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Matt reached out suddenly. James ducked away but he was too late to stop Matt from swiping a finger along his cheek. Matt smelled his finger. ‘Aftershave. The good stuff. Did I also imagine you had left the ironing board open?’
James stifled an oath and slowly bit into the apple as a big goofy smile grew on Matt’s lined face.
‘It’s okay, dude. It was an amateur’s mistake. Now spill. How did it go?’
James slumped into a chair by the round kitchen table. It had been a day filled with many firsts—his first date in several years, the first time he had found a woman whose hand fitted into his as though it was made to be there, and the first time he had ever told anyone how much he hoped Kane was like him. Anyone …
‘It was strange,’ James admitted, trying the words on his tongue rather than on his fingertips, and finding they didn’t taste as sharp and hurtful as he had expected they might. ‘Terrifying, mystifying and enjoyable by turns.’
‘Fantastic!’
‘Fantastic?’ He shuffled higher on the chair. ‘Matt, I have no idea what I was even thinking. Kane still stays up talking through his day to Dinah before he goes to sleep, and every morning is still spent in hope he’ll go to school without some sort of hypochondriac complaint. I’m not sure he’s anywhere near ready for anything of this sort.’
‘In all those lame excuses you didn’t say one word about how you feel about this girl.’
James let that comment lie.
‘Am I trying too hard? Trying to get back to the dating scene like it’s part of some twelve step programme to becoming a proper human being again? When really, maybe, I don’t ever have to go through it all again.’
All that feminine mystique. All those girls’ nights out wondering if this time she might not come home at all. And all that pain in wondering that if he had done more to try to stop her, to tame her, to need her the way she needed him, everything might have turned out differently.
‘Okay. That’s a fair point,’ Matt said, straddling the chair next to James. ‘But answer me this: why now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you been thinking about your twelve step theory for some time? Or is this the first time it has occurred to you?’
James wasn’t entirely sure. He had touched on it in his blog, but it had always been a rhetorical argument. A question sent out into the void with no hope of a response.
‘I hadn’t really considered it in detail until now,’ he admitted.
‘You mean you hadn’t considered it in detail until you met her?’
James let the words tumble about in his mind until he was pretty sure that was exactly the right answer. He dropped his face into his palms.
‘Fine. Then tell me why when she asked me about Dinah I said that she was incandescent.’
Matt laughed so hard his whole body shook. ‘You told her Dinah was what?
‘Incandescent. It means—’
‘I know what it means. I also know that to be putting stuff like that out there on a first date you are either terrified of how much you like this girl or the complete opposite. And only you can know which.’
Matt patted him on the shoulder, then stood and left him to his thoughts.
His thoughts? His thoughts weren’t the problem. It was his conscience that was having trouble keeping up.
‘So how was your big date?’ Rick asked Siena when she came out of the body shop staff bathroom all dolled up in her now cola-free Dolce suit, looking and feeling much more like herself than she had in the last twenty-four hours.
‘It wasn’t a date,’ she said, as she ran a finger around the edge of her lips to make sure her lip gloss was picture perfect.
She swung her Kelly bag into the cracked vinyl lounge chair in Rick’s office before following in its wake, letting her legs flop straight out in front of her and slinging an arm over her tired eyes.
She heard Rick sit down in his bouncy office chair on the other side of his big messy desk.
‘If that nice James Dillon had
anything to do with it, that was a date,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t know what you two are playing at, Siena. He has a kid and he never did answer me properly about his wife.’
