Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
Simon barrelled out of the meeting room, bouncing us into the harsh lights of the wood-panelled corridor.
Less dark and crooked little house, more Scandi spa chic.
Pinballing along the wall, I had to keep pace with his long-limbed power walk without tripping over my own feet.
Hard no to falling behind. Mel Booker would eat me like a buttered kipper on toast.
The metal bar in the middle of the glass side wall clattered as Simon shouldered the fire door open, and I braced for the building going up in a wall of sound.
But all I got was the white noise of distant traffic and the scrunch of my rubber-soled granddad shoes on the gritty flat roof of the tiny L-shaped terrace.
A skyline I’d never seen from this angle stretched out in front of us – a mishmash of glass and jagged scaffold tents and sleek slopes of tiles. Silhouettes of cranes mingled in with church steeples. London, perpetually under construction.
The door slammed, and Simon loomed livid, neck-crickingly tall, all but visibly rocking forward with the pace of his pulse.
“What do you think you were doing in there?”
“Saving your bacon, mate!”
Simon’s eyes boggled. He should really get that throbbing vein in the side of his neck checked out.
“That’s not part of your job.” Clawed hands balled into fists up by the side of his head. “You’re my interpreter. You’re supposed to interpret. My life is not a group project!”
“I know that.” Wincing, I held my hands up. Full on surrender gesture. “But I’m not one of those documentary photographers who’s going to watch the antelope getting mauled to death by an entire pride of lions, am I?”
Simon growled, a whole lot more Scar than Simba, and I inched a step towards the side wall, away from the parapet. In case he tried to throw me off the building.
“You’ve gone all Geordie.” His eyes narrowed murderously. “Did you just call me an antelope?”
“No! Yes. Sort of. Maybe?” Most of the time, London abraded my accent into something smoother than I was, and I’d still never get to where he wanted me to be. Flared tempers thickened everything.
Simon folded his arms across his chest. “You’re being entirely unintelligible. Stop doing the accent.”
Balling my fists, I held myself back, teeth gritted with the effort of not lamping him. “Excuse me? Doing the accent.”
When my words came out raw – nothing matching what he was used to. The shape of them on my lips didn’t pair with the sound profile he expected. But he didn’t have to make out I’d started speaking Klingon, did he?
“I’m voicing an accessibility requirement.”
“What – received pronunciation?” Fuck him and his privately educated bubble.
His eyes flashed to mine with a wicked kind of unhurriedness. “Maybe.” He ducked his head, snorting a hiccoughed laugh. “And what if it was?”
A reciprocating proto-grin pestered the muscles of my cheek. Frowning didn’t fully counter it.
“Should never have hired me then, should you?” His ego didn’t need rewarding.
I slumped against the wall of the building and the urge to punch him eased like the pressure in a tyre with a nail embedded in it.
In front of us, somewhere under the blanket of hazy grey, the sun was turning everything golden.
Dawn peeking through the rooftops might have been worth being awake for on any other morning.
Pale clouds danced against the black slate and flashes of steel, and the low early morning sun etched blurry shadow lines against the day, scribing around the buildings it climbed between.
Simon stepped in front of me, blocking out the stretching reach of light, arms dropped to his sides. “I don’t know. We do alright when neither of us are yelling.”
We did. I thought we did.
Where the sun touched, the glass of the building was already warm through the backs of my trousers. But coolness seeped into my bones anywhere he blocked it. It was the shaded cotton of my shirt making me shiver. Not him looking me over like he had at the bus stop, so closely it made my skin itch.
“What do you normally do when you have a fight?” Knowing him, he was only wondering whether I owned an ironing board.
“I’m not in the habit of having fights.”
“Bollocks. Everyone has fights.” He was the one who’d started shouting.
The ghost of a laugh quivered at the edges of his lips. “I have balanced discussions. There’s a qualitative difference.”
I snorted so hard I ripped the back of my throat out. Tears prickled the corners of my eyes as I wheezed, shaking with the hilarity of his bullshit. Simon Azie: my shit does not stink.
He didn’t bother trying to disguise his grin anymore, drawing close like he was magnetised. Still laughing, I sagged against the glass.
And then it stopped being funny.
Slow motion, his hand rose to my chest and I went cross-eyed watching his fingers smooth an invisible smudge from the front of my shirt.
“...What are you doing?”
Simon huffed one of those chuckle-laughs people drag out at team building exercises, like I’d said something terribly, terribly amusing, and his eyes flashed sideways like cartoon arrows. “We have an audience, Loverboy.”
