We pause in the passage outside my front door. “Do you have first aid stuff?” he asks.
I shake my head. “It’s fine. I just need a shower.”
He scans down over my scratched arms and legs and gives me a grim look. Placing a hand in the small of my back, he leads me to his own apartment. Surprisingly, I go along.
Inside, while I sit at his small, round dining table, he goes into his kitchen for a couple of minutes. He does something loud, rummaging around and running water and opening and shutting cupboards.
Left on my own, I look around me, curious about his home. The place is tidy – ish – but definitely lived in. It smells faintly masculine. A mix of aftershave, coffee, and leather. I feel a little like a voyeur, sneaking a peek into his private space.
His living room is furnished in that functional way men often have. Part sitting room, part study. Books crammed on shelves next to a Bluetooth speaker. A multi-outlet electrical extension with half a dozen USB wires. A phone charger lies next to a cup full of pens and pencils. The leather sofa – why do men love leather furniture? – has a jacket carelessly flung on its arm.
However, the guy-style is at odds with the framed pictures on the wall. I just bought framed pictures for my own walls: photographs of trees and lakes. His, on the other hand, are photographs of distant hills and fields. They’re not especially artistic – just simple pictures, the kind that never live up to real scenery. Then one of the images makes me stop. It’s of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct at sunrise; I know because I have a picture of it too. It was the reason I bought the set of six photographs, because I loved that particular one.
His, despite the almost amateurish approach, is more striking. The aqueduct splits the picture in half: green fields below, the light of sunrise behind the arches and above the pale blue sky of early morning.
It’s an oddly romantic photograph for a practical man like Osian.
“I thought you might be dehydrated,” Osian says, coming back with a mug of tea. He hands it to me before setting a tray full of stuff on the table.
“My throat thanks you very much.” I sip the hot, soothing tea gratefully.
While I drink, he arranges the first aid things on the table.
First, he checks my hair, hunkering down beside me examining the briar still tangled there.
After undoing the clip and separating the strands with his fingers, he reaches for the small secateurs from the table and makes a few snips, very close to my ear. “Sorry, this might pull a little. I don’t want you to lose any hair,” he says, leaning very close. I can feel the heat from him, smell the sun on his skin, the salt from sweat on his brow and the ghost of aftershave on his collar.
“There.” He rises from behind me, holding a snippet of climbing rose which he drops into a wastebasket under the table.
Dragging a chair to sit opposite me, quite close, he says, “I think your leg got the worst of it.” He studies my face and arms.
“My fault for rolling up my trouser legs,” I admit. “I was hot after all the walking.”
He wets a cotton pad in a bowl of water and dabs at my shoulder, the top of my arm and then my cheek. “Just a few tiny scratches.” For the next minute or two he wordlessly cleans my face with gentle fingers and applies disinfectant cream.
It’s not unusual for me to have someone, a stranger, right up in my personal space, touching me. In TV, I’ve had no end of techies and make-up people work on me. Yet this here makes me nervous. He has a more intense presence. I’m aware of every motion, every breath he takes, the way hair grows along his dark eyebrows.
When he’s done with my face he leans back and lifts my leg into his lap. He starts by cleaning around the long scratch, hissing lightly when he finds thorns still embedded in my skin. He rifles through the box for medical tweezers and wipes them with disinfectant. “This might hurt a bit,” he says quietly.
The last time something like this happened – prickles from a cactus – the person trying to pull them out ended up fumbling and pushing them deeper in. Osian’s hand is perfectly steady but also light as a feather, and I barely feel a thing. He taps the tweezers against a saucer, dropping one thorn, sprays more disinfectant and eases out another fragment of something. When it’s all done, he dabs my wounds with a folded piece of gauze, applies antiseptic cream and covers it with a dressing.
“You’re very good at this,” I breathe out.
A ghost of pain, like a distant memory, flashes across his face and disappears. Quickly he averts his eyes and mutters, “I’d better put these away.”
He puts my foot down and starts collecting the first aid things, his face turned away from me.
Twice while working he pauses, and I could have sworn he wanted to speak to me but held back.
Should I go? Maybe he wants to tell me to go home. But something keeps my backside in the chair. Eventually, after he’s tidied and washed up, he comes back and stands behind his chair, both hands gripping the backrest. Lifting his gaze, he meets my eyes. “Miss Palmer.”
Ouch. We’re down to surnames now.
“I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you the other morning. Raff mentioned that he ran into you soon after and you seemed very upset. I was unforgivably rude. It won’t happen again.” Every word feels like it’s been dragged out of him by force. He hasn’t changed his mind about me, or about the words he said to me. He’s just apologising for the way he said them.
He turns away and moves towards the balcony. I suspect he’ll go out and wait until I’ve left his apartment.
Trusting to instinct, I follow him out on the balcony and call softly. “Osian?”
