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‘You know?’ Mitch prompted. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked very much like his lips were twitching slightly. ‘You know?’ he asked again.
‘Sleeping over,’ I said on an embarrassed mumble, deciding that ‘sleeping with you’ was a step too far off the gangplank I had unwittingly walked down.
‘You thought that Sally was with me last night… in abiblicalkind of way?’
Okay, he was definitely mocking me now, and it was all entirely justified. People who are still half asleep should definitely keep their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Would you like to see a photo of Sally?’ Mitch asked, his usually expressive face completely devoid of any emotion.
‘If you like,’ I said in a false sing-song voice, suddenly wondering if there was any possibility at all of this being a truly horrible dream that I’d wake up from in a minute.
Mitch pulled out his mobile and began scanning through his photo library. This was all going to end very uncomfortably I suddenly realised, and I had no one to blame but myself.
‘Ah, here you go,’ he said, passing me his iPhone.
I took it, already prepared to say something nice about the woman, whatever I saw on the screen.
‘Er. This is a photograph of a shed,’ I said, swivelling his phone around to show him the picture on the screen.
‘Scroll right. The next one is a selfie I took of Sally and me the other week.’
I stared at the photo for a very long moment, not because I hadn’t instantly realised my colossal mistake, but more to give my burning hot cheeks time to cool down.
‘Of course, she’s a tad older than me,’ Mitch said, and now that I was listening for it, I could hear the humour in his voice. ‘But I’m very fond of her.’
‘Well, she looks lovely,’ I said, passing him back his phone.
He glanced down at the photo before clicking back to the home screen. ‘She is, and incredibly spritely for a woman in her seventies. Her late husband was a good friend of my dad’s. That shed, by the way, was what I was building for her while you were visiting your mum.’
I flopped down on the chair beside him, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot. ‘I’m sorry, Mitch. I got hold of the wrong end of the stick and then ran with it. And for what it’s worth, it’s absolutely none of my business if you’re dating a floozy in her twenties or a sexy octogenarian.’
‘That’s a pretty broad spectrum you’re giving me there,’ he said, with a smile. ‘But actually, I’m not in the market for finding anyone new at the moment.’
‘You already have someone?’ It felt as though the air had just been sucked out of the room. Was that why it was suddenly so hard to breathe?
‘I’m working on it,’ he said softly.
It took two cups of tea and a diversionary discussion about the merits of changing my broadband provider before it felt as though we were back on comfortable footing.He didn’t say that ‘someone’ was you, the voice in my head kept reminding me. And I had already jumped to far too many assumptions about Mitch’s love life to risk doing that again.
‘I’m sorry if losing out on your sleep last night messed up your weekend plans.’
‘It’s no problem,’ Mitch assured me comfortably. ‘Although I did sleep straight through the alarm and missed the hair appointment I had booked for this morning.’
He ran a hand ruefully through his thick dark hair. It didn’t exactly improve the overall appearance. Before I knew what I was doing, my tongue was off and running, still determined to get me into trouble.
‘I could cut it for you, if you like.’
He looked rightfully surprised. ‘Could you? I didn’t know you knew how to cut hair.’
‘Well not per se. I mean I’m not trained or anything, but I used to have a Saturday job in a hairdresser’s.’
‘Not wishing to be rude but isn’t that mainly just shampooing and sweeping up?’ he asked innocently.
I bristled on behalf of Saturday girls everywhere. ‘Observing is the best way of learning how to do something properly.’
His laughter filled the kitchen. ‘Okay then, let’s give it a go. But if you tell me one day that you’ve watched a couple of surgeries, I’mstillnot letting you take out my appendix.’
