Page 78 of Take My Breath Away
My breath catches in my throat, and the last traces of fog clears.
“Half an hour,” he says, as he whips the duvet away and dumps it on the floor.
I gasp as cold air hits my skin and I scramble to retrieve it, but he kicks it out of reach.
“You git.”
“Half an hour.”
A moment later he’s gone.
* * *
By the time we get out it’s closer to an hour and despite his growly threats, James doesn’t drag my partially clothed form out onto the street.
The café we pitch up at is buzzing. It’s just gone eleven o’clock and it’s packed. Breakfast has turned into brunch.
“This is great.” It’s also very Highgate, affluent with a touch of bohemian.
We order from the specials board, a kind of Full English but with a twist. When it comes, so much is piled up on the plate I swear the table groans under its weight.
“Oh God, this is lovely.” I crunch down on the thick slab of sourdough toast slathered in butter. I expect James to be equally enthusiastic but instead he answers with a hesitant smile.
The cocky and confident man of earlier is nowhere to be seen and I swallow the toast that now feels like a hard ball of concrete. My stomach bites down on itself and I wonder why there’s this sudden change in him. Maybe it was last night, maybe he regrets what happened… But I can’t believe that. It was perfect, absolutely perfect. For me. But maybe it was too much for him. Maybe my tears, my bloody stupid tears that came from I don’t know where have made him want to retreat.
My hands find the salt cellar and I turn it around and around and around. James is a man who wants no commitment in his life. And I agreed. I agreed because I was pathetically grateful for whatever he could give me, for the little time he could. But now—
He wants to step back, he wants his life to be as it was before. He’s brought me here to tell me that it’s time for us to move on…
I’ll smile and nod and agree and try to convince myself that this was always a deal.
“James?” I want him to say something, anything to relieve the heavy tension in my chest and allow me to breathe. I want this to be over.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about and I thought that doing it here might be easier.”
A crowded place where I’ll be less inclined to break down, or cry, or have a fit of histrionics. But I wouldn’t do any of those things and it pisses me off that he thinks I would. I sit up straight and pull my hands away from the salt cellar.
“I don’t know what it is you feel that you can’t talk to me about in the house, but if it’s about asking me to leave and make new arrangements then I understand. Staying with you was only ever meant to be a few nights but it’s turned into a lot more than that. You want your space. I get it. And anyway I need to put a rocket up myself to get somewhere in or close to Brighton.” I try to smile to show him I’m okay with what he’s on the brink of telling me, but my lips are refusing to obey.
“What?” His eyes open wide in a kind of horrified surprise, and the blood drains from his face as he stares at me.
“What do you mean,what?” I don’t understand his reaction. I’m confused and disorientated and all I can do is meet James’ stare across the weird kind of no man’s land that is the breakfast-strewn table.
“You think I’m asking you to leave?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No. Oh God Perry, no.” He pushes his fingers through his hair as he starts to laugh. I’m still not catching up with what’s going on and he must see it in my face. His laughter dies away and he takes my hands in his. “No, that’s not what I’m doing.” He looks down at our joined hands and brushes his thumbs across my knuckles. “What I’m trying to do, and very badly, is ask you to stay. To stay with me. To live with me, I suppose. Properly live with me.”
I can’t do anything other than gaze at him. I can’t speak; I can hardly even breathe.
“Can you say something? Anything?”
“Erm.”
“Erm. Is that it?Erm?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. This wasn’t what I was expecting.”
