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“Kettle’s on.” Leo, stripped back to his boxers though still a little flushed from the cold, was busy in the kitchen.
“I don’t like tea.”
“Coffee, then?”
I shook my head. “Water’s fine. Assuming I didn’t just clean myself in it.”
“Grey water goes straight out again.”
Leo filled a slightly battered plastic beaker and brought it over to me. I couldn’t help eyeing the contents suspiciously.
“I promise it’s okay,” he said. “It can get a bit discoloured when the tank’s running low. But it’s safe to drink.”
I took a reluctant sip. And he was right. Was it the most fresh and delicious water I’d ever tasted? No. Was it perfectly drinkable? Yes. “How do you live like this?” I blurted out.
“Without a fridge full of exclusive polar iceberg water, you mean?”
“All of it.”
He moved my leg and sat down beside me. I tried not to be too distracted by the roll of his abs or his naked thighs. But I was only human. “I like having to think about where I get what I need and how I use what I have.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
I couldn’t quite marshal my thoughts. It felt like there wasa yawning chasm of incomprehension inside me—or a yawning chasm of something—and I couldn’t figure out the words to string a bridge across it. “Isn’t it boring? Having to care about so much that most people take for granted?”
He turned to face me, something far too naked in his eyes. “Very much the opposite.”
“Aren’t you lonely, though?”
It wasn’t the sort of question anyone should have had to think about. And certainly not for that long. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Sometimes. Probably. Anyway”—he stood back up—“I expect there’s hot water again. I won’t be long.”
He vanished into the bathroom, leaving my chasm very much still yawning. At this point, I wasn’t sure what would be worse: if I couldn’t make sense of what he was telling me or if I could. When he emerged, in less than three minutes, his damp hair was gathered up on top of his head and water droplets were glittering on his bare shoulders. At the very least, he’d pulled on trousers. Although mostly their presence made me imagine dragging them off him.
“I was thinking of making a baked potato,” he said.
“Okay?”
He sighed. “Would you like a baked potato?”
Fuck no. But I didn’t want to be rude. “Sounds great. Thanks.”
He moved past me, heading for the kitchen again. Those were definitely Crocs on his feet. And no matter how hard I tried, there was no escaping the fact his hair was in a man bun. And somehow I was failing to be repulsed. I was failing to find him anything otherthan gorgeous…fuckable…fascinating. He must have known. Hot people always knew they were hot, even if they pretended not to. It was just that he was careless with—at ease in—his hotness. When I strapped mine on like armour and fretted for its flimsiness.
Returning with a couple of potatoes wrapped so tightly in foil it looked like he was intending to send them into space, Leo opened the doors of his stove and nudged them inside.
“When these work,” he said, using a pair of tongs to stir the embers, “they’re really good. But they don’t always work. Sometimes I get mush. Sometimes I get bullets. And once I forgot to pierce them so they exploded.”
I watched his naked back, remembering how it had bent for me last night. “Can’t wait.”
“Also”—he shut the stove but didn’t rise—“I know this isn’t—I know you’re probably bored. If you want to borrow a book. Or my laptop or—”
“A laptop?” I repeated. “I thought you’d transcended the shallow diversions of mere mortals.”
He turned swiftly. “I never said that.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be living…I don’t know…however you’re supposed to be living?”
