Page 126 of Read My Lips

“You’re not staying for lunch then?”

“Apparently not.”

Sev floored the accelerator, and the three of them roared off up the street, with everything on top shaking.

Inside, the house wasn’t aesthetically perfect like Simon’s place, but it wasn’t empty any longer. These weren’t all other people’s things. They were mine.

All the way up the stairs, what used to be a blank wall now had a multitude of pictures pinned to it in an asymmetric scattering. One night after work, Simon had shown up with an armful of frames, and we’d spent an hour sitting on the carpet taking the best photographs out the shoebox under my bed, bringing them into the light.

Matt added snaps of him and Cathy and all three of us together. Cathy and Graham. A couple of me and Simon appeared.

Above my desk in my bedroom, I hung the rest. Me and Simon smiling at each other for days. Mam all sunkissed in the garden, glowing in the fading orange burn of twilight.

Holding my breath, I levered the flat blade of Cathy’s screwdriver under the rim of the paint pot lid. It popped free with a burped metal ding, splattering a blob of dark blue onto my hand.

“Oh wow. That’s a lot.”

The drip of colour inked into the grain of my lifeline, my love line, pearling under the friction as I rubbed it away, leaving a high-pigment smear. I puddled the almost blacked-out blue into the roller tray, and some demon of abject and total doubt skittered through me.

“You sure about this?” Fiddling his cufflinks free, Simon rolled his shirt sleeves above his elbows. His choice if he wanted to help paint my room in a suit. I did not fixate on the soft rise of hair all over his forearms. I didn’t have to obsess any longer. A lot more than his forearms was on offer whenever I wanted.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Oh well.” Simon glinted, wicked with humour. “Far too late to change your mind now.”

Last week, Jo did me a sketch on a piece of paper, and I’d painstakingly scaled it up onto the bare wall behind my headboard where the sun puddled in the late afternoon. A ying-yang of fins. Light and dark circled each other in sketchy pencil strokes. Everything I’d been telling myself I shouldn’t have.

The next tin was vibrant orange-red.

“Why goldfish?” Simon dipped a thin brush and traced the outline on the wall with such deep concentration I had to wait for him to look up from putting the final touches to one swirling fin.

“They’re koi carp. Technically.”

“I stand corrected.”

“Me and Mam had a pond in the garden. I wanted a pet, see? So we got fish. We used to go out and feed them together, even in the rain. They’d come to the surface, lipping at it, blowing bubbles. And we’d watch for hours.”

Simon softened. “I love that.”

When he listened, it didn’t feel like telling secrets, or losing hold of what I wanted to keep. With him, I didn’t have to avoid talking about the bad bits, but he wanted to share the good bits too. He made my memories stronger. Every time I told him about Mam, it fed life back into who she’d been. And none of that was going anywhere. No one in my life now would ever throw out anything this important to me.

“How’s your new interpreter working for you then?” I asked, charging up the roller.

Simon hesitated, his brush hovering away from the wall. “She’s… exceptionally competent.”

I laughed. “That on the same level as passable footage?”

The bastard flicked paint at me. “No comment.”

“Oi!” I swiped at the glob soaking into my t-shirt, smearing it down his cheek instead, and he swatted me away. “You like her better than me, is that it?”

“Never.” He caught my wrist, eyes flashing with hungry heat he wasn’t even trying to disguise. How had I ever been convinced it hadn’t been there? “But, she doesn’t swear nearly as much as you. Can’t decide whether she’s sanitising everything, or you’ve just got an epically filthy mouth…”

My grin quirked. “Two things can be true.”

Simon wet his lower lip. “Mm. That reminds me. Your mattress needs christening.”

The new plastic-covered double leaned against the radiator. I’d had it delivered along with my brand new bedframe when Cathy officially signed me up with the students she didn’t have the hours to take on. New job, new bedroom. Actual boyfriend.