Page 18 of Read My Lips

“What – received pronunciation?” Fuck him and his privately educated bubble.

His eyes flashed to mine with a wicked kind of unhurriedness. “Maybe.” He ducked his head, snorting a hiccoughed laugh. “And what if it was?”

A reciprocating proto-grin pestered the muscles of my cheek. Frowning didn’t fully counter it.

“Should never have hired me then, should you?” His ego didn’t need rewarding.

I slumped against the wall of the building and the urge to punch him eased like the pressure in a tyre with a nail embedded in it.

In front of us, somewhere under the blanket of hazy grey, the sun was turning everything golden. Dawn peeking through the rooftops might have been worth being awake for on any other morning. Pale clouds danced against the black slate and flashes of steel, and the low early morning sun etched blurry shadow lines against the day, scribing around the buildings it climbed between.

Simon stepped in front of me, blocking out the stretching reach of light, arms dropped to his sides. “I don’t know. We do alright when neither of us are yelling.”

We did. I thought we did.

Where the sun touched, the glass of the building was already warm through the backs of my trousers. But coolness seeped into my bones anywhere he blocked it. It was the shaded cotton of my shirt making me shiver. Not him looking me over like he had at the bus stop, so closely it made my skin itch.

“What do you normally do when you have a fight?” Knowing him, he was only wondering whether I owned an ironing board.

“I’m not in the habit of having fights.”

“Bollocks. Everyone has fights.” He was the one who’d started shouting.

The ghost of a laugh quivered at the edges of his lips. “I have balanced discussions. There’s a qualitative difference.”

I snorted so hard I ripped the back of my throat out. Tears prickled the corners of my eyes as I wheezed, shaking with the hilarity of his bullshit. Simon Azie: my shit does not stink.

He didn’t bother trying to disguise his grin anymore, drawing close like he was magnetised. Still laughing, I sagged against the glass.

And then it stopped being funny.

Slow motion, his hand rose to my chest and I went cross-eyed watching his fingers smooth an invisible smudge from the front of my shirt.

“...What are you doing?”

Simon huffed one of those chuckle-laughs people drag out at team building exercises, like I’d said something terribly, terribly amusing, and his eyes flashed sideways like cartoon arrows. “We have an audience, Loverboy.”

He was right. On the other side of the glass wall Sev and Tracy and those stuffed suit lawyers I didn’t know had lined up in an awkward, socially distanced firing squad, with Mel at the head, looking like she was readying the orders.

“Oh shit.” The lot of them needed popcorn.

Simon caught my chin, and I tensed as he deliberately re-aligned the angle of my face like he touched me all the time.

“What did you say?”

My heartbeat stuttered at the swell of irritation in his eye-contact. Lip reading. That thing where he had to see my mouth move.

“I said, ‘oh shit’.”

The tension in his fingers softened. “Don’t panic. Laugh again, and do those moody puppy dog eyes you’re so very good at. They’re ever so convincing.”

The back of my neck went clammy and hot. “I do not have puppy-dog eyes.” They had to be brown, didn’t they? Not sludgy greenish-blue.

“Perfect, those are the ones.” His grin widened, and he let go. Dipping his head, he looked down for a measured beat, and took my hand in his like I’d turned into a wilting damsel.

“What are they doing gawping at us?” More importantly, why were we holding hands?

“I imagine Mel’s waiting for me to confirm your ridiculous assertion so they know whether to escort me from the building.”