Florian dragged me by the wrist into my bedroom, stripping me down to my underwear before I had a chance to further question his sanity, given that for some crazy reason this gorgeous man had decided he wanted to spend his night with—oomph. I found myself flat on my back and straddled.

  Still holding my wrists, Florian arranged them above my head. “Leave those there. I’m going to explore.”

  He swirled a finger through my chest hair, rocking forwards so that his dick brushed against mine. Molten silver flooded my senses, leaving me gasping for air.

  “I have a type, Charles,” he murmured. “Of the male variety, obviously.”

  “What?” Thanks to a combination of drowning in silver and the rocking, I was struggling to locate the part of my brain housing my French language skills. “Older men with mental health issues? That’s… um… quite niche.”

  He waved me off with a grin. “Paf, we all have a few mental health issues. Ups and downs. Forget about them for a while.”

  Mine were a tad more than the average ups and downs, and if he truly wanted to spend the night with me then, in a few hours from now, there was every chance he’d discover the full extent of them for himself. But I let it pass, especially as his finger and thumb had homed in on one of my nipples and were pulling and pinching at the nub. Fuck, it felt unbelievable.

  “Do that again.”

  “What, this?” He scratched across the other nipple, then did them both at the same time. I arched into him with a groan.

  “What type am I, then?” I managed.

  “The type who is, oh so straight on the outside, with your expensive cashmere sweaters and your brown leather loafers. And your cute sensible reading glasses that you protect in a plastic case, and your sensible haircut that you have neatly trimmed every eight weeks.”

  Green wafted happily above our heads and I let out a burst of laughter. “That is a very diplomatic way of describing someone as bland.”

  Ignoring me, he carried on. “But I reckon if I loosen you up and get you to drop that uptight businessman act, then you’re also the type who will be insatiable once you get going, Charles.”

  Oh Christ.

  With a quick dimpled grin, he tugged on my nipples again. Scorching silver flames framed his handsome face. That purring voice, that rolling accent. The way my name slithered out of his mouth, the way his tongue caressed and lengthened the consonants. And the lascivious looks he shot me through his lashes—I needed to capture them on paper—would have made a paid escort blush. “Am I right or am I right?”

  His groin rocked against mine again as nibbling teeth replaced cool fingers. His bare dick under that towel caressed mine through my underwear; I was so hard for him it was beginning to hurt. For a guy who had struggled to maintain an erection over the preceding few months, twice in one day was some going. “Erm… yes, maybe?” was the best I could come up with. Privately I thought insatiable was stretching it a little. My hibernating libido might take a little while to wake up. “I haven’t, what I mean is, I can’t… I… what I’m trying to say is what with being an… um… uptight businessman, that sex has been low down a list of my priorities over the last ten years and only with women and so… I… am probably… um… not particularly good at it.”

  Florian’s lips and teeth were turning me inside out merely from affording more attention to my left nipple than it had enjoyed in the preceding thirty-nine years, while one of his hands tracked down to my groin, peeling away my boxers for the second time this evening.

  “See?” he murmured, running a finger through the wetness pooling on my lower belly. “We’re halfway there already.”

  He sucked my pre-cum off his finger before sliding that same wet finger into the corner of my mouth and running it across my bottom lip. Another pulse of pre-cum dripped onto my belly as I tasted myself. Dialling up the heat a notch, keeping me on a low simmer, he did it again. A guttural sound escaped my throat.

  He let the towel fall with a flourish and rose to his knees, trailing the tips of his fingers up the inside of his thigh. His dick was long, the skin around it paler than the rest of his body. He was groomed too, a man used to showing himself off, knowing he was damn near perfection. He gave himself a languid stroke, from the thick root to the glistening swollen tip, and I decided I didn’t care where he wanted me to keep my bloody hands because I wanted them on him, specifically on that part of him.

