Give Yourself Away (27 page)

Caleb didn’t want to catch him out, but if March was going to lie to him, he had to know. “I used up five packets of sandpaper and two pairs of gloves.”

March laughed. “I’m going to open a bottle of wine. You fancy white or red?”

“I don’t mind.”

March took a bottle of red from the pantry and searched for the opener in the drawer. “Fancy pizza? Or Chinese?”

“Do you have any Chinese students?”

“No. The history courses are more likely to be filled by Brits.”

“But you don’t just cover British history.”

“No, but even so.”

March handed Caleb a glass, but Caleb put it straight down. He didn’t want March to see his fingers shaking. He stuck his hands into his pockets.

“What period did you cover today?”
Oh fuck. Please, please. Tell me the truth about what you did.

“The Vikings.”

Two words to destroy Caleb’s world. “That must have been tricky when you were off sick.”

March froze.

“I finished early,” Caleb said. “I had this crazy idea you might like to bend me over your desk. Only you’d called in sick. I came back here worried to death, saw there was no car and thought you might have had to go to the hospital. I went through every scenario I could think of.”

“Shit, Caleb. I took a group of students on a field trip to Weymouth to look at a Viking burial site. Fifty skeletons were found in an old quarry pit at Ridgeway Hill when they were digging the relief road in 2009. They’re part of an exhibition at the London museum and I wanted to show the students the site. Who told you I was sick? I don’t know why they thought that.”

Oh fuck. Why didn’t I just wait for him to tell me?
“Some woman. I don’t know her name. Sorry. I was just worried.” Relief poured through him.

March pulled him into his arms. “And I’m sorry my phone was out of juice.”

“I’ll buy you a spare.”

March squeezed him. “I’d forget to charge that one too. The grave was a brilliant find. Mass burial sites of Vikings are rare. Young guys mostly, all hacked at around the neck and jaw, and the skulls tossed in a pile. You wouldn’t believe how close the site is to the new road. When they’ve finished with them at the British Museum, they’re going on display down here. We’ll go and see them.”

“Sounds like a fun trip.”

March laughed. “No skeletons this weekend. We’ll set off first thing tomorrow. Now, what do you fancy? Pizza or Chinese?”

“Pizza.”

Caleb wanted to kick himself. The exact way to make someone go off you, getting too fucking clingy. If he’d kept quiet, March would have told him.

Oh fuck.
March felt terrible. He’d stood there and lied and babbled on about the Vikings and made it worse. He could have just told Caleb where he’d been. So why hadn’t he? Yeah well, he knew why. Caleb would have been pissed off.

No, he’d done the right thing. He’d called the same detective agency on the way back and asked them to find out what they could about Liam and Derry Fitzpatrick. Until he knew everything, he’d keep Caleb in the dark.

“What do you want on your pizza?” March asked.

“Anything but olives.”

March called the pizza restaurant with his phone still plugged in, thinking how he needed to stop Caleb seeing that it hadn’t completely run down. He managed to toss a dishcloth partially over it before he went back to the table.

Caleb had drunk all his wine.

“I thought you didn’t drink much,” March said.

“Oh God, did I drink all that?” Caleb looked horrified.

March smiled and poured him another glass. He felt guilty that he had an ulterior motive—keeping Caleb away from his phone.

Getting Caleb drunk turned out not to be such a good idea when the guy ended the evening throwing up in the downstairs bathroom. March sat at his side, stroking Caleb’s face as he clutched the toilet.

“Oh fuck. Why didn’t you warn me?” Caleb groaned.

March chuckled. “You’re such a lightweight.”

“I’m never drinking again. Ever.”

March handed him a glass of water to rinse out his mouth.

“You go to bed. I’m going to sleep here.”

“You can’t.”

Caleb retched and shuddered. “Yes I can. Please. I’ll come when the room stops spinning.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He rested his head against Caleb’s back.
I’m never leaving you again.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Are we there yet?” Caleb asked.

March groaned. “Ask me that one more time and I’ll turn round.”

