by Tilly Delane
I wasn’t expecting him to know anything about me.
I’d told Sheena the basics when she asked me what I was doing in Brighton. I didn’t tell her about the list or that Mum had been the manager of the Palais once upon a time, but I did tell her that I was on a kind of memorial tour for my British mother.
I don’t know why I find it uncomfortable that Silas knows why I’m here, only that it feels too close.
As I chew, my hunger comes back and I enjoy the sandwich. The man knows how to fry bacon just the right kind of crispy. I look up at him and find his eyes on me. He’s got his sandwich suspended in front of his mouth, untouched. He’s clearly been waiting for me to start and now he finally takes a bite. We eat in silence, just looking at each other, and something weird happens. The air between us changes. It’s full of electricity again, but it’s more...gentle, I guess.
I look around the kitchen. It’s crammed, clean, neat and in desperate need of updating. The units are dark wood effect, old and a bit shabby, the stove is gas and cheaply made with bits of the white enamel chipped out along the edges. The table we are sitting at is white brushed and pushed up against the wall below a window with five matching chairs around it. There is a vase with yellow and orange tulips on the windowsill.
Next to Silas is a door to the backyard and just as we finish our sandwiches, I hear the sound of a cat pushing through a cat flap, followed by a loud meow. I turn to see a black and white feline pad into the kitchen. Silas pushes his plate away and his chair back, so the cat can jump onto his lap.
“Hey, girlie,” he greets her as she treads around on his thighs and pushes her head into his hand, purring loudly.
He concentrates on making her purr louder and louder with tickles and strokes for a bit until she gently bites at his fingers, and then he looks up at me.
“This is Luna. Do you like cats?”
Do I like cats? Good question. I have no idea. If you grow up in a hotel, you don’t get to keep animals. The Atlantis had a fish tank in the lobby. That’s the closest I ever got to having pets.
I shrug.
He gives me a confused look.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.
“Means I don’t know. I never had much dealings with them.”
“Fair enough. Well, this is Luna and if you hang around long enough, you might meet her brother...”
“Sol?” I interrupt.
He looks surprised.
“How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” I hedge, but then I tell him. “Your curtains. You have a thing for the sun and the moon.”
He freezes and frowns before he pushes Luna off his lap and starts tidying the plates away into a dishwasher.
“So,” I say to his back and take the money out of my back pocket. “Thank you for breakfast, lunch, whatever. It was delicious. Now, do you have a piece of paper and a pen, so I can write your mum a note? And where’s the best place to stash her cash, so she’ll find it?”
He shuts the dishwasher, turns around, leans against the counter and crosses his arms in front of his chest. It does interesting things to his biceps that I really am trying not to notice. I’ve never in my life been interested in a man’s biceps before. I decide it’d be a lot easier to maintain that stance if his t-shirt wasn’t so tight. He frowns at me.
“You’re not leaving.”
“What?”
“Mum says you’re staying. So you’re staying.”
“It’s fine. I’ve already decided. I’m gonna go to London instead, figure something out.”
“You’re not listening. You’re staying.” He sighs. “If my mum’s got a bee in her bonnet about you staying, you stay. It’s as simple as that.”
I raise my eyebrows ‘cause it sounds like they’ve decided I’m moving in.
“How long for?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“How long were you booked at the hotel for?”
“Four weeks.”
“Four weeks?”
It’s the first time I’ve heard him raise his voice a little and I realize it’s powerful, he just disguises it well.
“Who’s got the money to stay at the Palais for four weeks?” he adds. “You minted or something?”
“No, I worked my ass off for a year and saved up every penny. And I booked through a discount site.” I pause to pull a face. “That’s gone belly up.”
“Hmm,” he grunts and scowls at me. “I can’t sleep on the living room floor for four weeks. That’s ridiculous.”
“You slept on the floor?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“The sofabed’s a nightmare. It kills your back,” he mutters.
“That settles it.” I stand up and leave the money on the table. “I’m off to London. Tell your mum thanks and that I really appreciated the rescue.”
“She’ll have my fucking hide,” he mumbles, rubbing his face with the hand that was just pinching the skin between his eyebrows, and straightens up. “I got an idea.”
Silas
I don’t want her to go. It’s as simple as that.
I don’t need or want the complication of her in the house. But I don’t want her to go. And it’s not even about the insane attraction I feel to this woman. The loss of that I could deal with. I’d welcome it. I really don’t need a distraction like that. In my fucking home.
No, it’s about what happened when we sat there eating together.
For those few minutes, I was at peace. While in the company of another human being. For the first time in, I don’t know, maybe ever.