  I caught him in my fist, taking him by surprise. The expression in his eyes turned restless as my palm curved around satiny skin. He leaned back, letting me explore, letting me find a rhythm, letting my thumb dip into the sweet slipperiness of his slit. My own shaft had found the divide of his arse, and with my other hand at his hip, I pushed up along the crease.

  “You’re good, Charles, you know that? I’m not going to last.”

  I reached to cup a hand around his neck. “Don’t come yet. I need you down here, I need to kiss you.”

  As the hard surfaces of his body stretched out over mine, I lost myself in the slide of tongue on tongue, matching the slide of his slick cock against mine. My skilful lover took over; his confident hand surrounded us both as we rocked together, silk on silk, enclosed by his work-roughened skin. His hot panting breath swallowed my moans, my insides turned liquid. Like mercury shooting up a thermometer, my orgasm gathered pace, unstoppable. Every thrust against him brought me closer. I closed my eyes, dazzled by a host of crystal fireworks raining down from above, a myriad of silver shards, spearing my parched green desert lands. Florian, my silvery man, made a needy sound.

  “Are you there, mon chéri? Are you there?”

  His voice tipped me over, freefalling into the void. “Christ, yes, yes.”

  “Then come for me, Charles. Like that, mon chéri, oh yes.”

  “Ça va, Charles?” Are you okay?

  He spooned me afterward, tucking me into him, uncaring that we were sweaty and covered in spunk, knowing it was everything I needed. An indescribable colour wheel of emotions hit me, all at once, and for a moment I had a dreadful feeling I would burst into tears. His lips traced a soothing path on the back of my neck, as if he sensed it.

  “I’m… yes, thank you.”

  God, so formal. As though he’d passed me the sugar bowl across the breakfast table.

  He gave a soft laugh. “Why silver, Charles? Why, when you look at me, do you see silver?”

  Because the stars were the brightest constellations in the sky? How much more did I want to scare him away?

  “I don’t know,” I replied instead. “I don’t choose the colours; I think they choose me. For instance, I see anxiety and stress as a glaring orange, I always have done. Disappointment is brown. Red is anger, of course, and black is… well, everything you would expect. I experience a deep navy blue when I’m working, and my mother was a pale yellow—she still is. I could go on.”

  I sensed him digesting my words, his silver dimming, even as it lapped against my green. Then he chuckled against my skin.

  “What colour is the sky?

  “Blue, you idiot.”

  “Wednesdays?”

  “Murky, all the days of the week are murky. I don’t really notice them.”

  “And is winter a brilliant white?”

  “No, luminous pink, with yellow spots.”

  Sharp teeth nibbled the back of my neck. “Putain, Charles, I’m asking very serious questions here! Is Christmas strings of sparkling fairy lights stretching across your mind?”

  I huffed a sleepy laugh, imagining it. Imagining waking on Christmas Day next to someone like Florian, instead of alone. Wrapped up in his silver, more radiant than any twinkly artificial incandescent glow. “Of course,” I answered. “Why wouldn’t it be? They even make tinkling bell sounds too.”

  “Mon dieu, that’s beyond cute.” He rolled me onto my back and planted a smacker on my mouth. “You’re beyond cute. And funny and sexy and like no one I’ve ever met before. And I’m here for all of it. Just so you know.”

  CHAPTER 16

  FLORIAN

  I woke to a sound that would stay with me forever, maybe even haunt my own dreams. A low, despairing keening; at first, I wondered if an animal—a fox or a cat—had got itself trapped in the garden, tangled up in some twine, or left for dead by a bigger creature. And because your mind plays tricks at three a.m., especially in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house, a cold sweat prickled over me as the keening worsened. Had someone broken in? Or something, because oh, fucking merde, that did not sound human at all.

  Bolt upright, I clutched the duvet to my chin, blinking in the dark and trying not to behave like a jumpy fucking idiot. Which was when I realised that next to me, Charles’s body was soaking wet and shaking like a damned earthquake, and that the spine-chilling noise piercing the very depths of my soul was coming from him. And that monsters weren’t imaginary and hiding under the bed at all, but one hundred percent real and torturing Charles’s mind. When he followed the keening with a shrieking scream, so violent and petrifying it curdled my bones, I nearly shat myself.

