“I have to answer it. It’s Michelle. She knows I’m here. I told her I would be.”

“Fuck.”

I smile at how annoyed he is by the prospect of breaking the little moment we’re sharing. “You need to go shower anyway. You’re still all sweaty from your workout.”

His eyes heat up as he moves to lean over me. “You love it.”

All I can manage in response is a shy smile.

Placing a soft, sweet kiss to my lips, he rolls off me and stands up. “A shower it is, then,” he says before leaving the room. I quickly grab some yoga pants and a T-shirt, throwing them on and hurrying downstairs to answer the door for Michelle. She’s ringing the bell now, getting impatient. My hair is still wet when I open the door.

“Sorry, I was in the bath,” I say as she comes inside.

She gives me a look and laughs. “Bit of a weird hour for a bath, but each to their own. Let’s go sit out on your patio. It’s a lovely day.”

I make us a selection of sandwiches and fill a jug with orange juice, bringing them all out to the deck furniture in the garden where Michelle is currently lounging. She’s wearing a yellow halter top that showcases her small but pert boobs, probably hoping to get a bit of a tan. The warm sun hits my feet, and I realise I’ve been going around barefoot, frazzled as I am by the day’s strange turn of events.

“So, any news?” Michelle asks, picking up a sandwich and taking a dainty bite.

Oh, I have news, all right. I’m not sure I want to broach the subject right now, though, not with Jay just upstairs anyway.

“Not really. You?”

She shrugs. “It was a slow week at work. Ooh, but I did see Michael Fassbender go by when I was leaving the office yesterday, so that brightened things up a little.”

“Really? Who was he with?” I ask curiously. Michelle has the uncanny luck of randomly seeing famous people in her everyday life. It’s weird. One time she was in the same queue as Gabriel Byrne in the supermarket.

“Just some old guy. At least, I think it was Michael Fassbender. It could have easily been a lookalike.”

At this Jay steps out into the garden, his hair damp and his clothes changed. Michelle eyes him as he pulls up a chair and sits. “You read my mind, Watson. I’m starving,” he says, grabbing a sandwich and eating it in one huge, hungry bite. I stare at his mouth, all too aware of where it’s just been. The heated look he gives me in return tells me he knows exactly what I’m thinking.

“Oh, yeah, help yourself,” I say sarcastically. I don’t really know what way to be around him now.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he replies, giving me a loaded stare.

When I glance at Michelle, I see her looking between the two of us, a smile tugging at her lips.

“So, you both just had baths at, hmmm” — she glances down at her watch — “two o’clock in the afternoon.”

I pretend not to get what she’s getting at, frowning. “What? I had a bath. Jay had a shower. He has his own en-suite. And why are you so concerned about our personal hygiene habits?”

Jay’s smirking, but he’s not looking at me, focusing mainly on seriously depleting our sandwich situation. I know why he’s smirking, too. I just got a little overly defensive at Michelle’s statement.

“O-kay,” says Michelle, taking a sip of her juice. “I was only making an observation.” She pauses and dusts some crumbs from her lap, then asks randomly, “So, is Jessie coming over today?”

Now it’s my turn to get curious. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something in her tone that’s different. Like she’s trying too hard to sound casual. I look to Jay.

“Is she?”

He shakes his head, his hand moving sneakily to rest on my thigh under the table. I gasp in a tiny breath but try not to make a big deal of it, not wanting Michelle to notice. “Not that I know of, darlin’.”

His voice is slicker than usual, lazier. Is this what he sounds like after making women come? He seems so…satisfied.

“Oh, well, that’s a shame. She was so much fun last week after your show,” says Michelle.

Jay raises an eyebrow, looking at Michelle in an intense way for a second. “That’s interesting.”

“What?” she asks, sitting up straighter.

Oh, no, is he reading her?

“Your pupils dilated when you were talking about Jessie,” Jay explains casually. “Do you know what that means?”

“My pupils weren’t dilated,” says Michelle in a rare moment of self-consciousness. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this before. She scratches at her neck.

“They were. They got f**king huge, honey.” He leans in on his elbow. “It means you were aroused. You like Jessie, don’t ya?”

I nudge him in the side. “Leave her alone, Jay.”

“We’re having a friendly conversation, Matilda,” he replies, moving his hand up my thigh and squeezing hard. I clench my fist to keep from physically removing it.

“You two are being weird,” Michelle observes, picking up another sandwich. “What’s going on?”

Her questioning makes me mildly defensive. “We’re being weird?” I reply, laughing. “You’re the one whose pupils got dilated at the mention of a girl. I thought you left your experimental days behind you when you finished college.”

She sighs and slumps back in her seat. “Whatever. I like to think there’ll always be a part of me that’s fond of the ladies. Like ten percent of my va**na is into clam while the other ninety percent likes a good sausage.”

I practically choke on my laughter. Trust Michelle to always know how to put me in my place. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Jessie got you back to her place last week, didn’t she?” Jay surmises.

Michelle gives him a demure look. “She might have.”

“What!?” I interrupt in a fake voice of insult. “Something happened between you two and you didn’t tell me? This is an outrage!”

“Oh, calm down, Jemima. Not much happened. We had a little…fumble. That’s all. I enjoyed it, though. Wouldn’t mind a round two.”

“Jessie likes to turn the straight ones,” says Jay to me. “It’s her thing.”

“Well, she can turn me for a night any time,” says Michelle, licking her lips.

“Just don’t go leading her on,” I say, frowning now. Jessie might have a thing for turning straight girls, but Michelle has a thing for playing with the mice she catches before she eats them alive.

“Pffft.” Michelle waves away my concerns. “I couldn’t lead that woman on even if I tried. She’s a total stud. Probably has a new girl every night.”

