One Plus One: A Novel (19 page)

She lay there in the dark, paralyzed by her own longing.

“Do you want to have sex with me?” she said into the darkness.

There was a long silence.

“Did you hear what—”

“Yes,” he said. “And . . . no.” He spoke again before she could turn completely to stone. “I just think it would make things too complicated.”

“It’s not complicated. We’re both young, lonely, a bit pissed. And after tonight we’re never going to see each other again.”

“How so?”

“You’ll go back to London and lead your city life, and I’ll be down on the coast leading mine. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

He was silent for a minute. “Jess . . . I don’t think so.”

“You don’t fancy me.” She prickled with embarrassment, remembering suddenly what he’d said about his ex. Lara was a model, for crissakes. She shifted away from him, and his hand tightened around hers.

“You’re beautiful.” His voice was a murmur in her ear.

She waited. His thumb brushed over her palm. “So . . . why won’t you sleep with me?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Look. Here’s the thing. I haven’t had sex in three years. I sort of need to get back on the horse, and I think it—you—would be great.”

“You want me to be a horse.”

“Not like that. I need a metaphorical horse.”

“And now we’re back to the weird metaphors.”

“Look, a woman you say you find beautiful is offering you no-strings sex. I don’t understand the problem.”

“There’s no such thing as no-strings sex.”

“What?”

“Someone always wants something.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

She felt him shrug. “Not now, maybe.”

“Wow.” She turned onto her side. “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

“I just . . .”

Jess slid her foot along his leg. “You think I’m trying to lure you in? You think this is me trying to entrap you with my womanly wiles? My womanly wiles, a nylon bedspread, and pie and chips?” She interlinked her fingers with his, let her voice drop to a whisper. She felt unleashed, reckless. She thought she might actually faint with how much she wanted him then. “I don’t want a relationship, Ed. With you or anyone. There’s no room in my life for the whole one-plus-one thing.” She tilted her face so that her mouth was inches from his. “I’d have thought that would be obvious.”

He moved his hips an awkward fraction away from hers. “You are . . . incredibly persuasive.”

“And you are . . .” She hooked her leg around him, pulling him closer. His hardness made her briefly giddy.

He swallowed.

Her lips were millimeters from his now. All the nerves of her body had somehow concentrated themselves in her skin. Or maybe his skin—she could no longer tell.

“It’s the last night. At worst we can exchange a glance over the vacuum cleaner and I’ll just remember this as a nice night with a nice guy who actually was a nice guy.” She let her lips graze his chin.
It carried the faint trace of stubble. She wanted to bite it. “You, of course, will remember it as the greatest sex you ever had.”

“And that’s it.” His voice was thick, distracted.

Jess moved closer. “That’s it,” she murmured.

“You’d have made a great negotiator.”

“Do you ever stop talking?” She moved forward until her lips met his. She almost jolted. She felt the pressure of his mouth on hers as he ceded to her, the sweetness of him. And she no longer cared about anything. She wanted him. She burned with it.

And then he pulled back. She felt, rather than saw, Ed Nicholls gazing at her. His eyes were black in the darkness, unfathomable. He moved his hand and as it brushed lightly against her stomach she gave a faint, involuntary shiver.

“Fuck,” he said quietly. “Fucking fuck.” And then, with a groan, he said, “You will actually thank me for this tomorrow.”

And he gently disentangled himself from her, climbed out of bed, walked over to the chair, sat down, and, with a great sigh, hauled the blanket over himself and turned away.

E
d Nicholls had thought that spending eight hours in a damp car park was the worst possible way to spend a night. Then he’d concluded that the worst way to spend a night was hoicking your guts up in a stationary RV somewhere near Derby. He was wrong on both counts. The worst way to spend a night, it turned out, was in a tiny room a few feet from a slightly drunk, good-looking woman who wanted to have sex with you and whom you had, like an idiot, rebuffed.

