The House Swap(34)

‘Yeah, sure,’ Francis says distantly, reappearing from the lounge. ‘I’m just going to pop up the road to get some juice, OK?’

‘Don’t go.’ The words leap to my lips so swiftly I don’t have the chance to consider them. ‘Please.’

He looks at me, frowning, arms folded across his chest. A beat of silence, the tension stretched between us. ‘So I can’t even go up the road now? You want to police me twenty-four seven?’

‘No …’ I search for something else to say, but nothing comes.

‘It’s fine,’ he says, but there’s a coldness in his tone that wasn’t there before.

I watch him walking slowly away from the house, head down. My mental timer clicks on. If he’s less than fifteen minutes, it’ll probably be all right. On autopilot, I make Eddie a sandwich and then settle him down for a nap.

Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. Half an hour.

It’s almost two hours before he returns and, when he does, he stumbles straight to the bedroom, drags the curtains across the window and collapses on the bed. There’s no point shouting but I do it anyway. I stand in the darkened room with tears streaming down my face and call him every name under the sun, and none of them makes the slightest bit of difference at all.

The bell outside Carl’s flat doesn’t work, so I stand outside and text him. I’m here. X. Seconds later, I hear the sound of a door opening inside, then footsteps coming quickly down the hall. He pulls me into the dimly lit hallway and kisses me hello, kicking the front door shut with his foot.

‘Evening.’ Already I’m relaxing, unable to stop smiling as the trauma of the day fades away into nothing. He never says he’s pleased to see me, but he doesn’t need to, and it’s infectious. He’s wearing a faded red shirt and a pair of black jeans. I think about telling him he looks sexy, but perhaps I don’t need to, either. These days, it seems we can read each other’s minds, probably because we’re usually thinking the same thing.

‘Come in,’ he says, taking my hand and leading me back into the flat. ‘Do you want the guided tour? Not really.’ He answers himself, grinning. I have time to take in polished wood floors, sparse, pale furnishings, bare walls. Then I’m in his bedroom and the door has shut tight behind us. In here, there’s not much to see. If I walked in as a stranger, I wouldn’t be able to pick up too much about the person who lived here, and perhaps that’s the way he wants it. He’s private, watchful. I’ve often seen the way he looks at people, as if he’s coolly sizing them up and drawing his own secret conclusions. He doesn’t look at anyone else the way he looks at me.

‘I can’t believe it’s only one more week until you go,’ I say. We’re standing very close together in the centre of the room, his hands on my waist. ‘I’m going to miss having you in the office.’

‘I’ll miss you, too.’ He narrows his dark eyes, passing a hand over the side of his face, considering. ‘But it’s not like we won’t see each other.’

‘Of course.’ The truth is, we haven’t spoken at all about what will happen when he leaves, beyond the vaguest of references to us having to wind things down eventually. I say it, but I’m not sure I mean it yet. It’s easy to believe that these encounters exist in a little pocket of space and time outside judgement and reality. I can’t imagine them ending. I can’t imagine any other option. The future is blank space, closed off. The thought gives me a brief trickle of dread and I put my arms around his neck to ground myself.

‘We should speak about it,’ he says, understanding my silence, ‘but maybe not yet, hey.’

‘Right.’

I don’t want to talk any more just now, not about anything, and he picks up on it straight away. Instead he kisses me again, pressing himself up against me, sliding his hands up my body, taking the material of my dress with them and unpeeling it over my head in one swift movement. His hands are warm on my skin and I hear myself gasp as his lips trail over the path they have taken, making me shiver. My fingers are working at the buttons of his shirt, fumbling impatiently with them one by one. He puts his hand over mine, stilling me. Say please. His mouth moves almost silently and I whisper the echo back.

Slowly, he moves his hand away, and I’m finishing what I started, running my hands over the muscles of his chest and pushing the shirt off his shoulders as he unclips my bra and then takes me up in his arms without warning, throwing me hard down on to the bed. He stands over me for a moment, looking down.

‘Come here,’ I say. ‘Please,’ and he lies down on his side beside me, propping his head up on his hand.

‘Dangerous times,’ he says, his breath hot against my neck. His hand is sliding down my body again, hooking into the side of my knickers and pulling them gradually over my thighs, pushing them away. He doesn’t take his eyes off me and, in this moment, I want him so much the rules I have made about us not crossing this boundary yet crumble up into dust. I reach for the buckle of his jeans, tugging at the belt. He stops me again, shaking his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t think so. You wanted to wait, didn’t you? So we’re going to wait.’

I bite my lip hard, saying nothing. We’re kissing again, and I’m pushing myself into the heat and hardness of his body, wrapping my legs around his waist and scratching my nails across his back. I know he likes it, but he pushes my hands away, shaking his head again. He reaches down to the side of the bed, scoops up a scarf that is lying there, and then, before I know it, he’s forcing my arms up above my head and tying my wrists together quickly and efficiently, smiling as I gasp. ‘There,’ he says when he has finished. ‘Got you where I want you now.’