Page 60 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“I told you to let go of the pole,” he said.

Diana was convulsing. He thought for a terrifying second that she’d gone into shock. Then she took in a shaky breath, and he realised she was laughing.

“As the bishop said to the actress,” she gasped, then rolled onto her back, drenched and hysterical, eyes squeezed shut against the grey winter sky. He had never seen her like this, all awareness of herself gone, given up entirely to what she was feeling. He felt a lurching swoop, less a sensation than a premonition: this was the woman he was going to fall in love with.

They landed at the docks by Magdalene Bridge. He requested a blanket, which she draped around her shoulders like an ermine. They walked back towards Trinity through the tourist crowds. Diana was soaked, shivering, river weeds in her hair. A couple walking past laughed under their breath; a group of children sitting on the wall by St. John’s were staring, mouths hanging open. Joe would have been mortified. But Diana walked on like the street was a red carpet, head held high, wearing the weeds in her hair like a diadem. He understood: by turning her humiliation into a performance, she made it about something outside herself. None of it could touch her.

She led him up the stairs, past her neighbour’s painting that looked now like a lightning strike, frozen at the moment of impact in a world turned sideways. In her room, she came into focus: a queen no longer, but a girl he could see and touch, her wetdress clinging to her body. She grabbed a towel and headed for the shower. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, in a husky, commanding voice that gave him the shivers.

He was left alone in her room, feeling like a spring wound up to an unbearable compression. He tried to calmly peruse her walls: the noticeboard covered with reviews of her shows, the pictures of Sarah Bernhardt arranged into a shrine above the fireplace. Every detail was an arrow pointed to her future, lit up with how fiercely she wanted it.

“I think I figured out what’s missing.”

He turned. She stood, naked under a towel, her collarbone and her bare shoulders a speechless poem. The scent of her damp skin drove every other thought out of his head.

His voice came out hoarse. “Did you?”

“To understand your poem, I need to know it from the inside. Feel what you were feeling.” She stepped closer, sliding her arms around his neck. “Can you show me?”

Her words were hesitant, but her expression was certain: she had no doubt about where this was going. With plunging realisation, he understood that she had choreographed this moment, from the punting trip to falling in the river to bringing him back here: all of it a performance, painstakingly crafted to seduce him. He should have felt manipulated. But all he could feel was a kind of amused relief. All his worry about being a pawn of fate, about acting out a prewritten script, when it was Diana who had been quietly pulling the strings all along, manoeuvring him exactly where she wanted him. And that in itself—to be wanted, so frankly and so confidently—took his breath away.

She doesn’t really wantyou, whispered a traitorous voice.She wants the man who wrote the poem.But that man wasn’t in herarms, her fingers trailing across his neck, making questions ofifandmightandshouldseem impossibly abstract and faraway. He was here with her, and even if the person she was interested in didn’t really exist yet, he could pretend to be him for a while.

“Yes,” he said, and kissed her.

Chapter Twenty-One

He awoke on the morning of Valentine’s Day in Diana Dartnell’s bed.

Really, he was half-in and half-out of it. In her sleep, she had sprawled diagonally across the single mattress, consigning him to a precarious strip on the edge. One of his legs had dipped to the floor, and the other was cramping.

He sat up, stretching until the pain faded. He was naked, and his muscles ached, and his stomach was churning with a strange unease. Other than that, he didn’t feel fundamentally different: a night with his muse hadn’t magically transformed him into someone else. Esi’s words came back to him, cold and bitter.You think sleeping with one out-of-your-league woman is going to turn you into a version of yourself you actually want to be?

The churning in his stomach intensified. He should tell her: he owed her that much. He reached for his phone, abandoned with his jeans on the floor. She still hadn’t replied to the message he’d sent her nearly three weeks ago. He typed:

You don’t have to worry about the future anymore. Diana and I are together.

He stared at the screen for some minutes after sending, waiting for her to reply. What would she say?Thanks?Good for you?Enjoy? Each option seemed more absurd than the last. But the idea that she wouldn’t respond, that their relationship would end with angry words and a string of unanswered messages, seemed the most impossible of all.

When it became apparent she wasn’t going to reply anytime soon, he dropped the phone and turned to Diana. She was still sleeping, mouth open in unfamiliar abandon. At the base of her neck, he spotted the purple bloom of a love bite. A memory rushed back—his mouth on her throat, unsure if he was being passionate or just trying to act like someone passionate. Either way, she had seemed to enjoy it.

He pulled on his clothes, then went to the sink and washed out his mouth, smearing some toothpaste around with a finger. He couldn’t imagine Diana Dartnell wanting to kiss someone with morning breath.

He sat back down on the bed, intending to gaze at her adoringly until she woke up. Five seconds later, the fire alarm went off.

She bolted upright, hair over her face, eyes half-open. “Oh God. What time is it?”

“Half ten,” said Joe, who had hoped for his first words of the morning to be more poetic. “Uh—the fire alarm’s going, should we—”

“Ignore it. They test it every Tuesday.” She leapt out of bed, in delightful disregard of her nakedness, and crossed the room to the sink. She splashed water on her face and started brushing her teeth.

He hovered behind her, not sure where to look. “I was wondering if I could take you out for breakfast,” he shouted over theshrilling alarm. Belatedly, he realised he probably couldn’t afford any breakfast place she would want to be taken to.

She spat into the sink. “That’s a lovely idea, but I’m afraid I’ve arranged to meet my fellow actors for brunch. It’s tradition on show days. We get together and drown our nerves in Buck’s Fizz.” She looked critically at her reflection, spotted the love bite, and efficiently applied concealer until it disappeared.

The alarm cut off, leaving behind a loud silence. He watched regretfully as she got dressed. “I could come with you?”

She did something with her hair that miraculously transformed it from a tangled mass to a neat bun in the space of ten seconds. “They’re not really your sort of crowd, Joseph. You’d be terribly bored.” Seeing his face fall, she tutted and came over to him. “My poor puppy,” she said, stroking his cheek. “Don’t worry. This is not me shamelessly using you for inspiration and then dropping you like last week’s news. Although God knows, enough of your lot have done that to their muses over the centuries.” She kissed him, soft and lingering. “Let yourself out. I’ll see you tonight.” She blew a kiss over her shoulder and left.

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