‘How so?’
‘You’ll go back to London and lead your big city life, and I’ll be down on the coast leading mine. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.’
He was silent for a minute. ‘Jess … I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t fancy me.’ She prickled with embarrassment, remembering suddenly what he’d said about his ex. Lara was a model, for Chrissakes. But even as she shifted away from him, his hand tightened around hers. His voice was a murmur in her ear. ‘You’re beautiful.’
She waited. His thumb brushed over her palm. ‘So … why won’t you sleep with me?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Look. Here’s the thing. I haven’t had sex in three years. I sort of need to get back on the horse, and I think it – you – would be great.’
‘You want me to be a horse.’
‘Not like that. I need a metaphorical horse.’
‘And now we’re back to confusing metaphors.’
‘Look, a woman you say you find beautiful is offering you no-strings sex. I don’t understand the problem.’
‘There’s no such thing as no-strings sex.’
‘What?’
‘Someone always wants something.’
‘I don’t want anything from you.’
She felt him shrug. ‘Not now, maybe.’
‘Wow.’ She turned onto her side. ‘She really got to you, didn’t she?’
‘I just …’
Jess slid her foot along his leg. ‘You think I’m trying to lure you in? You think this is me trying to entrap you with my womanly wiles? My womanly wiles, a nylon bedspread, pie and chips?’ She interlinked her fingers with his. She let her voice drop to a whisper. She felt unleashed, reckless. She thought she might actually faint with how much she wanted him then. ‘I don’t want a relationship, Ed. With you or anyone. There’s no room in my life for the whole one plus one thing.’ She tilted her face so that her mouth was inches from his. She could almost taste the toothpaste sweetness of his breath. ‘I’d’ve thought that would be obvious.’
He moved his hips an awkward fraction away from hers. ‘You are … incredibly persuasive.’
‘And you are …’ She hooked her leg around him, pulling him closer. The hardness of him made her briefly giddy.
He swallowed.
Her lips were millimetres from his. All the nerves of her body had somehow concentrated themselves in her skin. Or maybe his skin: she could no longer tell.
‘It’s the last night. You know … you can drop us off tomorrow and we’ll never see each other again. At worst we can exchange a glance over the vacuum cleaner and I’ll just remember this as a nice night with a nice guy who actually was a nice guy.’ She let her lips graze his chin. It carried the faint echo of stubble. She wanted to bite it. ‘You, of course, will remember it as the greatest sex you ever had.’
‘And that’s it.’ His voice was thick, distracted.
Jess moved closer. ‘That’s it,’ she murmured.
‘You’d have made a great negotiator.’
‘Do you ever stop talking?’ She moved forward, a fraction, until her lips met his. She almost jolted. She felt the electric pressure of his mouth on hers as he ceded to her, the sweetness of him, and she no longer cared about anything. She wanted him. She burnt with it. ‘Happy birthday,’ she whispered.
He pulled back a fraction. She felt, rather than saw, Ed Nicholls gazing at her. His eyes were black in the darkness, unfathomable. He moved his hand and as it brushed against her stomach she gave a faint, involuntary shiver.
‘Fuck,’ he said quietly. ‘Fucking f**k.’ And then, with a groan, he said, ‘You will actually thank me for this tomorrow.’
And he gently disentangled himself from her, climbed out of bed, walked over to the chair, sat down and, with a great sigh, hauled the blanket over himself and turned away.
20.
Ed
Ed Nicholls had thought that spending eight hours in a damp car park was the worst possible way to spend a night. Then he’d concluded that the worst way to spend a night was hoicking your guts up in a static caravan somewhere near Derby. He was wrong on both counts. The worst way to spend a night, it turned out, was in a tiny room a few feet from a slightly drunk, good-looking woman who wanted to have sex with you and whom you had, like an idiot, rebuffed.
Jess fell asleep, or pretended to: it was impossible to tell. Ed sat in the world’s most uncomfortable chair, staring out of the narrow gap in the curtains at the black moonlit sky, his right leg going to sleep, and his left foot freezing cold where it wouldn’t fit under the blanket and tried not to think about the fact that if he hadn’t leapt out of that bed he could be there, curled around her right now, her arms around his neck, his lips pressed against her skin, those lithe legs looped around …
No.
He had done the right thing, he told himself. He must have done. His life was complicated enough without adding an impulsive cleaner with an eccentric family to the mix (he hated himself for letting the word ‘cleaner’ appear in that little mental riff). Even as Jess, uncharacteristically still in those last few moments, had lain against him and his brain had started to melt, he had tried to apply logic to the situation, and had concluded, with the few cells still functioning, that it couldn’t end well. Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterwards, and the five hours spent travelling to the Olympiad would have been excruciating. Or (b) the sex would have been fine, they would have woken up embarrassed and the journey would still have been excruciating. Worse, they could have ended up with (c): the sex would have been off the scale (he slightly suspected this one was correct – he kept getting a hard-on just thinking about her mouth), they would develop feelings for each other based purely on sexual chemistry and either (d) would have to adjust to the fact that they had nothing in common and were just completely unsuited in every other way or (e) they would find they were not entirely unsuited, but then he would be sent to prison. And none of this considered (f), which was that Jess had actual kids. Kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as him: he liked children as a concept, but in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent – i.e. it was nice to know it existed but he had no knowledge about it and had never felt any real desire to spend time there.