Page 101 of Read My Lips

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

We did sex in my single bed. Until we ran out of condoms and both of us were sticky. The afternoon unwound into evening in the easiness of skin on skin. A puddle of light from the low, mellow sun on the wall behind my headboard highlighted the obnoxious magnolia with a stained-glass glow. The shadows softened out like our breathing. Simon was right – there could never be anything complicated about this.

Pillowed under my head, Simon’s wiry chest hair made my face itch. My thigh tacked itself to Simon’s. Neither of us was heading for the bathroom.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t have posters up. That my bookshelves were empty, because the room wasn’t. Not with Simon here.

His powder-dry hand spread along my arm, over the rise and fall of the muscles I worked so hard on at the gym to give him something good to notice. I tensed a bit, flexing for him, and his eyes flashed to mine, smile breaking containment.

The paler skin of his palms met mine with a taut wax-paper hush, rough-smooth, soft-firm. His long fingers skimmed along, playing join the dots with my freckles and moles. Navigating from point to point, mapping the constellations of me. Who knew where we were going anyway?

With a sigh, he leaned back against my pillow, lazy with satisfaction. When had it got so easy, being with him? He ducked his head, lips dusting against my shoulder like he didn’t even know he’d done it.

“I can’t believe you don’t have any photographs to put up.”

It didn’t sound like judgement. Confusion maybe, crossed with a shred of concern. What must this place look like to him, whose world was full of smiling faces and happy things to touch and pick up, and water and feed and watch grow?

“I do.” The words fell out of me like a bottle falling through the bottom of a too-thin plastic bag. Impossible to put back now.

Simon frowned, shooting my bare walls a double-take, and I gestured for him to wait.

Leaning off the edge of my bed, I abseiled out into space – stomach muscles all go – so I didn’t have to actually get up. I tugged out my trusty holdall stashed beneath the bed, rummaging right to bottom.

A single half-sized shoe box held every picture I’d ever wanted to keep.

With great care, Simon lifted the dusty lid with both hands, and I tensed, watching him pick each one up by its edges, looking them over like precious artefacts.

“This is your Mum?”

I savaged the skin tag off the edge of my thumbnail with my teeth. All I could manage was a stiff nod. Mam’s upside-down head was backed with green from our little garden.

“Why are you hiding these away?” Simon’s voice softened. “You look so happy together.”

My smile perished like an overused elastic band, crumbling in real time.

“I don’t—”My throat soldered itself shut with a searing bolt of something ugly rammed sharp up behind my eyes. “Haven’t really – shown anyone. Apart from you.”

I didn’t have to tell him they were dog-eared from me thumbing through them too many times, soft at the edges, one of them pock-marked with pin holes from where I’d had them on the board in the kitchen at Gran’s before they’d been layered over with leaflets about when to take the bins out and the new number for the GP.

I put all of them away then. They were safer in my little box, under my bed. Stowed so none of them would be lost under the weight of everything else. So my memories couldn’t flutter away, or get thrown out and leave me.

“Thank you. For showing me.” Simon meant it. Bone-deep gratitude was right on brand. And I couldn’t handle the kindness cloaking me like a weighted blanket too heavy to shove off. This was Simon all over. How he’d be with anyone.

We were supposed to be enjoying this for what it was.

But it wasn’t just sex anymore. Not for me. Not when afterwards he lay there rubbing patterns onto my forearm, grounding me, without a thought. I never knew I needed grounding, but one steady touch from him and my whole body eased.

The heat of his skin held the barest memory of a scent – clean and woodsy and rich beneath an unmistakable layer of him. I breathed him in, greedy for the hint of the perfect world of his flat he’d brought here.

Before he left, maybe he’d let me rub myself all over him to transfer the smell. Maybe, if I never washed my sheets again it would almost feel like dating him for real. Fucking hell, I was deranged. Simon should be running for his life.

Any minute he would sit up and thank me, or tell me we shouldn’t be doing this like he did back at Heybourne in the morning. Feelings were not part of the deal we’d made.

“Can you stay over?” Complications were not approved agenda items., but whatever this was, I didn’t want him gone yet.

“I was planning to.”