14. FOURTEEN
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…
If Poppy Fields did a little squeal as she turned in a circle, taking in the black-granite and brushed-concrete enormity of Roscoe Blackton’s kitchen, and the twinkling city lights that the flat quite literally looked down on through a wall of glass, and the pristine saucepans hanging over the kitchen island, and the enormous bowl of fresh fruit… Well, who could blame her?
“And to think,” she whispered to herself as she walked dazedly into the living room, to that spot where she had almost, almost kissed Roscoe Blackton. “Of this place, I might have been mistress.”
Then she giggled like a crazy person. But again, who could blame her? This was absurd.
How had she let him talk her into this? How had he even come up with this idea in the first place? Just what kind of lunatic was he?
Was this the sort of thing rich people did on a whim? Completely upend their own lives and the lives of anyone else in the vicinity without five minutes’ thought? Pluck starving girls out of penury and move them around London as though they were pieces on a chessboard—a Monopoly board: Old Kent Road to Mayfair with barely a toss of the dice? Was it normal to hand over the keys to a multi-million-pound penthouse without a backward glance? And he wanted to go and live in a crummy little flat and survive on pennies because he was curious?
She couldn’t believe he had done it for her. Not after how she had treated him. Maybe he pitied her a little. Maybe he saw her a bit like a bedraggled kitten he’d found mewing pathetically behind a bin, something he couldn’t just leave there, not without feeling annoyingly bad about it, so he’d taken it home, and made it all snuggly and warm with a big fat dish of cream…
Except… All the time they had spoken in his office—or at least, after he learned the reality of her situation—he hadn’t seemed condescending. He hadn’t tried to mansplain poverty to her and how if she just stopped buying avocados it would magically start raining money. (She never bought avocados). He’d listened. And he’d seemed genuinely curious. And been funny and clever and charming while doing it. Self-aware enough to get her jokes, to laugh at himself in turn. And, of course, while doing all that, he had looked how he looked, his voice that deliciously warm crisp voice, with the dripping irony and the velvet chocolate richness. And he… Well… Might the young, gorgeous, aristocratic millionaire genius with the nice manners possibly be her type?
It didn’t matter if he was.
She was not his type. Perhaps her face had briefly caught his eye. Perhaps he’d once found her tolerable, good enough for a one-night stand, anyway. But by now he realised the shoddy, dowdy mess that lay underneath. If he was attentive and inquisitive, it was because he was a smart, curious guy and she was a curiosity. A walking, talking headline in the newspaper: Cost of Living Crisis Pushes Thousands into Poverty… She was an exotic animal, a Victorian circus freak, her flat a foreign destination on Roscoe Blackton’s poverty safari, a hushed David Attenborough breathing: See how the poor live, the cramped conditions, the ever-present threat of starvation…
She wandered over to the glass window wall of the living room as she mused, the glass half-mirrored by the night outside. The dark reflection showed a pale girl, hair a mess, in creased charity-shop clothes. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the commonest of them all? Because that’s what she was, in every sense of the word. A common girl, no class or breeding, no money or education, and a million just like her in the world.
Very much not Roscoe Blackton’s type.
She looked out into the dark, not really knowing if she was facing north or south or east or west. But he would be out there somewhere at this very moment, in a sleek black car, heading straight to the heart of the truth of her. Her room, her life, her bed…
She hadn’t realised when she agreed to this quite what it was she was giving up. Privacy. Self. Any kind of pretence that she was in any way like him.
Her life would be laid bare. And he would see that what she had and what she was were the same.
Nothing.
Roscoe let himself into Poppy’s flat with the key she had given him. He wriggled it just like she’d told him he’d need to, but it still took a few goes before it turned.
The door opened onto a hallway that looked… Well. Small, obviously. A little grubby. But otherwise quite normal: cheap laminate faux-wooden flooring, white walls, and a flimsy shoe rack that was cascading absolutely enormous men’s trainers all over the floor. No rats. No peeling wallpaper. No dripping mould.
The air smelt of takeaway curry, a fact which was explained by the man he found in the living room, sitting on the sofa with a plastic container of what looked like chicken in something orange, and a huge naan bread spread over his other knee, no plate. The football highlights were on the TV. To Roscoe, who normally spent his nights alone and working, it initially appeared an inviting scene. He might have been tempted to grab a beer and join in. But the man gave a sort of grunt as he looked Roscoe up and down, not seeming particularly happy about what he found. “You’re him, are you? Poppy’s work friend?” He was big and fair-haired, with the bulk of a guy who once used to work out hard but hadn’t in a while.
“Yes. Hi.”
“I’m Dave,” said Lecherous Dave.
Roscoe would have shaken his hand, but the man made no move to stand up, and instead forked out a large piece of bright orange chicken then said, “You screwing her?”
“Excuse me?”
“Poptart. You her boyfriend or whatever?”
“No.”
“Not gay, are you?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Pretty big favour she’s doing you, letting you stay here while your place gets renovated.”
