“You should have woken me!” she stammered, pulling the seatbelt towards herself.
“Sorry, you looked so . . .” I wanted to say peaceful, angelic, beautiful, but didn’t. “You seemed like you needed the rest, and we’re only landing in twenty minutes. I thought you could do with the extra twenty.”
Her face softened somewhat as she pulled the seatbelt tightly across her waist and clicked it closed. “I got a fright, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting to wake up with your hands in my lap.”
I chuckled. “You’re deliberately trying to make it sound like I was feeling you up while you were asleep.”
“Were you?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“You know me—I would never do something like that.” I held eye contact with her. It was almost painful to do so, because as each second passed I felt as if I was slipping further and further, deeper and deeper.
“I don’t actually, not anymore.” Ash broke eye contact abruptly and looked away.
“What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”
“Okay.” She turned in her seat and faced me. “Do you own llamas?”
I looked at her for a second before laughing. “Seriously? That’s what you want to know—out of every single thing you could ask me in the world—do I own llamas?”
“Well, do you?” she asked, more emphatically this time.
I stopped laughing. “Where did you hear that?”
“From around and about. It was a rumor. There are a lot of rumors about you, actually.”
“What kind of rumors?” I asked, and I could see her weighing something up. But then she shook her head.
“You know—some people talk.”
“And some of those people say I own llamas.”
“Yes. They do!”
I looked away and fiddled with my watch strap. She didn’t know this was a loaded question, but it was. Not that I could tell her anything more personal at this stage, because I’d basically bared my soul to her yesterday. “My mom—I told you she has dementia—I bought one for her. Strange choice, but she said she wanted an animal and when I asked what kind, she said llama. Apparently, she’d always been fascinated with them, from the time she was a girl and saw a picture of them. It’s one of the only things that still makes her happy, going outside and watching Lucy—that’s what she called the llama.”
There was silence in the plane, a silence so big and heavy it somehow swallowed up the noise of the engines.
“Do they spit?” she asked, which I wasn’t expecting, but for which I was grateful and relieved.
“Lucy has never spat on us. She is smelly, though, and have you ever tried washing a llama? Not possible. And do you think any mobile pet groomers will wash one either?”
“No, I imagine that washing llamas is not their thing. How big is she?” she asked.
“She’s not that big, shorter than me. She’s actually kind of cute.”
“Cute?”
“You want to see a picture of her?” I pulled my phone out and started flipping through my photos.
“You have a photo of your pet llama on your phone?”
I chuckled. “I suppose I do.”
“Do you want to see my cat?” She didn’t wait for my response and pulled her phone out too. Once we’d located the photos, we swapped phones.
“Oh my God, sheiscute!” She laughed. God, I loved her laugh. “She has a snaggle tooth.” She laughed even more. I’d missed that sound.
“Your cat is very cute too,” I said, looking more at her than the cat. Ash was holding the cat up to her face and smiling one of her full-blown, dazzling smiles. The kind that had the ability to knock grown men off their feet.
