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‘What’s that?’
‘Have sex with you on my desk.’
‘Your desk isn’t here.’
‘No, but the table would do.’
He let me go and I squatted down to wipe the champagne off the floor. He turned to the fire, opened the burner door and poked it with a metal poker to make sure the wood caught properly, then shut the door again. ‘I thought we could get the cushions off the sofa and the chairs and put them out on the floor.’
‘Okay.’
My phone buzzed again. Jack picked it up and then read out the text. ‘Ivy. Please. I want to spend, the C word, with you.’
I looked at him. ‘See, it’s like the first text is a nice tester to see if I’ll reply and now I don’t, then he dives into being more and more pressing. But even when I was replying they used to end up desperate when I wasn’t saying what he wanted.’
‘You have two options. I call him and tell him to get lost – you’re here with me. Or we switch your phone off. I’m not listening to him texting and you shouldn’t be reading them.’
‘Just switch it off.’ It was nice to have someone else know about them. I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone because everyone was on Rick’s side.
‘Done.’ His thumbnail flicked the little switch, then he threw my phone back down on the chair.
‘Thank you.’
I went into the kitchen to throw away the soiled tissue. When I came back in Jack had spread out the sofa and chair cushions in front of the fire, and he was stripping off his burgundy jumper. His body was so firm and his black pinstripe shirt was fitted to every lean contour.
I loved watching his body. In the summer, when he just wore a shirt and trousers at work, when we were doing something in the blue-sky room, and he reached up, stretching, or bent down and twisted, my brain had me working on how his body might look beneath his clothes. His stomach was so flat and hard, and his pecs were not pronounced, but they had definition. Like his arms. He didn’t have massive biceps, but they were marked, slim, sculpted shapes. He was a man someone would love to sculpt in bronze.
He threw his jumper on to the now-bare sofa. ‘Are you going to come and get cosy with me? Do you want some music on?’
‘Yes, and yes.’ I threw him a smile.
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and toed off his shoes, while I bent and unzipped my boots then pulled them off. I left them near the door, but I was cold, so I didn’t take my hoodie off.
I sat down on the cushions, upright, facing the fire, with my knees bent up and my arms hugging my legs.
He’d put his phone in a docking system and the music played out through speakers, Maroon 5, ‘Maps’. He went into the kitchen and came back in a couple of minutes with a bowl of nuts and a bowl of olives, then he handed me my refilled glass and finally sat down near me, leaning back against the sofa, holding his glass. His knees were bent up too but slightly parted.
‘Oh fuck it…’ he said it out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, and then he drained his glass, set it down on the hearth in front of the wood-burner, and moved the bowl of olives there too, and the nuts. Then he lay down, with his knees bent upward and one hand behind his head.
He looked up at me as the next song came on. ‘Animals’, it was the V album. It was what he’d been listening to in the car when I woke up.
His eyes shut. Then he started singing.
‘You know your phone is full of breakup music, don’t you?’
His eyes opened but he still sang the next line, smiling at me. He had a good voice. I hadn’t heard him sing before, but his voice blended with the song and made it better—
‘So what, I bet you have a freezer full of cartons of Ben & Jerry’s.’
‘You got me.’
He shut his eyes again, and sang – the song was really laddish.
‘Did you love Sharon?’
‘That is a banned subject.’ He hadn’t opened his eyes.
I sipped some of my champagne then twisted sideways so I faced him. ‘I know, but answer the question please? I’d like to know, seeing as we’re planning on having sex.’
He stopped singing and his eyes opened. ‘Yes, I sort of did.’
‘When did you stop loving her?’
‘I probably never did, properly, but I didn’t start realising that until about a year ago.’
‘How did you decide what you felt wasn’t true any more?’
He stared at me, one hand still behind his head. ‘We weren’t like you and Rick, we lived fast and we played hard. We weren’t in each other’s pockets the whole time. And, believe me, it’s been pretty easy to cut her off. She’s proved herself to be an absolute bitch. But anyway, I really don’t want to talk about that. What about you and Rick?’
‘I do still love him like a friend. But there’s no desperation. I want to feel desperate when I love someone.’
His gaze held mine, the pupils at the heart of his eyes wide in the electric light.
I drank the last of my champagne.
‘Do you want more?’
‘No it’ll give me a headache. I wouldn’t mind a lager, though, if we’re going to stay up.’
‘I don’t drink lager. Ale? Do you want a bottle of ale?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
He got up and went into the kitchen. Then came back with two open bottles. He flipped the light switch off when he came past it.
The only light in the room then came from the flames in the burner. He handed me a bottle, then tapped the neck of my bottle with the base of his. ‘Happy morning. Technically we’re not staying up late, we’re up early.’
He put his bottle down on the hearth beside his empty glass, then turned his back on me and walked around behind the sofa.
He opened the cupboard under the stairs and reached into it to get something off a high shelf, something that he’d obviously had hidden away so his cleaner wouldn’t find it. He pulled out a tin. ‘Do you smoke cannabis?’
‘Shit, I didn’t know you did that.’
‘Do you smoke it?’
I breathed out, my heart dancing to the beat of his music. ‘No.’ Not even when I was at school. Rick and I had got together a month before my sixteenth birthday; I’d never had an adolescent stage when I’d tested out life.
‘Do you want to try it?’
‘I don’t know. What does it do to you?’
‘You sound like you’re fourteen. It relaxes you. It’s a downer.’
‘A downer?’
‘I’m not so good at relaxing; my head races with too much stuff—’
‘You drink too much coffee.’
‘I know, that’s an upper, it keeps me punched up and thinking fast at work, but I keep cannabis up here so when I get away from the city I can chill out.’
‘You don’t smoke it in London.’
‘Not so much now.’
‘Is it addictive?’
‘Do you want me to look up FRANK on my phone? There’s a whole website there that’ll tell you the risks and what it does. Or