Unforgotten (Forgiven)

now, mainly because I’d spent all weekend locked in my room and using vodka as a substitute for prescription pain relief. And it had worked. Combined with a few days off the tools, I could move my shoulder without screaming or pounding my fist into concrete for a sick and welcome distraction. Winner. Still, I had no idea why Gus felt a sudden need to share his romantic history with me. I’d avoided him since Friday, and he’d been a weirdo all morning.
I caught up with him on top of the garage we were working on. Gus was laying felt with a pensive expression plastered on his lovely face, and I had no patience for that shit. I trampled across his hard work and crouched down. “Do you think I decked my brother or something?”
“What the—” Gus reeled back, wavering a moment before he steadied himself on the roof ledge behind him. “What are you doing?”
“Getting up in your face to ask you a question. It works better than talking in circles all day.”
“And better than silence, huh?”
“If you say so. Answer me.”
For the umpteenth time, Gus’s gaze slid to my mashed knuckles and back again. “What happened to your hand?”
“What do you think happened to it?”
“That’s not fair. I answered your question.”
“Actually, you didn’t.”
“Okay, fine. Did you mess your knuckles up fighting with Luke? Cos there’s no way you decked him. Your brother is mean.”
“You think I couldn’t take him?”
“I think it would get too messy to matter who won.”
He was probably right, but we were losing the thread of the conversation. “You’re missing the point.”
Gus sighed. “What is your point, man? Because I want to get this done and go home. I’m tired.”
He didn’t seem tired, but then he never did. I had two speeds: batshit and coma. But Gus was a machine, he just kept going and going and going, only stopping to eat enough food for ten blokes and not have an ounce of extra flesh on him.
Not that I’d checked.
Much.
Maybe it’s you that’s missing the point. “I’m trying to tell you I didn’t fuck my hand up fighting with Luke, because I know that’s what you think.”
“It’s not what I think.”
“Yes, it is.”
Silence. Gus stared at me, expression carefully blank. And I fucking hated it. Don’t dead-eye me. Show me how you really feel.
Why do you care how he feels?
I had no idea.
But I did care. I cared a lot. “I didn’t fight Luke. I went back to his house after you’d gone and got drunk with Mia for a bit. Then he came down and stared at me for a little while longer before I went home.”
“And drank yourself to sleep?”
“Something like that.”
“Doesn’t explain your fight knuckles.”
“So? If I didn’t fight Luke, why do you care what happened to them?”
More silence. I tried not to let Gus’s troubled gaze get under my skin, but man, it was hard. He was like a kicked Labrador when he wasn’t smiling, and it made me want to throw up. Or maybe that was the hangover. After three nights on the sauce, I pretty much wanted to die. “Look,” I said. “I didn’t fight anyone, okay? It was...part of something else and nothing to do with Luke. Please don’t make me explain it cos it’s really fucking stupid.”
Gus’s frown deepened. “I wouldn’t think it was stupid.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not that kind of arsehole.”
He wasn’t any kind of arsehole. Everyone round here knew that, even me. But I still didn’t want to confess the ridiculous ways I’d dealt with chronic shoulder pain since I’d smashed it up falling from, of all things, a garage roof, though I’d been out of my mind on mandy at the time, not grafting like an honest man.
I started to straighten up, then changed my mind. “Why didn’t you ask Luke?”
“Ask him what?”
“If we’d had a fight. You’re his gatekeeper, aren’t you?”
Gus nudged my feet, forcing me to move so he could relay the felt I’d kicked aside. His back was to me, and I was instantly so lost in his broad shoulders and rippling muscles I almost missed his response.
“Because I didn’t want him to know if you’d punched someone else.”
It turned out to be the longest day of my life. My hangover wore off mid-afternoon, taking with it the numbness I’d found at the bottom of a vodka bottle, and by the time we packed up for the day, I couldn’t move my arm without biting chunks out of my tongue.
Somehow Gus didn’t notice. Or maybe he was still ruminating over his assumption that I’d lost a fight to Luke, and my craptastic counter explanation as to why that was bullshit. Fucking-A, he was a patient dude. Sometimes I had to remind myself that he’d spent the majority of the last few years with Luke, and that even on my worst day, I’d never be as maddening as my brother. In the reticent stakes, at least. I was willing to bet Luke bought more cups of tea than me. That his wallet didn’t hold the grand total of thirty-seven pence to last him until whenever Daley Roofing paid out these days.
If I was even getting paid. If I was Luke, I’d have paid my wages directly to Gus to cover my rent and board. Who cared if I was in desperate need of some weed to ease this fucking pain?
“Are you falling asleep on me?”
I wish.
The unbidden—and definitely errant—thought brought me back to the present. I sat up in the passenger seat in the van. Apparently I’d missed the drive home. I glanced at Gus’s house. My temporary bedroom had become a sanctuary, but despite the earth-shattering throb in my shoulder, I was hungry, and I knew the fridge was bare. Gus ate a lot but never shopped, as if he expected food to fill his plate by magic. Or he spent all his time on Just Eat, which I guessed was better than the imagined life I’d created