Chapter 6 The Twelve Days of Jet Lag
Chapter six
The Twelve Days of Jet Lag
Jasper
The driver’s playing something soothing—piano, strings, the sort of instrumental soundtrack that thinks it’s helping. It isn’t. My head’s buzzing, my eyes feel like sandpaper, and every muscle in my back is staging a slow, organised rebellion.
I shift in my seat, trying to find a position that doesn’t feel medically concerning. First class or not, two weeks of hotels, back-to-back meetings and the jet lag equivalent of being repeatedly slapped with a wet pillow has finally caught up with me.
I don’t sleep well on planes. Never have.
Something about the hum, the recycled air, the relentless sense of being trapped in a tube—it all keeps my brain twitching just enough to stop rest from happening.
I drift. Hover. Float in that half-sleep where your neck clicks at the wrong angle and you have strange dreams about spreadsheets that can talk.
Callum, of course, slept the whole flight.
Curled up with his noise-cancelling headphones and a blanket he insisted was “NASA-approved.” He offered me one of those inflatable neck pillows as if that would fix decades of deeply entrenched restlessness and control issues.
I think I just stared at him until he put it away.
The truth is, I didn’t really need to be in Singapore.
The deal wasn’t mine. It’s Callum’s company, his client, his success, and he’s more than capable of handling it.
Has been for years. But we’ve always had that arrangement when one of us needs an extra set of eyes, a bit of backup, the other shows up.
It’s not about necessity. It’s about momentum. And power.
Sometimes, just having a second person in the room tips things. Not because I said anything particularly clever—though I like to think I was at least moderately intimidating—but because the client clocked that Callum had support, that he wasn’t flinging proposals across the table solo.
Strength in numbers. Posturing, basically. But the good kind. The kind that lands you an extra zero at the end of a contract.
And it worked. The client signed. Callum looked five years younger and three inches taller. And all I really did was throw some disapproving looks across the table.
He still sees me as some sort of mentor, which is both flattering and vaguely hilarious. He doesn’t need me. But I suppose it’s easy to forget your own competence when the stakes get high.
So I turned up. I smiled in the right places. I drank very average coffee from very expensive boardrooms. And now I’m crawling back along the M25 in a car that smells faintly of fabric softener and end-of-trip fatigue.
The driver clears his throat. “Traffic’s moving. Should have you back in just under an hour.”
I grunt something that might pass for gratitude and close my eyes again, though sleep is still off somewhere over the Channel.
It’s just before midnight when we finally roll up the drive. I step out into the cool night air, stretch slightly, and blink up at the stars like I might find a second wind somewhere between Orion and Heathrow.
And then I notice it.
The lights.
On, steady, glowing out from the small flat on the right—the annexe, as my solicitor insists on calling it, though Stella's tried more than once to pitch it as a “self-contained executive let.” It’s not. It’s a decent two-bedroom with its own entrance and slightly too much beige.
For half a second, I frown, confused. Then I remember.
Right. The tenant.
Stella sorted it all while I was away. Said it was an easy one. She assured me Miranda is lovely and won’t be any trouble. She told me that part at least five times, which does make me suspicious.
So, I’d asked Callum if he thought Stella was pulling something. Wouldn’t be the first time. She once tried to set me up with one of her relatives under the guise of “urgent marketing consultancy.” That woman had a Pomeranian in a pram and believed Gwyneth Paltrow had been misunderstood.
Callum had rolled his eyes at my question. “Mate, she’s not matchmaking.”
I want to believe him. Maybe my brothers are right. I am turning into a bit of a hermit.
After I say goodbye to the driver, I wheel my suitcase to the door and let myself in. The house is still and cold, just as I left it. No sounds of life from next door, but then it’s nearly midnight; I’m hardly expecting her to be hosting a party already.
I drop my keys onto the side table and head upstairs, too tired to do anything but autopilot. Stripping off the last of the travel-wrinkled layers, I step into the shower and let the water run hot enough to sting.
It doesn’t fix the jet lag or the deep ache behind my eyes, but it’s something.
When I finally crawl into bed, everything hurts in the way that suggests I’m either getting old or allergic to air travel. Possibly both.
Still, I make a note to myself: tomorrow, I’ll do the civilised thing. At the very least, I should introduce myself.
That’s what normal people do, isn’t it?
The treadmill hums beneath me, steady and joyless. My feet slap out a rhythm, sharp against the rubber. It's just gone six, but the world outside is still thick with night; black sky pressing in against the gym’s long windows.
The air in here is cooler than I like. I didn’t bother waiting for the heating to kick in. Just yanked on my kit and started moving. Better to sweat into the cold than sit still and listen to the silence claw at the walls.
Normally, I’d swim. Nothing clears the mind like cutting through water—smooth, silent, solitary. But the local pool doesn’t open until seven, and I can’t be arsed to sit around waiting for chlorinated serenity.
I’d have had one built by now. A proper pool house out in the garden, something sleek and warm and mine, but the parish council got twitchy. “Out of character with the village aesthetic,” they said. “Obtrusive.” As if I’d planned to install a disco and a hot dog van alongside it.
