Just Last Night(81)

I sob openly, and Finlay puts his arms around me.

I make a decision, in the embrace, to lean into it. I’m not going to stanch my tears out of embarrassment. I’m not going to stop and choke this back into something feminine, and picturesque. I ugly heave-sob into his T-shirt until it’s wet enough to stick to his skin. He feels hard-bodied and lean under the fabric, a stark contrast to the squish of my chest. I’ve never been this physically close to an athletic type before. My partners, however narrow they looked when dressed, were always softly British-pudgy from beer and curries. Like me.

“I miss her too,” he says, into my hair.

“Really?” I look up at him. I blink and focus enough to see he has tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t sure if you did.”

“Yes,” he says, voice very low. “Very much. Not in the same way you do, I can’t miss a relationship I didn’t have. I’d been missing her for a long time. But it’s like I’ve lost a part of myself, my past. So many things only Susie shared with me. I already was pretty isolated, but now I realize, I wasn’t. Not like I am now. And like you, there are things between us that will always be unfinished. After the police called, I sat in silence, before the tears. I wasn’t ready. This wasn’t how it was going to end. I know you only saw the anger. I think there was still some love, underneath. Or a bond at least, whatever you’d call it. I know there was on my side. I found out I’d always been clinging hard to a notion of a point in the future when we could reconcile. The way things were between us wasn’t ever going to be forever, you know? And it turned out, it was.”

I’ve never heard Finlay, or indeed anyone, sound this raw.

“I’m sorry for being like this,” I say, in the deep silence that follows.

“Why?”

“I didn’t mean to suggest my loss is greater.”

“I know you didn’t. Come and sit down,” Finlay says, and guides me to the edge of the bed. “How about a cup of milky tea with a large sugar in it? It’s what my mum would suggest.”

“Sounds perfect,” I say, smiling. It actually does. I watch as Fin goes to fill the kettle in the bathroom, rustles around in the stash of sachets and plastic pots of UHT milk, clanks the china cups.

“Why have you got the television on, on mute?” he says, noticing the dancing picture in the gloom.

“I turned it on and I didn’t know how to turn it off.”

“Silent rugby at Twickenham is oddly hypnotic.”

Fin hands a cup to me, demonstrating good manners in twisting it so the handle is nearest. From his bearing, you’d definitely think he went to a posh school, not my school. He is a bit of a Gatsby.

“Thank you.”

“Want to be alone, or shall I stay for a while?” Fin says.

“Stay! If that’s OK.”

“Of course.”

Fin pours hot water onto a tea bag, dunks it and casts it aside, and walks to the bed. It’s so huge that he can lie on it and channel surf without it feeling as if we’re in bed together.

As I drink, I realize that as well as being emotionally unsettled, I was half drunk and dehydrated. Halfway down the cup, I feel significantly steadier.

Finlay holds the remote aloft and clicks through channels rapidly. For a few seconds, a male model with goatee and top knot in huge trousers swings down a catwalk and holds a jacket off his shoulder, before pulling it up, wheeling around, and stalking onward.

“Oh fuck’s sake. Where’s the off button on this thing?!” Finlay points the remote while pretend hammering at it in straight-faced ire, and I gurgle with delight both at the incident, and Fin having a sense of humor about it.

I have a tiny revelation: I like him. I’m not sure I trust him, but I do like him.

“Oh my God, can you do that?” I say.

“What, walk? Yes. Thank you.”

“Can I see a modeling picture? Are there any online?”

“No, too old, I’m afraid. Archive material. They were still using Box Brownie cameras.”

I gurgle some more. This was the brightener I needed.

“Did you do any famous ‘campaigns,’ as I believe they’re called?”

In laughter, I’ve unintentionally rolled closer to Finlay. Our arms are nearly touching, and neither of us are moving away again.

“Hmmmm, not telling you. You’ll look it up.”

“You said there’s no photos of you anywhere!”

“I was lying, as people do when they do not wish problematic women to know things.”

“Problematic, haha.”

He lifts his hips off the bed, pulls his phone out of his sweatpants pocket, turns it on, and presses a few buttons, careful to angle the screen away from me. “Think there was one for a whisky brand that was quite Mad Men, that I didn’t hate . . .”

My heart rate jumps a little, as it dawns on me he’s doing this not only to oblige me, but to impress me. I didn’t think for a second he’d actually show me anything, in my teasing. But I have more power than I realized.

Fin holds the phone, screen side to his chest.

“Alright, I’ll show you this, but the search term has been obscured for a reason!”

He barks this in a mock “schoolteacher when the bell rings” voice and I’m weak with giggling as he turns the phone toward me and I hold it steady, my hand over his, and examine the image. It has such an effect on me, I almost wish I hadn’t started this.