There is something about her presence that is soothing. Like the ocean. And I’m not prepared to let that walk out of the door just yet. There is also the fact that Mum was very clear. When I started moaning at her about the American in my room, she cut me down in flames. Told me in no uncertain terms that this was a young woman who was lost, and she needed a temporary home and we happened to be it. I’m not sure why she’s so adamant, but when she gets like this, there is no arguing. So I didn’t bother.
“Go on, then,” Grace says impatiently, and I realise that I said I had an idea but then stayed quiet for a whole minute.
“I never get in till around six or seven every morning,” I start. “And I don’t normally go to sleep till eight or nine, then get up at three. We could share. If you get up and are out by nine, I get in there, and then you can have the room back by, say four at the very latest.”
Now that it’s out of my mouth, it sounds utterly idiotic. But she doesn’t seem to think so at all. On the contrary, her face lights up.
“Really? You’d do that? You wouldn’t mind?”
I shake my head.
“No, it’d be cool. No skin off my nose. If it keeps everyone happy, I’m happy.”
There is a moment when I can see her thinking it over, making her decision, and then she does something I wouldn’t have expected in a million years.
She comes over and fucking hugs me.
Grace
I don’t really think about it, it’s an impulse.
As soon as it sinks in what he’s said, I feel so relieved I want to cry. I didn’t really want to leave this house and go to London. It’s weird, but attraction to him aside, I feel like I’ve come home for the first time since Mum passed.
It happened while we were eating those stupid sandwiches. Just sitting there. Relaxed. With the sunshine falling through the window onto the silly tulips on the windowsill and the cat jumping onto his lap. I can’t explain it.
And my instinct is to wrap my arms around the man who’s just made that happen, who has just decided he’ll let me stay here. And breathe. For the first time in months.
So I cross the kitchen and I do. It’s not even a real hug, because it’s all on his outside, my arms wrapped around his still crossed ones, my face turned so his mouth is roughly by the top of my ear, and he gets a nose full of my hair. It’s like embracing a stone statue. It should be kinda awkward, b
ut it doesn’t last long enough for the embarrassment to really kick in. I just say ‘thank you’ while I squeeze him and then let go without looking at him.
I turn away to go back to the table and grab the key that Sheena left on it for me.
“In that case, enjoy your room. I’m out,” I say, without making eye contact again.
Then I leave to explore the town, his scent in my nostrils.
I’ve finally figured out what that salty tang is.
Beneath soap and wood smoke and man, he smells of the ocean.
Silas
It’s fightnight and I’m headlining, but I’m not feeling it tonight.
Not that I ever really wanted to punch people for a living in the first place, but I have enough anger in me to at least not give a shit if I do. Or did. Things have changed in the last few days. And not necessarily for the better.
It’s her, that calming influence she has. She’s messing with my mojo. Though I barely see her.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm that seems to suit both of us perfectly well. She’s got this list of stuff she has to do while she’s in England. Not sure what it is about or what’s on it, but I know it contained having High Tea at the Grand among other things. I know about that one because she took Mum along. Nice of her. Mum hardly ever gets out. Bit of an irony that they went to another hotel, I guess, but still, I think they had fun. They came back laughing at any rate. Mum looked ten years younger.
Grace also went shopping with Kalina at some point, though I’m not sure that’s on the list. They seem to be getting on alright. Good for Kalina. She’s been with us four months now and she was finding it hard to make friends, I think. She’s the only Polish girl on her course, and the charity shop where she volunteers is run by a bunch of old biddies. Like they all are. She’s only eighteen, so a lot younger than Grace, but Grace doesn’t seem to mind.
Not that I really know.
We only ever see each other in passing. Literally.
Grace usually sits on the landing when I come out of my morning shower with all the stuff she needs for the day by her side. We sail past one another, and I go into my room to slip in between sheets that are still warm and smell of her. I can never decide if that’s heaven or hell. My dick has very clear ideas about it, but I’ve started silencing him in the shower beforehand since I can hardly do it in the bed she’s going to sleep in that night. Somehow, we gave up changing the linen between our shifts on day two. I had all intention of putting the sleeping bag on top of the bed, but when she saw me with it outside the room, she just took it off me and hung it over the banister.
“Just get in the damn bed, I don’t have cooties,” she said.
It made me laugh.
Then I did as I was told.
And found out that just the scent of this woman makes me rock hard.
So that first morning, I snuck back into the bathroom as soon as I heard her leave the house and jerked off like a teenager. I’m usually alright coming on my own, provided the door is locked, the windows are shut and there’s nobody else in the room. But coming on my own with her scent in my nostrils and the image of those cat-like lips saying ‘good morning, sleep well’ to me was doubly easy. Thinking about it now makes my dick twitch again and I groan inwardly.
