Leon glanced over, one eyebrow arched. “Since when?”
I shrugged. “Off and on.” In fact I’d barely smoked a cigarette in my life until a month or two back, but I wasn’t about to say that in case he interpreted it as some dramatic lunge towards self-destruction, which it wasn’t. The head-injury thing had done something weird to my sense of smell; I kept picking up improbable scents (reek of disinfectant off my microwave pasta, sudden rush of my father’s cologne as I pulled the curtains closed for nighttime), and since the awful warnings about smoking always waxed ominous about how it destroyed your sense of smell, I figured it was worth a try. So far I had managed to hide it from Melissa, but I felt safe enough; she was hardly likely to ditch Hugo and come looking for me.
Leon passed me a cigarette and his lighter. Of us three, he was the one who had changed most. When we were little kids he had been sparky and mischievous, in constant motion, but somewhere around the time we hit secondary school that had changed. We were in different classes, but I knew he had taken a certain amount of hassle—small, slight, suspiciously delicate-featured and gentle, it had been inevitable; I’d done what I could, but when I caught a glimpse of him in the corridors he had always been hurrying along, head tucked down, shrunken and self-contained. He was still a couple of inches shorter than me, and he still had the elfin look and the ragged dark hair falling in one eye—although now the raggedness had clearly taken about an hour and a metric ton of hairwax—but I had trouble overlaying either of those memories on this slim guy slouching against the wall, jiggling one foot and looking cool enough to imply that your whole life was an exercise in missing out.
“Thanks,” I said, passing back the lighter.
Leon had relaxed enough to look at me properly—I had to stop myself turning away. “Sorry I didn’t ring you more,” he said abruptly. “When you got hurt.”
“You’re fine. You texted me.”
“Just, your mum said all you needed was peace and quiet and not to be hassled, so . . .” A one-shouldered shrug. “Still, though. I should have rung. Or come over.”
“Jesus, no. No need for that.” I couldn’t tell whether my voice sounded casual enough, too casual— “I just, all I wanted to do was chill out and, and take it easy. Like, shitty daytime telly in my pajamas, you know? I wouldn’t have been great company.”
“Still,” Leon said. “Sorry.”
“You’re here now, anyway,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about this any more. “Are you staying here?”
“Oh hell no. I’m at my parents’. God help me.” He wiggled the lighter into his pocket. “I’d actually way rather be here, except once I moved in, boom, I’d be the designated carer and I’d never be able to leave because then it would be all my fault if Hugo collapsed and died alone, and no thank you very much. I love Hugo, I want to spend time with him while I can and I’m happy to help out for a few weeks, but I can’t make any big long-term commitments. I’ve got a job”—Leon worked for some achingly hip indie record label, I couldn’t remember the name—“I’ve got a relationship, I’ve got a life. And I’d like to keep them.”
I didn’t much like the sound of this—I had no intention of being the designated carer, either—but then Leon had always been kind of a drama queen, and it sounded like someone had been leaning on him pretty hard. “Pressure?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes to heaven. “Don’t even get me started. My mother and my father. They’ve been tag-teaming me, like a pair of interrogators, every single day. First she’d call to go on about poor Hugo spending his last days alone and bring on the violins, then he’d call with a big pompous speech about how good Hugo’s always been to me and wouldn’t it make sense to give a little of that back, then she’d call to tell me how they have total faith in me to be able to handle things just for a little while, and after that I don’t know who would say what because that’s when I’d stop answering my phone. I’m hoping they’ll back off now that I’m at least in town, but I don’t know, they might step it up and hope that if they drive me mental enough I’ll move in here just to get away from them. Which I won’t.”
He was a little drunk, but not enough that most people would have noticed. “I’m staying here,” I said.
His face whipped around to me, eyebrows sky-high. “You?”
The incredulity—like I was a chimpanzee put in charge of a rocket launch—set my teeth on edge. “Yeah. Me. Is there a problem?”
After a moment Leon let his head fall back against the wall and started to laugh, up at the sky. “Oh. My. God,” he said. “This is beautiful. I can’t wait to see this.”
“What’s funny?”
“Our Toby, the angel of mercy, sacrificing himself to care for those in need—”
“For a couple of weeks. I’m not planning on being the designated carer either.” And when that turned the laugh into a dry, knowing snort: “What?”
“Surprise surprise.”
“What are you bitching at me for? You just said there’s no way you’ll move in even for—”
“Because once I was in I’d never get out. While you’ll just prance off, won’t you, the minute you’ve had enough—”
The cigarette and the booze and the whole fever-tinted afternoon were making me feel sick; I really wasn’t in the mood for this. “It’s not my fault if you don’t have the, the”—I was looking for cojones—“the balls to stand up to your parents—”
“—and we all know that won’t take long. I give you a week. Ten days, max.”
The snide flick in his voice, like I was some pampered prince who had never dealt with anything tougher than a hangover— If only he knew, Mr. Cool with his faux-meaningful leather bracelets and his carefree all-night-clubbing life, if he had the faintest clue— “What the fuck are you babbling about? You don’t think I’m able for it?”
I was at least semi-deliberately asking for trouble. Leon always did get defensive easily; the snap in my voice was the perfect way to turn him nasty, especially when he was already on edge. It wasn’t that I was aiming to get into a knock-down-drag-out fight on the terrace—although I could think of worse ways to spend the time; it sounded like someone inside had started singing—but I did, with a vicious, self-flagellating intensity, want Leon to lose his cool and tell me exactly what he thought about this new version of me.
He brought up his cigarette and took a long pull. “You’re not exactly at your best right now,” he said, on a sideways stream of smoke. “Are you?”
The rush of anger almost felt good. “What? I’m fine.”
A glance under his eyelids. “If you say so.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
I couldn’t tell how close I was to punching him, but he didn’t seem worried. One corner of his mouth curled upwards. “Oh, please. How many words have you said today? A dozen? How many bites did you eat in there, like two?”
I laughed, a startled yelp that echoed off the high walls. I had been expecting something about my walk, my inability to follow the thread of a conversation, the agonizing pauses as I fumbled for words: a deft, pitiless slice straight to the jugular that would leave me bloodied and reeling. In its place I had got a snippy little finger-wag about not being chatty enough and not eating my greens, and I was practically light-headed with relief.
“Today sucks,” I said, still laughing. “Like you said. I can’t be arsed making the effort to pretend everything’s great. If you can, away you go. I’ll watch.”
“Now that’s the Toby I know and love,” Leon said. There was an edge to his voice; he didn’t like being laughed at. “Leave the dirty work to everyone else.”