Adam heard the chime of a text and reached over to the bedside table for his phone.
May be able to get away for a quick drink later if you’re free. Sxx
He smiled. She was desperate for him, and why not? Women were stupid. They liked to dream, and a bit of flattery and flirtation went a long way in blinding them to reality. He put the phone down and lay staring up at the cracked ceiling. He had set the alarm for eight a.m. but by seven he was already fully awake, his mind buzzing. Who was the man upstairs in Kit’s room? Having failed to find out his real name, he had decided to call him ‘Gunner’, after the Dolph Lundgren character in The Expendables. It suited him better than Jonny, at any rate. Whoever he was, he seemed to know the layout of the house pretty well, all the funny little places Kit used to put things, even the drawer where he hid the key to his cellar in case the cleaning lady found it. Had he really been Kit’s lover? Anything was possible with Kit, but it was difficult to imagine the two of them together. The thought was also disgusting.
Adam had seen Kit naked more times than he cared to remember and it wasn’t a pleasant sight, even if he’d been into that sort of thing. Kit would walk around the house with nothing on, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Amused at Adam’s discomfort, playfully flaunting himself as though it must be a turn-on, he called Adam an uptight prude for refusing to do the same. It had been extremely irritating. He wasn’t a prude at all. He looked after himself and was one of the small minority of people who looked better naked than clothed. But by keeping his clothes on, or at least some of them, he kept hold of the power with Kit. There was then always the tantalising promise of more, if Kit behaved himself. It was a precarious dance of the seven veils and he knew he wouldn’t be able to string things out for long. Luckily, all he needed was a couple of weeks to get things straight and Kit was rarely together enough to pose much of a physical threat. His memory wasn’t that accurate either.
Adam flexed his shoulders and stretched out on the narrow divan. His hands hit the wall behind, his feet hanging over the end of the bed. He wasn’t particularly tall, but there was barely space to swing a cat. The rest of the room was equally uncomfortable. Just a chair and a chest of drawers, a tiny shaving mirror on the wall and a moth-eaten Turkish rug partly covering the old floorboards. The only advantage was that the room was on the ground floor. If Gunner went out, he would hear. The door had no lock and he had put the chair up against it to secure it. Even so, he had been unable to relax into sleep for more than a few hours at a time, knowing that Gunner was upstairs in Kit’s room, sleeping off a skinful of Bells, judging by the empty bottle left on the counter that Adam had found when he went down to the kitchen for a glass of water in the middle of the night.
He was still reeling from what had happened the previous night: Gunner’s sudden appearance in the house, being forced to move his things out of Kit’s room. He cursed himself for having been so compliant, but the last thing he needed was confrontation and questions being asked. Still, he hadn’t been thinking straight, and in his fury he had left one of his bags behind in Kit’s room. He made a quick mental list of the contents and reassured himself that the things in it weren’t important, just some clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes. There was nothing that he need worry about, should Gunner choose to have a little rummage around. But he hated the idea of him doing it, of his possessions sitting up there all night, made somehow vulnerable, with this arrogant stranger. He had become so upset about it that eventually, at about midnight, he had gone upstairs to ask for the bag. He had heard the sound of some sort of foul heavy metal coming from inside, but when he knocked Gunner had bellowed at him through the door, telling him to bugger off.
He assumed that the door was locked, although he hadn’t felt like trying it. Kit’s bedroom was the only room in the whole house with a lock. Kit had always locked himself in at night in case burglars or unnamed others broke in while he was asleep. Kit suffered from night fears, often talking in his sleep, sometimes even calling out. He would wake up sweating and have a headache the whole of the next day. Adam had never quite understood what it was all about; nothing like what Kit described had ever actually happened, as far as he was aware. But like so much about Kit, it wasn’t rational. However, it made no difference whether Gunner had locked the bedroom door or not – Adam had no intention of going in while he was inside. What stupid drug or alcohol-fuelled whim had caused Kit to allow such a man into his life? More importantly, his presence in the house threatened to ruin everything.