So, no pool. Just this. A tiny home gym.
I increase the speed slightly, the incline a little more. Make it bite.
A dull ache starts in my right calf. The good kind. Reminds me I'm not entirely ornamental. That something still works.
I used to know what my days were for.
There were meetings, pitches, problems with edges. Things that needed solving, urgently, with consequences if I didn’t. People who looked to me like I was the adult in the room. And I suppose I was.
Now?
Now there’s this: silence, sweat, motion without direction. A treadmill in every sense.
I don’t need to work. That’s the headline, isn’t it? Clever man makes clever thing, retires before forty, becomes a cautionary tale for ambitious twenty-somethings who think they’d enjoy having nothing to do.
No one says what comes after.
The money’s fine. The freedom’s fine. The doing nothing is... not.
I’ve invested. Dabbled. Stuck my name on a few things to make other people feel better about theirs. But nothing’s lit that part of my brain that used to wake me up at three in the morning because it couldn’t wait to try something.
Now I wake up because I can’t remember why I sleep.
I increase the pace again. Not by much. Just enough to feel it in my chest.
After another twenty minutes of running that gets all my muscles burning. I finally push the button and the machine slows down. I need a shower; but first a coffee.
As I head downstairs in my running shorts, I toe off my socks and trainers, pull the soaking wet T-shirt over my head and drop it in the basket in the utility room.
My skin is cooling in patches where the sweat’s started to dry. The kitchen tiles are cold underfoot, a sharp little reminder that November doesn’t care if you’ve just burned five hundred calories trying to outrun a vague sense of purposelessness.
I flip on the lights and basically can taste the coffee on my tongue already. Still overheated, I open the door to the garden. A gust of cold air rushes in, biting against my skin. I exhale sharply. Better.
I pop the lid on the coffee pod jar, pick one at random and slide it into the machine. Familiar movement. Something automatic. Hands doing what they’ve done a thousand mornings before.
And then—
Something soft brushes against my ankle.
I freeze. Not metaphorically. No, I’m at a full stop. Like a statue.
My first thought—entirely rational, given the hour and my blood sugar levels—is rat. Some bold little menace from the neighbour’s compost heap staging a kitchen coup.
I glance down, preparing to launch a mug if necessary.
It’s not a rat.
It is... orange.
No. Ginger.
Fluffy. Round. With white paws like it’s wearing the latest feline shoe line. And currently staring up at me like I’m the surprise.
We lock eyes.
It meows.
High-pitched. Piercing. The sound of entitlement in fur form.
I take a slow step back, as if disengaging from a wild animal on a nature programme. It follows. Purring.
“You... don’t live with me,” I inform it, very reasonably.
It blinks up at me with the blank confidence of something that’s never paid rent in its life… then leans forward and licks my shin.
I recoil instinctively. “Oh God. No. That’s—don’t do that.”
It does it again. Enthusiastically.
Apparently, post-run leg sweat is the breakfast of champions.
“Brilliant,” I mutter, swiping gently at it with a tea towel as if I’m warding off a particularly persistent foot fetishist. “Absolutely not how I imagined starting my morning.”
The kitten attacks the tea towel with alarming enthusiasm, latching onto it like it’s just declared a blood feud.
“Oh, for—” I lift the towel, kitten still attached, a dangling, soft orange bauble of wrath.
It growls. Actually growls. A noise that might be threatening if it weren’t coming from something that weighs less than a decent sandwich.
“Right. That’s enough,” I mutter, peeling tiny claws off cotton. It flails mid-air and, against my better judgement and every principle I hold about not hugging wild animals, I draw it in and hold it against my chest.
It goes limp instantly. Snuggles in.
Purrs.
Loudly. Deeply. I stare down at it, baffled.
“You manipulative little furball,” I whisper.
The purring intensifies.
Of course it does.
Then, from somewhere beyond the open door, a whisper-shout cuts through the silence:
“Twinklesocks! Pss-pss-pss—Twinklesocks!”
It comes again, louder, still in that frantic stage whisper people use when trying not to wake small children or enrage large neighbours.
“Twinklesocks!”
There’s a rustle. Movement. A crouched figure emerging from the hedgerow like a burglar with a moral conscience.
I walk to the door, kitten still anchored to my chest and lean out.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” I chuckle.
The figure startles upright with a small gasp. Straightens too fast and wobbles slightly, caught in the act.
That’s when I see her properly for the first time.
Hair in a chaotic bun, tendrils escaping in every direction. Big eyes. Shocked expression. And the faint, universal look of someone who definitely didn’t plan to meet anyone before 7 a.m.
She blinks. “Hi.”
Then she points weakly at the orange fluff glued to my chest. “That’s... yes. Twinklesocks.”
I glance down at the kitten
She looks up at me. Slow blink. Like she’s confirming it, “Yes, that’s my ridiculous name.”
My gaze drifts back to the woman: breathless, hair in full mutiny, weird pyjamas, slippers, eyes far too wide for this hour. And still, she is adorable… no, stunning.
Brilliant.
The kitten’s trouble.
But the woman?
Quite possibly worse.