But this wasn’t. This was something else. I was three chapters deep before it even occurred to me to text him back. Then four, five, six…I kept reading. It was an atmospheric whodunit set in 1930s Norfolk, except the mystery was not so much about a murder as a notorious haunting. The house was nightly awakened by footsteps, ringing bells and strange puddles, said to have been left there by the ghost of a drowning victim, but as the story unfolded it became more about who had a reason to fake a haunting – journalists, ghost hunters, the lady of the house, even her young stepdaughter. And it was good. So good that I kept on reading, and eventually – shortly after midnight – my phone burred into life. Poor Rob. He must have been torturing himself the whole time.
—Have you started it yet?
I laughed. Started. Can’t stop.
Bloop. Are you serious?
—It’s wonderful. Now go to bed. I’ll talk to you about it tomorrow.
—You like it?
—I love it. And I’m trying to read it. :p
He LOLed me, and then typed – Sorry. I’ll leave you alone. <3
*
I didn’t quite finish the book. I lasted until about three thirty and then I could hardly see to read any longer, then surrendered to sleep.
The next day Rob had an expectant, authorish look, a neediness I recognised from the way I used to feel when I was trying to court Rupa’s approval on stage. He was freshly shaved and his skin glowed, and all I wanted to do was bury my head in his lap and tell him how much I adored him.
“I couldn’t put it down,” I said, taking a seat opposite him, close enough for our knees to touch.
“Really?” he said, and his surprised smile made me want to spend the rest of my life making him happy. I was fucked. I was beyond saving. I was drowning in his sweetness, and happy to be doing so.
Unable to resist any longer, I reached out and caressed his cheek. “Why did you have to be talented, too?” I said.
His hand covered mine. His eyes were wide and bright, their blue blurred with unshed tears. I leaned and he leaned, our knees crammed together. The angle was awkward, but his mouth was every bit as soft and warm as I remembered.
I tasted salt, streaming down from his eyes, and when we came up for air we were breathing fast. “You’re shaking,” I said.
“I can’t help it.” His fingers were in my hair, his breath fanning my wet lips. “I thought I could walk away from this. Spare you the trouble. But I can’t.” He ran his thumb over my mouth. “I kept telling myself we were just a fling, but I still love you.”
This time his kiss tasted like relief, tasted the way the air had smelled the first night we’d made love, when it had rained and the whole parched, sweating city seemed to be breathing one vast sigh.
“I know,” I said. “I wasn’t ready for it either. All the way here I was sure we could be friends, but as soon as I saw you again…” His eyes were like nothing I’d ever seen before. “One look, and I thought my heart was going to explode.”
I had to lean too far to kiss him. We were trying to crawl all over one another, but our knees were in the way. He got up from the chair and held out his hand to me. The bed was maybe two feet away, and I had a million questions – was he sure? was he ready? – but I took his hand anyway. I laid him down very carefully, conscious of his poor, pinned spine and thigh, and stretched out on my side next to him.
He felt slight at first, but then his arms wrapped around me, and they were thicker and harder than I remembered. He must have thrown himself into physio with the same determination with which he’d made love; he’d always been a demanding lover, whether he was tugging my hair and telling me to suck it, or crossing his ankles behind my head and begging for more, harder, faster, more. When he pushed his tongue deeper into this kiss I got a taste of that sex monster ferocity, and like always it lit me on fire. I pulled his hips in tight but then he winced and I stopped.
“Shit,” he said, frowning. “I don’t think I can…”
“…no, it’s okay. My fault. I went too fast.”
Rob didn’t contradict me. Instead he lay back on the narrow bed, and we cuddled – fully clothed – like teenagers, behind his closed bedroom door. He traced the shape of my cheekbones with his fingertips. I told him to close his eyes so I could kiss his eyelids and feel the feathery shiver of his lashes against my lips. We drank one another in, swooning over tiny kisses, nosing at one another in a daze of love.
