AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Thanks.”
Jack slid an arm around Harry’s waist. “He was a good bloke.”
“He was an institution,” Tristan announced, flipping his hair back and displaying the long line of his throat. He tugged the edges of his satiny robe together. “I’ll be in bed.”
Then he sauntered up the stairs, and Leo definitely didn’t stare at his arse. Definitely not.
“Do you want us to show you around?” Harry asked, nose wrinkling again. “Or do you just want to, um, sort of wander on your own?”
Leo tore his gaze away from Tristan’s receding arse. “If you could show me around, that would be great.”
It was weird going through the house and looking at other people’s things, especially when the other people were standing right there with him and obviously trying to pretend that any slight sign of actually living there was totally out of character, and normally the place looked like a page spread out of House Beautiful, which was never going to happen with this house. This was definitely House Ugly. Hell, Leo wasn’t even sure he should have been charging anyone rent to live here, and not just morally, but legally. When Harry explained how they had to turn the living room light off to get the oven to work, Leo’s stomach dropped.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Are you serious? That’s—what even—oh, Jesus. I’m going to call an electrician out straight away.”
Harry’s eyebrows shot up. “On a weekend?”
“Yes!” Leo didn’t want to electrocute his tenants just to avoid paying more for a weekend callout.
The rest of the inspection went pretty well, except for the part where Harry flung Tristan’s door open and they all discovered Tristan crashed out, face down on his bed, his sheet pulled down low enough to expose the crack of his naked arse.
“Um,” Harry said, and pulled the door shut again. “Sorry. He works late hours?”
The way he ended on an upward inflection made it sound like a lie. But Leo, who had a pretty damn good idea of exactly what Tristan’s work entailed, knew it wasn’t.
They headed back down the creaking, warped stairs to the kitchen.
“Do you want a cuppa?” Jack asked. “We probably should have offered you one at the start.”
“That’d be great, thank you.”
Harry sat down with him at the small kitchen table and set a Milo tin in front of him. “Nobody’s collected our rent in a while, so um, here it is.” He pried the tin open with a battered teaspoon and extracted a bundle of notes. “Jack, did Tris put back the fifty he borrowed the other day to go to the bottlo?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, it’s all there then,” Harry said, and slid the money across the table to Leo.
“I…I can’t take your rent money,” Leo said.
Harry paled. “Are you evicting us?”
“No! I just, I can’t charge you for living here. I think it’s probably illegal. This place is a dump, and it’s not liveable!”
Harry’s wide-eyed gaze drifted around the kitchen before it landed back on Leo. “It’s liveable! We already live here!”
Leo made the mistake of looking to Jack.
“We can’t afford rent anywhere else,” Jack said. “I mean, the place is a dump, but have you seen rental prices lately?”
“I’m not kicking you out!” Leo said. “I just—this place might kill you! I’m pretty sure it needs to be basically gutted and started all over again.”
Jack and Harry exchanged a worried look.
“I’ve never been a landlord before,” Leo said. “And I don’t want to be a slumlord! Sorry, but this is all harder than I thought it would be, and I shouldn’t be dumping that on you guys. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of money to get this place up to code, is all I mean. I’ll start by getting the electrician here as soon as possible, but it needs a proper inspection.”
Harry and Jack didn’t look reassured, and who could blame them? Fixing this place up would probably cost tens of thousands of dollars that Leo didn’t have, if not even more than that, and in all likelihood the only way he could recoup those costs would be selling it when it was done. And nobody was going to buy a million-dollar home—because fuck Sydney real estate prices, seriously—then let three guys live in it for a Milo tin’s worth of rent money.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to sell. Maybe once he untangled all of Uncle Jimmy’s finances, he’d find a way to repair the house and keep it. But at the same time, he had to be realistic. There was every possibility the figures wouldn’t work out and selling would be the only option. He wasn’t a charity, after all.
