Page 40 of Bare
The words hit bone. Neil pressed his palms to his face. Held them there. Breathed.
He dropped them. Looked at Rory.
‘My parents have never asked how I was doing,’ he said. ‘Never once since Gemma.’ He looked at his wine. ‘My mother asks about Freddie. About the school. About whether I've had the boiler serviced. She asks about everything except...’ He stopped. ‘You know what she doesn't ask.’
‘Yeah,’ Rory said. ‘I know.’
‘And your dad?’
‘My father doesn't do questions. He makes statements. Children need stability. This family doesn't make a fuss.’ He paused. ‘He said that at my grandmother's funeral. She was being lowered into the ground and he told my mother not to cry because the neighbours were watching.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah.’
‘My family... Kieran doesn't remember the worst of it. He was too young. I remember all of it.’
‘Is that why you took him?’
‘That's why I couldn't not take him.’ He paused. ‘I've never had a relationship last more than a few months. I can. That's the problem. Every time it starts to matter, I think: what happens when it falls apart? What happens to Kieran? What happens to the stability I'm killing myself to build?’
He stopped. Picked up his wine. Put it down untouched. His hand wasn't steady.
‘Sorry. I don't usually...’ He gestured at the air between them. The sentence died. He ran both hands through his hair and the gesture was too fast, too rough.
‘So we're both terrified.’
‘Apparently.’
‘Brilliant.’
A ghost of a smile. The real one.
‘We're a right pair,’ Rory said.
Neil almost laughed but didn't. But the corner of his lip tightened, and the movement cost him less than he'd expected.
Rory reached across the sofa and took Neil's hand, deliberately, lacing their fingers together.
Neil looked at their joined hands. Rory's paint-stained, the serpent visible at the wrist. His own clean, the knuckles that had been white from clenching now releasing, one by one.
He didn't pull away.
They sat like that for a long time. The rain eased. The light shifted to darker grey. The Schiele book lay on the floor, open to a body that refused to be anything other than what it was.
Rory got up to close the curtains.
That was it. That was the thing.
He'd stood, and Neil had watched him cross the room, and felt the sentence forming in his chest before he understood it.
Stay. Don't go yet.
He thought it, he didn't say it. But his body stood too, and his body followed, and now they were both in the narrow hallwaybetween the living room and the studio, Rory two steps ahead, half turned with a question in his mouth that never made it out because Neil caught his wrist.
The serpent moved under Neil's thumb. The tattoo at the pulse point, the one he'd touched a hundred times in the dark and never once by daylight.
‘Neil...’
