Both Callum and the conductor gave me a look and I briefly considered throwing myself under the train. Eyeballing the sliver of space between the bed and the bathroom door, I sucked in my bottom lip.
‘That’ll be a no then,’ I muttered.
‘Grand, glad we got that sorted.’ The conductor clapped his hands together even though we had in fact got nothing at all sorted. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you be. We’ve a full house tonight, as I said, but I’ll be back once we’ve left the station to make sure you’ve got everything you need.’
‘Everything except two beds,’ I muttered as he sailed off down the corridor, leaving us alone.
Turning back, I poked my head into the room once again. It was tiny. It was so tiny and so beige, and there wasn’t so much as a trace of tartan to be found.
‘It’s giving ferry,’ I said, reluctantly stepping inside the plastic pod. ‘It’s giving institutional.’
‘Utilitarian,’ Callum agreed, still in the corridor. ‘Do you think they hose it down between every journey?’
I turned to give him a horrified look. ‘Ihopethey hose it down between every journey. It’s all very wipe clean, isn’t it?’
With a half-hearted scowl of acceptance, he entered the room and closed the door behind him. It was like being locked inside a Zara changing room with Big Bird’s hot Scottish cousin.
‘Pretty snug,’ I commented, backing in until I hit the window. ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty snug.’
Suddenly silent, my oversized roommate picked a laminated card up from the bed, scanning it quickly then turning it over to read the back while I eyed the rest of the cabin. Bed, window, little sink, tiny towel, mirrored door that should’ve made the space feel larger than it was but instead reflected an anxious-looking redhead and her equally unnerved giant companion, trapped in an impossibly claustrophobic space. I couldn’t work out how to take off my coat without elbowing Callum in the ribs but it was too hot to keep it on and even the tiny amount of extra space it took up around my person was too much. We needed every inch we could get.
‘Right,’ Callum said eventually, dropping the card back down on the bed beside what looked like a couple of amenity kits that I was shamefully desperate to claw open. ‘Well.’
‘Well indeed.’
The train pulled away from the platform and we were off. No time to back out now. I undid the toggles on my coat and shimmied my arms out of the sleeves, allowing it to fall to the floor behind me before bendingover to pick it up, my forehead grazing his crotch as I went. He took a step backwards and collided directly with the closed door of the cabin.
‘I’ll sleep on the floor,’ he offered, rubbing the back of his head and bashing his elbow into the wall at the same time.
‘You’d have more hope of sleeping on the roof. You’re taller than the room is long.’
I turned in three tight circles, searching in vain for somewhere, anywhere, to hang my coat. Wordlessly, Callum took it and hung it on a hook hiding on the back of the door.
‘It’s only for tonight and I’ve definitely done worse,’ I said, arms flapping uselessly at my sides. ‘If I can share a blow-up bed with Desi in Joel’s nan’s caravan in North Wales for a week, I can manage this. It won’t be that bad.’
I offered a hopeful smile and the tight set of his granite jaw softened very slightly.
‘Just so you know, I told Mum and Dad we needed separate rooms at the house.’
‘And how did you explain that?’
‘I told them you have night terrors,’ he replied. ‘Very violent night terrors.’
Ignoring the slight sense of disappointment that tugged at my sleeve, I threw up my hands. ‘Then we’ll manage. We’re grown-ups, we can share a bed for one night.’
‘You’re right,’ Callum concurred and the tense atmosphere of our beige cell settled. ‘We should start as we mean to go on. How about a toast?’
Wedging his weekend bag between the wall and his body, I watched as he unfastened the zip and rootedaround inside with one giant hand. With a snort of success, he let the bag fall onto the bed and held up a bell-shaped bottle of dark amber liquid, a silver stag’s head emblazoned on the front.
‘Whisky?’ My mouth went dry at the sight of it.
‘The Dalmore 15. It was supposed to be my dad’s Christmas present but he can make do with a box of chocolates from the shop at the station. If he’s lucky. Here.’
He opened the bottle then held it out to me.
Generally speaking, the darker the drink, the worse my hangover, but I’d always wanted to be a whisky girl and this felt like as good a time as any to commit. Caroline, I’d decided, was a whisky girl. She was also a woman who smoked cigars, knew how to change a tyre, and could rock a rollneck jumper without looking like she was wearing a cervical collar. Bracing slightly at the unexpected weight of the bottle, I tipped it back and let the liquid run into my mouth, scorching the back of my throat. It stung my nose, eliciting a full-body shiver. An involuntary reaction, I told myself as I resisted the urge to gag. An automatic reflex, the contraction of the bilateral pharyngeal muscles and elevation of the soft palate, millennia of evolution designed to stop human beings from choking on foreign objects and stop Laura Pearce from knocking back a shot of whisky without humiliating herself in front of an attractive man.
Passing the bottle back, I pinched my eyes shut and rubbed at my nose, willing my body to keep it down, but Callum was already too busy taking a deep gulp to notice my struggles. I watched him drink, head tilted back, his lips wrapped around the opening of the bottle, his huge hand clasping the weighted glass as if it wereno bigger than a teacup. His hair fell back away from his face and his long eyelashes grazed his cheeks, eyes closed in a moment of rapture. My own face heated instantly, burning with the twin flame force of the alcohol and an unexpected flicker of desire as I noticed how his throat bobbed when he swallowed.
