“And what you did when we got back to the room?”
My eyes reopen, gunshot-fast.
“When you decided to hang your underwear out of our window to dry?” he prompts.
“Oh, no. Did it...?”
“Oh, yes,” he says, like he’s trying not to laugh. “I went down there in my dressing gown to try to salvage it.”
“Please,pleasetell me you succeeded.”
“I’m sorry, Cal,” he says, and he’s really laughing now. “I got thebottom half, but your bra’s hanging off a gargoyle. There’s no way of reaching it.”
“Oh, my God!” I sit up, a throb of planetary alignments taking place inside my skull. “Pleasetell me you’re joking.”
He’s beside himself. “I wish I were.”
“Then we have to go. We have to check out right now!”
Joel climbs out of bed and moves over to the sash window, raises the lower frame, and sticks his head through the gap. “Yeah, I think you could be right. Sun’s up. There’s no hiding that beauty now. The green really stands out against the building. Still, on the bright side, it’s drying well.”
I hurl a pillow at him, but despite my varying dimensions of suffering I’m laughing. “We seriously have to leave.”
“Don’t you think we could style out breakfast?”
“No!”
“How about a quick rendition of ‘Agadoo’ from the shower? You sang it so beautifully last night.”
Abject horror floods my mind. “We are going, right now.”
•••
We pull in at a café on the way home, a dual-carriageway pit stop where they serve only instant coffee in one size of mug, but fifteen variations on a fried egg.
Beyond the window, the road is a racetrack, the traffic motion-blur.
Joel looks tired, but in a good way—the kind of tired that reminds me of dawn kisses in bed, or late nights with music and candlelit conversation.
By contrast, I’m not too sure I want to know what I look like right now. I was so desperate to leave the hotel that I bypassed the hair dryer entirely. Ditto makeup—except for a touch of mascara and a reassuring squirt of perfume.
“You know you were the hit of the dance floor last night?” I say to Joel.
“In terms of most-mocked, you mean?”
“No, I’m serious! For a self-confessed hermit you had some good moves.”
“Hey, you’re not so bad yourself.”
“Come on—I’ve got two left feet. Didn’t you see me nearly crash into the band?”
He finishes his egg roll, wipes his fingers. “They didn’t seem to mind. I think they were flattered by your boundless enthusiasm.”
“Mildly alarmedmight be a better description.”
“And you were very popular with the kids.”
That much was true. At one point I found myself surrounded by a gang of under-tens, teaching them how to do the Twist. After some gentle heckling Joel joined in, and for the next twenty minutes or so we were all dancing together—just us and a bunch of sugar-crazed kids—when a thought popped into my mind:We’d be great parents. We’d have so much fun. How many children should we have—two? Five? Ten?I was too happy and tired to restrain my imagination, so instead I just ran with it, enjoyed the fantasy—got drunk on it, almost.
