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“He’s not a lumberjack. He’s a civil engineer.” Edwin’s gaze slid to mine, unexpectedly defiant. “And yes it has.”
Edwin should not have had the power to surprise me. Not after a decade together. I gave him my best sneer. “Then good for you, myszko.”
He laughed. “You did always prefer me s-silent.”
“I what?” Apparently he possessed far too much power to surprise me. Except this was not like the first time. That had been a scratch that had unexpectedly drawn blood. This had tipped the earth sideways. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“You’re p-proving my p-p-p…” Twop’s in a row. Edwin must have been feeling brave. Then again, he’d never known when to give up. “Provingmypoint, Marius.”
“You have no point. Your point is bullshit.”
“You’re b-bullshit.”
“That’s your comeback? Seriously? Are you twelve?”
He gave a mutinous shrug.
“I’m not Don fucking Draper. Why would I”—it was hard to do air quotes, let alone sarcastic air quotes, with only one hand, but I made a furious attempt—“‘prefer you silent’?”
Edwin’s eyes sought mine again. The worst of it was, I’d half forgotten how beautiful he was: those luminously dark eyes, the sharp curiosity of his features. “So you never had to think about what I w-wanted.”
The bag I’d brought from the boat tumbled from my slack fingers, Edwin managing to catch Mr. Froderick before he bounced onto the pavement. We stared at each other, equally shocked by the other’s strangeness and injustice.
“I spent our whole relationship thinking about what you wanted,” I said, expecting to be yelling and finding I was whispering instead.
But before he could respond, a car—one of those obnoxious SUVs splashed with actual mud—reversed carefully up thepartially blocked-off driveaway of the nearby accommodation block. I spared it an irritated glance. Caught a flash of orange from the driver’s seat.
And groaned. “Oh for God’s sake. You brought the lumberjack?”
Edwin retrieved my bag, sweeping some escaped pants off the pavement. “It’s his car.”
The lumberjack was already leaning across the seats to push the passenger door open for me. “In you pop, duck.”
I popped with all the spite I could muster, trying to find a justification for resenting the way the seat had been thoughtfully put back so I could stretch out my leg. Edwin—along with my pants and Mr. F—climbed in the back. And when the looming prat next to me offered me his hand, I somehow found it in me to shake it instead of biting it like I wanted to. Feral biting. Not sexy biting.
“Marius, right?” He had big, knotty-knuckled hands, more deft than they were rough. And one of those nebulously northern accents that people were supposed to find trustworthy. “I’m Adam.”
“Lovely.”
He glanced from me to Edwin and back again. “To the John Radcliffe?” he asked.54
We both remained sullenly silent like teenagers who’d had a falling out.
“Right,” he said, largely to himself. “To the John Radcliffe.”
With the consummate ease of a Man Who Got Things Done, he guided the stupid car that he probably did actually drive across rough terrain into a gap between the traffic. As we crossed thebridge, I twisted around as discreetly as I could to try and catch a glimpse of Leo’s boat. But there was no sign of him either because I was at the wrong angle or looking the wrong way or he had already gone or was passing beneath us that very moment.
Just the dull sheen of the river. A mirror with nothing to reflect.
We were several hours at the hospital, mostly waiting as people whose limbs were hanging off or whose faces were gushing blood were triaged past me. Edwin was maintaining a stony silence—still more evidence, if he’d cared to notice it, that I did not, in fact, prefer him that way—and the lumberjack had his nose stuck in a book aboutMaking Kin in the Chthulucene, whatever the fuck that meant. He seemed irritatingly relaxed about being stuck in A&E on the 27th of December, all because of his boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Which made him either a doormat or an infinitely better partner than I had ever been.55
Eventually I was seen by a nurse, then a doctor, then sent for an X-ray, then returned to the doctor, and the nurse again, before being released back into the wild with a severely sprained ligament, a sheet of exercises to perform daily, and my leg strapped into a ridiculous-looking moon boot. The lumberjack had put his book down and was, instead, crouched in front of Edwin, a hand on each knee, looking up at him intently—their faces so close they could have kissed without moving. From the flutter of Edwin’s hands, he was talking—and talking a lot.
The problem with being with someone for such a long time wasthat you got attuned to them…spatially, if nothing else. And the awareness lingered, a habit of feeling for them in a room, of your eyes finding their eyes, even when you didn’t want to. I’d barely stepped into the waiting room when Edwin’s head came up like an impala scenting a predator. I gave him an apathetic wave.
“Well,” said the lumberjack, as I lurched over, “you must have been hurt worse than we realised.”
I gave him a disdainful look. “What do you mean? It’s just a sprain.”
