Free Passing Time by Ash Penn Page A

just stepped back in time twenty years. He’d never expected to set foot in this street again.
     
    He helped Mrs. Banks up her front path to her door. She instructed him to wait while she disappeared inside, leaving the door wide and the stench of cat hanging on the breeze.
     
    Jake remained in the car while Louis stood on the path in his brand-new black mourning suit, eyeing the street and trying not to think back to playing in the road at three in the morning waiting for his mother to come home. He also tried desperately hard to keep his back turned to the house next door.
     
    A few moments later, perhaps out of boredom, Jake joined him on the path.
     
    “What’s she doing?” He peered through the open doorway into the murky hall beyond.
     
    Louis shrugged. “Fetching something.”
     
    “Yeah? Like what?”
     
    “She didn’t say.”
     
    Jake glanced down the street. “Where did you used to live?”
     
    Louis gestured to the house where he grew up. “Not much, is it?” He thought back to the cold February when they couldn’t afford coal for the fire, to the mold mottling the walls. Watching Jake scan the house piqued his own curiosity, and he turned around.
     
    The first thing he noticed were the Victorian sash windows, once so badly rotted they wouldn’t open. They were now double glazed. Clean net curtains concealed the rooms behind. A small lawn made up the front garden. Summer flowers bloomed along the border, and a family of gnomes huddled together on the grass. Gnomes? Since when had his mother taken a fancy to gnomes? She’d never bothered about the garden when Louis was a child. He was the one who ended up trying to cut the foot-long grass with a pair of scissors because they didn’t own a mower. Somewhere along the line his mother must have got hold of one. Perhaps around the same time she’d taken a liking to the gnomes. They weren’t exactly Louis’s cup of tea, but, still, apart from those little ceramic people, nothing struck Louis as sinister about the place anymore. He barely even recognized it.
     
    “Shit!” Jake took a step back, his heel pressing hard on Louis’s toes.
     
    “Ouch! What the…?”
     
    Jake pointed to a couple of cats slinking along Mrs. Bank’s hall. One parked itself in the doorway while the other ventured as far as the path before settling down to eye them with lazy suspicion.
     
    “I don’t like cats,” he said as a tremor rattled through his body.
     
    “Hey.” Louis reached around Jake’s waist, mildly amused that such a strapping guy could ooze fear like a cold sweat over such a harmless creature. “Remind me never to show you the tigers at the zoo.”
     
    “Cats are evil,” Jake said quietly.
     
    “Not evil. But they can smell fear like it’s a big chunk of rib-eye. Full of meaty goodness.” Louis nuzzled his neck and nipped the skin, inhaled the sweet-smelling aftershave. The world around him fell away. God, how he’d missed this. Holding him, touching him. He slipped his arms around Jake’s waist, and Jake leaned back against him. They stood that way until a kid on a bike sped past and bellowed “bum bandits” at them from across the road.
     
    “Nice neighborhood,” Jake said.
     
    “Some things will never change.” Louis released him. “Why don’t you go wait in the car? I’ll deal with Mrs. Banks and her cats.”
     
    “You mind?” Jake turned to face him.
     
    “No.” He touched Jake’s cheek and leaned in for a kiss, but Jake shied away. He walked off down the path and got back into the car. He was probably still smarting over that ‘just friends’ comment Louis had made about them to Martha Banks. Louis wished he could take that back, but still…friends was about all they had been this past week.
     
    A few moments later Mrs. Banks came inching back down the hall. The cats got up and wound their way back into the house as if, upon Jake’s retreat, their mission had been accomplished.
     
    “Here.” She