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“Oh no, you don’t, you slippery little bastard,” he muttered and slammed the door shut again. Tobermory took any chance he could to bolt and made a game of staying exactly one arm’s length out of reach while Liam spent an hour trying to coax him back inside, and Liam absolutely didn’t have time for the cat’s bullshit today.
He glared at Tobermory, Tobermory glared back, then Liam went down the hall to the kitchen and pointlessly opened the cutlery drawer just so it would look like he was doing something when Ambrose arrived.
It didn’t take Ambrose long to get to Liam’s floor. Sometimes people were a bit thrown by the lift, which had a cage you had to close yourself. The cage was one of the building’s original features. The lift itself, fortunately, had been updated since the Depression. A knock on the door heralded Ambrose’s arrival, and Liam went back to open it.
“Hi,” he said, then noticed he was holding a potato masher. He shoved it hastily behind his back.
“Hi.” Ambrose was wearing faded jeans and a worn T-shirt that might have been black once, but was now grey, and whatever logo it had ever had on it had almost vanished under way too many washes. His dark hair was tousled, and there were smudges under his eyes. He looked a little tired, but his hazel eyes were as bright as always.
“Come in,” Liam said, gesturing with his potato masher. “I was just, um…”
“Making a snack for the road? That’s what Irish people do, right? Eat potatoes?” Ambrose grinned and slipped into the flat. He dumped an overnight bag on the floor and padded curiously down the hall towards the kitchen and living area. “Wow. This place is amazing. Oooh! A cat!”
“Oh, no,” Liam said as Ambrose darted forward. “Don’t touch him! He’s?—”
“He’s what?” Ambrose asked, turning around. Tobermory was cradled in his arms, his eyes half-closed, and Liam thought he could hear him purring. Which was one of the signs of the apocalypse, probably. “What’s his name?”
“Tobermory,” Liam said.
“Oooh!” Ambrose scritched Tobermory under the chin. “Saki!”
“What?”
“The story by Saki,” Ambrose said. “About a cat called Tobermory that learns to talk and threatens to reveal everyone’s secrets.”
“Neve named him,” Liam said. “I think it was after the Womble.”
“That’s cool too,” Ambrose said cheerfully. He scritched Tobermory under the chin, and the cat writhed happily. Definitely a sign of the apocalypse, then. Ambrose wandered around the flat, stopping at the balcony doors. “Oh, fuck right off!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Liam hurried over, worried that the cat had shown his true arsehole nature, but instead he found Ambrose staring out at the harbour.
“You have fucking water views!”
“Oh!” Liam flushed. He genuinely sometimes forgot that not everyone had views of the harbour, or that other people had to have roommates and pay rent and eat ramen. He knew that it made him privileged, and he worried that his privilege automatically made him a bad person. It was usually about then that Kelly told him to pull his head out of his arse, that having money didn’t make him a bad person, but if he felt so guilty about it, he could pay for lunch, and also, she’d like a couple of bottles of Connelly wine from the cartons that his parents always dropped off when they came to visit. “Yeah. It’s, um, nice. You can see the bridge from the roof.” He sidled over to the sink and dumped the potato masher. “I’d offer to take you up there, but Bridget’s gonna be here any minute and she’s frankly terrifying if there’s even a hint of being late somewhere. If Orhan has to circle the block more than once, she’ll go ballistic.”
“Good to know,” Ambrose said, tapping the side of his nose with the hand not occupied with the cat. “I’ll make sure to dawdle this weekend.”
Right on cue, Liam’s phone buzzed.
“That’s her now,” he said, checking his screen. “Ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Ambrose said, and planted a kiss right on Tobermory’s nose before setting him down on the couch. “Let’s roll, boyfriend.”
And Liam’s heart absolutely did not skip a beat when Ambrose said that.
It was only a couple of hours to the Hunter Valley, but it felt like they spent that long getting out of Sydney traffic. Ambrose sat in the front with Orhan—“I get carsick otherwise!”—leaving Liam in the backseat with Bridget and Balian. Balian was fifteen months old, and the most relaxed baby Liam had ever met. He obviously got that from Orhan’s side of the family.
Bridget didn’t seem too put out by being relegated to the back. Ambrose seemed a little put out that she wasn’t put out, so Liam figured he was laying the groundwork early for being a dick, but more of a subtle dick than usual. Orhan gave him the side eye when he leaned forward and changed the playlist without asking, and Liam felt a twinge of second-hand embarrassment that he wasn’t sure could even be called that, since it rolled off Ambrose without any effect at all. But Orhan was way too nice to tell Ambrose to pull his head in, and even Bridget wasn’t crazy enough to insist someone prone to carsickness should sit in the back. Ambrose was going to have to up his game to get them to dislike him, and Liam wondered exactly what he had planned, and how excruciating this next couple of hours was going to be.
Except it wasn’t. Once Ambrose got his front seat and his music of choice, he settled in comfortably for the drive.
They were just passing through Cowan when Ambrose’s phone chimed.
“Sorry,” he said, and leaned towards the passenger window to answer it in a low tone. “Hi, Mum.” He listened for a moment. “No, I can’t this weekend. I have a thing. Yeah, rehearsing for the play.”
Bridget exchanged a curious look with Liam, and Liam wasn’t sure how to feel. Because of course Ambrose hadn’t told his mother he was dating people for money. Who would tell their mother that? But he was obviously lying to her, and it didn’t look good. And Liam probably should have felt better that it didn’t look good, because that was the whole point of Ambrose coming this weekend, except Liam didn’t think this was a part of Ambrose’s script. This was exactly what it appeared to be—a guy lying to his mother about being in a play, when Liam knew for a fact that Ambrose hadn’t been cast in anything at all, because Ambrose had told him so. Unless Ambrose had been lying to Liam? And Liam didn’t know why he would do that.
“No,” Ambrose said. “I don’t know where you put it. I didn’t take it, Mum. No, Isadora didn’t either. Yes, I’m sure. I’ll help you look next week, okay? Okay. Bye.” He ended the call and stared fixedly out the window.
