Boyfriend Material(3)

“Um.” I swallowed, feeling about as desirable as a roadkill sandwich. “Can we go back to the bit where you’d come over to hit on me?”

There was a longer silence than I would have liked. Then Cam smiled—if slightly warily. “Sure.”

Another silence.

“So,” I tried. “This hitting-on-me thing you’re doing. I’ve got to say it’s pretty minimalist.”

“Well, my original plan was to, y’know, try to talk to you a bit and see how it went, and then maybe try to kiss you or something. But you kind of torpedoed that strategy. So now I don’t know what to do.”

I drooped. “I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just really bad at…” I tried to find a word that properly encapsulated my recent dating history “…everything.”

Perhaps I was imagining it, but I could almost see Cam deciding whether or not he could be arsed with me. To my mild surprise, he seemed to come down on the side of arsed. “Everything?” he repeated, and tweaked the tip of my bunny ear in a fashion I chose to interpret as encouraging.

This was a good sign, right? This had to be a good sign. Or was it a terrible sign? What was wrong with him that he wasn’t running away screaming? Okay. No. I was in my head, and that was the worst place for anyone to be, especially me, and I needed to say something light and flirty and right the fuck now. “I might be okay at the kissing.”

“Mmm.” Cam leaned in a little farther. Holy shit, he was actually going for this? “I’m not sure I trust your judgment. Perhaps I’d better check for myself.”

“Um. All right?”

So he checked for himself. And I was okay at the kissing. I mean, I thought I was okay at the kissing. God, I hope I was okay at the kissing.

“Well?” I asked a moment later, sounding relaxed, playful, and not at all desperate and insecure.

His face was close enough that I could see all the tantalising details, like the thickness of his eyelashes, the beginnings of stubble along his jaw, and the crinkles at the corners of his lips. “I’m not sure I can draw an accurate conclusion from a single data point.”

“Oooh. Sciencey.”

We expanded the data set. And by the time we were done, he had me pressed up against the corner of the bar, and my hands were tucked into the back pockets of his jeans in a really half-arsed attempt to pretend I wasn’t blatantly feeling him up. Which was when I remembered that he knew my name, and my dad’s name, and probably my mum’s name, and quite possibly everything that had ever been written about me, and all I had in return was that he was called “Cam” and tasted nice.

“Are you?” I said, breathlessly. And in response to his confused look, “You know, sciencey. You don’t look sciencey.”

“Oh. No.” He grinned, all foxy and delicious. “That was just an excuse to keep kissing you.”

“What do you do, then?”

“I freelance, mainly for sites that wish they were BuzzFeed.”

I knew it. I fucking knew it. He had been far too eager to overlook my many, many flaws. “You’re a journalist.”

“That’s a pretty generous term for it. I write those lists of x things about y where you won’t believe z that everybody hates but seem to read anyway.”

Twelve Things You Didn’t Know About Luc O’Donnell. Number Eight Will Shock You.

“And, sometimes, I make those quizzes where it’s like pick eight pictures of kittens, and we’ll tell you which John Hughes character you are.”

The rational version of Luc, the one from the parallel universe where my dad wasn’t a famous shithead and my ex-boyfriend hadn’t sold all my secrets to Piers Morgan, tried to tell me I was overreacting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening.

Cam tilted his head quizzically. “What’s wrong? Look, I know it’s not exactly a sexy job, and I don’t even have the comfort of saying ‘Someone has to do it’ because we totally don’t. But you’ve gone weird again.”

“Sorry. It’s…complicated.”

“Complicated can be interesting.” He went up on tiptoes to smooth a lock of hair behind my ear for me. “And we’ve got the kissing down. We’ve just got to work on the talking.”

I gave what I hoped wasn’t a sickly grin. “I’d rather stick with what I’m good at.”

“Tell you what. I’ll ask you a question, and if I like the answer, you get to kiss me again.”

“Um, I’m not sure—”

“Let’s start small. You know what I do. How about you?”

My heart was racing. And not in a fun way. But, as questions went, that was harmless, right? It was information at least two hundred spambots already had. “I work for a charity.”

“Wow. Noble. I’d say I’d always wanted to do something like that, but I’m far too shallow.” He turned his face up to mine, and I kissed him nervously. “Favourite ice cream flavour?”

“Mint choc chip.”

Another kiss. “Book that literally everyone else has read but you haven’t.”

“All of them.”

He drew back. “You’re not getting kissed for that. It’s a total cop-out.”

“No seriously. All of them, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, anything Dickens ever wrote, All Quiet on the Western Front, that one about the time-traveller’s wife, Harry Potter…”