AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He stops beelining. “I’m perfectly capable of displaying emotion.”
“Only if that emotion isnarked.”
Curiously for a self-made bathroom supremo, Jonathan takes the minimum offer. “Which is still one more than you get from my father.”
I shouldn’t have expected Jonathan Forest to be paying attention, even to his own family, but this surprises even me. “Okay, maybe we really aren’t talking about the same person.”
“The man never even raises his voice.”
Three weeks ago, hearing a comment like that’d have me thinking what a prick Jonathan was. A week and a half ago, it’d have me thinking he had hidden depths. Now it’s got me thinking he has hidden depths but a lot of those depths are depths of prickishness. “You know there’s ways to express feelings that aren’t loud.”
“Not in my family.” Now he does give one of those not-exactly-smiles, but there’s an edge to it that I don’t much like.
“Yes, in your family.” I’m very rapidly getting fed up here. “You just haven’t noticed over all the noise. And don’t get me wrong, it’s good noise a lot of the time. But just because your dad isn’t like that doesn’t mean he’s not worth listening to.”
Jonathan’s busy trying to open his study without dropping the cat. “Haven’t we already had the conversation about you staying out of my business?”
“Yeah,” I start. And then change my mind. “Actually, no. We haven’t had a conversation. You just went back to barking instructions at me and reminding me I’m your employee.”
“Youaremy—”
“I know. But I’m not, though, am I? I mean I am. But this is”—I make awhat the fuckgesture—“you’re holding my cat. I’mliving in your house. Your family comes and talks to me and…and I care about yez.”
“So you like me, then you don’t like me, now you care about me.” Jonathan leans his head against the door, looking, if I’m honest, a bit despairing. “And leave Gollum out of this.”
“He’s a cat. He’s not an emotionally damaged teenager whose parents are in the middle of a messy divorce.”
“Cats are sensitive,” declares Jonathan with the authority of a man who’s never had a cat.
He’s wrong—cats are genetically programmed to be narcissists—but I let him have it. Because for some unfathomable reason the one living being in the entire world Jonathan Forest has chosen to be emotionally open with is a cat with a face that looks like other cats use it as a scratching post. “I’m sorry,” I say, “that I said what I said before. I was just angry. And in my defence, so were you.”
“We still can’t…we shouldn’t… This is for the best.”
“Jonathan, this fucking sucks.”
He turns his head slightly and gives me a challenging look. “Do you have an alternative?”
“Can we not just talk? About this. About us. About what happened?”
While he doesn’t look enthusiastic, he at least starts heading back into the room. “About the time you kissed me, or about the fight I had with my family afterwards?”
“Either. Both. Whichever.”
He sits on the sofa, where his dad sat. There’s a trace of a resemblance about the eyes, but they have very different energies. Jonathan’s much more tense, for a start. “How much is there to discuss?”
I’d not planned this far ahead. “I don’t know exactly, but there’s got to be more than nothing.”
Gollum sits purring on his lap and, for a while, that’s the onlysound in the room. Eventually, Jonathan untenses enough to ask, “What did my dad say?”
It’s probably the safest starting point. “Just that he was looking for yez, at first. I think he probably wanted to smooth things over.”
“It doesn’t need smoothing.” Jonathan scritches Gollum behind the ears. For such a sharp man, he’s got a surprisingly gentle touch. “It’s just the way things are.”
“What? You blowing your top if you have to spend more than twenty minutes with your family is the way things are?”
His mouth twitches. “To some extent. You can see why I prefer to keep them at a distance.”
“No,” I tell him. “I can’t. Or rather, I can. Like I understand your reasons, I just think your reasons are shit.”