  “Charles. Hey. Hey, wake up!”

  I shook him, hard, my heart galloping as though I’d sprinted the length of the island. “Charles, wake up. Wake up! You’re here with me. In bed with Florian. You’re safe.”

  I flicked on the bedside light, bathing him in a yellow glow that I hoped cast his skin in a much ghastlier shade of chartreuse than it actually was. He took forever, but bit by bit he blinked awake, clawing big noisy breaths as if there was a vice clamped around his neck. Glassy and unfocussed, he stared up as if he’d never clapped eyes on me in his life before flopping an arm over his face with a groan.

  “Hey, Charles, sshh. It’s okay. I’m here. It was only a bad dream. You’re just waking up.”

  I scrambled out of bed, returning from the bathroom with a cold, damp face cloth and a glass of water. Bunching a couple of pillows behind his back, I coaxed him to sit up and handed him the water. The cooling face cloth I plopped on top of his head then climbed back in next to him. He took a few sips.

  “Better?” I asked.

  He sucked in a shuddering breath before replying. “Shit. Yeah, better.”

  “Thank God. You scared the living daylights out of me.”

  “Sorry. I should have warned you. It’s a thing I do. He glanced at the sleek watch still strapped to his wrist. “Usually around about now.”

  “What? Every night?” Christ, no wonder he was so worn out. I felt drained just witnessing it.

  “What the hell do you dream about? What do you see? Whatever it is, it’s fucking scary.”

  He took another shaky sip before placing the glass onto the bedside table. The facecloth stayed on his head, dribbling water down his temples. His colour had perked up a little, he looked unbelievably sweet, not that now was the moment to tell him.

  “Dark grey blobs mostly,” he answered, in a sober tone.

  Okay, so I hadn’t expected that. He rubbed a hand across his jaw.

  “Have you ever seen the film The Mummy?”

  I nodded—the actor in the main role had been sexy as anything—although he was probably old enough to be my dad now.

  “Well, the shapeless things in my dreams swarm like the scarab beetles in that film, the human-eating ones. They make the same menacing clicking sound; they sort of swallow me up. I dream I’m covered in them and being eaten alive.”

  Mon dieu, no wonder he’d yelled his head off. “Putain, you see that every night? I’d go nuts.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  His hand fumbled for mine and gave it a pat. ““Don’t worry. I used to see them during the day, too, when I was wide awake. So at least this is progress, I guess.”

  “Waouh,” I said, because, you know, I was a master at dissecting other people’s psychoses in the middle of the night and then coming up with the perfect response.

  He huffed a laugh.

  “Wow indeed.” Charles had reverted to the conversational tone he’d used when he’d told me about his mother’s death and his subsequent breakdown, as if distancing himself from the story, as if it were someone else’s story he was reading out from a newspaper. His colour was back to normal, though, and he wiped his face with the damp cloth before putting it on the table next to his water glass.

  “Am I still your type?” He offered a rueful smile. “As you can see, the mental health issue I’m dealing with is a little more than the usual ups and downs. When I’m not being an uptight businessman, I’m being an utterly deranged one.”

  “Hey, I told you to stop saying that stuff about yourself.” Taking his clammy hand in mine, I brought it to my lips. “I’m liking you just as you are.”

  A warning voice in my head—sounding a lot like Nico’s, to be honest—suggested this might be an opportune moment to walk away. I mean, I’d wait until a civilised time of the morning, obviously. I wasn’t crass enough for a three a.m. flit. But even if I was, Charles was such a nice guy there would be no hard feelings. Mon dieu, he’d probably still agree to help me with the cooperative stuff.

  “How long have you been having nightmares like this?”

  “Er…” He performed some mental calculations. “Coming up to five months? Although part of that period is a little hazy.”

