The Wake-Up Call(46)

“Mm.”

“I was going to make you run out into the car park in the snow,” she says, “but now that feels kind of cruel.”

“How were you going to make me do that?” I ask, amused.

She shrugs. “I’d dare you.”

The room is very small and very quiet. Izzy has her bottom lip between her teeth now, biting down. My breath is catching, too.

“But I think maybe dares are a bad idea now, too.”

I think we’re in one of those sliding-doors moments. Balancing on the edge of a decision we won’t be able to unmake. I am struggling to remember why I shouldn’t lean across the poker cards and pull her down into a kiss—not the kind of kiss she gave me, sweet and slow, but a fiery, electric-shock of a kiss, the kind that gets you hot in half a second.

“I’m getting ready for bed now, Lucas,” Izzy says. Her voice is low and quiet.

“OK,” I say.

She doesn’t move. “I don’t get you,” she says. “At all.”

I tip my chin, and she sighs out a breath, unmoving.

“You would strip naked for me, but you don’t want to kiss me?”

“I never said I didn’t want to kiss you.”

Her eyes move over me. “Kiss me, then.”

I grit my teeth. She’s within reach. I could grab her with one arm and have her body against mine before she’d caught her breath. I haven’t forgotten how she looked in that bikini at the pool—the soft curve of her breast, the dip at the small of her back. I know how she’d fit against me.

I’ve got good self-control, but even I have limits. The moment stretches, testing me.

“Right,” Izzy says, moving at last. “God, I’m a glutton for rejection when it comes to you, aren’t I?”

The moment breaks. She slams into the bathroom, and I lie there, breathing hard, reminding myself that what’s true in the gym applies here, too: holding it a little longer always pays off.



* * *



? ? ? ? ?

It is perhaps the worst night’s sleep I have ever had, and I have slept on airport floors, on many tiny sofas, and, once, at a terrible party I was dragged to by my sister, in the bottom of a closet.

Izzy is a quiet sleeper. She lies curled towards me with her knees tucked up and her hands pillowing her cheek. Even in the darkness, I notice things I have never noticed before. I see how her brows arch to a point, and how a very fine line brackets the corner of her mouth like the blueprint of a smile.

For a dangerous few minutes somewhere between two and three in the morning, I imagine what my life would look like with Izzy in it. I catalogue what she’d think of my flat, wonder which side of my bed she’d claim as hers, imagine how it would feel to lift her against my bedroom wall and wrap her legs around my waist.

And then I spend at least another hour wondering if I’ve made a terrible mistake by choosing not to kiss her. What if she’ll never see me as anything more than the emotionless “robot-man” who gets in her way all day? Then all I’ve done is lose my one chance of having any part of her at all. At three in the morning, a kiss with the wrong intentions feels much better than trying and failing to change Izzy’s mind, and ending up with no kiss at all.

I manage a few hours of sleep before the winter sun sears through the threadbare curtains and wakes me again. Izzy hasn’t moved, but her hair has shifted, laying two strands across her cheek. I get as close as lifting my hand to smooth them back before remembering how inappropriate that would be.

I slide out of the bed quietly and grab my clothes before slipping into the bathroom. I want to get back to Forest Manor. This room feels like a trap—if I spend much more time with Izzy here, I’ll kiss her.

She lifts her head as I emerge from the bathroom. “Oh,” she says, rubbing her face. “I remember. Woking. Snow. Ugh.”

I straighten my pillow. I don’t know where to look. She slept in her top and knickers—her jeans are folded on the footstool.

“We should go. The trains are running again.”

“Yeah? Has it settled?” she asks. “The snow,” she clarifies when I look blank.

She slides her legs out of the bed and pads over to fetch the rest of her clothes. I turn away with a sharp breath as she bends to pull on her jeans.

“Wow,” she says, opening the curtains.

I step around the bed and look over her shoulder. Outside, the town looks like a different place—it’s blanketed in snow, every hard edge softened, every block of flats now capped in white.

“A blank slate,” Izzy says, and the small smile she shoots over her shoulder gives me hope.





Izzy


We travel home in a silence that is only broken twice: once by Lucas saying, “Please stop kicking the table leg,” and once by me objecting to Lucas manspreading, though the moment he moves his knee out of my space, I find to my alarm that I kind of want it back again.

I feel totally panicked by last night. The kiss. The strip poker. Lucas in nothing but boxers. It’s hard to even know where to begin with processing it all, so instead I just stare out at the snowy countryside and listen to an upcycling podcast, fully aware that I am forgetting everything the podcaster says in real-time.

When we get back to the hotel, there is a dark-haired woman sitting on the front steps, doubled over, shoulders shaking with sobs. A thin layer of snow dusts the stone around her, but her navy coat is hanging open, as though she hasn’t noticed the cold.