Page 52 of We All Live Here
“Am I boring you?”
Jensen is looking at her. He has a nice face. Maybe she just hadn’t noticed it properly before. “No,” she says. “No. I was just…thinking.”
“Anyway, so it was basically a lot of booze, a lot of drugs, a lot of evenings that ended with me desperately trying to remember someone’s name. And then I got into the relationship with Irina and it was really volatile, like, I never knew what she was going to go off about. But there was this bit of me that thought, ‘Better that than the girls whose names I didn’t remember,’ so I stayed with it. But it was just stress all day and then stress all night—she was the kind who liked to keep a fight going till five a.m., you know? You just kind of get acclimatized to the drama.”
He has nice hair, she thinks. She could run her fingers through that hair.
He sighs. “And after we got engaged, work got more frantic and mybody just started to fall apart in bits. And then I found out she was sleeping with my mate at work, and my brain just…It was like a spin dryer, going round and round and round. I couldn’t sleep, I started to get panic attacks, I felt like I was braced all the time. But I thought I could plow on through. Until I couldn’t.”
“What happened?” she says, dragging herself back.
“Someone found me catatonic in the men’s loos. Couldn’t get up. Couldn’t speak. Went home and couldn’t stop crying. Stayed in bed for three weeks. I don’t even remember it, to be honest.”
He glances at her and away again, like this bit makes him feel awkward. “My parents didn’t really get it. But my sister intervened. After rehab, she got me into therapy, moved into my apartment for two months, and made like an attack dog to anyone who wanted me to party. And one of the things that came out in therapy was that I really hated my job. Hated it. Every time I thought about going back there I felt ill again. So…” He straightens up. “…so I trained and did this instead.”
He waits for her to say something, but she doesn’t know what to say. She is suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that she really wants him to be closer.
“And it turns out just being in a garden all day is good for me. Obviously I don’t make much money but I—”
“Do you want to sit on the bench?” she interrupts, moving over to make room.
He studies her for a minute. “You want me to sit next to you?”
“Don’t you want to?”
He’s still reading her face, like she’s a puzzle he can’t quite work out. He doesn’t speak, but gets up wordlessly and moves onto the bench, keeping a couple of inches between them when he sits—a tiny gap of plausible deniability. She pours herself another drink and takes a long sip.
“I think we need music,” she announces. She gets up and makes for Bill’s transistor radio on the worktable. She may have been a little unsteadyon her feet, but she hopes he hasn’t noticed. She switches it on and it goes straight to Radio 3—gentle classical strings in a minor key. The room feels suddenly filled with intent.
“This feels…”
“Nice?” she says hopefully.
“ ‘Nice’ is an awful word. Supermarket cakes are nice. Your nan is nice.”
“I’m not a cake. Or a nan.”
“You’re certainly not. I’m just not sure what—”
It is at this point that she lunges forward and kisses him. It is not that she is overcome by lust, more that she doesn’t know what to say anymore, and is afraid of what might come out of her mouth. Plus she hasn’t kissed anyone in three years and really, really wants to see if she still can.
It turns out she can. His lips are fuller, softer than Dan’s. She observes as they touch hers that she and Dan hadn’t kissed properly for years. Not like this. Somehow proper kissing is the first thing to go in a failing relationship, the first casualty of long-held resentments and a lack of casual affection. Jensen smells of soap and a shampoo she recognizes but can’t name, and tastes faintly of beer and there is a tongue involved and it is a little shocking, and then it is revelatory, and then it is just…dreamy. She had forgotten, she had actually forgotten, how good this was. She is pulled in, her capacity for thought floating away in little pieces, even as a tiny voice in her head is yelling, like a twelve-year-old:I’m kissing someone! I’m actually kissing someone again!He pulls back after a few years and blinks, his eyes on hers.
“Okay. That…was unexpected.”
“But…nice?”
“No.”
She feels herself prickle with embarrassment, and he says quickly, “Nice is way too inadequate a word to describe that.”
She deflates slightly with relief. “I haven’t kissed anyone in three years.”
“I’m here to tell you you’ve still got it.”
She feels the smile light up her face, goofy and unstoppable. “Really?”
He frowns, considers this. “Actually, I might not be a hundred percent sure. I might need to try again, just to check.”