He was right. On the other side of the glass wall Sev and Tracy and those stuffed suit lawyers I didn’t know had lined up in an awkward, socially distanced firing squad, with Mel at the head, looking like she was readying the orders.
“Oh shit.” The lot of them needed popcorn.
Simon caught my chin, and I tensed as he deliberately re-aligned the angle of my face like he touched me all the time.
“What did you say?”
My heartbeat stuttered at the swell of irritation in his eye-contact. Lip reading. That thing where he had to see my mouth move.
“I said, ‘oh shit’.”
The tension in his fingers softened. “Don’t panic. Laugh again, and do those moody puppy dog eyes you’re so very good at. They’re ever so convincing.”
The back of my neck went clammy and hot. “I do not have puppy-dog eyes.” They had to be brown, didn’t they? Not sludgy greenish-blue.
“Perfect, those are the ones.” His grin widened, and he let go. Dipping his head, he looked down for a measured beat, and took my hand in his like I’d turned into a wilting damsel.
“What are they doing gawping at us?” More importantly, why were we holding hands?
“I imagine Mel’s waiting for me to confirm your ridiculous assertion so they know whether to escort me from the building.”
Ridiculous assertion: Us being together. Right. How hilariously unlikely.
Simon’s thumb traced a nonsense pattern over the ridge of my knuckles, and my brain fused.
“Erm.” I tugged my hand free. Why did he keep touching me if it was all so bloody improbable?
“Excuse me, Mel was practically begging you to give her an alternative explanation and you were stood there like a lemon.”
“Yes. Thank you for the I’m Spartacus routine. The thing is, it’s not entirely convincing we absolutely had to have each other right then and there when you’re getting twitchy over me standing too close.”
I jutted my chin up so fast I nearly headbutted him. “I am not getting twitchy about you standing too close.”
“No?” His cat-lick of a glance dragged right down the length of me, only it didn’t make me feel remotely clean.
“No.”
Tilting my head against the glass transformed Simon into a silhouette against the rapidly lightening sky. No surprise he eclipsed everything else. My backwards self-preservation drive had me holding my breath until my lungs burned and the colours throbbed, but he didn’t look away.
I bottled it first, glancing to the door again. Mel stretched out an arm and pointedly tapped the face of her watch. He was right. They weren’t going to buy this just because I stood up and told them it was true. Mel Booker wasn’t born yesterday.
Action required, stat. “We’d better give them something to look at then, hadn’t we?”
“Excellent idea. Exactly what I was thinking.” Simon flashed his eyebrows, fizzing with mischief. “Do try not to fall over.”
I full-on gulped. His eyes dropping to my mouth had absolutely jack-all to do with understanding what I was about to say. I wasn’t about to say anything.
His lips were right there. And then they were on mine.
Oh. They were as well, weren’t they?
And my breath was dead-rat level disgusting. Why did I not carry breath mints?
Too late now. Too bloody late.
Simon’s hands went for either side of my head, clamping me still, and I eyeballed him, utterly frozen, drowning in the golden brown of his irises, like those sailors who got sirened down to the depths of the Mariana Trench and liked it.
He kissed me. With his mouth and his lips and choirs of angels peering down from the clouds waiting for me to get with the programme. Eyes closed, swooping violins. Kissed me.
And I stood there with my fingers twitching, like a powered-down robot who’d forgotten it had arms.
He eased back. My brain fizzed, sparking uselessly, and a sound like a pair of deflating bagpipes wheezed right out of my lungs.
Simon stepped back, probably horrified. I was horrified.
“...Are you alright?”
I gasped, sucking in a breath like I’d been freshly defibrillated. “Never better. Why d’you ask?”
“No reason at all. I thoroughly enjoy kissing reanimated corpses.”
Three years I’d been dreaming about this moment. Three years, and I ballsed it up completely. Well why stop at only slightly awful?
I grabbed his arm before he backed off, yanking him forward again, hand to the dome of his skull like I was trying out judo moves, and he jolted off balance. Up on my toes. I went for it.
And our teeth clashed – chalk on chalkboard – my ankle buckling as I back-stepped into the box gutter.
Simon’s forearms slammed against the wall either side of me before I dragged us both down.
Clinging on to him, I banana-ed in the middle, scrabbling for balance.
And he started shaking, laughing breathily right against my mouth.
“Ben, you’re such a disaster.”