Page 44 of Cassian is Getting Out

Ruari beamed down at him. “One more drink, Cass.”

“You’ve had lots more drinks. You’ve had all of the drinks.” Cassian pulled his arm and Ruari swayed off the bar like a felled tree, catching himself on Cassian’s shoulder.

Geoff appeared at Ruari’s other side, and between them, Geoff taking the left, Cassian wedged under the right, they manoeuvred Ruari out onto Portobello Road.

The night air hit them. Ruari took a huge breath and started singing again.

“Holte Enders, in the sky!” His voice ricocheted off the terrace fronts. “We know what we are, we know what we are—”

“Ruari, it’s midnight.”

“Cass! Cass, listen, you’ve got to learn this.” Ruari slung his arm tighter around Cassian’s shoulders. “It goes, right, listen, we know what we are, Champions of Europe, we know what we are!”

Cassian tried. The words came out wrong and in the wrong order, but Ruari was laughing too hard to correct him, stumbling over his own feet while Geoff steered them both past a bollard.

“Champions of Europe,” Cassian attempted, and Ruari kissed the top of his head.

They reached Proving Ground with Ruari’s arm still draped across Cassian’s shoulders, singing the same four lines on a loop because they were the only ones Cassian had managed to learn. Geoff propped Ruari on the shopfront, saluted Cassian with two fingers, and disappeared towards the pub.

Cassian fished Ruari’s keys from his pocket, unlocked the door, and shouldered it open. Getting Ruari up the narrow stairs to his flat was a challenge, and by the time Cassian had deposited him on the bed, his own arms were shaking from the effort of steering sixteen stone of drunk alpha around a tight corner on the landing.

Ruari lay on his side, one arm flung across the pillow, still humming. His eyes were closed and his mouth curved into a smile so wide that Cassian stood in the doorway of the bedroom and just looked at him until the humming trailed off, and his breathing deepened into sleep.

He pulled Ruari’s trainers off. He found a blanket folded on the chair and spread it over him, tucking the edges around his shoulders. Then he sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark, feeling the pub’s singing still buzzing in him.

Chapter Seventeen

Cassian hadn’t seen Ruari in person for the last three days, and it had been his own idea to make himself suffer this way. It was a necessary sacrifice; he wanted to focus before his Functional Skills exams, and he couldn’t do that around Ruari, since they somehow always ended up naked together.

But the exams were done now, the results were in, and Cassian had passed every section. Sure, the maths had been close enough to make Colin wince when he saw the score, but a pass was a pass!

Ruari was restocking the display case when Cassian arrived. His movements were slow and mechanical, and the radio was off. Cassian had never been inside Proving Ground when it was this quiet.

“Ruari!” He crossed the shop floor in four strides and slapped his palms flat on the counter. “I passed my exams!”

Ruari’s hand moved a croissant from the tray to the shelf. He didn’t turn around to face Cassian.

“I passed all of it, Ruari. Maths and English and the science one, which I didn’t think I’d pass, but I still got a point above what I needed!” Cassian bounced on his toes. “Lysander called me this morning and shouted. He actually shouted his congratulations at me. And then Hamish came on, and he said they’re going to take me to Belgium to celebrate!”

Ruari slid the tray into the case and shut the glass door. His shoulders hadn’t shifted from the set they’d been in when Cassian arrived, locked high and tight.

“Hamish has got a shoot there. For a documentary about Belgian pigeon racing. Some of the pigeons cost more than houses!”

Ruari wiped the counter with a cloth, working in short, tight circles over a section that was already clean.

Cassian put his face right in Ruari’s sightline. Ruari would have to actively look away to avoid him.

“Ror, let’s have dinner with Hamish and Lysander when they’re in London!”

Ruari kept working. Maybe Ruari hadn’t heard him. The display case was glass, and sometimes glass did strange things with sound. Cassian had learned this from Ivar, who knew about acoustics and had told him about a church in Skalavik where you could whisper at one end and hear it at the other, which Ivar said the elders used to eavesdrop on confessions, and which Cassian found both clever and appalling.

“Ruari! I said we need to have dinner with Hamish and Lysander when they visit! I love them, Ruari! And you will too!” Cassian slapped the counter again, harder this time. The volume of his voice was clearly the issue. “Hamish is the most interesting person I know. He knows heaps about the weirdest things. And Lysander…” He pressed both palms flat on the glass and tipped forward until his stomach was resting on the edge of it. “Ruari, Lysander is everything.”

Ruari set the cloth down. He turned around slowly, and the face that met his was Ruari’s, with the light switched off behind it. His jaw was set hard, and his eyes had gone flat and grey, when usually they got all soft and pretty the moment they landed on him.

“What’ll you have, Cass?” he asked.

Cassian blinked at the unexpected question. “A Chelsea bun?”