Page 73 of In Too Deep

“Ah, playboy.” Roman grinned, then nodded towards the bar. “He keeps looking, if you’re after some.”

Jake glanced back at the bar as the chatter behind him swelled again, swallowed by football, shouting, and someone starting up on another story involving a pissed-up ex-wife and a caravan in Skegness. Brodie was behind the bar stacking glasses, stretching up to the shelf above his head. His vest rode with the movement, exposing the lean strip of his stomach and the sharp jut of his hipbones before dropping again. Still the same smug prick Jake remembered. Still attractive, if you liked that sort of thing.

And Jake had.

Once.

The memory came with the thought. Uninvited. Brodie beneath him. Clothes somewhere on the floor. That narrow body Jake had known considerably more intimately than anyone sitting around this table needed to hear about.

He then frowned into his pint.

Something snagged.

A fragment. A detail. Something he’d seen before and never had a single reason to think about again.

He stood.

Roman’s gaze followed him upwards. “You getting some, Whitton?”

Jake said nothing, then crossed the pub before he could think himself out of it, boots thudding over warped floorboards and headed straight for the bar, where Brodie finished shoving the last glass onto the shelf.

Jake slapped a palm on the counter. “Why’d you do that?”

Brodie dropped back onto his heels and looked at him. The ease that had once existed between them had been dead for months. Buried beneath Jake dumping him, Emily Fisher’s disappearance, Brodie trying to worm his way back in with lies piled on top of lies, and Harrison tearing through his past with that cold, relentless stare of his. Whatever they’d once been—quick hook-ups, filthy flirting in pub toilets, drunken hands under tables—had curdled into this. Sharp-edged and ugly.

“Aren’t you supposed to be all out and proud?”

Jake planted both hands on the sticky wood and leaned across the bar. “Hoping they’d kick off, were you? Hoping someone’d cave my head in so I’d get thrown off site?”

Brodie pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled as if he didn’t care. “Couldn’t give a shit what happens to you.”

Jake laughed under his breath. Bitter. He knew he should walk away. Knew whatever strange memory had snagged in him couldn’t be worth speaking to this prick for. And he nearly did. Then he caught sight of the corner of the pub near the jukebox and a different memory punched clean through him. Robyn standing there. Waving at him while he signed some stupid CD sleeve after a gig. Grinning so hard her cheeks hurt. Alive. Loud. Here. Then her walking out of those doors and never coming back.

So he turned back to the bar and drummed his nails on the wood, trying to work out how the hell to ask what he needed without sounding completely fucking deranged. Nor letting on that he knew anything he shouldn’t.

He nodded at Brodie. “Your tattoo…”

Brodie peered over his phone.

“The one down there.” Jake gestured vaguely towards Brodie’s hip. “Is that a heart?”

Brodie narrowed his eyes. “Fuck off, Whitton.”

“It is, int it?”

Brodie laughed. “You weren’t this interested in my body when you were inside it.”

Jake ignored that. “It’s a black heart, aye?”

“Jesus. You miss it that much?”

Jake stared him down. Because he was almost certain now. Not identical maybe. But close enough. Same placement. Same shape. Almost exactly where Harrison had absentmindedly traced along Jake’s hip in bed that morning. Could be coincidence. Probably was.

But something about it hooked under Jake’s skin and refused to let go.

Or maybe he was doing what he always did. Digging obsessively for answers in places they didn’t belong.

“It’s a heart, right?” he asked again. “Stitching through it?”