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“That’s not true.”
I’d made the mistake of turning back. So we were stuck staring at each other again.
“Honestly,” Leo went on suicidally, “it made me like you more.”
Electric tendrils shivered down my arms. “Don’t like me, Leo. I hurt people when they like me.”
“The way you did earlier?”
“Well, I didn’t mean I Hulk-smashed them,” I clarified. “I’m just—let’s just. This”—I made what I hoped translated into a kind ofwhat we’re doing nowgesture—“is good. Can we let it be? Unless it’s not good for you, of course, in which case—”
Frankly it was a relief when he cut me off with a firm, “It’s good for me.” Except then he added, “Though I did say I’d take you up to the bridge today.”
It was not, in truth, so very late. “My parents sort of knocked us off schedule.”
“And this is a narrowboat not a speedboat.”
“And the ice is still melting,” I pointed out.
Leo fell silent then. Which was probably fair. After the way I’d acted, it was not for him to make this easy for me.
“Can I stay?” Even asking felt like sticking my hand down a crocodile’s throat. “For one more night?”
“I’d like that.”
“And Mr. Froderick too, if that’s all right.”
“Well…” Leo turned him around, smiling down at him with such easy fondness that it swirled me through a succession ofbizarre and barely interpretable emotions. “Of the two of you, Mr. Froderick has been an exemplary guest.”
“He hasn’t fucked you, though.”
Leo put his hands over Mr. F’s head where his ears would have been had he possessed them. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Neither do I. I wish I hadn’t said it.”
“I imagine he wouldn’t try to embarrass me in front of his parents either.”
I tried so hard to be shameless. Remorseless. But I flinched. “I wasn’t trying to embarrass you. I was trying to shock my parents, so they’d get off my back. It never worked when I was a teenager. I have no idea why I thought it would work now.”
“I…” Leo let out a long, slow breath. “I’m not ashamed, you know. Of having been to prison. I’m only ashamed of the life I lived before.”
“Are you proud of the life you live now?” Something else I wished I hadn’t said. It wasn’t my business. I didn’tcare.37
“Let’s add it to the list of things I’m working on.”
“You should be proud,” said some stranger who had taken possession of my body and mind. “I know my parents give the impression of being completely tasteless and undiscriminating, but they’re not. They have good instincts. And they’re good people. Just like you.”
“And you’re so terrible, are you?”
I scowled at him. “Don’t think you know me just because we’ve had three conversations and my mother told you about my prepubescent foreskin.”
“Actually, that was you.”
The absurdity of it all almost made me laugh. Except I wasn’t the sort of person laughter came easily to. So instead I delivered a rancourless “oh fuck off” and Leo laughed for me. I wasn’t sure he was the sort of person laughter came easily to either, but in that moment, he could have been. Unselfconscious, with a glitter of gold in his hair, and his eyes like water and frost.
9
“I have a confession to make,” Leo said not so very much later, as he crouched in front of his impossibly stuffed fridge.