He’d thought at first that Caleb was pretending to be excited, until March registered this was a guy who’d never had surprises, treats, presents. March hoped he’d not miscalculated Caleb’s probable reaction to the tattoo-removal appointment, which was that afternoon. Until then he wanted to do something ordinary. Wander around the shops. Eat fish and chips on the seafront. Just be with him.

Most weekends March found something exciting to do. Kitesurfing, climbing, mountain biking. After a week spent cooped up in college, he looked forward to being outdoors, getting his heart pumping and his blood racing. He glanced at Caleb, knowing he’d found something else that made his heart pound hard.

“Are we—?”

“Nearly,” March said.

“How nearly?”

March’s phone rang and he groaned. “My mother.”

“I’ll keep quiet,” Caleb said.

March accepted the call. “Hi, Mum.”

“Hi, sweetheart. Am I interrupting anything?”

“Nope.”

Caleb slid his hand over March’s crotch and squeezed. March bit back his laugh and knocked his fingers away.

“Alain and I were thinking of coming to stay with you the week after next. Is that okay? Mary and Ken Turner’s wedding anniversary.”

“That’s fine,” March said, thinking the opposite. But maybe this was the push he needed to talk to her about his life.

“We’ll get the ferry over a week on Wednesday. We’ve still got your key so we’ll see you when you get home from work. We’ll cook supper. Alain says he’ll bring a few bottles of that wine you like.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“You’re not off doing anything stupid today, are you?”

“No.”

A cue for Caleb to stroke March’s cock.

She gave a heavy sigh. “Which means you are. Please be careful.”

“I’m only going shopping.”

Caleb ran his thumb down the length of his dick and it hardened.

“Good grief, Baxter. Are you feeling all right?”

“Yep. I’ve never felt better.” He glanced at Caleb and smiled.

“New clothes? Does that mean—?”

“Bye, Mum.” He ended the call. “Hands off or I’ll crash.”

Caleb took his hand away. “I can go and stay somewhere else.”

“You’re not going anywhere. Well, yes, you are. Into my room. Our room.”

Caleb tugged at the knee of his jeans, pulling at an imaginary thread. “I don’t want to cause problems.”

“I’m going to tell her about us. There is no problem.” He slid his hand over Caleb’s fluttering fingers and pressed him still.

“Not all of it.”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“She still calls you Baxter?”

“Yes. My stepfather calls me March. It confuses everyone.”

“So how much farther?”

March chuckled.

“What would you have been doing normally?”

“Whatever took my fancy. Probably nothing on the water on a gray day like this.”

“Do you ever just stay in and read or listen to music or knit socks?”

March shot him a glance and caught his smile. “Not often. But then I didn’t have anyone I wanted to stay in with before.”

“Do you have big dreams?” Caleb whispered. “Things you want to do, see, feel?”

“Like a bucket list?”

“I guess, but not because you have a limited amount of time, although I suppose we all have. Just parts of life you want to make yours.”

March thought about it. “I’ve done so much, been to so many places. There are always going to be more places to visit, more things to do.” But Caleb’s question had brought him crashing to earth.

He’d been searching for something all this time, looking for something that was missing, without him even realizing it was missing. Not death, though he’d been walking in its shadow, but a connection to life. Something that anchored him. March knew now that it wasn’t something that had been missing—it was someone. “I want to see things with you,” March said.

“But if you’ve already been there…why go twice?”

“Because it would be different with you.”

“We could do the churches and museums,” Caleb said. “The ancient ruins.”

March glanced at him, thinking he was joking, but he wasn’t.

“Is there a country you’d like to visit?” Caleb asked.

“Antarctica.”

“Lots of ruins there.”

March laughed.

“A mountain to climb, by some chance?” Caleb asked.

“Yeah and a marathon to run, but that’s not why. I’d like to see the wildlife, especially the whales and the penguins. I want to stand on a sheet of ice that seems to go on forever, touch an iceberg, take a helicopter flight to the South Pole and swim under the ice.”

Caleb groaned. “I was absolutely with you until you said swim under the ice. I couldn’t do that. What if you didn’t find the hole again to surface through? What if you met some sea creature that wanted to eat you? What if you swam down instead of up because you got confused? What—?”