“Yes. She’s…nice like that.”
Dave snickered. “She’s nice alright. Did she explain the situ here? My place. My rules. If you’re here instead of her, then her chores are yours. She does”—he waved a hand carelessly in the air—“everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yeah. Gotta earn her keep, hey.”
Poppy had warned him he would likely want to kill Dave. He just hadn’t imagined it being within five minutes of meeting him. Was it possible to drown someone in a takeaway-sized tub of curry sauce? He was willing to give it a good old college try.
“Anyway, she said to tell you there’s nothing to eat.”
“Right,” said Roscoe and walked into the kitchen. Anything seemed preferable to further conversation with Dave. He’d already picked up his phone to order a takeaway before he remembered. Twenty pounds. That was his food budget according to Poppy. He’d thought she meant for each day until she laughed and said, “A week, Roscoe! Twenty pounds a week!”
Which was…impossible. But did explain why she had fainted in his office.
Roscoe laughed to himself when he walked into Poppy’s bedroom, because she must have had a mad-dash cleaning spree before getting the car back to his flat. The place was surgically tidy. It would pass an army inspection. There wasn’t a single object out on any surface.
Fair enough. It’s not like she was getting much of an insight into his character at his own sterile show-flat. But even the furniture and décor in her room didn’t give any clue to her tastes. He suspected it had all been chosen by the landlord. It was that cheap, mass-produced stuff that would be found in student rooms and rented properties the world over.
Was it wrong that he peeped in her wardrobe? Just to see if there was space to hang his shirts, of course. (There wasn’t.) Then his eye fell on her chest of drawers, and images of underwear flashed through his mind. Images of Poppy in her underwear. Poppy on the single bed…
When had he last slept in a single bed?
He sat down on it, still laughing slightly to himself. Because this was all absurd. Him being here. In the bedroom of a girl he hardly knew. In the bedroom of his Executive Assistant. Breathing her air, living her life…
His eye fell again on the chest of drawers. It was opposite the bed, next to the wardrobe. That’s all there was room for. A chest of drawers and a wardrobe along one wall, the bed along the other. There was less than a metre of space between them down the middle of the room. He could reach out with his foot and touch it. A small window at one end of the room, a door at the other.
Such a tiny space. But did people really need any more room than that? On a basic, fundamental level of human survival, did anyone really need any more than a warm, dry room with a bed to sleep in? Maybe not. But did people deserve more? Of course they did.
He forced himself to look away from the chest of drawers, because the part of his mind that wasn’t philosophising grandiosely about human worth was still busy conjuring images of Poppy and underwear. Plain cotton knickers. Or lacy lingerie. And whatever else she might hide in those drawers… Without any prompting at all, his brain conjured a mental image of Poppy on this very bed, legs spread, a vibrator teasing her core. And then he was in the mental image, and he was the one teasing her with it, watching her face as he pressed the tip inside and…
Fuck.
That was just…ridiculously inappropriate.
And hot.
And really, really inappropriate.
It was gone midnight, but he went out to the living room and persuaded Dave to give him the wifi password. Once he figured out that the crappy wifi signal only stopped working every thirty minutes instead of every five if he sat near the end of the bed with the door open, he worked until late.
Unfortunately, having the door open meant he was fully exposed to the sounds of Dave existing. The belch as he finished his curry. The phlegmy clearing of his throat. Dave using the fucking toilet. Jesus Christ.
On the plus side, it managed to completely block out any more Poppy fantasies. Until he finally turned his laptop off and got into her bed.
The sheets were freshly laundered. They had that dry, crisp feel. And they smelled nothing like her. But there was still something intimate about being there. The place where she slept. Where maybe she—
He got out of bed, poured himself a glass of water. Spent twenty more minutes checking some market movements on his phone, and made sure his alarm was set for four AM. Which was only two hours away. Shit.
Back in bed, he lay awake in the dark—although it wasn’t properly dark. There was a street lamp near the window, and Poppy didn’t have blackout curtains. It was loud outside, too, despite the flat being on a relatively quiet street. His flat—the one Poppy was at—was so high up that all the sounds of the city seemed completely remote. And even his other place, which was in a smaller building, was on a quiet mews, and felt distanced from the world by the weight of old stone.
Here, the road was close, the world outside only held back by the thinnest of skins. And Dave was in the room next door, just the other side of a thin partition wall. He could hear him moving around, the noise of his mattress. The flat was so small that all the rooms seemed to crowd around. The hum of the fridge, the living room clock. People passed in the street outside and their voices rang clearly inside the room. The vibration of passing cars reached into his mattress, their headlights crawled shadows across the ceiling. Was this one of the secret privileges he hadn’t realised his money bought? The ability to put a cushion between himself and the world outside. To create a world of his own liking. Or the illusion of one, at least.
He fell asleep wondering how Poppy was getting on, if she was comfortable in his seldom-used bed.
He fell asleep wondering if he was in her mind even half as much as she was in his.