Page 32 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
‘Mattie, we should go home now,’ Pippa said decisively. ‘I have a very early reformer Pilates class and, I’m not judging, but I think you’ve probably had enough to drink now.’
‘Yes, you probably have,’ Tom added as if anyone had asked him, and then he insisted on walking them back to the tube station because he said it was easy to get lost. Though Mattie, in a near-constant state of bristledom by now, felt that this was another dig about her alleged drunkenness, as if Tom suspected that she wasn’t capable of working Google Maps.
‘I might as well see you all the way home,’ Tom decided. ‘Just to make sure you don’t end up at Heathrow.’
‘As if I would,’ Mattie hissed as she repeatedly slapped her Oyster card down on the card reader, only for the pesky orange light to appear. ‘Why won’t this stupid thing work?’
It wouldn’t work because Mattie had run out of credit. She had to top up and eventually, she, Pippa and Tom were on a westbound train, Pippa valiantly keeping the ball of conversation in the air as she talked about her new initiative at work to ban all single-use plastic items.
But Pippa said goodbye at Finsbury Park, leaving Mattie and Tom sitting there side-by-side in silence. Mattie couldn’t even think why Tom had wanted to see her actually-not-that-drunk-anymore self home when he could have carried on collecting phone numbers or – she could hardly form the thought – copped off and gone home with a girl.
‘You … you’re quite popular with the ladies, then?’ she heard herself say as if her brain was acting independently of her mouth.
Further down the carriage a group of middle-aged revellers, all in Santa hats, broke into a spirited rendition of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’. Tom glanced at them in horror then pulled his gaze back to Mattie, who couldn’t help but stare at him across the armrest that separated them. So tweedy and yet such a hit with the opposite sex. It made no sense.
‘You know the rules,’ he said stiffly. ‘I never discuss my personal life.’
Mattie snorted. ‘Much as it pains either of us to admit it, we’re sharing a flat. That means that our personal lives are going to cross sometimes. I mean, we’ve just been to a party together!
‘We weren’t together.’ Tom shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge the notion that he and Mattie had been social with each other in public. ‘You went to the party without my knowledge, consent and certainly against my better judgement.’
‘You didn’t want me to go to the party? Why? Because you hate me?’ Mattie couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice, but she had downed three lagers in the space of an hour.
‘I don’t hate you,’ Tom said in the manner of someone who was humouring a small fractious child who was up long past their bedtime.
Mattie dug him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Then youlikeme?’
Tom put a hand to his side and ‘oof’ed as if Mattie had mortally wounded him. ‘I don’t know why it’s so important that I like you when you hateallmen.’
‘Not all men!’
‘So you keep saying, though I see precious little evidence of it,’ Tom said with a sniff and when Mattie opened her mouth to argue the case, he startled her by placing his fingers very gently over her lips. ‘This is the part where you start listing the very few men that you don’t actively hate, but can we skip it just this once?’
Mattie smacked his hand away, though she could still feel her lips tingling where Tom had touched them. ‘Any more out of you and I’m putting that picture on Instagram, only after I’ve zoomed in on your face.’ Mattie smiled at Tom’s pained expression, though that might have been because the Santa Hats at the other end of the carriage were now attacking ‘Good King Wenceslas’ with great gusto.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he breathed.
‘Not another word,’ Mattie warned him, holding her phone aloft.
‘Fine,’ Tom sighed.
‘Fine,’ Mattie confirmed.
And they travelled the rest of the way to Russell Square in blissful quiet. Or it would have been blissful and it would have been quiet but for their fellow travellers doing ‘Silent Night’ in rounds.
The next morning relations between Mattie and Tom were still frosty.
When Mattie emerged from her room much later than she should on a working morning, wrapped in her new voluminous dressing gown and with a mild hangover, there was Tom up early and making scrambled eggs in the kitchen. Mattie knew a moment of fair-to-middling shame.
‘So sorry about last night,’ she said as she sidled kitchenwards. ‘I was quite the brat and I will absolutely delete the photo from my phone if you want me to.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’ There was a very long, very awkward pause. ‘I trust you.’ But this was said so stiffly as he peered down at the saucepan, it was clear that Tom didn’t trust Mattie at all.
He was also wearing slim-fit trousers and shirt, hadn’t had time to add a bow-tie or a baggy cardigan yet, so Mattie could see there wasn’t a spare ounce of flesh on him, despite his poor food choices. Talking of which …
‘You’re not having a panini this morning, then?’ she asked, trying to keep the edge from her voice.
‘Evidently not.’ Tom was using a fork to stir his eggs in one of Mattie’s non-stick pans and it was all she could do not to snatch the fork from him and demand that he stop his culinary crimes right that very minute.