“Let’s run away together,” he said, gazing up at me, his hand on the back of my head where a dangling trapeze had just bumped me. “Take me away from crutches and physio and these stupid things hanging over my head.”
“And where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know. Back to London. Or Edinburgh. I’ve never been there. It’s supposed to be lovely. Or what about York? Have you ever been to York? It’s so beautiful.”
I laughed, loving his impulsiveness. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re shiny and fascinating and I want to hold you up to every light the world has to offer.”
How had I ever feared for a second that he wouldn’t know how to write? “I love you so fucking much.”
He sighed into my kiss. He’d been cut open and bolted together and screwed into place, but as we kissed I could feel him trying to arch into me the way he used to, pushing his belly into my hand. My fingers slipped beneath his waistband and my heart was going mad. I touched the cupped edge of his navel and felt the tension in the fabric as I went lower – yes, he wanted me as much as I wanted him.
And then I touched scar tissue. It was a roundish scar on his lower belly, and as much as I was trying not to freak out, it must have showed on my face. I couldn’t help it. It was a reminder of what violence his body had been subjected to, not only in those seconds when the car hit him, but afterwards.
Rob drew in a sharp breath. I lowered my head, and kissed the puckered scar.
“My body’s not what you remember,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
He pushed his fingers into my hair. His erection had wilted and there were tears in his eyes. “I’m not…” he said, and sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but…”
Oh God. I’d overstepped a mark. I quickly pulled his t-shirt down over his belly and snuggled back up to him. “No. It’s all right. We don’t have to do anything. We can just cuddle.”
“I’m a mess,” he said, shaking his head. “Forget the sex monster. More like Frankenstein’s monster. All scars and metal bolts.”
“Shh. It’s okay.” I kissed away his tears. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. Tell me what you want.”
He sighed. “I want a break,” he said.
My heart did a strange, swoopy thing. “From us?”
“No. God, no. I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much. I mean a break from this. From being a patient all the time. I’ve had a long time to think about that word, and I think I’ve cracked it. They call you a patient because you need supernatural fucking reserves of patience to be one.” He gazed up at me, his eyes the colour of rain clouds. “Let’s go somewhere. Even if it’s just down to Belfast for a night or two. I want to feel like I’m normal again.”
“Okay,” I said, but I couldn’t help glancing at the wheelchair by the door. It was one thing to talk about city breaks, but these things usually involved a fair amount of walking.
He saw me looking and sighed. “Look, I know my limits,” he said. “But I need to test them. I’m going mad here. And I want you all to myself.”
“Yeah. I think I can manage that.”
16
Rob booked us a hotel in Belfast. We had separate rooms, because that fell into the realm of unavoidable compromises for now, like the wheelchair we had to fold up and stuff in the back of the car. “They’re doing a Milos Forman retrospective at this one little cinema,” he told me. “If you can stand to hear the name Valmont ever again, that is.”
/>
I could stand it, so long as he was with me. The first night we found a cosy Italian restaurant, a warm, low ceilinged place with bottles of fancy balsamic lined up on shelves. “I kind of want to try out my Italian,” he said, with an adorable scrunch of his nose as he perused the menu. “Is that pretentious?”
“Why would that be pretentious?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m not Italian?”
I laughed. “Why would you learn it if you had no intention of speaking it?”
Rob shrugged, but then the waiter, a lanky young man with wide blue eyes and a thick brown beard, came over.
“Can you settle something for us?” I said. “He’s been learning Italian…”
The waiter smiled and said something in Italian to Rob, who took a moment to process and then replied. “So soltanto un po’ di Italiano…”
“No, capisco benissimo!”
“Grazie…” Rob blushed and ordered for us both. In Italian. He got so into it that when he turned to ask me what wine I wanted he gave me the option of ‘rosso o bianco?’ before remembering to switch back into English.
“Is there anything you can’t do?” I said, reaching for his hand across the table.
“One or two things,” he said, and his expression darkened.
“What? What’s wrong?”
