A beat of silence passed between us and the corners of his mouth twitched. “I can work with that,” he replied, looking at me as if he were stripping me naked in his imagination.
I could work with that too.
Thirteen
Dexter
I rarely used my kitchen and wasn’t territorial about it at all, but it still felt odd as I sat on the bar stool and watched Hollie buzz about, poking her head in cupboards and pulling out bits of equipment I didn’t even realize I had.
“Considering you don’t cook, you’re set up like a world-famous chef or something,” she said as she pulled out some kind of device that looked like a sieve gone wrong.
“I used to have a housekeeper who liked to cook,” I replied, taking a sip of my wine and pretending to be preoccupied with the emails on my phone. I needed something to take the edge off. Everything about tonight was making me itch. Not because I was uncomfortable, but because the exact opposite was true. I barely knew Hollie, hadn’t even slept with her, but here we were in my flat as she cooked for me. No woman had ever made herself at home in my kitchen. Cooking together was the kind of shit married people did. And the only woman I’d ever even imagined marrying was Bridget.
“Have you ever lived with anyone?” I asked and immediately wished I hadn’t. It felt too probing, too intimate. And I didn’t want the same question back.
She turned to look at me, her hand hovering over the tap as she filled a saucepan with water. “I live with my sister.” She paused. “And of course, my parents, back in the day.”
“How long have you lived with your sister?”
“Ten years or so,” she replied, shutting off the tap and putting the saucepan on the hob.
My creaky brain whirred and did the maths. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five. But I look twenty-one, right?” She winked at me and turned back to the hob.
I wasn’t sure whether or not there was much difference in what a twenty-one-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old looked like, but if it made her feel better . . . “Not a day older. You moved out at fifteen?” I asked.
She had her back to me and seemed to still at the question.
“Yeah. I mean,” she said, her voice softer. “We were just a few trailers down. My parents were fighting a lot. And . . . it was just easier to move out.”
She kept mentioning trailers. I was pretty sure she meant something other than the thing you towed behind a car to transport camping gear or rubbish. I’d heard of a condo, but I didn’t get US real estate. It was true what they said; we were two nations separated by a common language.
“Do you like marionberries? I’m going to make a pie.”
Marionberries? Christ, I hoped she was a good cook. I wasn’t the best liar—I became an awkward fifteen-year-old and might as well have a neon sign above my head with an arrow pointing down that flashed liar liar, and I really didn’t want to upset her. “I have no idea. What are they?”
“You have no idea?” She skated across to my fridge and threw the door open. I was half expecting her to pull out a selection of sea slugs but instead she held up a bag of blackberries.
“Oh, blackberries,” I said, relieved that it was something I actually liked. “Jesus, I wish you Americans would learn English.”
“You like them?” she asked, her eyes shiny and wide as if she were showing a child the ocean for the first time.
“Sure. Only a monster doesn’t like blackberries.”
She tipped her head back and laughed. “Maybe. My sister and I used to pick them wild when we were kids.”
“Me too,” I said. Bridget and I used to go down to a wild patch outside her parents’ village. “Funny,” I said. Those long lazy summers together had felt impossibly long and impossibly hot. I thought they would last our entire lives.
“Funny?” she asked.
“Not ha ha funny,” I replied. “Just . . . you know, we live on different sides of the planet and have that in common.”
“I bet you didn’t grow up in a trailer though,” she said. “I’m not sure we have so much in common.”
“I have to confess, I don’t know what you mean by ‘trailer.’ Do I need to consult my Anglo-American dictionary?”
“You’re too funny.” She pulled out her phone from a pocket in jeans that hugged her rather perfect bottom. “There,” she said, showing me a picture of her and a girl, their arms around each other.
“You look lovely. Is that your sister?”
“Yes, Autumn. But behind us. That’s a trailer.” She pointed at the static caravan behind her and her sister.
“Oh, I see. Like a holiday park or something?”