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To which she couldn’t resist holding up her phone.
“But it wouldn’t be any trouble. Look. I can just press play.”
“No, don’t press play. Just put it down.”
“I want to,” she said. “It’s just that it’s hard when the person you’re with is a big exaggerator. You being that way makes my fingers really heavy, and so once I start moving them toward something I can’t really get them to stop.”
“None of that’s even a real thing.”
“And yet I’m still doing this.”
“Because you’re an arsehole.”
“And sadly, being an arsehole makes heavy-finger syndrome even worse.”
She let her hand tremble, then. As if it really were holding up something that weighed about a thousand pounds. And she made a good show of looking distressed, too. Like a funny dad, pretending to pinwheel over some steep drop for his kids.
Absurd,she thought.Ridiculous.
But he sagged anyway.
“Fine. Fine, I take it back. You’re not any of those things. You’re a nice person who never describes things as way more ridiculous than they actually were. Happy now?” he burst out. Mostly angry, she thought, mostly irritated seeming.
But with that hint of amusement that he couldn’t quite hide.
She couldn’t say yes to his question, however, for one very good reason:
“To be honest, no. I was looking forward to hearing Chris sweat again.”
And now his amusement was more sixty/forty than ninety/ten.
Most probably because he was remembering exactly what she’d described.
“Christ, it was rolling off him. I’d have been sorry if he wasn’t such a twat.”
“I mean, fair. Considering he cracks a joke about living up north that’d put a posh playwright from the eighties to shame, five seconds into the interview.”
“Well, what can you expect from a softie southern bastard?”
“Nowt much, seems like,” she said, and let her accent go as thick as it could when she did. At which point his amusement went directly to a hundred percent.
Though maybe amusement wasn’t quite the right word.
It was more like a flash of recognition.
The simple pleasure of hearing something so familiar, when you’d had to exist for a long time among people who weren’t. People who were so well-to-do that the accent had gone, or were just from so far away that everything they said sounded different to you. Nonowts, noseems likes, none of those things.
Must be lonely, she found herself thinking of him.
Even though the situation was exactly the same for her.
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had talked to her like this.
Or heard something in her accent that they liked and wanted to talk about.
Even Connie sounded posher than she did, and she hadn’t grown up that far from where Mabel had. And that made it extra nice to hear it all from him.
“Whereabouts you from?” he asked with genuine interest in his voice.
