It was gorgeous, I reply after a moment. So festive.
I pause, and then I do something very bad. I type, I was kind of preoccupied, though.
Preoccupied with what?
Thinking. About last night.
His next reply doesn’t come for fifteen minutes, and I feel as if I am quite possibly about to die of embarrassment. I fidget on the sofa, trying to concentrate on the television. I’ll just quit my job, I think to myself. I’ll just never go back to work, so I never have to see him again after sending that message and not getting a reply.
When he finally writes back, the message is infuriating.
How was Louis? is all it says.
I type my reply before I can think better of it.
Are you jealous?
His response is instantaneous this time.
Yes.
I knew it.
Was it a date?
What’s it to you?
Can you just tell me that he was respectful?
I roll my eyes.
Lucas.
Yes?
Is it any of your business what happens between me and Louis?
There’s a knock on the door. I slurp the last of the cereal on my way to answer it, sliding the empty bowl onto the kitchen counter.
It’s Lucas at my front door, messaging. He must have left his flat the moment I said I was thinking about last night. He doesn’t look up when I open the door; my phone pings in my hand. He’s wearing his usual black coat open over loose, low jogging bottoms and a long-sleeved tee, with a duffel bag by his feet. The idea of him right there in my hallway seems as strange and impossible and exciting as the sight of him tipping his head back against the driver’s seat, muscles pulling taut in his shoulders, eyes piercing mine.
After a long moment facing each other across the threshold, I glance from Lucas to my phone screen.
No. But can it be my business to check you’re OK?
“No,” I say out loud.
“Why not?”
I narrow my eyes at him, but I’m tingling. I’ve spent all day avoiding that tingle.
“You don’t get to be jealous,” I tell him. “You don’t even like me, Lucas. In fact, I’d say this isn’t about me at all. It’s about another man. It’s a stupid macho possessive thing and it’s a total red flag for me, if you didn’t have enough of those already.”
“I can assure you,” he says, “I am not thinking about Louis right now. I am thinking about you.” His tone is clipped, and his eyes are all darkness. “Are you going to let me in?”
“Why would I let you in?”
He doesn’t answer that. Not as if he doesn’t know, more as if he thinks it’s obvious.
“You’re being completely obnoxious,” I tell him. “We had rules. You’re breaking them.”
“Tell me to leave, then.”
We face off on either side of the threshold. Slowly, slowly, his gaze shifts. Taking me in. My jumper dress, leggings, the woolly socks I slipped on when I got in the door. Back to the neckline of my dress, the only place where I’m showing skin. As he lifts his eyes to meet mine again, I feel like he’s stripped me bare. The tingle is a buzz now, insistent, like the giddy rush of a tequila shot hitting your stomach.
“We said one night,” I say, but even I can hear the lack of conviction in my voice.
“Then I’ll leave,” Lucas says, not moving an inch.
I say nothing. He waits.
“Is that what you want, Izzy?”
It absolutely isn’t. We made those rules for a reason, though. One night felt safe—I could do that without getting hurt. But to give him more than that, this man who drives me mad all day, who goes out of his way to make my life difficult, who laughed when I told him I had feelings for him?
That would be dangerous.
“Tell me to go,” he says, his voice low and rasping as he stands there in my hallway, one step away from coming in.
But I don’t. Despite all the reasons I should, that low hot buzz has set in, and no part of me wants to send Lucas away. I know what it feels like between us now. He’s not just some abstract fantasy. He’s real, and that’s even harder to resist.
I cross the threshold between us and kiss him hard, pulling him inside, letting the door close behind us with a short, sharp slam.
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
He doesn’t stay over, he just . . . doesn’t leave.
We doze for stretches at a time, but the whole night, we’re in bed together. From the moment he crosses into my flat and hitches me up against him, he barely says a word in English. He whispers Portuguese against my stomach, my thighs, the back of my neck, but we don’t talk.