She lowered herself down on to the bed and arranged herself provocatively.
‘Come and lie down, baby,’ she said. ‘Forget about Tiger.’
She patted the cover next to her but Jax was having none of it.
‘What’s the story, anyway, between you two?’ he asked.
Angie knew what he was getting at, but it really wasn’t going to make things any better if she gave him all the details.
‘We met on my year out,’ she said. ‘In India. And then I came home to go to uni and he stayed where he was. He’s been travelling ever since. He doesn’t have a base in the UK any more so if he comes back he floats around begging favours until it’s time to leave again.’
‘Bloody scrounger,’ said Jax. His mood seemed to be getting blacker by the minute and Angie could see her lovely precious time slipping away from her.
‘Oh, let’s not worry about him,’ she said. ‘Come here. Relax. Have another beer and let’s just chill. I can give you a massage if you like, release those tangled chakras.’
He seemed to relax a little then and came to lie down next to her. A wave of excitement rippled through Angie’s body at the proximity of his to hers. She swung her leg over his hips, sat astride him and began to rub at his shoulders and the top of his neck.
‘You’re so tense in there, baby,’ she said as her thumbs worked at the knots. She hoped that this didn’t set him off again, but he finally seemed happy to leave Tiger where he was on the other side of the door.
She wasn’t really surprised that Jax didn’t understand Tiger or their unusual relationship. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure that she understood it herself. They had been friends for over a decade, although the time actually spent together over that period couldn’t have amounted to more than a handful of weeks since she had been back in England. And Jax was right – Tiger was something of a scrounger. He’d show up out of the blue, just as he had done today, and expect shelter and food whilst making no effort to contribute to the cost. He did help around the flat; it wasn’t as if he expected to be waited on hand and foot. And she supposed that he had to hang on to whatever cash he managed to earn to pay for his living expenses when he was abroad. But still, he definitely seemed to expect that she would be up for supporting him when he arrived.
Still, whilst she didn’t have so much spare cash herself, she didn’t begrudge him it. He had been there for her, in India, when she had most needed a friend. He had sat up with her late into the night as she had tried to make sense of what had happened to her in life thus far – her mother, the children’s homes, the feelings of never belonging, never being secure or safe. It was Tiger who had listened without judgement, not tried to fix anything – what could he fix, anyway? – but had just let her work it all through in her own head. And for that she would be eternally grateful to him in a way that she would never be able to fully explain to someone else.
She would be the first to accept, though, that Tiger was far from perfect. His thirty-year-old self hadn’t really changed that much from the eighteen-year-old she had first met. His outlook remained unsophisticated, despite all that he had seen in the world, and his needs were very simple. Angie had discovered a long time ago that there was very little point trying to get into any kind of political argument with him. He just had no interest, and anything that he did say was generally just a parroted version of what he had heard others say rather than a genuinely held belief.
But Tiger had something about him that none of her other friends shared. A kind of courage. It took balls to have no base, no stuff, to go where you wanted with neither aim nor plan. She didn’t think she could do it – well, not for year after year. She liked to think that she kept her horizons wide but at the end of the day, her dreams were tethered, like a hot air balloon, so that they couldn’t just float off whither they would. Tiger’s were different. The only thing holding him back was gravity.
But she couldn’t explain any of this to Jax. All he saw was an irritating ignoramus who was trespassing on his patch. That was fine. She didn’t feel the need to share what she and Tiger had with Jax. If he was going to be in her life for any length of time, then he would get used to the random appearances of Tiger at inopportune moments. And she did hope that Jax would be in her life, for a while longer at least.
And with that in mind, she turned Jax over beneath her so that he was facing up and began to kiss him with everything that she had.