Chapter Twenty-Two
Alex
He has used up all his self-control.
All he can do now is stand very still and wait for the urge to pass.
But it’s not going to pass, and if he’s honest with himself, he knows it. In vain have I struggled. It will not do. Where is that from, again?
Jess stirs the milk with a wooden spoon.
Chocolate tinged with orange mingles with the scent of apple shampoo.
Despite the season, it makes him think of Christmas, of family and tradition, of the picture he has always had of himself with his own kids giddily unwrapping their presents.
Now, in his mind, those children have honey blonde hair and a certain boisterous joie de vivre he somehow hadn’t imagined before.
All of which, he realises, is ridiculous.
He hardly knows Jess. He didn’t know she existed a few months ago. And now just is not the right time for a girlfriend. The book is the thing. Getting his anxiety under control is the other thing. His next girlfriend deserves better than his messed-up self.
He rehearses these arguments in his mind, as he has many times.
But all the other times, Jess has not been standing in front of him, pink in her cheeks, gently humming an unrecognisable tune as she stirs what smells like a very pleasurable drink.
Perhaps that’s why, this time, it doesn’t seem to be working.
He studies the curve from her neck to her shoulder, the delicate gold chain around her neck, its clasp slipping further and further round.
And there it is, his excuse to touch her.
He moves towards her. She stops humming. He slides his finger under the gold chain at the back of her neck. Her skin – so soft. Her hair – so shiny.
She turns to him, eager, as if she has been waiting for him to do exactly this. As if to say, What took you so long? Her pupils are wide, and he reads determination in them, mirroring his own.
Later, they will argue about who leaned forwards first, who kissed whom.
But right now, it doesn’t matter. All that matters in the moment is lips brushing together, tongues finding each other, teeth tingling as they awkwardly meet.
And heat, so much heat.
And then – ‘Stop,’ she says, pulling away. and his heart drops into the pit of his stomach until she tells him why. ‘The chocolate is going to burn.’
‘Let it,’ he says, bumping her forehead with his, beckoning her in again.
‘It’s Whittard’s chocolate,’ she says, laughing against him. ‘One does not let Whittard’s chocolate burn.’
He groans (inwardly? Outwardly? Who can say?) but does not argue. She turns back to the stove, to the stirring. He slips his arms around her waist and she leans back into him. Emboldened, he kisses her shoulder, her neck.
She sighs against him. He thinks he might feel her trembling the tiniest bit.
And then at last, at long last, the hot chocolate is ready.
‘You’re going to have to let go of me so I can pour this,’ she says softly, a smile in her voice. He reluctantly does, and he waits.
He waits interminably, it seems, though it is probably only ten seconds. She turns off the stove. Pours the hot chocolate from the saucepan into the mugs, sets them on the coffee table.
‘Where were we?’ he says, his arms around her again.
‘Here,’ she says, looping her own arms around his neck. Drawing him close, up against her. He holds his breath, vulnerable: in doing this, she is going to know how much he wants her. But if the moans in her throat as he kisses her are any indication, she wants him just as much.
‘The hot chocolate,’ she says, when they come up for air.
He has to laugh. ‘You’re obsessed with that stuff,’ he says.
‘Have a sip,’ she says. ‘You will be too.’
Reluctantly, he pulls away. Takes her hand, leads her to the sofa, picks up his mug. Inhales, as he has done so often at wine tastings. Then he takes a sip.
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘That tastes—’
‘Like an orgasm in a mug?’ she says.
The word itself makes him groan.
‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘That’s not fair.’
She looks at him, the picture of innocence. ‘Not fair how?’
‘Because …’
How to put this delicately? Romantically? Or at the very least, not smarmily?
‘Because you’re making me jealous of hot chocolate, which is an odd position to be in.’
She smiles. His favourite smile of hers – slightly crooked, mischievous. ‘You’ve got chocolate on your bottom lip,’ she says, and she leans in to lick it off. Slowly, teasingly. Electricity runs across his lip, then the other, and then his whole body lights up as in a game of Operation.
‘Jess,’ he says. ‘You are killing me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound sorry. ‘Would you like me to stop?’
He shakes his head, but she pauses, looks longingly at her mug, as if torn between the taste of him and the taste of chocolate orange. Alex is going to track down Mr Whittard and murder him in cold blood.
She takes a sip, and then another.
