‘Well,’ he says. ‘Clearly you can’t sleep there.’
He looks up at the ceiling. There’s an ominous patch of sagging plaster on the other side of the room, which threatens to start leaking any moment, too.
He points up at it. ‘I don’t think anyone’s sleeping in here tonight, wherever we move the bed to.’
‘Yeah,’ she says.
‘Hotel?’ he says weakly. He wants her to know he is not jumping to the most appealing alternative.
‘I’ve already checked.’ His heart sinks. Anything to avoid sharing a bed with him, he guesses. ‘They’re all full around here tonight.’
‘I’ll take the sofa, if you like,’ he says. ‘You can have my bed.’
He’s too tall for the slightly worn sofa, and they both know it. But if she sleeps there, she’ll still be able to hear the drip. And it’s freezing in the living room, anyway. Hardly an attractive prospect for either of them.
‘This sofa is too short for you.’
He is out of non-obvious options now. He has reached the limits of the creativity he is willing to draw from, in order to keep a woman he is very much attracted to away from his bed.
‘Well, then,’ he says. ‘I guess there’s only one solution.’
She nods.
He extends his arm, and she takes his hand. He leads her – oh happy day – to his bedroom.
‘There is just one problem, though,’ he says. ‘My bed is the smaller of the two doubles. There won’t be much space between us.’
‘I imagine that’ll be okay,’ she says, trying to make light of it. But she can’t fool him. He heard her breath catching.
‘We could move my mattress to the living room,’ she says, her voice – he is almost sure – tinged with disappointment that she has thought of a way out of this predicament.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he says. Not that sheisbeing silly, not in the most practical sense. It’s a plausible suggestion. It would do fine for him, if they weren’t both so desperate to end up in the same bed, with a semi-plausible excuse.
But then he remembers his manners. He remembers the importance of enthusiastic consent, freely given. Stopping inches from his room, he takes her other hand too and looks into her eyes, making sure she knows he means it.
‘We can do that, if you want. I’m happy to sleep on the mattress in the living room.’
Despite Alex’s best efforts, his words come out with an edge of desperation.
‘It’s freezing in there,’ she says. Grasping for excuses now, he hopes.
‘I get hot at night,’ he says, which is not at all true. Usually. Tonight, it might be. But, still, there are bound to be spare blankets in a cupboard somewhere.
‘No,’ she says, shaking her head for emphasis. ‘I think the bed will be okay for both of us.’
If he can survive a chaste night with Jess in his bed, he is pretty sure he can survive anything.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jess
Heat radiates from Alex as he lies in bed next to her, so close they are almost touching. Jess lies on her side, facing away from him. She pictures sheep jumping over a gate and counts them till she gets to a hundred. She counts her own breaths, forcing them to slow. She counts Alex’s.
But her heart. Her heart refuses to slow.
She turns onto her back, stretches out her arm.
She finds Alex’s hand, and she takes it.