  I did some quick arithmetic of my own. His mother’s tragic death had happened a bit before then, but they had to be related. “Do you want to tell me about how it started?”

  “That depends if you want to hear. I’d understand if you didn’t. Frankly, I’d understand if you picked up your clothes and walked out now.”

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider it. I’d found myself in a few different beds over the years. Often after a big night out, and never sober like tonight with Charles. A few guys I’d met up with more than once—I remember fucking a student from Lyon, spending the summer working on the village campsite, almost every night for a month. Three years later, I couldn’t even recall the colour of his eyes. Only enough to know they paled in comparison with the stormy grey ones warily gauging me now.

  “I want to hear,” I answered and pulled his sweaty body into my arms, startling him. “Start at the beginning.”

  With his head resting on my chest, and my fingers curling in his damp hair, Charles didn’t say anything for a few moments, as if he were gathering courage. When he began, his voice was a shaky, low hush.

  “The first thing to tell you is that after my mother committed suicide, I went straight back to work. She died on a Friday, and I was back in the office on Monday.”

  “Why the hell did you do that?”

  He took a long steadying breath. “It’s a very good question. My counsellor has since suggested I may have… ah… discounted the depth of my grief.”

  Mon dieu, that was one way of describing it.

  “He thought that I didn’t believe I deserved to… indulge myself, especially as I lived with the same condition. That I was scared I had the same weakness and would follow in her footsteps if I acknowledged my worries. And ultimately, that I was still in shock and not thinking clearly, too.”

  Never mind the counsellor’s opinion. “What did you think?”

  He hummed, the sound rumbling on my chest. “Now I’m mostly recovered, I have a lot of guilt that I was too busy, too wrapped up in work to recognise how ill she had become. Which is a fairly normal grief response, apparently.”

  That made sense, although perhaps some parents tried to hide frailties and illnesses from their children, even grown-up ones, so they didn’t worry.

  “Ultimately, I think my brain elected to miss out all the well-documented, understandable stages of grief—like denial and anger, and guilt that I could have done more, and go straight to acceptance. So that I could carry on as normal, avoiding processing not just her death but my belief in my own dire prognosis.”

  He gave a humourless laugh. “I found out the hard way that if you ignore your body’s signals, it will take matters into its own hands.”

  I remembered back to when my grandmother had died and my mother being unable to function properly for weeks. As though she were sleepwalking through the days. But my grandmother had been an ill old lady—her death had been expected and prepared for; losing an elderly parent was the usual order of things, no matter how sad at the time. Charles’s mother must have only been in her sixties, and her death had been horribly sudden, not to mention somewhat gruesome. “What happened?”

  He blew out a long breath; it floated across my chest. “The official diagnosis was acute paranoid psychosis precipitated by a delayed grief reaction, secondary to resistant fixed beliefs. Which is a bit of a mouthful.” Another deep breath. I sensed this was a story he would never become used to retelling.

  “I started seeing dark shadows in my head. In the beginning, it only happened at night when I couldn’t sleep. I recognised I was feeling low, because greys and blacks have always signified that. Not that I made any changes to accommodate how I felt, I just waited for it to pass. But then somehow, the shadows took on a meaning, almost like they represented some kind of creature, insects generally. And then I became fixated on the stupid idea that they were insects, and not just dark, formless colours in my head—I was sleeping very badly at this point, only a couple of hours a night. Swiftly after that, I convinced myself they were making themselves a cosy nest in the corner of the bedroom. Don’t ask me why my mind chose insects, by the way. I’ve no fucking idea. I wasn’t even particularly scared of creepy crawlies prior to that. If there’s a big spider in your bathtub, then I’m generally your go-to man.”

  I should have found some comforting words, but I was too stunned. And possessed zero counselling skills. Instead, I waited for him to continue, staring at the dawn light creeping across the ceiling and concentrating on running my fingers through his fine hair as he found the strength to carry on.