should pack for cold weather or hot. Oh, and how many suits, and if I’ll need—”
“No suits required, and leave itallto me—I’ll pack for you. And you’ve got clothes you’ve forgotten about you have so many.”
Nikolas was staring at him as if Ben had said he could go naked. Ben fidgeted with the shower gel. “What?”
“No suits? At all? What am I supposed to wear down to dinner?”
This evident dismay didn’t bode well, in Ben’s opinion, for Nikolas’s first night under the stars.
Even if it was in a gorgeous pod.
* * *
Chapter 22
Five Months Before April
Ben was relatively sanguine about leaving everything in a month. Everyone was set for Christmas. He’d made lots of lists.
However, their departure appeared prematurely imminent one evening in early December when the front door crashed open and Squeezy barged in with a large, packed holdall, swearing colourfully to someone on the other end of the phone he held clamped to his ear.
They watched him pass by to the suite he used to share with Tim.
He re-emerged empty handed and made his way back out, returning with a pile of books and another full bag from the car.
Nikolas cocked his head to one side then tried the other. Ben frowned. “What are you doing?”
“It’s an exact replay, only in the other direction. I was trying to make it reverse once more.”
Ben attracted Squeezy’s attention the next time he strode empty handed from the bedroom. “What the fuck?”
Squeezy gave them both a nod but carried on his conversation, until at something said on the other end, he just clicked his phone off. He sank down into a chair at the table and helped himself to Ben’s biscuits, waving imperiously at the kettle and tapping his fingers impatiently on the table, as if the wait for someone to make him a cup of tea was intolerable.
Ben and Nikolas continued to stare at him in silence.
Squeezy frowned. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”
Nikolas narrowed his eyes. “Tim Watson has finally come to his senses and found someone normal, and consequently you’re moving back in with us?”
“The Old Woman’s forgotten the definition of normal—he’s known you for ten years. And not him anyway.Daddybark.”
Ben saw Nikolas’s gaze flick to the dogs asleep in their baskets.
Squeezy, with a huff of annoyance, got up to make his own tea. “We had a chat about it, DB and me, and DB said I’d better move back in here with himnow, not wait like, not leave it till you two fuck off and leave us all at Christmas. No way he was coming up and spending another night in that old dump—his words for that fucking pile of shit, not mine—said he’d done that, been there, got the T-shirt. And he wasn’t squatting in a fucking caravan, neither. Although to be fair, he didn’t say fucking.”
Nikolas scratched his head. Perhaps at the fact they weren’t actually leaving for many weeks yet, but he only asked in all seriousness, “And what did PB say about all this?”
Squeezy gave Ben a furtive look, and, as if Nikolas was either deaf or defective, whispered, “Does he hear the wolf talking to him? ’S the first sign you know…” As if Ben wouldn’t get his meaning, Squeezy screwed a finger around on his temple then continued in a loud and slow voice as befitted Nikolas’s various impairments, “So, anything else I need to know?”
