“It's been … is it OK if I have a sleep?�? Cody's face was drawn, and his eyes haunted. He seemed to have aged twenty years since before all this had happened. Before Luigi had walked away from him, before the murderer had taken him. Before …
“Yeah, 'course. Wouldja like to have a shower first?�?
“Yeah.�?
Luigi found him a towel and a pair of Bonds trunks Jason had left there once. His own undies would have been too tight for Cody. Cody wasn't fat, though he was bigger than him, much more muscular, with big hands and feet, and taller, too. And he himself was so slim, like a skinny teenager. He wondered what it would be like to have been macho and muscled and on the footy team at school. Ah, well. No point wondering about what might have been and now never would be. What was his grandmother's saying, in her strong Calabrian dialect? Something about as useless as asking goats to be wise. He was what he was, and it was what he had now which mattered.
When Cody came out of the shower, Luigi had made tea and toast and had a jar of peanut butter and his grandmother's homemade plum jam on the table in the kitchen.
“I thought you always wore thongs, Lou?�? asked Cody as he rearranged his package in the trunks before he sat down.
“I do, usually. But they would have been too small for you.�?
“Yeah, prolly.�? And Cody gave him the first smile he'd seen. “Skinny little bugger!�?
“Hey! I'm Mr Muscles!�?
“Yeah, right. So I suppose they belong to—who was it?—Jason? Keith?�?
“Jason. He's your size.�? When Cody was silent, Luigi added, “They're clean. I washed them.�?
Cody felt how odd it was that he was in the home of the man he loved wearing the man's other lover's undies. He didn't think he could cope with all the ramifications of that. Not yet, not now. But it twisted something inside him, painfully.
Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter
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