There is no chocolate left on his lip for her to lick off.
‘Maybe we should slow down,’ she says. There’s no teasing in her voice. She might mean it. She takes another long sip and makes the kind of all-body sound in response to the taste that he wishes he were responsible for.
‘Jess …’ he says. More to hear himself say her name than anything else.
It comes out like a moan.
‘What if it gets awkward?’ she asks.
‘I think we’re past that point,’ he says. Hearing each other make the kind of sounds they have been making over the last little while feels as intimate as nakedness. Not that he’d say no to the actual nakedness. To see her body, her every curve, trace the outline of her waist—
Deep breaths, Alex.
Drink your chocolate.
Jess finishes hers with a satisfied slurp and puts the mug down. Thunk.
‘Do you watch the Winter Olympics?’ she asks, a swerve in the conversation so screechingly extreme that he wonders if he somehow hallucinated the last portion of the evening.
Maybe the door came unstuck so violently that he stumbled, fell onto the ceramic floor, and gave himself a concussion?
He scrambles to think of another explanation.
But Jess is looking at him expectantly, so he digs deep and finds an answer.
‘I’m more of a Summer Olympics fan,’ he says. ‘Swimming and running, especially.’
‘All right,’ she says. ‘So I take it you haven’t heard of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir?’
‘It rings a vague bell,’ he says. Which it doesn’t, but these people are clearly important to Jess in some way, or she wouldn’t bring them up at a time like this. He doesn’t want to admit total ignorance.
‘Canadian ice dancers,’ she says. ‘They won the gold medal in 2018 with this electric performance to the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack. And, oh my gosh, I have never seen anything sexier. It was incredible.’
He nods, earnestly, to show he is listening. And to speed up the story, so they can get back to previous activities.
‘Supposedly, there’s nothing romantic between them. But, honestly, the chemistry. It was electric.’
‘I always thought electricity was more about physics than chemistry,’ he says, because sometimes, he can’t help self-sabotaging.
Jess narrows her eyes. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘It had so much sexual tension. So much unresolved energy – like an unconsummated love affair.’
Such a quaint word, unconsummated. And yet it has an effect on him that is not at all quaint.
‘I had an idea for a novel when I watched them. About ice dancers who are in love, but they decide, for the sake of their sport, their art, their chemistry – that they won’t sleep together until they’ve won a gold medal.’
He is starting to see where she might be going with this. ‘The magic is in the lack of consummation,’ he says, defeated.
‘Exactly.’ She nods, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. ‘You get it.’
He wishes he didn’t.
He isn’t sure how to respond.
The pause between them stretches and stretches.
‘So you’re thinking,’ he says, processing, just making doubly sure he hasn’t read this situation wrong, ‘for the sake of this novel, we should also—’
‘Leave things unconsummated.’
He nods, not I agree but I understand. He isn’t sure he does, totally.
Jess’s sudden reluctance to, well, consummate, has come out of seemingly nowhere.
Could it be that she is scared? Not of sex itself – he is pretty sure she is into that – but of the ramifications.
The possibility of pain if whatever this is between them doesn’t work out.
Scared, maybe, of how vulnerable it feels to be so intimate. Either way, he won’t push her.
‘I might need a cold shower,’ he says at last.
‘You and me both,’ Jess says, and he refrains from mentioning the obvious solution.
Jess comes out of the shower wrapped in just a towel, and he rushes in after her, not making eye contact.
They have one more night in this cottage and that, Alex knows, is going to feel like eternity.
Damn you, Scott and Tessa, he thinks, shaking his fist in what he assumes to be the vague direction of Canada.
He switches the shower to the coldest setting he can bear and tries to think about William Faulkner and James Joyce – writers he knows that he is supposed to deeply admire, to want to emulate, but that he finds unbearably pretentious, impenetrably obscure.
Or, to put it in starker terms: boring. These are things he would not, of course, ever admit in interviews.
But there are going to be other minefields when it comes to the interviews about this particular book.
He is going to have to sit side by side with her, breathing in her apple shampoo, listening to her enthusiasm, maybe brushing her arm as they both reach for a glass of water – and somehow remain unaffected.
The apple shampoo has followed him here, to the side of the bath, and he can’t help himself: he flicks it open, breathes it in. This will have to do for now.
And then he turns the shower temperature even lower.