Asher blinks. ‘You mean like one of those metal ones? The kind that wraps around your head like some kind of medieval torture device?’
I groan. ‘Yes, that exact kind. It even had the chin strap and the neck pad and everything. My mother tried to call it my “robot superhero gear” to make me feel better about having to wear it.’
He lets out a short bark of laughter. ‘That’s brutal. Did it work?’
‘Absolutely not,’ I say, already laughing with him. ‘I hated every second of it. ThankGodI didn’t have to wear it at school, but I had to wear it whenever I got home, even if we had guests.’ I shudder, remembering the time my cousinscame to stay for a long weekend and my parents wouldn’t let me take a break from wearing the brace. The teasing I endured that weekend was relentless.
‘My older cousin once spent an entire weekend chasing me around with her digital camera.’
‘There arephotos?’
I nod sadly. ‘Unfortunately.’
His eyes glint dangerously. ‘Please promise me you’ll show me one.’
‘Never.’
‘Please.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll find them.’
‘Over my dead body.’
‘Oh, I will,’ he says, grinning widely now, and for a second I forget how to walk again. It’s not fair that anyone can have a smile that nice.
We round a corner and the streetlights hit him just right, throwing warm gold across his cheekbones and catching the faint scruff along his jaw. I swallow hard and look away.
‘Anyway,’ I say, trying to distract myself from whatever my heart is doing at this moment, ‘that was my weird kid thing. So now we’re even.’
‘I don’t know,’ he muses, eyes twinkling. ‘Having to wear a head brace is maybeslightlyworse than not knowing cactuses were real.’
‘Definitely not,’ I say confidently. ‘At least my embarrassing secret has no casualties. Yours ended with you impaled.’
He chuckles again, and the sound sends an odd little flutter through me.
We fall into silence again, but it’s different this time and I don’t feel the need to say anything to break it up. It feels more comfortable. Like we’ve found a rhythm neither of us expected to stumble upon tonight. I realise, with a jolt, that I don’t want it to end. I want to stay hidden in the quiet backstreets of Mayfair and learn every weird and wonderful fact about Asher Vouvalis he’s willing to share, but I’m suddenly acutely aware of the fact that the hum of the busy main road is getting louder and louder with each step we take.
I sigh, feeling the little bubble we’ve created beginning to pop. ‘I guess we should think about wrapping up?’
Asher glances at the watch on his wrist and then at the empty street ahead of us. ‘I’ve got nowhere to be. You?’
I fight down the urge to grin, and instead play it cool with a small nod. ‘Let’s go.’
And so we do.
As we walk, the conversation flows even more easily than before. I tell him about the time I got stranded in Doha for eight hours and ended up joining a group of elderly Filipino women in a makeshift karaoke session in the food court. He tells me about the month he spent in Crete as a teenager, being the unofficial translator for all the British tourists who wanted to order beer and chips and not much else. We debate the best sandwiches in London; he swears by some hole-in-the-wall deli off Brick Lane that ‘does magical things with pastrami’ and I counter with the grilledhalloumi from a stall in Broadway Market that, I insist, ‘has changed my life’.
Somehow that leads to confessions about our comfort foods. His is rice pudding straight from the tin, mine is instant noodles with a possibly ungodly amount of chilli oil. He admits he can’t cook anything that requires more than three ingredients and that he’s probably exclusively paying the salary for several Deliveroo drivers at this point. I tell him about the time Sloane once set off my building’s smoke alarm making toast.
From there, the stories keep coming and each one feels like a little window opening wider and wider. I tell him about the time I accidentally dyed my hair orange trying to go blonde at university – a mistake Sloane has never let me forget about – and he admits he once got a shitty tattoo with Andreas and Teddy to celebrate graduating. He stubbornly refuses to tell me what the tattoo is of or where it is and I make a mental note to try and wheedle it out of him at some point.
We spend the rest of the walk comparing notes on our most questionable life decisions and realise we both hate olives but pretend to like them at dinner parties because it seems sophisticated and like the kind of thing weshouldlike.
I make him laugh again. Several times, actually. It feels like I’m playing a game – get Asher Vouvalis to laugh – and I’m winning.
It’s easy talking to Asher like this. It’s like we’ve known each other longer than we actually have and we’re just stepping back into what is only natural for us.