Jess fell asleep, or pretended to: it was impossible to tell. Ed sat in the world’s most uncomfortable chair, staring out of the narrow gap in the curtains at the black moonlit sky, his right leg going to sleep, and his left foot freezing cold where it wouldn’t fit under the blanket. He tried not to think about the fact that if he hadn’t leaped out of that bed, he could be there, curled around her right now, his lips pressed against her skin, those lithe legs tangled with his . . .

No.

Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterward, and the five hours spent traveling to the Olympiad would have been excruciating. Or (b) the sex would have been fine, they would have woken up embarrassed, and the journey would still have been excruciating. Worse, they could have ended up with (c): the sex would have been off the scale (he slightly suspected this one was correct—he kept getting a hard-on just thinking about her mouth), they would develop feelings for each other based purely on sexual chemistry, and (d) would then have to adjust to the fact that they had nothing in common and were just completely unsuited in every other way, or (e) they would find they were not entirely
unsuited, but then he would be sent to prison. And none of these considered that Jess had actual kids, kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as he: he liked children as a concept, in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent—that is, it was nice to know it existed, but he had no knowledge about it and had never felt any real desire to spend time there.

And all this was without the added factor that he was obviously crap at relationships, had only just come out of the two most disastrous examples anyone could imagine, and the odds of his getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think of how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.

And the whole horse conversation had been, frankly, weird.

And these points could be supplemented by the wilder possibilities that he had completely failed to consider. What if Jess was a psycho, and all that stuff about not wanting a relationship was just a way to reel him in? She didn’t seem that sort of girl, sure.

But neither had Deanna.

Ed sat pondering this and other tangled things, and wishing he could talk a single one of them through with Ronan, until the sky turned orange then neon blue and his leg became completely dead and his hangover, which had formerly manifested itself as a vague tightness at his temples, turned into an emphatic, skull-crushing headache. Ed tried not to look at Jess as the outline of her face and body under the duvet became clear in the encroaching light.

And he tried not to feel wistful for a time when having sex with a woman you liked had just been about having sex with a woman you liked and hadn’t involved a series of equations so complex and unlikely that probably only Tanzie could have got anywhere near understanding them.

—

“Come on. We’re running late.” Jess shepherded Nicky—a pale, T-shirt-clad zombie—toward the car.

“I didn’t get any breakfast.”

“That’s because you wouldn’t get up when I told you. We’ll get you something on the way. Tanze. Tanzie? Has the dog been to the loo?”

The morning sky was the color of lead and seemed to have descended to a point around their ears. A faint drizzle promised heavier rain. Ed sat in the driver’s seat as Jess ran around, organizing, scolding, promising, in a fury of activity. She had been like this since he’d woken, groggily, from what seemed like twenty minutes’ sleep. He didn’t think she had met his eye once. Tanzie climbed silently into the backseat.

“You okay?” He yawned and looked at the little girl in the rearview mirror.

She nodded silently.

“Nerves?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Been sick?”

She nodded.

“It’s all the rage on this trip. You’ll be great. Really.”

She gave him the look he would have given any adult if they had said the same, then turned to stare out of the window, her face round and pale. Ed wondered how late she had stayed up studying.

“Right.” Jess shoved Norman into the backseat. He brought with him an almost overwhelming scent of wet dog. She checked that Tanzie had done up her belt, climbed into the passenger seat, and finally turned to Ed. Her expression was unreadable. “Let’s go.”

—

Ed’s car no longer looked like his car. In just three days its immaculate cream interior had acquired new scents and stains, a fine sprinkling of dog hair, jumpers and shoes that now lived on seats or wedged underneath them. The floor crunched underfoot with dropped sweet wrappers and crisps. The radio stations were no longer on settings he understood.