“Okay, okay. I won’t swim under the ice. Now look for somewhere to park. We’re here.”

Caleb drew in a breath. “Would you really not swim under the ice if I asked you not to?”

March spun the wheel. “Look. There’s a spot.”

It didn’t escape March’s attention that he hadn’t answered Caleb’s question. Nor would it have escaped Caleb’s. Would he let Caleb’s anxiety stop him doing what he wanted? He doubted it. Maybe he’d be less reckless, but what he
really
wanted was to persuade Caleb to take a risk and do exciting things with him.

March had never been a fan of shopping. He liked to look good, but he tended to buy in bulk a couple of times a year. Shopping with Caleb turned out to be fun. For a guy who seemed to manage with a couple of pairs of everything, Caleb had strong opinions on what looked right and what didn’t.

March was pleased when Caleb bought things for himself. If he hadn’t, March would have bought them for him, though he knew there’d have been an argument if he’d tried. Caleb even bought clear lenses, though March wanted to persuade him to have laser surgery to correct his vision.

They tried on crazy stuff there was no way March would have even looked at if Caleb hadn’t been with him. Clothes that March thought were too tight ended up being purchased, partly because Caleb’s eyes had glazed over with lust when March emerged from the changing room. They ended up having to go back to the car to dump the bags.

“Lunch, then we have an appointment,” March said.

“To do what?”

“Wait and see. Fish and chips?”

“Eaten outside?”

“The only way.”

They stood in line at the busiest chippy, on the basis that it was likely to be the best, then found a bench and sat looking out over the almost-empty beach to the gray sea beyond.

“Your parents brought us here,” Caleb said. “That was when your mum lost her ice cream to the gull. We ate fish and chips in one of the restaurants on the seafront. I don’t think I’d ever been in a restaurant before, not counting McDonald’s. I put too much vinegar on my chips and your mum tipped it off my plate onto hers. She was always kind to me.”

March didn’t remember the vinegar thing, but his mum
had
been kind to Caleb. He thought now that she’d seen what a tough life Caleb had. She’d never even expressed surprise March was friends with a boy three years younger than him.

“When I was in that room, I went over everything I remembered, time after time, so I wouldn’t forget. I imagined grass under my toes, how it felt and how it smelled, the sun on my face, you cycling next to me. Snow. God, I missed snow.”

March tucked his foot behind Caleb’s leg and rubbed his calf.

“But I forgot what you looked like,” Caleb whispered. “One day, I just forgot. I thought maybe it was my brain telling me I had to, that I couldn’t move forward unless I accepted you were dead. Did…did you forget what I looked like?”

“No. But I had a photo to remind me.” March was finding it difficult to swallow.

“Liam was such a lying bastard. He’d say, ‘I’m going to let you go tomorrow. Just do this and tomorrow I’ll set you free. Tomorrow you’ll be in the sunshine. Tomorrow you can breathe fresh air.’ And I kept believing him, even when his tomorrow never happened—because the alternative was worse. To not hope. To not want… I did try to get away.”

Caleb had stopped eating. He stared down at his lap.

March didn’t know what to say.

“Well, I did for a while, and then I didn’t. I was scared I’d go mad. I talked to you, talked to myself, talked to made-up people.” He gave a short laugh. “Then I stopped talking out loud and did it all in my head. I made so many promises. ‘If I get out of here, I’ll not answer back to my dad, I’ll give my mum flowers and make her happy, I’ll try harder at school, give up ideas about dancing, give up chocolate, give up wanking.’”

March snorted.

“Well I didn’t have to, did I?” Caleb shrugged and started to eat again. “I wonder if we’d have gone out with one another if life had taken a different path.”

“Did you imagine that life?”

Caleb nodded. “The strange thing is I always imagined I’d make the first move. I wasn’t sure about you, but I was about me. I’d planned it out. We’d go to the cinema, some scary movie, and I’d hold your hand because you knew what a wuss I was. Only when it wasn’t scary anymore, I’d keep hold of your hand and sit and wait to see if you’d let me go. And that was all we’d do. Hold hands. Because I was eleven years old and that was all I needed.”

March wrapped his fingers around Caleb’s.

