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Three Years Before I Do
At seven a.m. one Friday morning, three weeks after they started dating, Josh turned up at the Tooting house with a shovel in his backpack. He and Audrey were at that stage of mutual besottedness where everything the other did seemed full of untainted wonder.
‘I’ve come to move the tree,’ he told Audrey, who was bleary-eyed and still wearing pyjamas.
‘In the middle of the night?’ she asked, self-consciously wiping sleep dust from her eyes.
‘Not a morning person?’
‘No, definitely not a morning person.’
‘Duly noted,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek and then striding down the hall towards the kitchen door. ‘You can go back to bed if you like.’
She wasn’t going to go back to bed. Not when Josh and Josh’s biceps would be doing manual labour in the garden. She made him coffee and watched as he dug a fresh hole in the sunnier side of the garden. When he finished, he wrote ‘Audrey’ on the trunk in chalk.
‘Does this count as one of my hundred and sixty trees?’ she asked.
‘Why, because I did all the digging?’ he asked, wiping sweat from his brow.
‘No, because we only moved it, we didn’t plant it.’
‘It wasn’t going to thrive if we didn’t.’ Josh paused. ‘Shall we count it as half?’
Audrey nodded, satisfied.
As they drank coffee together in the garden, admiring her half tree, Audrey reflected on the last few weeks with Josh. He was so straightforward, she found it slightly disconcerting. There were no games, no telephone cat and mouse. When things went too well, it made Audrey nervous. She thought there had to be a catch. It had been three weeks, and they hadn’t done much more than kiss. Every time he touched her, it was like he’d turned on a fire inside her, but then he’d say goodnight, and there was nothing left to burn. Now he was coming over, digging stuff up with his shirt off, it felt almost cruel.
Josh put down his coffee cup and looked at his watch.
‘I’d better go, or I’ll be late for work. I’m seeing you later?’
Audrey nodded. ‘I promise I will look less revolting.’
‘You could not look revolting if you tried,’ he said, and then he kissed her properly, and suddenly she felt very awake and very aware she hadn’t brushed her teeth yet.
Later that evening, they met up for beer and tacos on Greek Street. When the bar got crowded, Josh suggested they go back to his place in King’s Cross. It was the first time he’d proposed it. Josh, it turned out, lived in exactly the kind of place Audrey had imagined him living in. It was minimalist and utilitarian; there were no pictures on the wall, no dirty dishes in the sink, and a neatly ordered bookcase of biographies and reference books lined one wall of the living room. A tablet stood on a stand in the kitchen, next to a notebook full of handwritten notes.
‘What’s this?’ she asked.
Josh closed the book and put the kettle on. ‘I’m doing an online cookery course on Tuesday nights.’
‘You’ve taken more notes than I took the whole time I was at uni.’ Audrey laughed, trying to read the notebook, but Josh picked it up and closed it.
‘It’s how I digest information. I like to follow instructions, write stuff down.’
‘Let me see,’ she said, reaching for it, but he held the book above his head.
‘You’ll think I’m a massive geek.’
‘I already think you’re a massive geek.’
She leant in to kiss him and as soon as she did, the outside world melted away. His arms curled around her, and their bodies took over. The recipe notes fell to the floor. ‘So, do you want me to sleep on the couch tonight?’ she asked, putting both hands around his lower back, pressing his body against hers.
‘I don’t want you to sleep on the couch,’ he said, his voice shifting to a lower tone.
‘You have more self-control than I do.’
‘I don’t,’ he said, kissing her neck, pressing his hands around her waist and lifting her up onto the table behind them, slowly running a hand up her thigh. She let out an involuntary moan.
