I Didn't Realise What You Did Last Summer


"I have a whole new respect for your mother," Jeremy muttered as Richard dropped into the sofa next to him, reaching for the Playstation console again, "and I had enormous respect for her to start with."

Richard, he and James had quickly discovered in the last two days, couldn't be inactive. The reason he'd worked himself to the edge of a breakdown last year, they'd realised, the reason he'd almost done it again this year, was that he couldn't do nothing.

He was useless at just sitting still if he wasn't in a pub with a pint in his hand, and that was out because of the painkillers he was on.

Even Jeremy's Playstation 2 - a gadget on which he'd idled away more hours than he liked to count - couldn't keep Richard in one place for more than an hour or so at any one time.

The full spectrum of bruising was visible now over most of his torso and on his face. He couldn't drive - he couldn't wear a seatbelt and if that hadn't been an issue even moving his arms to the height of the steering wheel hurt.

After forty-eight hours he was bored out of his skull and the doctor had said it would be at least a week before he started to have some relief from his injuries.

The only good thing was that they had Jeremy's house sprawling house to themselves for the week. In the cautious search for positions Richard was comfortable in they'd found a couple of new and interesting things to fight over and for a while they'd managed to distract him from the battered state of himself.

"James and I are going to pick your car up from the studio when he gets back."

Richard rolled his head across the cushions to gaze up at him. "Thanks." It was genuine, like he knew he was driving them nuts and was sorry for it, but he couldn't do anything about it right then.

"Keys?"

"Jacket pocket, hopefully. Want me to...?"

"No! Sit! Stay." Jeremy pushed himself to his feet and padded into the hall, retrieving two sets of keys from Richard's leather jacket - dropping the house keys back and fingering what he was left with.

"Is this a Ferrari key?"

Stepping back into the lounge, he held out the red-topped fob.

"Yes."

"I didn't know you had a Ferrari. You hate Ferraris."

Richard looked almost sheepish. "It's the 308 GT4."

"The Dino? When did you get a Dino?"

"It's... the yellow one."

Jeremy frowned. "Which yellow one?"

"From the challenge - the race to the Spearmint Rhino?"

Incredulous, "You kept it?" He could feel the laughter bubbling up inside.

"James and I did it up last summer. It runs like a dream."

"Rather than a nightmare." But he was distracted by vague images in his imagination of Richard and James covered in engine oil working close together under the bonnet of the Dino. "Did you have fun?" Jeremy had long ago stopped feeling jealous of the time his two lovers spent together. Now the idea was just an incredible turn-on. "I just want to hear the messy details." Jeremy stood in the doorway, still stroking the long, black plastic fob topping the silver key.

Richard's laugh was refreshing, and knocked him off the boil a little. Sometimes some of the thoughts he had were utterly inappropriate. He palmed the key.

~

Richard got bored of Gran Turismo 4 within half an hour. He had no idea how Jeremy sat and played the game for hours on end.

As usual the remotes were on the carpet in front of television set, and he cautiously bent to grab them, noticing a small pile of DVD-Rs next to Jeremy's HDD - his Christmas present to himself after James had surprised them both by buying one.

He picked up the top one, marked in black pen in Jeremy's scrawling handwriting - 'FoS, Tues-w4'. The one underneath it was apparently titled 'Fos, Mon-w4'.

Suspicious, Richard put the top one in the DVD player and flicked the channel on the television until it picked up the playback; the end of an advert for shampoo, a trailer for Five News at Six pm, then the familiar theme tune and his own grinning face on a colour-striped background.

'The Five O'Clock Show'. And going through the four piles of disks, Jeremy had every episode, every single one. And he hated it, passionately.

Despite all the grief he'd taken for it from him, and all the grief he was going to take for the rest of his natural life, Richard was touched.

"…since he had his teeth whitened…" the old joke dragged his attention back to the screen where Mel was pointing into the audience, "…and apparently there's a group of them in the audience this afternoon!"

The camera panned around the small studio, over the audience, to pick out a group of blokes sitting two rows back. It was a second, possibly two, but Richard made a grab for the remote, hitting the pause button and winding back frame by frame until the guys' faces were clearly in shot. His stomach churned when he realised he'd been right - the third one along was the man who'd watched as he'd been attacked outside the studio.