“No.” Giles turns more of his body towards me. “God, no.”
“And it was okay, for you? The sex, I mean.”
“Marcello, it was very okay. It was…” He studies me and I feel like he knows exactly what he wants to say but I’m not sure when he speaks again if that’s actually what leaves his mouth. “Really good.”
I beam with pride. “Good, because that’s important to me. If you’re going to be so generous with your time, with your experience, with your body,” I trail my fingers up his forearm and feel the cords of muscle there tighten under my touch, “the very least I can do is make it worth your while.”
Giles’ eyes seem to glaze over, like a wave crashes in them and the swirls of blue-green change colour again.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” he says and it leaves me feeling a little cold. “My cleaning and counting.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I do it every Sunday. Last week I did it before you arrived, but this morning I ran out of time. And I kept thinking about it. It stopped me falling asleep next to you, even though I so desperately wanted to. But Ijust couldn’t. And then I started to think, if I didn’t get up and do the cleaning, then I’d be punished. That something would happen to you.”
“Oh,” I say slowly.
“And honestly, it’s not a big deal. If I just do it, then it’s done and I can forget about it.” There’s more bounce in his voice, but it feels very, very forced.
“I’m not saying it is a big deal, but it doesn’t sound like an easy way to live.”
“What is an easy way to live?” Giles’ eyes are wide and manic. His moustache is bouncing for all the wrong reasons. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s all under control. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I wasn’t worrying,” I begin but then stop because what I want to add is, “I was caring about you.” And that’s too much. “I was being a friend.”
“A friend,” he repeats the word like he’s never heard it before. I wonder if his stomach is churning like mine. I don’t think I’m hungry – it certainly doesn’t feel like hunger – but maybe that’s what we should do.
“A friend who wants to buy you dinner,” I say as I swig back the last mouthful of my tea.
“Dinner?”
“Or takeaway. Or maybe I could even cook for you. I don’t know what you’ve got in your fridge. But even if there’s nothing there, I could go to the… You must have a supermarket near here, right? There’s always a supermarket or a corner shop close by in London, isn’t there?”
Giles waits for me to stop waffling with a patience that not everyone has when I go on like this.
“If you don’t mind,” he says slowly and I know what’s coming before he says it on account of the way my stomach stops churning and sinks. “I’d rather be alone this evening.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Giles
“Awatched phone never rings,” Radia says from somewhere behind me. I drop the device on the counter and turn to her. She’s hanging up suits and putting them in travel bags for a pick-up.
“I wasn’t waiting for it to ring. I…” I stop. I don’t know how to explain what I was debating doing because Radia would think it completely ridiculous.
Because it is completely ridiculous. Cancelling my gym session with Marcello later is petty and selfish and rude. All the more so because my reason for doing so is because he knows my secret. A secret I’ve kept hidden and guarded for my whole adult life.
Sure, people have picked up on it. Friends, lovers, even men I’ve dated for a few months or more, but nobody has approached it the way Marcello did. Until him, there were jokes and confused comments, a couple of derisive comments, and I laughed them all off. I told them what I first told Marcello. That three is my lucky number. And that seemed to be enough. It didn’t silence the comments or the teasing but it didn’t prompt further interrogation like it did yesterday with Marcello.
Yet it wasn’t an interrogation. Not really. Marcello spoke more about his own experience than anything and he didn’t push me to go any deeper than I wanted to, and yet I felt like he was asking me to excavate my soul. And I didn’t want to do that. That was why I asked him to leave when I did.
And I don’t want to do it later today in the gym.
Not that I expect Marcello to pick up that conversation where we left off. When we’re in the gym we focus on training. Apart from that one – fucking glorious – tryst in the shower, we’ve managed to keep our workout sessions strictly focused on the task in hand.
But today, I’m not sure I can.
My counting is off the charts, to the point where earlier I was watching Radia do alterations and became obsessed with the number of pins she was using. I’m still not over the fact she used a number that isn’t divisible by three, especially after I convinced myself that this will mean that Marcello doesn’t want to see me again after I was so rude to him yesterday.
