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“That’s them,” Jack agreed wryly. “Pasta for lunch?” he asked, deftly changing the subject. Harry took the hint.
“Sounds good. If I eat something with plenty of garlic, I can be really offensive at dinner with Tracy tonight. She wants unwashed and unemployable, so it fits right in.”
Jack’s laugh was rich and warm, the sound of it settling over Harry and taking up residence somewhere in his chest, like a small furry animal making itself at home. Not something creepy like a rat, though. More like a kitten. And possibly he meant a kitten curling up on his chest, not in his actual chest cavity. It made him warm and fuzzy, was his point, and Harry liked it.
He liked it a lot.
Chapter Six
It’s not a date, Jack reminded himself for the fifth time. Just because Harry had said “it’s a date” didn’t make it a date, any more than Jack saying, “It’s a Porsche,” made his shitty ute anything other than a shitty ute.
As far as Jack knew, Harry didn’t even like guys. Jack wasn’t sure what his deal was, but Harry was a cutie, so Jack could only assume that if he wanted to go out, he’d have no trouble finding someone. Ergo, Harry didn’t date because he wasn’t interested.
Ergo. Jack rolled his eyes at his own bullshit and dragged his attention back to the menu in front of him. It was the same as it always was, and he knew he’d order the fettuccine just like he did every other time, but it was a good excuse not to stare at Harry’s messy hair and his bright smile, and at least it stopped him blurting out something embarrassing like, “Go out with me?”
He scanned the dessert section, and he frowned. Maybe it was just because he was aware of it, but did everything have strawberries on it now? Did that mean the kitchen was awash with punnets of potentially life-threatening fruit? He signalled their waitress over and she gave him a bright smile. “Ready to order?” She held her pen over her pad expectantly.
“Um. Sorry, no. But I wanted to make sure the kitchen knows that my—” he bit back the word date “—friend is allergic to strawberries.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“No,” Jack said intently. “I mean deathly allergic. It could legitimately kill him.”
She nodded. “I’ll make certain they know.”
“Thanks. Um. I’ll have the fettucine carbonara and a Coke,” Jack said, because he wasn’t going to be a dick and not order after he’d called her over.
It occurred to him then that he hadn’t asked if Harry was ready but when he glanced across the table, Harry was wearing a pleased smile, like he appreciated Jack thinking of him or something. Which wasn’t why Jack had done it—he’d done it because he never again wanted to see Harry look half-dead like he had that day at the café—but it still gave him a warm feeling inside.
Harry’s gaze skittered away to the menu. “I’ll have the same, thanks.”
The waitress took their menus and left.
“Sometimes I have trouble remembering that I’m meant to be an arsehole on my dates, then I’m polite to the waiter and I have to claw my dickhead status back by calling them serfs or plebs once they’ve walked away,” Harry confessed, and Jack couldn’t help but laugh. He still had trouble picturing Harry—sweet, slightly clueless Harry who spent his Friday nights playing with poster paint and making animal masks—as a professional arsehole, but from the stories he’d heard from his parents about Harry’s date with Mia, he apparently pulled it off.
Still, it was entertaining to imagine Harry being accidentally pleasant. “You can be nice to me and get it out of your system before tonight,” he teased.
Harry gasped dramatically. “I’m always nice to you! Even after you almost?—”
Jack held up a hand. “Just—don’t, okay?” It might have been a month, but Harry’s hospitalization was still too fresh in Jack’s mind to be funny. He wasn’t sure when he’d be able to laugh about it.
Never, maybe.
Harry must have read something of that in his face, because he nodded. “Sorry. I’ll stop winding you up about it.”
“Thanks.” Jack let out a relieved breath and the tight twist of unease in his gut unclenched. “It’s just, I still feel a bit shit about it, you know?” Maybe it was his upbringing, but Jack had a tendency to hold onto guilt with all the determination of a cat hanging from a screen door.
Harry shrugged easily. “We’ve all done dumb things. I mean, I dyed my hair blond once.”
Jack gaped at him, open-mouthed. “You did not! That would have been?—”
Harry grinned. “Yeah, it was fucking awful. And I was too broke to get it fixed, so I ended up wearing a hat for a month and then getting a short back and sides. Ambrose took one look and told me that, as my friend, he forbade me from attempting do-it-yourself haircare ever again.”
They were interrupted by their meals arriving, and Jack, who’d skipped breakfast, attacked his pasta with vigour. He let himself get lost in the creamy goodness of the sauce and was about three bites in when a tiny sound made him look up. Harry was staring at him, mouth slightly open. Jack raised his eyebrows in a silent query and Harry cleared his throat, cheeks going inexplicably pink. “You have—” He pointed wordlessly to the corner of his own plush lips, in the universal signal for ‘you have shit on your face,’ and Jack swiped across his bottom lip with his tongue, catching a glob of creamy sauce.
“Is it gone?” he asked, dabbing at his chin with a paper napkin just to be sure.
“Yeah,” Harry said, ducking his head and starting his own meal. He took a bite and let out a moan that wouldn’t have been amiss in a porn video.
