Chapter 3 #2
We both move towards the phone but I get there first. It is, after all, my room.
‘In a nutshell,’ Jonas begins, and then tells me at great length that the only remotely nice (in his opinion) hotels with two vacant rooms are right on the outskirts of the city.
Apparently (and unsurprisingly), Cape Town is popular at New Year, and today is the twenty-ninth of December.
‘I understand from when the booking was made that you do know each other, so in my opinion you should just share the suite, with one of you sleeping in the sitting room on the sofa bed.’ He pauses, pregnantly.
‘Unless there’s a particular reason that you cannot share with Mr Rock? ’
I sigh. Jonas is going to win. I cannot imply that I have any kind of bad problem with Dominic, like he’s ever said or done something inappropriate.
And I can’t actually say out loud that we once had sex a very, very long time ago and then I got together with my newly-ex-husband basically because he reminded me of Dominic who I thought I’d fallen in love with at essentially first sight and then I met Dominic again very recently and discovered that we have absolutely nothing in common and I just don’t really want to spend a lot of time with him basically.
So I tell Jonas that, no, of course there is no particular reason, and we’ll call him back in a minute. I put the phone down, summarise everything Jonas said for Dominic and bow to the seemingly inevitable, concluding with, ‘I think we have no option but to stay here.’
‘Right,’ Dominic says when I’ve finished. ‘Well… fine. We’re grown-ups. I will of course take the sofa bed.’
I incline my head. ‘Thank you. I’ll tell Jonas. He says he’ll send someone asap to make it up with bedding.’
Dominic’s large frame is almost entirely filling my vision, and a very unwelcome thought occurs to me. I go into the sitting room. The sofa bed does not look that big. I’m not sure that I ought to agree to him sleeping in it.
As I’m standing there sizing it up, a man holding a large pile of linen knocks on the door, and shortly afterwards, more quickly than I could have believed possible, the bed is folded out and fully made up with beautifully smooth and gleaming white linen.
It looks lovely and also very welcoming, but it is fairly small.
Dominic is a lot taller than me and must also be a lot heavier.
I don’t want to have to walk past him (as he lies in my lovely big bed) when I go to and from the bathroom in my pyjamas, but I can’t accept his offer to sleep in a bed that’s far too small for him when I would clearly be fine in it.
‘Obviously I’m going to take the sofa bed,’ I say once the bed-making-ninja man has gone.
(He was amazing: I want someone like him to live with me and make my bed every single day.) ‘It’s the wrong size for you.
’ I’m really not sure why I can’t bring myself to say the words you’re too big.
I mean, am I teenager? Clearly Dominic would know I wasn’t referring to that kind of bigness.
And, no. Why am I even thinking about his…
Oh. My. Goodness. My eyes just went to his crotch. They did. And he saw. He’s smirking.
‘Yep,’ I say briskly. ‘So I’ll take this and you take the… bigger one.’
Why? Why did I leave a pause before the word bigger? There was literally no need whatsoever for me to do that. I am beyond ridiculous. This weird proximity is obviously getting to me.
Dominic continues to smirk as he says, ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I mean it.’
‘And so do I.’ Dominic steps around me and sits himself plonk down on the middle of the sofa bed, which definitely sags a little when he does it.
‘See.’ I point. ‘It sagged.’
Dominic does not reply. He’s busy patting all over the duvet cover with his hands.
I stare at him for a moment and then ask, ‘Are you actually doing the equivalent of a child licking food so that no-one else can eat it?’
‘Yep.’ He beams at me and then pats the top pillow too.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say nothing, apart from “You win”, and go and make yourself comfortable in your bedroom and let me know when the bathroom’s free.’
I’m just staring at him. It’s very odd when someone who has been coming across as very uptight suddenly behaves like a complete toddler.
I end up shaking my head and saying, ‘Thank you. I will enjoy the big bed.’
‘Here to please,’ he replies.
And then we both just stare at each other for a moment, before I say, ‘Great then,’ and go back to the bedroom, unable to help muttering, ‘Toddler,’ under my breath as I go. I’m slightly smiling, though, too.
* * *
About ten seconds later, I return to Dominic’s room to ask him if he would like to use the bathroom first and to tell him that he absolutely must if he wants to, given that he’s made the bed sacrifice.
Clearly several mini dilemmas are going to arise now that we’re sharing. Will the first one who is ready wait for the second one to go down to meet the rest of the group? Will we tell any of the others about our strange sharing situation? Will we go down for breakfast together?
Dominic accepts my first-in-the-bathroom offer and then I – not at all extremely awkwardly – sit myself in an armchair in the corner of the bedroom while he’s in there, and busy myself on my phone, hoping greatly that I won’t be able to hear him at all.
That would be, just, eurgh, and – worse – might mean that he could hear me at some point.
Fortunately, the bathroom fan is loud and the door is thick and so I really have absolutely no idea whether he goes to the loo, showers, or just stands around for a while: I can’t hear anything at all.
When he comes out of the bathroom, I glance up and almost gasp out loud.
Dominic has clearly had a shower – his hair is wet – and Dominic straight out of the shower is gorgeous.
His damp hair is no longer super-conservatively styled but very sexily mussed and I love its natural wave and thickness.
Also, he must have got dressed in a bit of a hurry, and not completely dried himself following the shower, because his shirt is sticking a tiny bit to his visibly slightly damp body, showing that he’s in just as good shape as he was all those years ago when we…
I’m staring.
‘So.’ His voice is oddly hoarse. Maybe from tiredness. ‘I’m thinking I’ll go down now and meet the others. Give you some space in here.’
‘Perfect.’ My own voice comes out a little high and squeaky. I’m obviously tired too.
He grabs a jumper and is out of the door almost before I even have the word out.
I flop down on the bed for a moment, for a little rest – it’s a big relief finally to have the room to myself for a few minutes – and then get out my toiletries before going into the bathroom.
It smells of a lovely, foresty, very masculine shower gel (or something), and I just…
yeah, I don’t like it. I mean, I do like the smell; it’s very nice.
But I don’t like being able to sense the aftermath of Dominic’s shower. It’s too intimate.
I frown. I’m being silly. At uni, at various times, I often shared shower rooms with people I’d barely met.
It is, of course, because it’s Dominic, the man I spent many years wondering about, even, to my shame, occasionally during the early days of my relationship with Jed, not least because the reason that I first got together with Jed was that he reminded me of Dominic.
I really shouldn’t, when I think about it, feel awkward around him now.
Because he really isn’t the man I’ve always remembered him as.
I thought he was fun, soulmate material. I was clearly wrong.
Yes, he’s attractive. Really attractive. But he’s also very uptight (other than when pat-claiming the sofa bed) and, crucially, my divorce isn’t even finalised yet, and we are both in our mid-thirties and entirely able to ignore a little bit of physical lust. Entirely.