Chapter Twenty-Two #2
When Alex comes out of the bathroom, having given himself a stern talking-to, Jess is in the living room in leggings and a hoodie, looking forlorn. His immediate, hopeful thought: perhaps she regrets putting a stop to things. Quite rightly, in his view.
But when she hears him behind her, she asks, ‘Are you decent?’ and this seems like an entirely different order of things.
‘Decent as I ever will be,’ he says, an attempt at a joke, which is nowhere close to landing.
‘Okay.’ She swivels her head round and says, ‘So. You know how it’s been raining quite a lot today?’
It is impossible to guess where this is going. ‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t think the roof was properly equipped for that.’
He gives it a moment, ponders the possible implications. But he’s still not quite getting it.
‘Oh?’ he says at last.
‘There’s a leak in the ceiling in my room,’ she says. ‘Right above my bed, as luck would have it.’
My bed. Very much not the point of her sentence, but his brain snags on it. Her bed.
He snaps out of it. ‘Can we move your bed?’
‘Maybe. But can I sleep through a constant drip?’
He probably could. With a house as full as his was growing up, you had to train yourself to sleep through everything and anything, or you didn’t sleep. But she’s the only child of a single mum, so he’s guessing it’s different for her.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know your sleeping habits.’
It’s an obnoxious thing to say, he knows, but he means it as a desperate kind of flirting. I don’t know your sleeping habits, but I know I’d like to.
He does not have to look at her face to know it has not quite landed the way he intended it to.
‘Well, I can’t,’ she says.
‘Let’s see the damage,’ he says. He is trying not to let his brain go to where it has immediately gone.
Before he suggests what he really wants to, he will offer to switch rooms with her.
He can sleep through a drip. Probably. Or at least, he can sleep through it no worse than he will anyway.
Noise doesn’t keep him awake, but anxiety does.
The thumping of his heart when he’s thinking about her, in pyjamas just a few footsteps away – that does, too.
She stands up from the sofa and follows Alex into her room.
The bed is tidily made; a pile of books sits on the bedside table: four of them.
It’s hard to guess when she imagined she’d have time to read those over a working weekend, but he’s guessing she is one of those people who has to take multiple books everywhere because what she reads depends on her mood.
Also, he imagines that she is someone who starts books, reads a few paragraphs, and gets sucked in, putting aside her current read, rather than just calmly proceeding through what she has already started.
He has to admit he finds people like that hard to fathom.
But that’s a conversation he can have with her some other time.
There are more pressing matters at hand.
Pretty much bang in the middle of her bed, water is accumulating into a bowl.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Clearly you can’t sleep there.’
He looks up at the ceiling. There’s an ominous patch of sagging plaster on the other side of the room, which threatens to start leaking any moment, too.
He points up at it. ‘I don’t think anyone’s sleeping in here tonight, wherever we move the bed to.’
‘Yeah,’ she says.
‘Hotel?’ he says weakly. He wants her to know he is not jumping to the most appealing alternative.
‘I’ve already checked.’ His heart sinks. Anything to avoid sharing a bed with him, he guesses. ‘They’re all full around here tonight.’
‘I’ll take the sofa, if you like,’ he says. ‘You can have my bed.’
He’s too tall for the slightly worn sofa, and they both know it. But if she sleeps there, she’ll still be able to hear the drip. And it’s freezing in the living room, anyway. Hardly an attractive prospect for either of them.
‘This sofa is too short for you.’
He is out of non-obvious options now. He has reached the limits of the creativity he is willing to draw from, in order to keep a woman he is very much attracted to away from his bed.
‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘I guess there’s only one solution.’
She nods.
He extends his arm, and she takes his hand. He leads her – oh happy day – to his bedroom.
‘There is just one problem, though,’ he says. ‘My bed is the smaller of the two doubles. There won’t be much space between us.’
‘I imagine that’ll be okay,’ she says, trying to make light of it. But she can’t fool him. He heard her breath catching.
‘We could move my mattress to the living room,’ she says, her voice – he is almost sure – tinged with disappointment that she has thought of a way out of this predicament.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. Not that she is being silly, not in the most practical sense. It’s a plausible suggestion. It would do fine for him, if they weren’t both so desperate to end up in the same bed, with a semi-plausible excuse.
But then he remembers his manners. He remembers the importance of enthusiastic consent, freely given. Stopping inches from his room, he takes her other hand too and looks into her eyes, making sure she knows he means it.
‘We can do that, if you want. I’m happy to sleep on the mattress in the living room.’
Despite Alex’s best efforts, his words come out with an edge of desperation.
‘It’s freezing in there,’ she says. Grasping for excuses now, he hopes.
‘I get hot at night,’ he says, which is not at all true. Usually. Tonight, it might be. But, still, there are bound to be spare blankets in a cupboard somewhere.
‘No,’ she says, shaking her head for emphasis. ‘I think the bed will be okay for both of us.’
If he can survive a chaste night with Jess in his bed, he is pretty sure he can survive anything.