I wait.
“For my parents. It was always just the three of us. My dad was estranged from his family, and my mum was an only child, so we didn’t have that big aunts-and-uncles, loads-of-cousins type vibe—it was just us three. Trouble trebled, Dad used to say. Hence . . . treble.” She shrugs. “It’s a stupid play on words. I was twenty-one and thought it was clever.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid. It’s creative.”
She gives me a small smile at that. A different sort of smile from usual.
“I cannot imagine how hard it was for you to lose them.”
“No,” she says simply. “It changed me completely.”
“What were you like before?”
She pauses as if she wasn’t expecting that question. “Quiet, actually,” she says. “I held myself back a lot. Now I go full-out because—like I said—life’s too short for having regrets.”
I hesitate before answering. I’m not sure Izzy does go “full-out.” She’s certainly spontaneous, and she works hard. But her life does not seem to me to be built on taking chances. Just look at the inferior men she dates. The job she’s been in for eight years without promotion. The friends she has all over the world, and how rarely she takes time off to visit them.
“Do you feel like you don’t hold anything back now? That you really go full-out?”
She looks at me shrewdly. After a moment, she snorts. “Lose the trousers, Lucas. Don’t think you can distract me by Mrs. Hedgers–ing me.”
Remarkably, for a moment, I had almost forgotten I am sitting here topless.
“Mrs. . . .”
“Mrs. Hedgers, the career-change coach in Sweet Pea? Has she not got you yet? She did a number on me and Poor Mandy. Told Mandy she’s not assertive enough.”
Izzy is breezy and bright again, as though we never spoke about her parents. I’d like to push and ask her more, but I know I’ll get nowhere.
“In the time I have known Mandy,” I say, “she has never once asserted herself.”
“I know, right?”
“What did Mrs. Hedgers say about you?”
Izzy shifts so her feet are tucked underneath her on the bed. Her socks are gone, lost when she played a bad hand at the start of the game.
“She said I don’t know how to switch off.”
Interesting.
“On Thursday, you’ll try some of the ways I unwind and switch off.”
“Oh, will I, now?”
I raise my eyebrows, lying back against the pillows with my hands behind my head.
“Have you forgotten? Thursday is my day. I’m in charge.”
“Oh, shit, yeah.” Something passes across her face. I wonder if it’s worry.
“I won’t . . . If you want to change your mind about the bet . . .”
“Are you kidding? Please. I’d never have given you that opportunity if I’d won.”
“But it’s different. I’m a man. We are always in charge, so . . .” This doesn’t come out the way I intended—she’s glaring at me. I grope around for the right words, remembering how succinctly Ana put it when she was explaining why it’s different for a woman to approach a man than the other way around. “No, I just mean, it’s not the same because of the way society always puts men in control anyway, so me telling you what to do, it just feels like it could be . . .”
“Oh.” Her face clears. “Yeah. A bit loaded. Well, actually, oddly enough I do trust you to be a gentleman about it. You want to have a safeword or something?” She laughs at my expression. “If I say, Fuck right off, Lucas, then you have to back off. Agreed?”
“It is a good safe phrase,” I say solemnly, and I can tell from her face that she doesn’t know whether I’m joking.
“Trousers,” she says, pointing at my knees.
“Ah. Yes.” I shift to the end of the bed and stand to take them off.
The atmosphere in the room shifts the moment I start unfastening my belt. Izzy is quiet, watching me as I unbutton my jeans, rolling her bottom lip between her finger and thumb. I thought stripping off would make her feel like she was in charge, but she’s not laughing or humiliating me, she’s just watching me, and I shiver under her gaze. It’s been a while since I’ve stripped down for a woman, but they’re normally touching me by this point. The distance between us should make this less intimate, but somehow it’s the opposite.
I lie down on my back again, my head on the pillow. Laid out for her, with the cards and that silly little heap of raisins between us. I hear her breath catch and the sound sends something turning over inside me.
“If I win the next hand, you’ll be naked,” Izzy says.
“Mm.”
“I was going to make you run out into the car park in the snow,” she says, “but now that feels kind of cruel.”
“How were you going to make me do that?” I ask, amused.
She shrugs. “I’d dare you.”
The room is very small and very quiet. Izzy has her bottom lip between her teeth now, biting down. My breath is catching, too.
“But I think maybe dares are a bad idea now, too.”
I think we’re in one of those sliding-doors moments. Balancing on the edge of a decision we won’t be able to unmake. I am struggling to remember why I shouldn’t lean across the poker cards and pull her down into a kiss—not the kind of kiss she gave me, sweet and slow, but a fiery, electric-shock of a kiss, the kind that gets you hot in half a second.
“I’m getting ready for bed now, Lucas,” Izzy says. Her voice is low and quiet.
“OK,” I say.
She doesn’t move. “I don’t get you,” she says. “At all.”
I tip my chin, and she sighs out a breath, unmoving.
“You would strip naked for me, but you don’t want to kiss me?”
“I never said I didn’t want to kiss you.”
Her eyes move over me. “Kiss me, then.”
I grit my teeth. She’s within reach. I could grab her with one arm and have her body against mine before she’d caught her breath. I haven’t forgotten how she looked in that bikini at the pool—the soft curve of her breast, the dip at the small of her back. I know how she’d fit against me.
I’ve got good self-control, but even I have limits. The moment stretches, testing me.
“Right,” Izzy says, moving at last. “God, I’m a glutton for rejection when it comes to you, aren’t I?”
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.