He sighed, making the candle on the table flicker between us. “Remember the time you told me about how you broke your arm?”
“Yes.”
“And how you forgot the pain?”
“Mmhm.”
He ran his tongue over his lips. “How did you do that?”
“Rob…”
“I kept meaning to ask you. Like there was some magic formula to forget. Some trick I couldn’t pull off.”
I squeezed his hand tighter, still appalled by the thought of him suffering. “Time,” I said. “I think it’s just a matter of time.”
The waiter brought our wine – a deep red Montepulciano – and a basket of bread.
“God, I’m sorry,” said Rob, when we were alone once more. “Stop me if I start talking about horrible road accident shit again, okay? This is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get away from.” He gave a small shudder. “Ignore me. What do you want to do tomorrow?”
“Titanic museum?”
He raised an eyebrow. “More museums?”
“I’m hoping I can rely on this one not to have homoerotic vases. Besides, the Titanic is fascinating. It sounds like fun.”
“Fun?”
“Yeah. Fun.”
“As in ‘the fun kind of preventable shipping disaster where a whole bunch of people died?’”
“Yes,” I said. “Come on. You have to admit Jack and Rose had a blast. At least, before the whole unfortunate sinky business.”
Rob nibbled thoughtfully at a piece of ciabatta. “Do you think she let him drown on purpose?”
“What? No. Where did that come from? Jesus, Rob – that’s dark.”
“No, but they did a Mythbusters thing on it and everything,” he said. “Jack would totally have fitted on the door, but you know how it is with first boyfriends sometimes. You make a complete fool of yourself because you’ve never been in love before, then you have these weird moments of clarity where you look back at five o’clock in the morning and you’re like ‘Oh, shit – did we do that sweaty hand thing in the back of a taxi? And did I really ask him to paint me like one of his French girls?’ And you cringe, and it’s like…oops.”
“Oops?” I said. “Oops was a reason to let him sink to the bottom of the North Atlantic.”
He shrugged.
“Sadder and colder than a frozen Findus crispy pancake?”
Rob laughed. “She was…what? Seventeen? Teenagers can be cold sometimes.”
“Icy, more like. And still not as cold as poor Jack Dawson.”
He was still giggling about it when the antipasto arrived, a big plate filled with olives, artichoke hearts, mortadella, Milano salami and Parma ham. “Stop laughing,” I said. “I’m disturbed, Rob. Truly disturbed. Was that what you took away from Titanic? That Rose DeWitt-Bukater was a teenage sociopath?”
“Well, she was definitely an idiot,” he said, skewering a big green olive with a toothpick. “I know she didn’t want to give the game away, but I can’t believe she couldn’t find a fence to hock that diamond.”
“Maybe the museum will solve that mystery tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” he said. “All I know is if I hear even a whisper of Celine Dion I’m running for the fucking hills. I’ll do it. I swear. It’ll be like that thing where you develop supernatural strength because you have to, like when you read about mothers lifting whole cars off their babies. That bloody song – I’ll do just about anything to get away from it.”
“Why didn’t you recommend it to your physio?” I said.
“I know. I missed a trick there. If he’d played it from the start I’d be training for a marathon by now. Sprinting all the way up to the end of Napoleon’s nose, and back down again. Like Rocky on the stairs.”
“I think you’ve done enough,” I said, watching him tear into a sundried tomato. “You learned to walk again, taught yourself Italian and wrote two novels. I couldn’t write one. Wouldn’t know where to start. You’re superhuman.”
He shook his head. “No. I was a desperate person who needed something in his life that he could control.”
I saw the book clearly in that moment. It was controlled. Perhaps it was just an artefact of the mystery genre, but nothing was wasted: even the crumbs in the butler’s pantry meant something. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Not to the people who are going to read that book. All they’re going to care about is whether the ghost is real or not, and what’s really going on with Alice.”
Rob gave a self-deprecating little snort. “And who are these people, exactly?”
