Chapter 18 #2
He tears off his jumper and holds it out for me. When I don’t take it, he sighs and says, ‘Arms up, Tiny.’
For some reason, I let him do it, and his knuckles skim my cheeks as he guides the jumper over my head. It’s warm from his
body, just the right side of well worn.
Nice, I think, pulling my hair from the neckline.
‘Nice,’ he says quietly, assessing me.
‘Since when have you been growing a beard?’ Jude asks, circling her own face with her pointer finger.
‘Since Dylan requested I stop leaving hairs in the sink.’
‘I didn’t mean you had to stop shaving,’ I say, though there’s no way I can deny that Max with a darkened jaw and cheeks has
brought him a significant, if unwelcome, increase on the attractiveness scale.
‘Anything for you, roomie,’ he says, eyes gleaming. Then, to Jude, ‘Did you know I walked in on Dylan and Bertie yesterday?’
‘Scandalous.’ She pulls out a granola bar from her pocket.
‘And Bertie was showing her his crystal collection.’
‘That’s a euphemism, right?’
‘See?’ Max looks pointedly at me. ‘Dylan was adamant he had no ulterior motives.’
‘Because he didn’t. He was just showing me his favourite ones.’ I feel the urge to defend Bertie, but after what happened
today, I don’t know if I can commit to it fully. ‘Some were very pretty.’
‘Guess what he was showing Dylan when I walked in? An aphrodisiac. Wait,’ he flashes me a grin, ‘maybe that explains why you
were—’
I level him with a glare and he stops halfway through the sentence. Jude’s mouth is half-full of granola bar when she says,
‘Why what?’
I scramble to pick up the pieces. Nothing happened the other day, aphrodisiac or not. My heart just dropped all the way between my thighs when he crowded me against the sofa, and I’ve been reminiscing over that
moment on repeat ever since, that’s all. ‘Why I wanted a romance recommendation from you. I mentioned it to Max.’
She looks between us suspiciously but shrugs and says, ‘The second cowboy one I read was way better than the first.’ Once
she’s swallowed her mouthful, she says, ‘Max, you seem very upbeat for someone who walked in on the woman he desperately wants
to sleep with canoodling with another man.’ She looks between us again and, when eyes widen, she adds, ‘Oh, sorry, were we
meant to be pretending Max’s interest was a secret?’
‘Sometimes I wonder if you have any social skills,’ Max says through a laugh, shaking his head. He has this look sometimes, when he laughs. It makes him softer. More like someone you’d bring home to your mum, less like someone who’d try
to hook up with her. It’s infinitely more dangerous than his normal face.
‘Bertie and I weren’t canoodling,’ I point out.
‘I honestly just wanted to hear you say the word “canoodling”,’ Jude says.
‘What were you two talking about just now?’ Max asks. ‘It looked important.’
‘The audacity to think you can just drop into a conversation and expect to be a part of it,’ Jude says.
When Max gives her an expectant look, she explains, ‘For your information, we were talking about work. Dylan’s starting her new accountancy job in a few months.
’ She peers around Max to look at me. ‘I am good at many things, but filing a tax return is not one of them. So what I’m saying is, please hurry up and get qualified. ’
‘I’ll try my best,’ I reply smoothly. But the knot in my stomach tightens. It’s been kind of nice, recently, to let my brain
go where it wants instead of thinking about the next thing. To wake up to a crashing tide and cawing seagulls instead of London
traffic outside my window, to fill my days with quiet moments that unravel like rolling waves instead of spending hours planning
for a life of numbers and spreadsheets.
‘I’ve not once heard you talk about becoming an accountant with any level of excitement,’ Max says.
‘Not everyone truly loves their job, Max. You’re lucky with that.’
‘But you do like your job. As a barista.’
‘I like the concept of my job, but, in practice, it doesn’t do what it needs to.’
‘Why do you have to do one or the other? Isn’t there something in between?’ He watches me carefully, and I have the uncanny
feeling that those stupidly blue eyes can see right through me. ‘I’ll sponsor you to have a little more fun while you figure
out what you actually want to do.’
‘You’re not paying me,’ I say, though I’m eighty per cent sure he’s joking. ‘I have a job lined up and a five-year plan. A ten-year plan, even.
It’ll all be fine.’
‘You should do whatever feels right for you,’ Jude offers.
‘Would you settle for “fine”, Jude?’ Max demands, walking backwards so that he can see both of us.
‘I mean, no, but—’
‘Exactly. I get that you two have this thing going on where you agree with everything the other says, because the alternative
is agreeing with me, but if it were me telling you that I was only half-attached to a career I intended to have for the rest
of my life, you’d—’
‘But that is what you’re doing,’ I say. The interruption is uncharacteristic enough that Jude lets out a surprised laugh. I continue, ‘You changed the type of content you make purely because the new one makes you more money, but you’ve said yourself that you prefer the old style.’
‘It’s different,’ he says, running a palm against his stubble.
‘Is it?’
Something dark passes over his face, and I get the inexplicable urge to reach for him. I tuck my hands into the hoodie’s giant
pocket instead.
Arun catches up to us, and he’s not sniffling for once. Maybe the coastal air has solved his sinus problem. ‘Can I show you
guys something? I’ve taken some pictures, and I think they could be good. Maybe. I’m not sure. I’m not saying I’m—but–yeah.’
‘I’ll take a look,’ Max says immediately, and the pair of them hang back while Jude and I keep walking. I get the feeling
he’s doing it to avoid this conversation.
‘Max is unfairly hot, isn’t he?’ Jude muses. I assume it’s rhetorical, until she turns to me and says, ‘What, you’re still
acting like you’ve never thought about it?’
I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve thought about how he looks when he comes in from a run, cheeks pinched with cold, hair stuck to the back of his neck.
I’ve thought about the way he wakes up with a line on his cheek from his pillow. I’ve thought about how it felt to have him
standing over me in the living room, his mouth a hair’s breadth from mine, the air so thick with tension I could hardly breathe.
But I’ve also thought about the consequences of anything happening with him, so I reply, ‘He’s pretty. But he knows it.’
I tug my–Max’s–sleeves over my hands and breathe in the smell of his jumper, and hope that maybe it’ll satisfy my ever-growing
urge to touch him.