“You’re not too far off,” says Jay, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Speaking of which, here she is now.” He answers the phone and steps away to talk.

“Don’t tell her I was talking about her,” Michelle whisper-shouts at him.

He gives her a wry nod and starts talking seriously on the phone. I wonder what that’s all about. Before I have the chance to ponder it further, Michelle grabs my wrist and practically yanks me across the table.

“Okay, I want to know everything that’s going on with you and Mr Magic Hands, and I want every last detail.”

Nineteen

I surprise even myself when I decide not to tell Michelle what happened between Jay and me. Here’s my reasoning: I want to save face, just in case it turns out that all this was to him was a roll in the hay. Michelle knows about my quest for epic love, and I don’t want her to judge me for letting my newfound libido lose the run of itself.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I know she wouldn’t judge me, but let’s face it, talking about sex is embarrassing. She’s always been the one to tell me about her bedroom adventures, not the other way around. To put it plainly, I have no problem talking about other people ha**ng s*x, but talking about me ha**ng s*x, well, that’s a whole other kettle of uncomfortable collar fiddling. I wouldn’t know where to begin in explaining to her just how spectacularly Jay managed to rock my world after what must have been a record-breaking dry spell.

“Nothing’s going on. He’s just flirty. He flirts with everyone,” I answer dismissively.

“Eh, no, he doesn’t. He hasn’t so much as given me a backward glance since I first met him, and that’s probably because he’s too busy giving you all his backward glances to even notice that other women exist.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re reading too much into it.”

“I am not, but if you want to sail your pretty little rowboat down the Nile and take in the scenery, then I’m not going to be the one to stop you.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you use twenty words when five will do? I thought they were supposed to teach you the opposite of that in marketing school.”

“Ah, now she’s getting bitchy. She always gets bitchy when she’s being defensive.”

“She would prefer not to be referred to in the third person, thank you very much.”

“She just did it herself.”

“She was trying to make a point.”

“Her point has been made.”

We look at each other for a second before we both burst into laughter.

“God, I f**king love you, Matilda, but I swear you’re the most neurotic girl I know.”

“Glad to hold the title.”

A minute later Jay returns, telling us he has to go out for a while, but he’ll be back later. He gives my shoulder a small, meaningful squeeze before he goes. Michelle and I watch a movie for the rest of the afternoon, and then I retreat to my sewing machine once she heads home.

It’s ten o’clock when I decide to call it a night. I furrow my brow, noticing that Jay still hasn’t gotten back yet. Worrying the screen of my phone, I hesitate over whether or not to call him and see if he’s okay. In the end, I decide not to. He’s a grown man. He doesn’t need me checking up on him.

In bed I toss and turn, as I usually do when I’m alone in the house. When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about being kidnapped in my sleep and taken away by bad men all dressed in black. I’d wake Dad up constantly, screaming my head off until he came and calmed me down, reassuring me that it was just a dream. Over the years the nightmares faded, and I know Dad was glad that they did. He never said it, but I could tell he worried the nightmares were because of what happened the night Mum got killed. The kidnappers in my nightmares were always the same men who shot Mum.

A little while later, I hear Jay arrive home. He comes upstairs, and I hold my breath as I listen to him walk in the direction of my bedroom. Not knowing what else to do, I pretend to be asleep. My door opens, and the house is so quiet that I can hear him standing there, breathing, watching me for the longest time. I can’t help holding my breath expectantly.

Is he considering coming inside?

He doesn’t. Instead, he closes my door and goes to his own room. What was that all about? He moves around in his room for a while, doing his usual pacing that I tend to hear him do at night. The pacing is oddly reassuring to me, and I find myself drifting off to the sound of it.

Hours later, I wake up. It’s still dark, and when I glance at the alarm clock on my bedside dresser, I see it’s three in the morning. My heart is racing, and I can’t tell why until I hear what it is that woke me up. Loud, pained sounds are coming from Jay’s bedroom. I jump out of bed and hurry to his room, worried that he’s somehow been hurt. When I get to him, though, he isn’t hurt. His body is curled in on itself in the foetal position as he clutches his knees to his chest.

I’ve never seen such a huge man look so small.

Switching the lamp on low, I go to his side, finding he’s still asleep, in the midst of what seems to be a bad nightmare. It’s odd that I’d only just been thinking about my own experience with nightmares earlier tonight. He’s wearing boxer shorts and no top, sweat glistening on his skin. I hover over him, not sure if I should wake him up or leave him alone. He’s a fully grown man, but in this moment it’s like he’s reverted back to a child.

Hesitantly, I place my hand on his shoulder, whispering, “Jay, wake up. Jay, you’re having a nightmare.”

His body jerks and his eyes snap open; he grabs the hand that’s touching him tightly, painfully.

“Jay.” I wince. “Let go. It’s just me. It’s Matilda.”

At hearing my name, something seems to jolt him. Instead of letting go of my hand, he pulls on it, though more gently now. He drags my body onto his bed, pulling the covers over us both and wrapping his arms and legs around me. I’m trapped, but I don’t mind.

“Matilda,” he whispers.

There’s something about the way he says it that makes me wonder if he’s awake, or still half dreaming. His arms are warm and comforting around me as he presses his lips to the back of my neck.

“Stay,” he murmurs.

I inhale the heady scent of him, feeling like I’ve been encapsulated in a bubble of Jay, and I probably couldn’t leave even if I wanted to. His breathing evens out after a while, and he’s sleeping deeply again. Only a short while later, I drift off, too.

The next time I wake up, I’m alone in the bed and it’s morning. I can hear the pan sizzling downstairs, the smell of bacon making my mouth water. Getting up, I pay a quick visit to the bathroom before going down to the kitchen.

“Morning sleepyhead,” says Jay with a smile as I sit down at the table and pour myself some juice.