It was nearly one o’clock before they got to the swimming pool—Heeley, not Pond’s Forge—but Luca didn’t mind. Out of the house was out of the house, and winter was great for getting to hold hands with Tav and slide down the middle of abandoned roads, laughing and crashing into banks and snowdrifts every hundred metres. In the dead of winter, when the ice was treacherous and the schools shut down for Christmas, they weren’t advertising anything about themselves other than ‘I don’t want to fall over and break my arse-bones.’ If arses had bones.
Luca loved Christmas. Loved it—the cold, the holding hands, the snow, the way Tav’s face lit up when he got presents he liked, the way Tav looked when he was flushed, Tav in general…
“Stop staring.”
“Nope.”
Tav laughed as they skidded to a halt in