“Do you mind me talking about it?” Caleb asked. “I never have and I think I should have, but I had no one to tell. But I also know it’s hard to hear because it’s hard to say. You’re the first person I’ve felt able to trust, that I’ve wanted to trust. And I’m sorry if I’m coming over all heavy, but I feel as though my past has been pressing me down harder and harder, and now I can breathe again.” He winced. “Too much, I know. Sorry.”

March squeezed his fingers. “You can tell me what you like, whenever you like.”

Caleb shot him a smile. “Four years and I still haven’t gotten the talking to people right. After I walked away from Jasim and away from the sunrise to the station, I had to talk and listen, and I was so overwhelmed I almost broke down. I told you before that it took me a while to understand how to have conversations, but that first day was so hard. Later, even when I thought I understood what people were saying, I didn’t always get what they meant, the subtleties passed me by. I trusted too easily when you’d have thought the opposite should have been true. I should have trusted no one.”

“But the vast majority of people are good. I think you did the right thing. You did the brave thing, risking getting hurt. You’re the bravest guy I know, that I’ll ever know.”

Caleb screwed up the papers from his fish and chips. “Don’t ever show me a snake.”

“There are no snakes in Antarctica.”

“Sold,” Caleb said.

“But there are leopard seals and killer whales.”

Caleb groaned. “And you want to swim under the ice?”

March stood, tossed the remains of his meal into a wastebin and held out his hand for Caleb’s.

“Right. Time to go see a man,” March said. “Or it might be a woman.” He checked the directions on his phone.

“What’s happening?”

“Wait and see.” March was nervous about this. He wanted them to look at Caleb’s back and tell him they could fix it. But what if they couldn’t?

Caleb had no idea where March was taking him. When they stopped outside a building with the sign
DisappearInk
over the door, Caleb sagged.

“I’m surprised but not in a good way,” he mumbled.

“I’ll make up for it later. Just see what they have to say. I booked you for a first session, but if they can’t do anything, they’ll tell you.”

Caleb gritted his teeth and pushed open the door. A young girl sat behind a desk, and she smiled when Caleb and March walked up to her.

“Caleb Jones. He has an appointment,” March said.

“If you’d like to take a seat, Rod will be out in a moment.”

Caleb dropped onto a chair.
Do not have a panic attack.
He could feel his heart rate increasing, that choking sensation forming in his throat. He was breathing too fast and clenched his fists.

March wrapped his hand around one of Caleb’s and caressed his knuckles with his thumb. “Is there a tiger coming to eat you?” March whispered. “A snake about to bite you? Or an ordinary guy coming to talk to you? What’s your worst fear?”

“I have to answer?”

“Yep.”

“Snake.”

“There you go.”

“If this guy Rod comes out with a snake around his neck, a snake tattoo or snakeskin boots, or even mentions a snake, I’m leaving.”

“Breathe,” March said in his ear.

“Hi.”

They both spun toward the voice. It belonged to a small guy with a wide smile and curly blond hair. No snakes.

“Which of you is Caleb?”

Caleb tried to say “me” and failed.

March hauled him to his feet. “It’s him. I’m coming with him.”

They followed the guy down a corridor and into a treatment room.

Caleb tried to listen as Rod went over everything. All he wanted to do was bare his back, be told they couldn’t help and get out of there.

March helped when Caleb stripped to his waist—Caleb’s fingers wouldn’t work. Caleb stood with his back to the door, his chest aching and his pulse sliding out of control.

“Turn around,” March said.

“This won’t be anything I haven’t seen before,” Rod said. “We’ve had it all. Misspellings. Faces of people the wearer now hates. Names of ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends. Bad tattoos. Ugly ones. Sometimes good ones but no longer wanted.”

Caleb turned. There was no exclamation of disgust. He flinched when he felt Rod’s gloved fingers touch him.

“Okay,” Rod said. “We can fix this.”

“You can?” March asked.

“Yep. Black ink is easier to remove than color. It hasn’t been done professionally—at least I hope not—so the ink’s not as deep into the skin as it might have been. I don’t foresee any problems. I’d estimate seven sessions, but you should see a difference after just one.”