I laugh. ‘You know what? I think you’re right.’
‘You’ll find I often am.’
‘Oh, fuck off. You just tried to get me to ride a bike. You have no standing here.’
‘If you’d just kept an open mind. Spin is known to increase cardiovascular health and lower your blood pressure…’
My glare stops him. ‘Do not try the hard sell on me, buddy. We can circle back to the synergies later. If it’s so incredibly good, I take it you have a membership?’
‘No,’ he says, unashamed of the hypocrisy. ‘I’m a yoga guy. Run sometimes.’
I let out a childish whine. ‘Why didn’t you take me to a yoga class, then?’
‘Next time.’ He shoves a large piece of bacon and toast in his mouth, and I watch him struggle to get it under control.
Sometimes I don’t think before I speak, which is why I ask, ‘Does that mean you’re super bendy?’ And he nearly spits out the half-chewed mouthful. He takes a long drink of water to buy himself some time and I watch his throat work as he gulps it down in rhythmic waves.
‘I didn’t mean for that to sound so inappropriately sexual,’ I say. I’m not entirely sure how else it could sound, though. ‘What…got you into yoga?’
He chuckles at my backtrack. ‘Iamactually quite bendy. You should see me do the limbo.’ Yes. I would like to see that. ‘My older twin sisters are really into it, and it’s basically the only way I can see them both regularly and at the same time.’
‘I didn’t know you had siblings.’ I kind of say it to myself because how fucked up is it that he knows my deepest, darkest insecurities, but I don’t know his basic life information?
‘I didn’t tell you,’ he says simply.
‘I didn’t ask,’ I frown.
‘We don’t need to know everything about each other all atonce. We’ve still got loads to learn about you.’ He needs to stop saying profound things when I can see bits of chewed egg in his mouth. It really ruins the effect.
I tilt my head, considering him. ‘You know, I can see it now. Youngest only boy. Two older sisters who were basically two additional mothers. I bet you grew up footloose and fancy free.’ He laughs.
‘I don’t know about that. They used to pay me to do their house jobs until I learned that they were stooging me and only paying me ten per cent of the pocket money they got for the jobs. Joke’s on them, though. Jeanne couldn’t use an iron until she was twenty-three.’
‘Well, that just shows good entrepreneurial spirit.’
‘My father said roughly the same thing. Then he offered me the jobs direct at double what I was making before because he argued that he was losing money on the middlewomen.’
‘But he was still paying you less than what he paid each of them individually?’
‘It took me another year to figure that out and renegotiate. But what about you?’ he asks.
‘What about me?’ I can guarantee that supply-side economics and salary negotiation played no part in my childhood. I am very good, however, at deciding when to hit and when to stay in a game of blackjack.
‘Siblings?’
‘I’m an only child,’ I say. Deliberately casual. Super chill. ‘What was it like growing up with twins and not being one of them?’ If he notices my deflection, he’s polite enough not to comment.
Apparently, it’s not at all like I imagined because while older sisters are one thing, older twin sisters are a whole other situation. Arthur refers to Morgana and Jeanne as ‘agents of chaos’, but his smile as he says it means he really loves them. Aside from savvy financial dealings, they leaned a little too hard into being named after historical witches (a carryover from their mum’s flirtation with Wicca in the eighties) and used him on a rotating basis for spell practice (‘They were good at making me fly’), potions practice (‘Only one trip to the ED’) and as a cat (‘That was actually quite nice’). Maybe it’s the look of horror on my face, but he rushes to assure me that he found ways to get his own back (‘Which became much easier once I turned fifteen and started growing’).
He opens his phone and shows me a picture of them at a Halloween party, he in a shark onesie flanked by two identical witches in black hats and long lacy dresses.
Oh. When he leans over to show me the photo, our knees brush under the table. But when he takes his phone back, he doesn’t take the knee with him. Our knees are just touching under the table now. Should I tell him? No, of course he already knows. I shouldn’t draw attention to it, but the longer neither of us subtly moves our knee away the weirder it’ll be when we do.
‘So, will our next outing be a yoga date?’ I ask to distract myself.
‘I reckon we can swing that,’ he says.
‘Bee would be totally into it.’
