Page 69 of Read My Lips

The taxi dumped us outside an oversized Victorian townhouse with half-height black painted railings topping the pristine garden wall and a chequered path leading to the sweep of steps up to the main door. No wheelie bins in sight.

Yellow London brick stretched up four storeys, all big windows and high ceilings. A nanny flying down from the clouds holding onto an umbrella would not have been out of place on this street.

My palms went amphibious and my heartbeat kicked up a gear. I’d been kidding myself thinking we existed in the same universe of possibilities. He’d never live anywhere less than fabulous.

Simon let us into the entrance hall, past a bank of varnished pigeon holes for post, jangling his keys. The front door to his flat caught, sticking instead of swinging open and he glanced at me over his shoulder. “There’s a knack.”

So maybe it wasn’t all flawless perfection. I could handle that.

The letterbox clattered as he shouldered into it, and then – I was in his hallway. His actual home. Like someone he voluntarily spent time with without getting into career-saving fake-sexcapades.

Inside, Simon took his case off me and parked it next to the neat line of dress shoes. They could have lived in the window display of the kind of shoe shop I had never been into. This was a shoes-off kind of home.

I trampled the backs of my trainers instead of unlacing them and nudged them to the wall, balanced on one foot to corral them into order without bending down.

“Nice place.” Impressed, flashed my eyebrow raise.

At least I didn’t have holes in my socks. My mostly-empty carrier bag looked silly enough on the bentwood arm of his coat stand between Simon’s wool coat and his deep green scarf without anything else to highlight my comparative scruffiness.

“So...” His bedroom was through one of those doors.

“Coffee?”

I snorted a laugh. He did not.

“Oh.” That was not a euphemism. Simon did adult things like legitimately offer guests beverages of their choice. I scrubbed the back of my neck. “...Alright then?”

Reality check: Bedding me was not the be-all and end-all of his existence. Ego downsize required.

In the kitchen-half of the open-plan space, tall windows opened onto a stretch of lawn edged with gravel and well-tended flower pots that was bigger than the entire footprint of my building. Simon touched my shoulder, smoothing his hand towards my neck. His fingers skimmed above the collar of Richard’s shirt, lingering with something I could have mistaken for affection. More than catching my attention. My skin tingled.

“Go through.” He nodded to the half of the flat set out like a living room. I gawped at him. Brain malfunction. Full on space cadet. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He probably did not mean press myself to his chest and refuse to move, did he?

Dutifully, I sloped towards his Ikat print sofa and the cream rug over the not-quite-black painted boards.

Bloody hell it was a nice flat. The size of his deposit alone had to be more than any sane bank would lend me on a mortgage. No way he was renting. The walls were all colour. Greens and blues and deep yellows so saturated they made my eyes vibrate. He had things everywhere. Books, and artfully sculpted paperweights. A jam jar of shells. A vintage film camera. Plants. Indoor ones he hadn’t tortured. I could kill an artificial cactus, but Simon was growing himself a rainforest in a rainbow of brightly coloured pots.

A vining triffid thing draped down from the top of a bookcase, lush and verdant. Not a single leaf turning yellow at the edges.

My thumb purred over the page edges of a thin, corner-curled paperback he’d left out on a side table. Aesop’s Fables.

Not the only one hanging onto kids’ books then.

This was more than me prowling an unfamiliar flat, getting nervous about the next move. Simon’s whole enviable life was on display.

He’d squeezed an upright piano in by the door. A palm stood in an oversized terracotta pot in the window. And there was one with long, fat, stripey purplish leaves, next to a photo of a woman roughly Simon’s age, with her hair in a perfectly rounded afro. She had the same tall, lean build as him, and the same humour shimmering in her eyes.

This had to be Jo, his sister.

She was holding an award – clearly excellence ran in the family – teeth and eyes flashing her happiness so contagiously I grinned too. The bold geometric print of her dress was an artwork in its own right.

Another picture showed Simon with his arm slung around Jo’s shoulders, and an older couple standing on her other side. The white woman had crows feet at the corners of her eyes, her hair gone to grey beneath a knotted headband in the same pattern as Jo’s dress. The shape of their eyes told me this was their mum. And the Black man with stylish, thick-framed glasses had to be their dad next to her, ducking unnecessarily for the picture, like he thought he was too tall to fit, brimming with pride.

I blinked hard. Other pictures dotted the shelves, in frames or leaning against the spines of his books, their shiny paper curling. And I didn’t want to look at any more.

Through the bay window at the front, the leafy residential street we’d pulled up on in the cab was calm and quiet with smug, uncomplicated affluence. Everything was easy and warm here. Full of so much love Simon could take it or leave it from me.