But something had happened while he was driving along at forty m.p.h. The faint sense that he should actually have been somewhere else had begun to fade, almost without his being aware of it. He found himself glancing at the people they passed, buying food, driving their cars, walking their children to and from school in worlds completely different from his own, knowing nothing of his own little drama several hundred miles south. It made it all seem reduced in size, a model village of problems rather than something that loomed over him.

Despite the pointed silence from the woman beside him, Nicky’s sleeping face in the rearview mirror (“Teenagers don’t really do Before Eleven O’clock,” Tanzie explained), and the occasional foul eruptions of the dog, it slowly dawned on him as they crept closer to their destination that he was feeling a complete lack of the relief he had expected to feel at the prospect of having his car, his life, back to himself. What he felt was more complex. Ed fiddled with the speakers, so that the music was loudest in the rear seats and temporarily silent in the front.

“You okay?”

Jess didn’t look round. “I’m fine.”

Ed glanced behind him, making sure nobody was listening. “About last night,” he began.

“Forget it.”

He wanted to tell her that he regretted it. He wanted to tell her that his body had actually hurt with the effort of not climbing back into that sagging single bed. But what would have been the point? Like she’d said the previous evening, they were two people who had no reason to see each other ever again.

“I can’t forget it. I wanted to explain—”

“Nothing to explain. You were right. It was a stupid idea.” She tucked her legs under her and stared away from him out of the window.

“It’s just my life is too—”

“Really. It’s not an issue. I just”—she let out a deep breath—“I just want to make sure we get to the Olympiad on time.”

“But I don’t want us to end it all like this.”

“There’s nothing to end.” She put her feet on the dashboard. It felt like a statement. “Let’s go.”

“How many miles is it to Aberdeen?” Tanzie’s face appeared between the front seats.

“What, left?”

“No. From Southampton.”

Ed pulled his phone from his jacket and handed it to her. “Look it up on the Maps app.”

She tapped the screen, her brow furrowed. “About five hundred and eighty?”

“Sounds about right.”

“So if we’re doing forty miles an hour, we’d have had to do at least six hours’ driving a day. And if I didn’t get sick, we could have done it—”

“In a day. At a push.”

“One day.” Tanzie digested this, her eyes trained on the Scottish hillsides in the distance ahead. “But we wouldn’t have had such a nice time then, would we?”

Ed glanced sideways at Jess. “No, we wouldn’t.”

It took a moment before Jess’s gaze slid back toward him. “No, sweetheart,” she said after a beat. And her smile was oddly rueful. “No, we wouldn’t.”

—

The car ate the miles sleekly and efficiently. They crossed the Scottish border, and Ed tried—and failed—to raise a cheer. They stopped once for Tanzie to go to the loo, once twenty minutes later for Nicky to go (“I can’t help it. I didn’t have to go when Tanze did”), and three times for Norman (two were false alarms). Jess sat silently beside him, checking her watch and chewing at her nails. Nicky watched
groggily out the window at the empty landscape, at the few flinty houses set into rolling hills. Ed wondered what would happen to Nicky after this was over. He wanted to suggest fifty other things to help him, but he tried to imagine someone suggesting things to him at the same age, and guessed he would have taken no notice at all. He wondered how Jess would keep him safe when they returned home.

The phone rang and he glanced over, his heart sinking. “Lara.”

“Eduardo. Baby. I need to talk to you about this apartment.”

He was aware of Jess’s sudden rigidity, the flicker of her gaze. He wished, suddenly, that he hadn’t chosen to answer the call.

“Lara, I’m not going to discuss this now.”

“It’s not a lot of money. Not for you. I spoke to my solicitor and he says it would be nothing for you to pay for it.”

“I told you before, Lara, we made a final settlement.”

He was suddenly conscious of the acute stillness of three people in the car.

“Eduardo. Baby. I need to sort this out with you.”

“Lara—”

Before he could say anything more, Jess reached over and grabbed the phone. “Hello, Lara,” she said. “Jess here. I’m awfully sorry but he can’t pay for any more of your stuff, so there’s really no point in ringing him anymore.”

