FULL NOVELXO Faking with Benefits : Chapter 43
I lift one of his trembling hands. He stares at it for a moment, then threads our fingers together. I lean forward, pressing my lips to his. It’s a slow, gentle kiss, with none of our usual fire, but heat still simmers through me. When I finally pull back, blood is pumping through my body, and Josh looks vaguely more alive.
I trail my lips over his cheek, then look up, finally noticing the corkboard he has pinned over his desk. It’s covered in small cards and slips of paper, and it takes me a second to realise what I’m looking at.
“The infamous wall of wedding invites.” I reach out, brushing one of the embossed cards with my fingertip. “I thought Zack was joking about this.”
He tilts his head against mine. “Is it weird?”
I shake my head, running my eyes over the collage. There must be over a hundred invitations here. Cream, pink, white. Some are handwritten. Some are embossed. Some have photographs, or floral details, or watercolours. There’s so many that they’re overlapping each other, pinned two or even three pages deep. It’s incredible. “Do you go to all of the weddings?”
He shakes his head. “We did at the beginning. Now there’s too many. We make them if we can, though.” He points at a line of photographs at the bottom of the corkboard. I lean in to get a better look.
They’re wedding photos. In each picture, all three boys are standing in suits and ties, with their arms around an assortment of beaming brides and grooms. In a couple, Zack is wearing a tartan kilt, which is doing fun things to my insides.
“That’s so cute,” I whisper, glancing across the line. My eyes automatically focus on one photograph, tacked right at the end. Unlike all of the others, it’s not a wedding photo; it’s a black-and-white headshot of a middle-aged woman, smiling brightly at the camera. I immediately recognise the silky black hair and intensely dark eyes. “Is that your mum?” I point. Josh nods slowly. I examine her. “She’s lovely.”
“She was.”
I glance across at him. “She’s dead?”
“When I was nineteen. Car crash.”
I look down, leaning back against his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
His voice is robotic. “I didn’t tell you.”
I squeeze his elbow, my heart thudding. God, no wonder he’s locked away in here, having a breakdown. The rest of England is spending time with their mums today, and he’s stuck here with no one.
I try to think of the right thing to say. “She’d be so proud of you, for everything you’ve done.”
He sighs, his breath rushing over my cheek. “I hope so. She was the reason I came up with the idea for the podcast in the first place.”
“Did she like advice shows?”
He shakes his head. “Her and my dad’s relationship was… bad.” He stares at the photo, his face blank. “He met her in Vietnam, on a month-long business trip. She was a maid at the hotel he was staying at. Working fourteen hours a day for pennies, while rich men spent ten times her daily salary on one drink in the hotel bar. She and my dad had a fling, and then he brought her back to England and married her.” His mouth twists. “My grandparents thought it was so romantic. He’d met this pretty, poverty-stricken foreigner and dragged her out of the gutter. Like a Cinderella story.”
I find his hand and hold it. “But it wasn’t.”
He snorts. “My mum used to say that he picked her because he liked the way she cleaned his hotel toilet. He didn’t want a wife; he wanted a silent, beautiful maid who’d share his bed, have his kid, and never ask anything of him. He was always complaining about how Western women were too ‘modern’, and I guess she was his solution.”
“They fought?” I ask, grazing my lips down his temple.
His eyelashes flicker as I kiss his brow bone. “No. It would have been better if they had. Instead, my dad just… ignored her. Blanked her completely.” He takes a sharp breath. His voice is level, but I can feel the energy thrumming through him. “It tore my mum to bits. She was convinced she could make him love her. She’d spend all day cleaning. Making him these massive meals. She’d cut flowers for the dinner table, set out all the nice china, and be waiting by the front door to kiss him when he got home from work. And he’d step inside the house, grunt at her, and take his dinner to his office. Every single day.” He touches the ends of my hair.
“That’s horrible,” I murmur.
He looks down, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “When I got older, I realised how badly he was treating her. I used to beg her to divorce him. But she never understood. And over the years, it’s like she just faded away. By the time she died, she was just… a shell.” He takes a deep breath. “That’s why I do the show. I want to help people like her. I want to help them see that they deserve better.”
“You’re so much more than you let other people see, Josh.”
His hand flexes on my hip. He dips his head, and for a second, I see a flash of the emotion hidden behind his carefully blank expression. Then he clears his throat, and it goes away again. “You can stay, if you like,” he murmurs, tugging at the belt of my coat. “I can’t promise I’ll be very good company, but—” he pushes aside one of the panels of my coat, and stares at the corset I’m wearing underneath. I wait patiently as he visibly struggles to speak.
“You’re not wearing any clothes,” he manages eventually.
“Yes. And I see now that it’s not really appropriate for the situation.”
His mouth turns up slightly, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “You came here wanting to have fun. Sorry.” He hooks his finger under the straps. “Sorry Zack’s not here. He’d have taken this off you before you’d even made it through the front door.”
I push his hand off me, offended. “Okay. Can you not act like I’m a total bitch?”
He blinks. “What?”
“You don’t have to apologise for grieving. For God’s sake, you’re my friend. I don’t just want to sleep with you.”
His gaze flickers. “What do you want?”
I run my fingers through his thick hair. “I want you. I want to see you happy, and proud, and sad, and tired. I want your low moments, as well as your high ones. I want all of you. I want as much of you as you’ll give me.”
He looks up at me, his eyes dark, and I’m shocked by the raw grief in his face. Josh seems so cold and aloof, but he has so much going on under the surface.
And I want to help him. I have to.
“I want a date,” I decide.
“What?”
“I’m your girlfriend, right? You guys have taken me on all these dates. I haven’t gotten to pick anything. I want a date.”
“Right now?” He looks exhausted. Like all of his batteries have run out of juice. It hurts my heart to see him like this. “Can I get a rain check?”
“Sorry, it’s not raining,” I tell him. “Don’t worry. It’ll just be at my flat. I’ll order pizza and we’ll watch a movie. Whatever. It’ll be chill.”
He frowns. “I don’t think I’m in the right mindframe to be romantic. I’ll probably just bring the mood down.” His hand splays over my back. “I’m sorry.”
“Jesus, Josh.” I lean forward, pressing my forehead to his. “I don’t want you to be romantic. I don’t want you to be anything.” His breath hitches as I press a kiss under his jaw. “You don’t have to do anything. Or say anything. You can just sleep in my bed, if you want. Drink all my wine. Play Snake on your phone and ignore me. We don’t have to exchange one word. I literally don’t care.” I take his hand, interlacing our fingers. “Just come, please.”
His brow is furrowed as I help him to his feet. “Why?”
“I don’t want you to be alone right now.”
He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He lets me tug him out of his bedroom and across the hall into my flat. Next to his dark, messy lair, my living room is like some kind of pink-papered paradise, clean and warm and full of light. I shove him onto the sofa, hand him the TV remote, and go to the fridge to get us both a drink.
When I get back with two bottles of beer, he hasn’t moved. He’s staring blankly at the wall opposite, his jaw working. I can practically feel the sharp fragments of his grief splintering through the quiet room.
“Josh,” I say quietly.
He looks up at me. His eyes are dry, but he’s breathing hard.
I plop onto the sofa next to him. “Lie down.” When he doesn’t move, I push him down, curling against his broad chest. His arms wrap around me automatically, and he buries his face in my hair, breathing me in. For a while, we just lie together in the quiet, dim room. Eventually, he falls asleep, his body finally relaxing underneath mine. It’s way too early for me to sleep, but I just arrange him a bit more comfortably, watching over him as the sun sets outside the window. My heart feels like it’s bursting.