53
‘You know when you say something so stupid that afterwards, you get an actual body-cringe remembering it? Like,’ Cal mimed one eye opening wide as a memory occurred, and his body going rigid in response, while sat next to Harriet on the sofa.
‘Yes?’ Harriet said, tucking her legs underneath herself. It was one week since the exploded wedding, and one day until she moved out to her next digs in Chapel Allerton. For a send-off, Cal had suggested an evening in, sensitively pairing wine and crisps. Harriet was grateful for them when she got back at nine from a hip wedding at Duke Studios.
‘When you said you’d read your mum’s letter, I said, “Do you want some toast?”’ Cal put a palm over his eyes. ‘Do you want some TOAST. I am sunburned with shame.’
‘Hahahahaha! I didn’t even remember. It was OK.’
‘I couldn’t think of something that would meet the moment, as it were. Instead, I went to the next obvious place. Oven muffins.’
‘Could’ve at least offered me a Breville toastie.’
Cal looked at her with what looked like acute fondness.
‘We’re going to stay in touch, right?’ Cal said, picking up his glass of red. ‘This isn’t goodbye-goodbye?’
Harriet guessed this was coming. She’d already admitted to herself that she had a crush. She knew if she stayed around Cal any longer, it’d be more serious than a crush. It’d go from a crush to a mess. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
It was a bittersweet achievement to be the prescient one for a change. The party who could see the oncoming traffic accident, and take the slip road.
After Scott, and Jon, she wasn’t going to break her own heart by falling for the unattainable popular boy, for the hat trick. Harriet was going to assume control instead. They could meet up, but she already knew how it would go. His friends, bar Sam, would be merely courteous, while not quite knowing why she was there. (‘Your ex lodger?’ As if she was attending on a scholarship.)
They’d go to the sort of place that micro-planed truffles, offered low-intervention wines and served radishes with their leaves on, to be dragged through things. (‘It’s called bagna cauda, with crudités!’ Lorna said of a starter dish to a doubtful Roxy, once. ‘It looks like my mum’s old WeightWatchers tea, without the rolled-up slice of ham.’)
Harriet would make half-hearted attempts to befriend the aloof beauty in the Vampire’s Wife dress on Cal’s arm, who’d wonder exactly how well Harriet knew her boyfriend.
Cal would be anxious she wasn’t enjoying herself, that the flatmate badinage he remembered with nostalgia, wasn’t appearing on cue. He’d end up feeling guiltily baffled, making empty promises of more meet-ups.
Instead of looking back on a brief, strange, but golden time and rejoicing, they’d both get a squirmy sense of what happened there? at the thought of one another.
‘Sure, but … will we make much sense after I stop being your tenant?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not sure our worlds collide all that much, outside these four walls.’
Cal’s brow knitted. ‘You can choose the pub.’
‘The thing is, if I met your next girlfriend and she was another Hot Thatcher, I couldn’t stand it. I know too much.’
‘Ah. Right.’
Harriet winced at the sting of her rejection, a poor return for his warmth. She was lying to him, to look cool. It wasn’t about his taste in other women. It was about other women, full stop.
‘If she was nice, I’d probably hate that even more.’
Clunk. Oh right. She hadn’t given herself a heads-up she was going to sort of tell him.
Harriet drank her wine and Cal looked over, gazing at her steadily.
‘Yes. I’m not mad keen to shake hands with the next Travel Iron Jon. Assuming he doesn’t just knee me in the nuts.’
Harriet laughed, glad of generous rescue.
There was a beat of silence, which Harriet instinctively recognised as one of those split-second moments where everything hangs in the balance.
‘And if he’s nice. That will be even worse.’
Oh. Oh.
He was using not only her line, but those eyes on her. She was looking at his mouth. This was bad. Harriet felt as if she was starting to liquefy.
She thought amid the heavy flirting, she’d best reassert some reality: ‘You’re not still seeing the girl you’ve been seeing, then?’
Cal squinted. ‘What girl?’
‘Lorna said when you were at her restaurant, it was with a date.’
This made it a little too obvious that Cal had been discussed in a certain way, but sod it – there were fewer than twenty-four hours left around him.
‘Er …’ Cal frowned. ‘Divertimento …? Ah, that was my sister! Erin.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘I’ve not dated anyone since Kit.’
‘Right,’ Harriet said, awkwardly. ‘And you’re not … sleeping with Kristina?’
‘Oh God, you DID you see my phone that evening!’
‘Er. Yes,’ Harriet said.
‘That was her idea of a joke and an attempt to fuck me up.’
Cal pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled to a conversation, turned the screen to face Harriet. ‘Ignore her jealous jibes about you. I did.’
Kit
If you want me to accept we’re over for good, maybe it’s time to stop sleeping with me? Just a thought
Cal
??? Are you confusing me with someone else?
Kit
LOOLLLLLLL. Lock screen fun. I can tell you’re keen on that photographer girl and now I bet she’s seen this and you have to work out how to explain it, without showing her THIS message HEY CAL WANTS TO POUND YOU UNTIL YOU SQUEAK FOR MERCY
Seriously – she’s a bit straight-edged for you, somehow, don’t you think? A bit ‘bean bag lap tray supper in front of Countryfile’? You do you, though
‘Woah. I don’t always watch Countryfile.’ Harriet was stung, while sensing it was, as Cal said, jealousy.
‘Is she moving to Qatar with Seb, or to a hidden island lair to develop a deadly bioweapon?’ Cal said, grimacing.
Harriet laughed, nervously. She had leapt, without a landing – she felt certain that Cal accounting for where she fitted into his furtive tomcatting would create a breathing space.
It would’ve been for him to describe what he thought was going on, here. Instead, she looked like she kept a running tally of rivals. Which she did.
‘You’re not seeing anyone?’ Cal said.
‘Hah. Nope.’
‘If those questions about me were security checks on whether it’s unethical for anything to happen between us, it’s not.’
‘OK,’ said Harriet, blushing and feeling like a total, total idiot, as adrenaline gushed through her veins. ‘Uhm … so …’
She hesitated, at a point of no return.
‘Say it,’ Cal said. ‘Whatever it is.’
‘… Was what Kit said true? About your wishes.’
Cal took a second to comprehend what she meant.
‘For once, what she said was one hundred per cent true. Yes. Every word.’ He paused, while Harriet silently dissolved. ‘You did say I have a lovely face, which is similar?’ Cal added.
‘It was exactly that sentiment, in code.’
‘Really worrying that my gran once said the same, then.’
Harriet shrieked with laughter, and in the moment of dropping her guard, Cal leaned forward and kissed her.
Crossing that line had seemed so difficult, and then so easy.
All the cagey dance steps leading up to it, the card game of choosing what to reveal, then Harriet’s body language trashed it entirely and left him in no doubt. She put her hands in Cal’s hair, pulled his mouth to hers, harder. Cal responded to her with as much enthusiasm, his hand gripping her denim-clad upper leg as they tipped backwards on the sofa. They laughed at the intensity of the scramble for each other, of the pure joy of it, when they came up for air.
Harriet found her fantasies had been a poor relation to the sensory reality of grappling with Cal, and she’d been quite optimistic in her fantasies. She’d been right that having his undivided attention was a high like no other.
Until this moment, chemistry was a concept she’d scoffed at a little because she’d never encountered it. Maybe he had the gift of making everyone feel this way, but she’d never been kissed like this before: with exactly the right degree of pressure and intent. It was like being with a dance partner who raised your game. Harriet felt like he’d done something to her spine, her whole posture changed.
She started unbuttoning his shirt, like she’d only been waiting for permission.