16
The social media post, which took close to ten hours to come up with and turned out to just be a mirror selfie of the two of us, goes down a treat. By Thursday morning, even Tilda’s mum, Violet, has texted me to tell me she thinks Miles is handsome. So, I’m feeling good when I meet him at Euston after lunch.
“Are you ready for your mission?” I ask Miles as he approaches. He looks as stylish as he always does in a pair of jeans, Dr Martens, and slightly oversized t-shirt. Man, he’s so cool that everyone is going to see through this ruse in seconds.
He grins, running his hand through his loose curls, “Ready and armed, captain,” he says.
I smile back, “Our train is gonna be on platform 5 apparently,” I say, gesturing toward the platform in question. I’m slightly antsy because when I told Miles the time for our train he suggested meeting up just 15 minutes beforehand, like some kind of sociopath. For anyone out there who doesn’t know, the appropriate amount of time to arrive at a train station prior to your train is approximately six hours, just in case.
He nods, “I love train journeys,” he muses, as we head toward the platform and onto the waiting train.
“Me too,” I say, “But not like tubes, actual trains,”
“Oh absolutely,” he says, “I like to be able to see daylight,”
*
It’s not a particularly long journey home, but it’s long enough that I have packed three different snacks, my Kindle, a paperback, and my laptop (just in case I want to go back to ruining my Sims’ life at some point), and four downloaded podcasts. Apparently, I have over-packed though, because we’re already an hour into the journey, the English countryside whipping past us in a blur, and my Kindle is left unattended on the tray table in front of me.
Any worries I had that Miles and I may have run out of things to talk about within the first ten minutes of the journey were swept away when he asked if I only read fantasy books (courtesy of the ad on the front of my Kindle display). To which I replied with a full essay, citations included, on my very varied taste in books.
“I do love the New Adult genre though,” I am saying, “I feel like it perfectly bridges that gap between teenaged main characters who are all orphans and think that somehow, that makes them mature, and those books you get in airports about divorced women having torrid affairs with Spanish men on lonely holidays, you know,”
Miles laughs, “I do know. I don’t know if I’ve ever read any though,”
I frown, “What was the last book you read?” I ask, knowing I probably should have asked him this a long time ago. I tend to decide who I am going to be friends with based on whether or not they think reading is pointless. Emme, for example, has a very secret, very obsessive love of YA fantasy which she revealed to me about a year into our friendship with the shame of a woman who was admitting she liked making rugs out of cat fur.
Miles ponders my question, “Avery kept pestering me to read Normal People ,”
“Oh my god,” I very nearly yell, “I love that book. And Connal’s fucking chain could get it. The BBC show was actually perfect. I’ve never seen such a good translation of book to screen before,”
He grins, “So, you like contemporary fiction too,” he says, “Anything else?”
I consider him, “I really like romance,” I say, “But I’m very specific about what I like,”
“How so?”
“So, I hate billionaire romance because billionaires shouldn’t exist,” I say.
He nods, “Very appropriate, there isn’t such thing as an ethical billionaire, ”
“Exactly,” I say, “And usually people are really woolly about where they got their money from, you know? Like, what do you mean you buy up companies, Mr. Grey,” I add, thinking I might have just confused Fifty Shades of Grey with Pretty Woman .
He snorts, “How did I know you’d get a Fifty Shades reference in there?”
I grin, turning slightly so that I am looking at him more fully, “Hey, it’s based on one of my all-time favourite series,”
He raises an eyebrow, turning his body too, his thigh pushing against mine in the tiny space that trains call seats, “Oh really?”
I nod vigorously, “I read somewhere that it’s Twilight fanfiction, like originally,”
“I did not know that, but I guess I could see it,” he says, musingly.
I raise an eyebrow, “Have you seen the Fifty Shades films?”
He grins, nodding, “And read the books,” he says, “Let me tell you, contracts with butt plugs in are highly amusing to 19-year-old boys. One of the girls I was at university with had it and she left it on the counter in our house. Anyway, we enjoyed reading them. I learned some stuff,”
I cackle, “Of course you did, Mr Grey knows what he’s doing,” I say with a wink .
Miles chuckles, “So, BDSM books are a genre you like?”
I shake my head, “No, I don’t read a lot of kink books, to be honest. Everyone has read Fifty Shades though. Honestly, I mostly like small-town romances where the men are unbelievably competent,”
Miles raises an eyebrow, “Like, in bed?”
I shake my head, “Like in life,” I say, “I mean, yes they’re always good in bed and have mass-hoo-sive dicks, but no, like, the men are like fishermen or blue-collar workers and they can, like, do stuff, you know?”
Miles clearly does not know because he frowns.
“So, like they can do stuff and it’s hot,” I try to explain, “I don’t know what it is about men who have skills, maybe it’s just that there’s like zero expectations anymore. Like the bar is in hell for what we expect men to be able to do, so when they can like sail or cook or build a shelf, it’s suddenly so fucking hot,”
Miles bursts out laughing, “You are going to wet yourself when you see me build an IKEA flat pack,” he says with a wink.
I shake my head, laughing. The image comes to me of Miles sitting on the floor of a room unknown to me yet. He has an instruction pack in his hands, the floor is covered in screws, and I am watching him build our coffee table intently .
I give my head another little wobble, trying to get the exceptionally overwhelming image out, and then grin at him, “You won’t be shocked to know that I also love cowboy romances,” I say, changing the subject.
He smiles, “I could see that,”
I chuckle, sitting back in my seat and I’m just about getting to the point of socialisation where I start to over analyse everything I’ve said in the conversation to work out if it was weird. The anxious lady in my brain is making a beeline for the comment about romance hero penis size, but Miles pulls me back from the edge with a question about a TV show he watches about cowboys and the moment passes, completely forgotten. Instead, we spend the rest of the journey debating whether we could cowboy, or if we’ve both lived in the city too long to move to Montana.