The pause between them stretches and stretches.
‘So you’re thinking,’ he says, processing, just making doubly sure he hasn’t read this situation wrong, ‘for the sake of this novel, we should also—’
‘Leave things unconsummated.’
He nods, notI agreebutI understand. He isn’t sure he does, totally. Jess’s sudden reluctance to, well, consummate, has come out of seemingly nowhere. Could it be that she is scared? Not of sex itself – he is pretty sure she is into that – but of the ramifications. The possibility of pain if whatever this is between them doesn’t work out. Scared, maybe, of how vulnerable it feels to be so intimate. Either way, he won’t push her.
‘I might need a cold shower,’ he says at last.
‘You and me both,’ Jess says, and he refrains from mentioning the obvious solution.
Jess comes out of the shower wrapped in just a towel, and he rushes in after her, not making eye contact. They have one more night in this cottage and that, Alex knows, is going to feel like eternity.Damn you, Scott and Tessa, he thinks, shaking his fist in what he assumes to be the vague direction of Canada.
He switches the shower to the coldest setting he can bear and tries to think about William Faulkner and James Joyce – writers he knows that he is supposed to deeply admire, to want to emulate, but that he finds unbearably pretentious, impenetrably obscure. Or, to put it in starker terms: boring. These are things he would not, of course, ever admit in interviews. But there are going to be other minefields when it comes to the interviews about this particular book. He is going to have to sit side by side with her, breathing in her apple shampoo, listening to her enthusiasm, maybe brushing her arm as they both reach for a glass of water – and somehow remain unaffected.
The apple shampoo has followed him here, to the side of the bath, and he can’t help himself: he flicks it open, breathes it in. This will have to do for now.
And then he turns the shower temperature even lower.
When Alex comes out of the bathroom, having given himself a stern talking-to, Jess is in the living room in leggings and a hoodie, looking forlorn. His immediate, hopeful thought: perhaps she regrets putting a stop to things. Quite rightly, in his view.
But when she hears him behind her, she asks, ‘Are you decent?’ and this seems like an entirely different order of things.
‘Decent as I ever will be,’ he says, an attempt at a joke, which is nowhere close to landing.
‘Okay.’ She swivels her head round and says, ‘So. You know how it’s been raining quite a lot today?’
It is impossible to guess where this is going. ‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t think the roof was properly equipped for that.’
He gives it a moment, ponders the possible implications. But he’s still not quite getting it.
‘Oh?’ he says at last.
‘There’s a leak in the ceiling in my room,’ she says. ‘Right above my bed, as luck would have it.’
My bed. Very much not the point of her sentence, but his brain snags on it. Her bed.
He snaps out of it. ‘Can we move your bed?’
‘Maybe. But can I sleep through a constant drip?’
Heprobably could. With a house as full as his was growing up, you had to train yourself to sleep through everything and anything, or you didn’t sleep. But she’s the only child of a single mum, so he’s guessing it’s different for her.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know your sleeping habits.’
It’s an obnoxious thing to say, he knows, but he means it as a desperate kind of flirting.I don’t know your sleeping habits, but I know I’d like to.
He does not have to look at her face to know it has not quite landed the way he intended it to.
‘Well, I can’t,’ she says.
‘Let’s see the damage,’ he says. He is trying not to let his brain go to where it has immediately gone. Before he suggests what he really wants to, he will offer to switch rooms with her. He can sleep through a drip. Probably. Or at least, he can sleep through it no worse than he will anyway. Noise doesn’t keep him awake, but anxiety does. The thumping of his heart when he’s thinking about her, in pyjamas just a few footsteps away – that does, too.
She stands up from the sofa and follows Alex into her room. The bed is tidily made; a pile of books sits on the bedside table: four of them. It’s hard to guess when she imagined she’d have time to read those over a working weekend, but he’s guessing she is one of those people who has to take multiple books everywhere because what she reads depends on her mood. Also, he imagines that she is someone who starts books, reads a few paragraphs, and gets sucked in, putting aside her current read, rather than just calmly proceeding through what she has already started. He has to admit he finds people like that hard to fathom. But that’s a conversation he can have with her some other time. There are more pressing matters at hand.
Pretty much bang in the middle of her bed, water is accumulating into a bowl.
