Page 91 of We All Live Here
“You’re in the bath.”
There is something contemplative in his voice, as if he’s considering this. It makes her laugh. “It’s my safe space.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it a safe space. Not if I was there, anyway.”
A flicker of something travels through her. “Oh, you’re dangerous in bathrooms, are you?” she says lightly.
“I’m dangerous in places where you’re naked.”
“That’s for sure.” She has a sudden memory of the two of them in his front room, the tangle of limbs, the urgency.
“You said we were going to do that again.” She keeps it light, flirtatious. His tone has made her a little reckless.
“We will. But in the meantime you should tell me more about what you’re doing in the bath.”
She is about to make a joke, but something in his voice stops her. “Uh…talking to you, clearly. And…” She swallows. “…thinking about you.”
“And what do you do when you think about me?”
His voice has lowered. It makes her feel faintly light-headed.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“You want to havethatconversation?”
“I absolutely want to have that conversation.”
Lila has never hadthatconversation. The one time she had tried with Dan he had been at first disconcerted, and said she hadn’t sounded like her, and then when she had tried again, he’d joked that she sounded like a cheap porn movie. She had been so cross with him that she had never tried again.
“This is new,” she says carefully.
“I like new.”
So Lila has that conversation. She tells him in a low voice what she is doing. Or at least what her pretend self is doing, given that what she is actually doing is sitting in cooling bathwater and hoping desperately that neither of her girls is lurking outside the bathroom door. She is emboldened by the sound of his rapt attention, his lowered voice, his increasingly short answers, and lets her imagination run riot. When he tells her what he is doing she feels faintly giddy with power. It turns out it’s easier than she’d thought to do this. You simply have to forget everything else, to shed your self-consciousness, word by word, to close your eyes and inhabit this imaginary self, so much wilder and less inhibited than she actually is. It turns out the conversation is swift, and effective, and has a gratifying, audible end.
Lila lies in the bath, completely still, listening to the sound of his breathing.
“Are you okay?” she says, after a minute.
“I…am definitely okay,” he says. “That was…unexpected. But amazing. Thank you.”
“Thank you” is an odd response, but Lila decides that manners are always a good thing. She still feels giddy, unable to believe she was able to produce a response like that from saying a few words down a phone. She is shocked by the intimacy of it, the trust implicit in it.We just did that, a voice in her head keeps saying.We just did that thing.
“Did you get there?” he says.
“I did,” she lies. And he lets out a littlehm, which might be satisfaction, or might just be him considering it.
“So when are we going to see each other?” she says, after a pause.
“Soon. Let me just get this nightmare week out of the way and we’ll find something nice to do.”
“Sounds good,” she says. “I could do with something to look forward to.”
And then Violet has opened the bathroom door and is standing there in her turquoise pajamas, her face clouded with crossness. “Mum, I really need a poo and Celie is in the other bathroom putting a stupid facemask on and she won’t come out.”
“I’d better go,” she says hurriedly, and tries to turn her flushed, slightly dreamy expression into something resembling maternal concern.
