Page 48 of People Skills

The teaspoon chapter is a wild swing, and if I’d been his editor, I might have told him to cut it, but I think that advice would have been wrong. I think maybe the whole book starts to make sense when you get to this part. Or maybe I only think that because I’m reading it at 2 am after kissing him.

In the morning, I hear him get up early. A part of me considers getting up with him, but no, he will be walking to the beach and the beach is a banned place now. Also I’m hungover.

I wait until I hear him leave, and then I get in the shower. I tell myself I can dwell on Xavier for the length of the shower and then I am not to think about last night again. Honestly, I am making a big thing out of nothing. The kiss, and it’s probably generous to call it that, went for mere seconds. Nothing happened.

I stay in the shower too long, until the hot water runs out, and then I get out, get dressed, dry my hair, determinedly keeping my mind focused on everything I need to do today, the festival, the authors I need to email, the tasks I need to organise for Hillary. Every time my mind drifts to Xavier, I slam an image of Hillary over it. My body and brain are both sluggish. I’m going to be late today, late for me, which is still early, but my whole day, my whole week, gets thrown off if I’m not organised and early on a Monday. I learned this early. The level of organisation I need to have as a personal assistant does not come naturally to me. I have to use every planning tool available. I need to be in the office early so I can mentally tell myself I have achieved this, I am here, and the rest flows from that.

I need something carby from the Good Spot to offset the tiredness and hungoverness, to keep my brain on track and not drifting back to being with Xavier on the beach. I need to keep this whole day Xavier-free.

When I walk into the cafe, the first person I see is Xavier. He’s standing in the line for coffee.

I stand behind him, and at first he doesn’t notice me, but then I feel weird saying nothing, so I reach out and touch the middle of his back.

He has a great back. I’ve never thought about a back before, but I’ve never encountered a back that appeals to me like Xavier’s. The muscles, the way it dips around his spine—

Stop. I am fantasising about a man’s spine. About bits of knobbly bone. There is something wrong with me. I turned on the tap of desire and now I can’t turn it off. I need strong coffee, the kind that will sit uncomfortably in my stomach, and I need a really unsexy problem to distract me. Luckily, I have several. Hillary wants to switch her phone provider, the kitchen tap in the office is dripping, and I have several parcels that I need to drop off at the post office. These tasks alone will swallow hours of my time and turn me back into a grumpy nightmare who cannot possibly fathom appreciating anyone’s body parts.

Xavier turns around at my touch, and his face breaks into a smile.

‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Good morning,’ I say in return.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Good,’ I say, and then I shake my head. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I’m feeling rough.’

‘You don’t look rough,’ he says.

Is he flirting? He’d better not be. I push past that.

‘Did you beach-walk?’

‘Yeah, I woke up and couldn’t sleep, so I thought I should see that sunrise again.’

‘And how was it?’

‘Pretty good,’ he says, yawning a little. A man who calls a perfect sunrise over the ocean pretty good is not an attractive man, I sternly tell myself.

It’s his turn to order, and I step up to the counter after he’s finished.

Darius, the sweet barista, smiles at me. He’s twenty-one, incredibly shy, makes the best coffee I’ve ever tasted, and he is very obviously in love with Jamila. If she walks into the room, he blushes. He often gives her a large coffee even though she has only paid for a small. He makes sure there is always a savoury scone left for her, even though they sell out by eight-thirty most mornings and she doesn’t get there until two minutes before nine. He hides the scone in a bag behind the counter and pulls it out when she walks in. Jamila pretends to be oblivious to this, but I know she knows. Kat and I have agreed not to tease her or Darius because we fear teasing them could push them both over the edge into doing nothing. Instead, we observe from a distance as they inch closer and closer to flirtation.

Today Darius is wearing a black T-shirt that says Sunday in small white writing. He often wears days-of-the-week T-shirts. I thought it was something that people only put on underwear back in the eighties. He wears them sometimes on the right day and sometimes he’ll be in Friday on a Wednesday. Or, like today, Sunday on a Monday. Is it funny? Is it irony? Is it nothing? I don’t know. It makes me feel old because I can’t figure it out.

‘Darius, Sunday?’ I say. ‘That hurts me.’

‘I’ve lost my Monday shirt,’ he says, shrugging.

‘Why not Wednesday? That at least has a Monday-ish energy.’

‘Sunday and Monday are very similar in my mind. They’re, like, friends,’ Darius says.

‘Your mind must be a terrifying place,’ I say.

Darius slides our coffees over the counter towards us, and also a brown bag containing their famous breakfast sandwich, which is enormous and triple-layered and fancy and delicious.

Xavier peers into the bag. ‘This looks—’