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.
Lucas and I exchange a glance and accelerate.
“Madam?” Lucas says. “Can we help you?”
She looks up at us through blue-rimmed glasses clouded with tears.
“You,” she says with venom. “You’re the ones doing this ring thing, aren’t you?”
Shit. Is this Wife 1? Wife 2? Or someone else entirely whose life I have managed to ruin?
“Yes,” Lucas says calmly, ducking down to sit on the step beside her. “That’s us.”
This is kind of him—I think we all know this is my pet project. I was quick to remind him of that when it was earning us a fifteen-grand reward.
“You’ve ruined everything. Graham is—was—he was a good husband. We were happy.”
Her make-up is scored with tear tracks. She’s beautiful, in that classic, statuesque way that always ages so well—I find myself thinking, How could anyone cheat on someone like her? As if beautiful people are immune to the damage a screwed-up man can create.