Joel squinted. He really was very tired. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, you go to all these amazing places and it’s all right to take me sometimes … you know, I’m not just a scullery maid.’
‘I never thought of you as a scullery maid. Also, what’s a scullery maid?’
‘You never take me out to nice places like this!’
Joel screwed up his face. ‘I’m working fifteen-hour days in a windowless conference room fuelled by American coffee, the world’s most disgusting drink. All I think of is getting through it, so I can get home to you. That’s all I think about.’
‘But I’m here.’
‘I know. And I hate it here.’
Flora looked around. ‘How can you hate it here?’
She was weak, and put up with too much, and all of those things, probably. But oh my God, here she was, under a purple New York sky with a man, the very smell of whom made her want to turn herself inside out – with so much love she felt she would die from it. It was all she wanted to do …
Joel shrugged.
‘Come on,’ she said, shaking herself awake suddenly. ‘No, I have a plan. Let’s go out.’
She couldn’t, she knew, just let him take her to bed. That was what always happened. And it was amazing, but nothing got fixed or moved on at all.
All Joel wanted – he so desperately wanted – was to take her to bed, tear that dress off her, lose himself in the pale beauty of her curves and her skin, then finally, blessedly, find some sleep because she was near him. Just being so close to her again was bewitching, almost made him forget his cases, his workload, the strangeness of being back in America, the pace of it all.
‘Can I take you out tomorrow?’ he said.
‘Aren’t you working tomorrow?’ she said, teasing.
‘I want you so much.’ He pulled her very close to him on the terrace, so she could feel it.
‘Tough,’ said Flora, smiling at him. ‘You get me into bed, I’ll fall asleep. You need to take me somewhere noisy. With dancing.’
‘I don’t dance.’
‘I don’t care.’
But Friday night in bustling New York, with a reluctant Joel and a clueless Flora, was a mistake, to say the least. Anywhere that looked nice had a two-hour wait for a table and rude, beautiful girls on the doors, looking doubtful when they hadn’t booked, while anywhere else was full of tourists. Avoiding the ridiculously fake Irish bars that Flora absolutely had no wish to go into, they ended up in a dark oak bar full of lawyers – exactly the type of people Joel had absolutely no wish to see – and their gorgeous dates, obviously picked up from Tinder or just around and about the place. And Flora, exhausted and strung out, misjudged completely the strength of the cocktails. She drank two and ordered another at top speed and was, not to put too fine a point on it, drunk in half an hour, while Joel was not. And every time she tried to bring up the subject of the two of them, she realised she was repeating herself and not making any sense at all.
Drunk people horrified Joel – too many memories – and he tried, gently, to convince Flora to go back to the hotel. She argued against it and told him he was a dreadful guy who didn’t really care about her at all and was never any fun, and while Joel disagreed profoundly with the first accusation, he couldn’t help seeing that she probably had a point about the second. On the other hand, they had come out to have fun and hadn’t had the slightest bit of fun at all, and now Flora was the worse for wear and he was concerned about bundling her into the lift at the hotel in case she started yelling at him inside.
‘Need any help, sir?’ said the receptionist, smiling perkily at him in what she considered to be an unthreatening way. He tried his best to smile bravely back while Flora muttered unpleasant words in Gaelic under her breath about the receptionist, and kept trying to press the down button and stumble off to the bar as Joel was doing his best to encourage her upstairs. Finally back in the room, Joel went to use the bathroom. He came back prepared for a diatribe about how dreadful he was. Instead, fully dressed, Flora was lying diagonally across the bed, fast asleep.
Sighing, he drew the blackout curtains, gently took off her shoes, put a glass of water and two ibuprofen by her bedside and rolled her carefully under the duvet – then, knowing sleep had no interest in coming anywhere near him that night – put on the desk light in the main room, ordered up some coffee and returned to his files.
Flora woke incredibly early, woozy, with a headache and not a clue where she was in the pitch dark. She rolled over, remembered, then groaned heavily. She had messed things up ridiculously. She remembered being rude to Joel last night, yelling at him. She realised to her horror that of course he’d put her to bed. Oh God. And then … what? Where was he? He wasn’t in the bed. Had he left in disgust? When she hadn’t immediately gone to bed with him … then had gone out and rolled around like a loony. Oh God. She thought of him, all buttoned up and restrained and her wanging on like a drunken harpy. She saw the glass and the ibuprofen next to her bed, and dropped her head in her hands. Oh Christ. She had never had a worse idea in her entire life. What on earth had she been thinking? What an utter idiot she was.
Her eyes were getting more used to the dark room and she saw the line of golden light coming from next door. She got up to use the loo and brush her teeth, then glanced through the door. He was sitting, staring at his files, hadn’t noticed she was there, and he took off his glasses and put them down for a second, and rubbed his dry eyes. He looked so young and so lost with this little gesture that Flora wanted to go to him, but she was afraid of his judgement, could not face him quite yet, she was feeling so bad, so she went back to bed and lay there in the dark, unable to sleep because of the time difference. Eventually, when he finally came to bed, she still lay there and did not move towards him, nor did he move to her, even though neither of them was sleeping, and it felt like the dawn would never come.
Chapter Twenty
Joel was up early the following morning to go into the office. Flora apologised and Joel said stiffly not to worry about it, it was nothing. They had still not even made love, and this was terrifying Flora because it was in that space they had together that nothing was ever wrong, and nothing was ever misunderstood; it had always felt like their bodies could talk to each other in a way that their brains could not: directly, with total honesty and utter mutual understanding. Whereas this … this was just a mess. And she had absolutely no idea how to fix it.
Still feeling utterly dreadful, she made coffee and sat in front of some strange American television, finding it odd to think that this was normal for everyone who lived there. It was going to be a beautiful day, she realised eventually, after trying to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. And there was the city at her fingertips … once she felt a little better. She had a long shower, which felt like being pummelled by water, in the amazing rainforest bathroom, and that definitely helped. Then she looked through her hastily packed suitcase to see if anything was suitable. Nothing was. She could go and buy some light, pretty dresses, she thought suddenly. But when would she wear them? It wasn’t like they got many hot days on Mure, or that they’d be suitable in the Seaside Kitchen.
She felt homesick, suddenly. It would be afternoon there; the trade would be coming in – the walkers, hungry for big sticky slices of millionaire’s shortbread and raisin pies and steak bridies and everything they needed to refuel; the wee old ladies down from their grocery shopping who wanted scones and cups of tea; the farmers, in for their weekly look around the bright lights of Mure Town, who would take big sides of fruitcake back home to sit on their dressers all week to be consumed with small glasses of whisky and large hunks of cheese.