The machine started vibrating so much it was almost walking itself across the counter. Instinctively they both rushed forward to pull the plug and Orla slammed into Jacques’s shoulder. It was like running into a brick wall.
‘Orla, are you OK? I am so sorry!’
‘It’s OK,’ she answered, holding her arm but laughing. ‘Stop the machine!’
He pulled the plug out and the machine gave one last spurt and Jacques ended up with foam on the end of his nose.
‘You look like one of the snowman faces Delphine drew on those cookies she was serving tonight!’ Orla said, laughing even more.
‘Really?’ he replied. He put a finger to the foam, scooped it off and, in one quick move, wiped it on her cheek.
‘What? That’s disgusting!’ Orla exclaimed, immediately putting her fingers to the cream and getting it off her face.
‘Don’t do it,’ Jacques warned her, taking a step back from her.
‘Do what?’ she asked, advancing.
‘I’m warning you, Orla. Don’t do it.’
There was nothing she loved more than a challenge. And being toldnotto do something was one of her personal favourites. She went for him, intending to wipe her foamy fingers all over his beard… except, somehow, in a split second, she was on her back on the table, her foamy hand up above her head, pinned into a position where she couldn’t strike. How had she got here? And how was this man managing to keep her in place with one hand on her wrist and one hand… where was his other hand? She could kind of feel it, but she also couldn’t and she was sort of temporarily immobilised.
‘How did you do that?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he answered.
His body was close, nothing touching her apart from that hand on her wrist, but she could feel the sensation of him. Her stomach did a deep dive.
‘O-K,’ she managed to say. ‘So… what happens next?’ Her mind was already conjuring up images of how this might play out and most of them involved fewer clothes. What was she thinking? All this man had done since she had met him was wind her up!
‘That is up to you,’ Jacques answered, a wry smile on his face that was somehow peppering her vagina.
‘Is this like the locked-door scenario?’ she asked, her throat becoming drier. ‘Because I thought we as good as agreed that was weird.’
‘I’m going to stop pressing on your ear if you promise not to wipe that foam on me.’
He was pressing on her ear? Why couldn’t she feel it? And now she was focussing on why she couldn’t feel his touch on her ear more so than anything else…
‘Whoa! OK! I am closing my eyes and wishing I hadn’t witnessed this!’
It was Tommy’s voice and suddenly Jacques had rebounded from the table like someone had thrown a grenade into the room… or tried to wipe his face with foam.
‘Tommy,’ Jacques said. ‘We were just?—’
‘Yeah,’ Tommy said. ‘I get it! I’m eighteen now, bro. But, seriously, in front of Hunter?’
It took the dog to whine for Orla to realise she was still lying on her back on the table. She propelled herself upwards, her hand still covered in foam.
‘Yeah,’ Tommy said, nodding at Orla, hand held out awkwardly. ‘I don’t even want to know what that is.’
20
‘Oh my God,’ Erin said, star-fishing across a king-size bed in another clean-lined, non-personalised room. ‘This is so much nicer than Delphine’s.’
‘Delphine’s room had character,’ Orla remarked, putting her case into one of the large wardrobes that spanned the whole of one wall.
‘It was full of crap you mean. I found a puppet under the bed. A puppet. Let it sink in how creepy that is. I took a photo and showed Burim. He said it looked like a dead baby.’
Orla rubbed at her eyes as she sat down on what little of the bed there was left for her to currently occupy. She was suddenly utterly exhausted.