A short silence. Then an explosive: “Who is this?”

“I’m his new wife. Oh, and he’d like his Chairman Mao picture back. Perhaps just leave it with his lawyer. Okay? In your own time. Thanks so much.”

The resulting silence had the same quality as the few seconds before an atomic explosion. But before any of them could hear what happened next, Jess flipped the Off button, and handed it back to him. He took it gingerly, and turned it off.

“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

“You’re welcome.” She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

Ed glanced into his rearview mirror. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Nicky was trying very hard not to laugh.

—

Somewhere between Edinburgh and Dundee, on a narrow, wooded lane, they had to slow down and then stop for a herd of cows in the road. The animals moved around the car, gazing in at its inhabitants with vague curiosity, a moving black sea, eyes rolling in woolly black heads. Norman stared back.

“Aberdeen Angus,” said Nicky.

Suddenly, without warning, Norman hurled his whole body, snarling and growling at the window. The car jolted to one side, the backseat a chaotic mass of arms and noise and writhing dog. Nicky and Jess fought to reach him.

“Mum!”

“Norman! Stop!” The dog was on top of Tanzie, his face hard against the window. Ed could just make out her glittery pink jacket, flailing underneath him.

Jess lunged over the seat at the dog, grabbing for his collar. They dragged Norman back down from the window. He whined, shrill and hysterical, straining at their grasp, great gobs of drool spraying across the interior.

“Norman, you big idiot! What the hell—”

“He’s never seen a cow before,” Tanzie said, struggling upright.

“Jesus, Norman.” Nicky grimaced.

“You okay, Tanze?”

“I’m fine.”

The cows continued to part around the car, unmoved by the dog’s outburst. Through the now steamed windows they could just make out the farmer at the rear, walking slowly and impassively, with the same lumbering gait as his bovine charges. He gave the barest of nods as he passed, as if he had all the time in the world. Norman whined and pulled against his collar.

“I’ve never seen him like that before.” Jess straightened her hair and blew out through her cheeks. “Perhaps he could smell beef.”

“I didn’t know he had it in him,” Ed said.

“My glasses.” Tanzie held up the twisted piece of metal. “Mum. Norman broke my glasses.”

It was a quarter past ten.

“I can’t see anything without my glasses.”

Jess looked at Ed.
Shit
.

“Okay,” he said. “Grab a plastic bag. I’m going to have to put my foot down.”

—

The Scottish roads were wide and empty, and Ed drove so fast that the GPS had to repeatedly reassess its timing to their destination. Every minute they gained was an imaginary air punch in his head. Tanzie was sick twice. He refused to stop to allow her to vomit into the road.

“She’s really ill,” Jess said.

“I’m fine,” Tanzie kept saying, her face wedged into a plastic bag. “Really.”

“You don’t want to stop, sweetheart? Just for a minute?”

“No. Keep going. Bleurgh—”

There wasn’t time to stop. Not that this made the car journey any easier to bear. Nicky had turned away from his sister, his hand over his nose. Even Norman’s head was thrust as far out the window, into the fresh air, as he could get it.

He would get them there. He felt filled with purpose in a way that he hadn’t in months. And finally, Aberdeen loomed before them, its buildings vast and silver gray, the oddly modern high-rises thrusting into the distant sky. He headed for the center, watched as the roads narrowed and became cobbled streets. They came through the docks, the enormous tankers on their right, and that was where the traffic slowed, and his confidence began to unravel. They sat in an increasingly anxious silence, Ed punching in alternative routes
across Aberdeen that offered no time gain. The GPS started to work against him, adding back the time it had subtracted. It was fifteen, nineteen, twenty-two minutes until they reached the university building. Twenty-five minutes. Too many.

“What’s the delay?” said Jess, to nobody in particular. She fiddled with the radio buttons, trying to find the traffic reports. “What’s the holdup?”