‘Really?’ I said, smiling vaguely, but I guessed that my intonation had been wrong because I wasn’t really thinking about what Billy was saying.
‘We started printing the lyrics on the sleeve afterThe Weight of Diamonds.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw that.’
‘God, you didn’t think…?’ Billy started to ask.
‘Yes?’
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s finish the tour.’
He extracted himself from behind the drum kit and I followed him out into the hall, still thinking about his unfinished question.Had I thought the song was about me?
The answer was,not really. But my misheard / Where the fuck are you? / Free Me! version had spoken to me in a way that enabled me to continue thinking Billy and I shared a connection. But the song was about bloody Phoebe. Talk about projection!
I reran that final snippet of conversation through my mind’s eye. There had been a hint of a smile on his lips, hadn’t there? The idea that I’d thought a song might be about me had been almost, but not quite, amusing to him.
‘Guest room with ensuite,’ Billy said, pushing open a door. ‘In case you want to stay over.’
I peered into the room. It was plain and had a smaller window with the same pretty view as his music room.
‘Office,’ Billy said, one door down. ‘This is where Joanna lives most of the time.’ It was a tidy office with a glass desk, a filing cabinet and a mustard chaise longue.
‘Sheliveshere?’
‘Façon de parler,’ Billy said, and, though I don’t speak a word of French, I somehow understood what he meant.
‘So you’re not together?’
Billy glanced back at me and wrinkled his nose. ‘Some drunken shenanigans in LA one night after a concert, but that’s about as far as it went.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Fair enough.’
‘And last but not least,’ Billy said. ‘The master bedroom.’
He crossed the room to another large sliding window, but I remained hovering on the threshold, eyeing up the black satin sheets and thinking how clingy and uncomfortable they looked. How potentially threatening, too.
‘Come look at the view,’ Billy said. ‘You can see even further along the cove.’
Still I hesitated, and, as I did so, a whole stream of different thoughts went through my mind.
I thought that entering Billy’s bedroom was risky, but that the risk was of something happening that I had fantasised about for half my life.
I thought about the fact that Billy wasn’t that attractive any more, but that I probably wasn’t that much of a catch these days, either, and how I’d still found him surprisingly attractive when he’d been singing, and that perhaps if I could just get him to sing to me while we had sex… I smiled at that silly thought and then, deciding that my hesitation was looking worse than just following him, I went for it. I walked the length of the bed and stood beside him to look out at the view.
‘Bedroom with a view, huh?’ Billy said, bumping my hip with his.
I nodded. ‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ I admitted. I wondered if I’d ever want to sleep with Rob again. I wondered if that was about Rob, or about me, and I wondered if sleeping with Billy would help me understand where the problem was.
‘Looks even better at sunset,’ Billy said.
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Must be nice.’ I wondered if I’d ever sleep with anyone else in my life. Sex had been so simple when I’d been young. It became surprisingly complicated once you were older.
‘If you stayed, you could see it,’ Billy said. ‘We could drink some champers and watch the sun go down. I wouldn’t necessarily make you stay in the shitty guest room.’ He slipped one arm round my waist as he said this, but I resisted him and pushed away.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be uptight.’
Uptight, I thought.Uptight. Something about that word annoyed me, but there wasn’t time to analyse exactly why.
