Jojo Moyes - The One Plus One

She thought about some expression she had heard Nicky use a few weeks ago – YOLO – You only live once – and remembered how she had told him she thought it was just an excuse idiots used for doing pretty much anything they felt like doing, no matter what the consequences.

She thought about Liam, and how she knew in her gut that he was probably having sex with someone right this minute – that ginger barmaid from the Blue Parrot, maybe, or the Dutch girl who drove the flower van. She thought about a conversation she’d had with Chelsea when Chelsea had told her she should lie about her kids because no man would ever fall in love with a single mother of two, and how Jess had got angry with her because deep down she knew she was probably right.

She thought about the fact that even if Mr Nicholls didn’t go to prison, she would probably never see him again after this trip.

And then, before she could think too hard about anything else, Jess eased herself silently out of the chair, letting the blanket fall to the floor. It took only four steps to reach the bed, and she hesitated, her bare toes curled in the acrylic carpet, even then not quite sure what she was doing. You only live once. And then in the near-total dark there was a faint movement and she saw Mr Nicholls turn to face her as she lifted the duvet and climbed in.

Jess was chest to chest against him, her cool legs against his warm ones. There was nowhere else to go in this tiny bed, with the sag of the mattress pushing them closer together and its edge like a cliff-drop just inches behind her. They were so close that she could breathe in the remnants of his aftershave, his toothpaste. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest, as her heart thumped erratically against his. She tilted her head a little, trying to read him. He put his right arm across the duvet, a surprisingly heavy weight, gathering her in closer to him. With his other, he took her hand and enclosed it slowly in his. It was dry and soft, and inches from her mouth. She wanted to lower her face to his knuckles and trace her lips along them. She wanted to reach her mouth up to his, and run her teeth gently along the soft curve of his upper lip.

You only live once.

She lay there in the dark, paralysed by her own longing, by the fact that just this once she did not know the answer, or even the question.

‘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 big 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 Chrissakes. But even as she shifted away from him, his hand tightened around hers. His voice was a murmur in her ear. ‘You’re beautiful.’

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 confusing 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, pie and chips?’ She interlinked her fingers with his. She 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. She could almost taste the toothpaste sweetness of his breath. ‘I’d’ve 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. The hardness of him made her briefly giddy.

He swallowed.

Her lips were millimetres from his. 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. You know … you can drop us off tomorrow and we’ll never see each other again. 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 echo 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, a fraction, until her lips met his. She almost jolted. She felt the electric 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 burnt with it. ‘Happy birthday,’ she whispered.

He pulled back a fraction. 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 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.

Ed 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 static caravan 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 and tried not to think about the fact that if he hadn’t leapt out of that bed he could be there, curled around her right now, her arms around his neck, his lips pressed against her skin, those lithe legs looped around …

No.

He had done the right thing, he told himself. He must have done. His life was complicated enough without adding an impulsive cleaner with an eccentric family to the mix (he hated himself for letting the word ‘cleaner’ appear in that little mental riff). Even as Jess, uncharacteristically still in those last few moments, had lain against him and his brain had started to melt, he had tried to apply logic to the situation, and had concluded, with the few cells still functioning, that it couldn’t end well. Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterwards, and the five hours spent travelling 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 either (d) would 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 this considered (f), which was that Jess had actual kids. Kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as him: he liked children as a concept, but in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent – i.e. 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 of (g): 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 him getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.

Plus 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 the girl sleeping in the bed a few feet away 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 – towards 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 colour of lead and seemed to have descended to a point around their ears. A faint drizzle promised heavier rain. Ed sat in the driving 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, folding and packing, dragging bags downstairs, supervising breakfast. He didn’t think she had met his eye once. Tanzie climbed silently into the back seat.

‘You okay?’ He yawned and looked at the little girl in the rear-view 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 exact 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, her eyes mauve with exhaustion. Ed wondered how late she had stayed up revising.

‘Right.’ Jess shoved Norman into the back seat. 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.