Page 7 of Read My Lips

What a wanker. My idiot heart spasmed with optimism at the Simon-ism, and his casual use of my sign name – Big Ben – all earnest and upright and formal, like he didn’t understand the utter piss-take of being compared to the iconic London landmark clamped to the side of parliament, when you were five-foot-six-and-a-half and northern.

It didn’t mean anything.

Simon appreciated everyone. He brimmed with equal enthusiasm for the media intern who made him tea, right through to whatever minor royal he was trying to steer away from social suicide that particular week. And I wasn’t going to get sucked in.

I shifted my leg out of reach.

Mirroring me, he slumped into the corner of the back seat between the door and the window, flagging my attention with a low wave.

“L-u-k-e’s a bit of a cock.”

Things I would stick a fork in my eye to get out of taking part in. Number one: discussing the bloke I failed to get off with, with the boss who stalked my fantasies. I set my jaw.

“Thought you couldn’t understand a word he said?” My finger jab in his direction might have been slightly confrontational.

Simon rolled his eyes. “His mouth barely moved.” Not one ounce of guilt existed in his smile. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”

So not an answer.

“You had live captions on, didn’t you?” I shook my head, eyes narrowed in disapproval. Sometimes, he was so full of shit. “What, you can’t do that for this meeting too?”

Simon tilted his head. “Are you asking whether I think your nuanced translations”—it took him a bit to choose his signs, merging them together, colouring them in with the pinch of his lips and the glint in his eye—“can be emulated by voice recognition software that struggles with regional British accents, doesn’t always differentiate between speakers, and has no take on tonality?”

I huffed a reluctant laugh. He deserved all my grumpiness, but he was bang on.

“No,” I signed. “I know you know they can’t.”

“Good.” His grin split wide, warming my skin like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“Glad to know I’m irreplaceable.”

Simon scoffed. “Utterly. Always. Couldn’t survive five minutes without you.”

Bloody hell. He didn’t mean it.

And Simon was speaking again. “You do know hitting on someone else when you’ve got a naked man in your bedroom is incredibly shady behaviour unless everyone is fully on board.”

My turn to laugh. It came out thin and tired. I had to bite my lip to remind myself not to switch to voice to match him. “Have you seen yourself standing next to me lately?”

Batting that away on a weary tongue clack, Simon rolled his eyes like dismissal was all it deserved.

Exoticism, he’d told me once, on a similar eye-roll, in reaction to an entire meeting room of lolling tongues back when I started working with him. Obviously, being half Mauritian Creole and over six foot, I’m an absolute animal in bed.

I still had his sparkling wink embedded in my wet dreams.

Alright to be him, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a short-arse with a thick neck, a gym habit, a badly broken nose and a cleft lip scar. But he didn’t get it. So how did I tell him he made my mind melt out of my ears? I’d say something daft, and he’d see me as this objectifying wank-stain, and I’d be telling him no it wasn’t like that. Not for me. I was different. And I’d end up doing something extinction-worthy like saying I didn’t even notice he was Black. And he’d fire me on the spot and never speak to me again.

I’d deserve it too.

“Will you watch the film? I need you to know what’s going on when we walk in there, or I might as well not have turned up at all.”

Realistically, I was never going to say no.

CHAPTER

THREE

A still room with an empty button-backed sofa centred perfectly in the middle of the shot made up the first frame. Somehow I wasn’t prepared when they came in from the side, waking up a photograph to real life, slamming into the couch with a jolt, knocking the camera over on its side, tilting the world at a sudden, sharp angle. Two bodies, too close up, sloped downhill at a sea-sick kind of incline, writhed over each other, faces firmly out of view.