“Your readers,” I said. “And you will have readers. Look, I already know a couple of actors at the RSC who have literary agents. And if I happen to casually mention that my boyfriend has written a superb psychological whodunit…”
“Boyfriend?” He blinked over the rim of his wine glass.
“Yes. Boyfriend. I thought we were in love?”
“We are.”
“Well, what’s the problem then?”
He scrunched his nose. “I dunno. I just never really liked the word. It sounds so teenagey. And we’re adults.”
“All right,” I said, and deliberately went too far in the opposite direction. “Lover. Should I introduce you as my lover?”
The nose stayed scrunched. “Don’t. That’s just…”
“What? What’s wrong with us being lovers?”
“Because…no,” he said. “It’s inappropriate. It’s one of those words that’s fine in the bedroom, but if you apply it to a social situation it…it fills people’s heads with the smell of flavoured lubricant.” I cracked up. “You’re laughing, but you know I’m right, Nathan.”
“Then what?” I said. “What are we? And please don’t say partner. We’re not practising law.”
“Significant Other?”
“Ugh. Really?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s precious,” I said. “And overcomplicated. Everyone knows what a boyfriend is. What else can I call you? The person who less-than-threes me in text messages?”
“You could,” he said. “That could be a thing. My Less Than Three.”
“No, it couldn’t. It’s even more overcomplicated than Significant Other.” I reached across the table and took his hand again. “Please. Be my boyfriend.”
He sighed. “How am I supposed to say no to that face?”
“You’re not. That’s the point.”
“Fine. Boyfriend. You’re my boyfriend.”
“Official?” I said, raising my glass.
He did the same and we clinked glasses. “Officialest of official,” he said.
We had a wonderful dinner. Chicken risotto
for me, lasagna al forno for him. Dessert was a couple of scoops of vanilla ice-cream with a thimble-sized espresso poured over it. “Affogato,” he said. “It means ‘drowned.’” I was already making plans in my head. Boyfriend-type plans, one where I stole the setting of Simon’s fantasy Tuscan holiday and ended up roaming around Florence or Siena, clutching a tourist map while my clever boyfriend practised his Italian. There were new things on the horizon, things I’d thought I’d never share with him, like his thirtieth birthday in March. Domestic possibilities. Lazy Sunday mornings with croissants in bed, or wandering the aisles of Sainsbury’s and complaining that they kept moving everything around, and now we couldn’t find the canned tomatoes.
My head was still full of these pictures when we got to the cinema, a little arthouse theatre where they were showing Valmont, the underrated twin to Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. This was one of my favourite Valmonts – Colin Firth – but honestly? I was sick of just about everything to do with the Vicomte de Valmont, but it didn’t matter. Like a billion or more boyfriends before me, I was here to sit in the back, and hold hands in the dark.
Rob’s thumb stroked slow circles on the inside of my wrist, where the skin was thin and the blood near to the surface. It felt as thought he was warming every drop of blood in my body as it passed beneath that point, and as my heart beat faster so the blood warmed hotter. It tingled as it moved through my veins, pooling sullen and heavy in my groin.
I pushed my fingers into the gaps between his, and when I clutched tight I heard him catch his breath. I didn’t dare look at him, but I knew what it meant, when he breathed like that. That was the sound he made before he said yes to everything, when I was between his thighs and my searching fingers found that spot inside him that made him shiver and pull my hair.
Rob inclined his head towards me, and I leaned closer, his hair against my cheek. We were white knuckled, breathing fast, as if we were on a rollercoaster rather than a couple of theatre seats. The screen flickered with the tired machinations of bored aristocrats, and I’d seen them a million times before, played them out night after night. They didn’t have a hope in hell of holding my attention. I turned my head, my cheek burning against his curls, and he turned to meet me. The tips of our noses touched, and I stifled a gasp. I was so fucking hard, crushed against the inside of my thigh, and I knew he was, too. His stuttering breath smelled of wine and coffee, and when I bridged the tiny gap between us his lips were soft.
Less Than Three Page 20
