Page 42 of Love in Tune

‘There’s that girl guide again,’ he said, but without malice. ‘Thank you, Honey, for all of this. You didn’t have to.’

‘I wanted to,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s your birthday. No one should drink alone on their birthday.’

Hal placed the flask back into its box. ‘I haven’t always drunk this much,’ he said. ‘I used to be too busy.’

Taking the box from his hands, she laid it on the table.

‘I don’t think badly of you for it, Hal.’

He shook his head. ‘You should. I don’t like the man I’ve become, Honey.

I don’t like the life I have now.’ He tried to choose his words to make her understand.

‘I’m not talking about the material stuff.

I mean sure, I miss the trappings, but it’s not that.

It’s in here.’ He tapped his fingertips on his chest like a builder testing the soundness of a wall.

‘My heart needs to race. It didn’t matter what it was, as long as I was pushing myself over my limits.

Faster cars. Bigger bikes. Higher slopes.

I was always restless for the next big thrill.

’ He rolled his shoulders and scrubbed his hand over his stubble.

‘I don’t know who I am anymore without all that.

’ He shrugged. ‘I feel like a dead man walking. Nothing makes my heart race.’

‘Maybe, in time …’ she said, tentatively. ‘There’s loads of things you could still do, when you’re ready, I mean. Tandem skydiving, even. Stuff like that.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s just I like to be the one in charge, not the passenger.’

Honey sipped her wine. ‘I bet you were a scary boss to work for.’

‘You wouldn’t have liked me.’

Would she have liked him? Aside from doctors, Honey was the first person he’d let anywhere near close enough to become a friend since the accident. She hadn’t known the man he was before. She only knew this pale, watered-down version of him.

‘Probably not,’ she said, candidly. ‘You frightened the living daylights out of me when I first met you.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’re Honeysuckle Jones, freedom fighter, bona fide Wonder Woman.’

She laughed gently. ‘Tash dressed up as Wonder Woman on New Year’s Eve last year. She had a terrible wardrobe malfunction in The Cock; Superman had to save her virtue with his cape.’

One of the things Hal had come to value most about Honey was the fact that she didn’t take life too seriously – never more so than in that moment. He loosened his shirt collar and tie as he sat back against the sofa, his arm along the back of it when she scooted back beside him.

‘Is your life always on the edge of ridiculous?’ he said, leaning his head back on the cushions.

She was silent for a moment. ‘Not always. Quite a lot more so since you moved in though.’

‘No way,’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault you’ve become a female version of Robin Hood with a band of merry pensioners, or that your crazy friends have some bizarre insistence that you can only date pianists.’

‘They did it again today,’ she said.

‘Did what?’

‘Tash and Nell set me up on a blind date,’ she said. ‘I was supposed to meet them at the café and they sent a pianist to meet me instead.’

‘Oh.’ The idea that she’d been on a date and then returned home to his drunken poor me rant pissed him off. ‘Was he better than the last two?’

Honey sighed. ‘I guess he was, yeah.’

She didn’t elaborate, and her hesitancy to share details frustrated him.

He wanted to hear her laugh and tell him it had been another dating disaster, but she didn’t.

Frustration had him reaching for his wine.

He wanted to see her face, to be able to see the things her face wouldn’t be able to hide rather than pick through her words for clues.

And he wanted to see her face because when he dreamed of her she was always indistinct, more of a feeling than an image. A good feeling.

‘Two dates in one day. It’s my personal best,’ she said, making light and sounding anxious as her head rested on his arm.

Hal’s need to be top dog at everything kicked in hard. Honey was beside him on the sofa, bumping against him from hip to knee.

‘Did he kiss you goodbye?’ he said.

‘It was lunchtime and I was stuffed full of American pancakes. He gave me a peck on the cheek and his number.’

Even that sounded too promising for Hal’s liking.

He found that he didn’t want Honey to use that number.

He knew well enough that he was being unreasonable, but it was his birthday and she was, well …

right now, she was his date, and it wasn’t lunchtime, and they weren’t stuffed.

They’d skipped dessert. He could hear her breathing, feel her waiting for him to take his turn to speak.

‘I don’t have a number to give you,’ he said, winding silky strands of her hair around his fingers. ‘And I don’t kiss on the cheek.’

He heard her intake of breath when he wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck and drew her head to his.

He hadn’t intended on kissing her tonight, in fact he’d planned not to as he’d tipped his face up into the beating rain of his shower earlier.

He needed involvement like he needed a hole in the head; but he wasn’t too big to admit that he was lonely.

What he really needed was a friend. He just wished his body had got the memo from his brain, because in that moment he didn’t want Honey to be his friend. He just plain wanted her.

If she’d have resisted for even a second, it would have been enough. But she didn’t. She was pliant and warm, and she turned into his kiss rather than away and opened her mouth under his.

When he’d kissed her before, it had been urgent, frantic.

This time it was neither of those things, deliberately so.

She moved closer into the circle of his arms, and he stroked his thumb along the curve of her jaw.

He took his time, because she was a luxury and his life was so starved of luxury that he needed to drink her in.

He could feel the tremble in her lips when she sighed against his.

‘I’m glad you don’t kiss on the cheek,’ she whispered.

He felt her reach over and click the lamp out, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t so easy to go slow because her hands were inside his shirt and his blood was roaring in his veins.

He’d been wrong earlier. There was still one thing that could make his heart race.

This, here and now. He pushed her down onto the sofa, or maybe she pulled him down, he couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter.

Either way he found himself lying on top of her, feeling himself yield into her softness, wanting her so badly that his whole body ached with it.

She pulled his tie loose and unpicked the buttons of his shirt. He pushed it off when she eased it back off his shoulders, kissing the skin she revealed.

‘Why did you turn out the light?’ he said, trailing his lips over her face with his hand buried in her hair.

‘To make it even,’ she said. They both knew it would never be anywhere close to even.

‘Crazy girl. Did it work?’ he asked, opening the buttons on her dress and kissing the curves of her breasts.

‘Not really. I can still see you,’ she whispered. ‘You’re beautiful, Hal.’

No one had ever called him beautiful. He paid the compliments.

So Hal let himself get lost completely in the wonderland of being here with her, in the soft warmth of her compliments and in her efforts to make him feel good, because he mostly felt so goddamn awful.

It moved him that she’d turned out the light.

It moved him because she wanted this experience to be as good for him as it was for her.

He remembered back to their previous terrible attempt at sex, to her telling him that she’d brought a blindfold.

He’d scorned it at the time, deriding her in his head for not having a clue how he felt, but right now, he got it.

She’d never understand the reality of how this was for him, but the fact that she even wanted to try turned out to be a huge fucking turn on.

‘Pass me my tie?’ he said, and took it from her fingers when she’d reached it from the floor.

‘Are you sure you want it to be even?’ he murmured, running it between his fingers to find the centre.

Her nails dug into his back, and he heard her low gasp as she lifted her head to help him. Her breath tickled the skin beneath his ear, and her hips rocked up to meet his.

‘Blindfold me, Hal.’