Free Junk by Josephine Myles Page B

do with it.”
    “Will you send it to landfill?”
    Lewis just smiled. “That depends on whether it still has any use for anyone else. Not if I can help it, no. I don’t like senseless waste any more than you do.”
    Oh.
    “Will you do it?” Lewis asked, moving closer and giving Jasper a smile that made him want to promise Lewis anything he wanted, just so long as he kept looking at Jasper in that way. “Just find one thing you can hand over to me next week?”
    “I’ll do it,” Jasper promised.
    It was only once the front door had clicked shut behind Lewis that Jasper realised the enormity of what he’d promised. Somewhere, in this house full of paper, he had to find something he was willing to let go of. But with so many potential options, how could he ever possibly decide?

Chapter Eight
    They’d almost kissed, Lewis was sure of it. As he sat on the bus on the way back home, he played the scene over and over in his head. He’d been standing there in the garden. Jasper moving closer, a question in his eyes. There was no doubt in Lewis’s mind at that moment, spellbound by the sun-drenched, fragrant garden buzzing with insects, he’d have welcomed that kiss.
    It would have been intensely stupid, and precisely the kind of thing he had to avoid. That was how all his failed relationships had started: with Lewis unintentionally flirting, capturing the attention of someone he didn’t yet know well enough. And then he’d sleep with them, and if they worked well in bed together, then he’d move in a few days later just to get out of his parents’ unofficial nudist camp. And before he knew it, he was embroiled in a “serious” relationship with a bloke he didn’t necessarily have anything in common with. Oh, sure, the sex was always good, but you couldn’t build domestic harmony on the sole basis of compatibility between the sheets. Compatibility in the rest of the house was every bit as important.
    And Lewis most definitely wasn’t compatible with Jasper’s house. The place was a nightmare. He flicked through the photographs on his phone. You couldn’t even tell it was a house. Each picture just looked like a wall of books or stacked newspapers. He paused on the one of Jasper’s bedroom. The bed with its rumpled sheets and pile of clothing was hemmed in by stacks of paperbacks. Even the windowsill behind the bed was piled high, so only a crack of light filtered in at the top.
    No. There was no way Lewis was going to have sex with Jasper on a bed like that. And they couldn’t do it at Lewis’s parents’. And besides, he definitely shouldn’t be thinking about shagging a client. Especially a screwed-up, hot client with an adorable nervous tic.
    Maybe he should just go to the pub. Reconnect with some old friends. And until then, he’d lose himself in the homework questionnaires Jasper had filled out for him. Yes. That was bound to help him forget all about the man.
    Lewis sighed and scrubbed at his forehead with his fists.
     
     
    “So, do we have a full-blown case of OCD on our hands?” Carroll asked when Lewis called her as he stepped down from the bus.
    “I don’t think so, no. He doesn’t seem to have any rituals that I can see. He even let me pick up a book, although I wasn’t allowed to move it.”
    “You sure? He seemed pretty twitchy to me.”
    “Plenty of people get twitchy when they’re nervous.”
    “Yeah, I suppose…”
    “What is it? Come on, sis. I know that tone.”
    “Have you thought about which of us should handle the case?”
    “Definitely me. He trusts me now, and he’s got some serious attachment issues with his hoard.”
    “You sure?” Carroll asked, but Lewis could hear the relief in her voice. “You’ve got more clients than I have at the moment.”
    “I can fit him in okay, and we’ll need your help when he gets stuck into serious clearing.” Lewis pictured the narrow corridors through walls of paper. “It’s the most extreme case I’ve ever seen in terms