She smiles. His favourite smile of hers – slightly crooked, mischievous. ‘You’ve got chocolate on your bottom lip,’ she says, and she leans in to lick it off. Slowly, teasingly. Electricity runs across his lip, then the other, and then his whole body lights up as in a game of Operation.
‘Jess,’ he says. ‘You are killing me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound sorry. ‘Would you like me to stop?’
He shakes his head, but she pauses, looks longingly at her mug, as if torn between the taste of him and the taste of chocolate orange. Alex is going to track down Mr Whittard and murder him in cold blood.
She takes a sip, and then another.
There is no chocolate left on his lip for her to lick off.
‘Maybe we should slow down,’ she says. There’s no teasing in her voice. She might mean it. She takes another long sip and makes the kind of all-body sound in response to the taste that he wishes he were responsible for.
‘Jess …’ he says. More to hear himself say her name than anything else.
It comes out like a moan.
‘What if it gets awkward?’ she asks.
‘I think we’re past that point,’ he says. Hearing each other make the kind of sounds they have been making over the last little while feels as intimate as nakedness. Not that he’d say no to the actual nakedness. To see her body, her every curve, trace the outline of her waist—
Deep breaths, Alex.
Drink your chocolate.
Jess finishes hers with a satisfied slurp and puts the mug down.Thunk.
‘Do you watch the Winter Olympics?’ she asks, a swerve in the conversation so screechingly extreme that he wonders if he somehow hallucinated the lastportion of the evening. Maybe the door came unstuck so violently that he stumbled, fell onto the ceramic floor, and gave himself a concussion? He scrambles to think of another explanation.
But Jess is looking at him expectantly, so he digs deep and finds an answer.
‘I’m more of a Summer Olympics fan,’ he says. ‘Swimming and running, especially.’
‘All right,’ she says. ‘So I take it you haven’t heard of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir?’
‘It rings a vague bell,’ he says. Which it doesn’t, but these people are clearly important to Jess in some way, or she wouldn’t bring them up at a time like this. He doesn’t want to admit total ignorance.
‘Canadian ice dancers,’ she says. ‘They won the gold medal in 2018 with this electric performance to theMoulin Rouge!soundtrack. And, oh my gosh, I have never seen anything sexier. It was incredible.’
He nods, earnestly, to show he is listening. And to speed up the story, so they can get back to previous activities.
‘Supposedly, there’s nothing romantic between them. But, honestly, the chemistry. It was electric.’
‘I always thought electricity was more about physics than chemistry,’ he says, because sometimes, he can’t help self-sabotaging.
Jess narrows her eyes. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘It had so much sexual tension. So much unresolved energy – like an unconsummated love affair.’
Such a quaint word,unconsummated. And yet it has an effect on him that is not at all quaint.
‘I had an idea for a novel when I watched them. About ice dancers who are in love, but they decide, for the sake of their sport, their art, their chemistry – that they won’t sleep together until they’ve won a gold medal.’
He is starting to see where she might be going with this. ‘The magic is in the lack of consummation,’ he says, defeated.
‘Exactly.’ She nods, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. ‘You get it.’
He wishes he didn’t.
He isn’t sure how to respond.