Fucking terrible timing, mate. Having her around is gonna kill me. Or make me blind. Whichever comes first.
In my bid to get her out of my head, I catch Arlo’s eye.
He’s sitting in his chair, kneading his hands. He’s my opponent tonight and since TripleX was built as a nightclub, not a fight venue, there are no dressing rooms. We all just sit in the office together waiting for our turn until the last two fighters are left. We are the last two tonight.
There is no pretence here. We don’t do all that growling at each other beforehand or any of that shit. We’re all here for the same reason: we have money issues and we don’t care enough not to get hurt. It’s a job. An illegal one, which means it pays more than fucking minimum wage, but a job nevertheless. We’re colleagues. So when Arlo and I hear the crescendo outside the door as the previous fight comes to an end, we nod at each other amicably.
May the best man win. I hope I don’t kill you.
We don’t say it. We don’t need to.
I think about Grace again and what I will cook for her tomorrow. That’s the other thing we do, we eat supper together if she’s back from her outings already when I come in from the gym. Just like the first day, we don’t talk much. Often, we just sit there in silence, but I’ve found a couple of things out about her by now. We’re the same age, born days apart. Her at the end of March, me at the beginning of April. She bartends in the hotel in DC where her mum used to be the manager until she got cancer.
There is a knock on the door, signalling that it’s time Arlo and I took our sorry arses out onto the dance floor.
As I step out into the roaring crowd, I watch Gareth prop up the loser of the last bout and take him to the exit, along with his minder. They’re gonna be shoved in a car and taken back to wherever. He’s some outsider, not part of the club. He’s got blood streaming out of his nose, his left eye is rapidly swelling shut and he’s barely walking. But he’s alive. At this point anyway.
The winner is a guy called Goran, who’s technically part of the club although he doesn’t bounce here anymore. Used to. Does security for the old Benson now. Whatever that means. I honestly don’t want to know. The shit old man Benson is into makes me wanna puke. Dog fights. Cock fights. And all the other shit the history books will tell you stopped happening after the Victorian opium houses were shut. Did it fuck. If you ever want to bang a corpse, old man Benson is the guy to ask.
I watch Goran shake some hands in the audience, being congratulated. He looks totally fine and goes to sit somewhere with the punters. Diego slaps him on the back as he goes past to stand on the dance floor and announce Arlo and me.
I push any lingering thoughts of Grace and home out of my head.
They have no place here.
Welcome to hell.
Grace
I’ve been here a few days now and it feels like forever. In a good way. Shoreham is tiny, so I already know it like the back of my hand. There are shops and restaurants, cafés, pubs and even an arts center where they put on shows and concerts, but it’s all within a one-mile radius. It’s like a pocket-size town but with all the trimmings. Already half the population knows me by sight and nods a greeting when they see me. I like it. It’s also really pretty and a bit wacky. It’s got an estuary where the river Adur goes into the sea and there are houseboats, big ones, moored on the other side of the estuary. Some just look like suburban little bungalows with flowers in window boxes, but others have been turned into some weird fantasy thing, like they’re from a psychedelic children’s TV show or something. It’s cool.
Every morning after Silas comes home, I leave the house and make sure that I’m out until his up-time. It works. I get the feeling he likes having the house to himself when he’s asleep. Some evenings he’s already gone again when I get back, but on the others he has been there to make me dinner.
Each time he didn’t ask me if I wanted any food.
Just made enough for two and put a bowl in front of me, telling me to eat. Exactly like that first morning. When we’re both in the house, I sit in the kitchen and read until he’s gone, so I’m just there anyway and I get to watch him cook. Sexy as sin, even when he’s just chopping carrots, dressed in jogging bottoms and a ratty old t-shirt. Sadly, I haven’t managed to catch another glimpse of him half naked since that first day despite the fact I sit on the landing every morning waiting for him to come out of the shower.
The thing is, it’s not just about the way he looks and smells and about the fact I fantasize about him every night. It’s the oddest thing between us. When we’re in the kitchen together and he’s silently making one of his thick soups, because that seems to be his diet staple, it feels like I’ve known him forever. Like that’s what we
are meant to do for the rest of our lives. Sit in a kitchen, make soup, be.
When he leaves again, it always feels like I’m being pushed out of reality and back into some side story that shouldn’t be my life. Hard to explain.
Aside from obsessing about my hostess’ son, I’ve also started ticking items off on Mum’s list. Two, so far. I went and had tea at the Grand, and I made friends with someone I wouldn’t normally make friends with.
Kalina is really nice. Her English is quite limited, but we do girly stuff together like paint our nails or do makeovers and that doesn’t need much talking. She’s really artistic, so way better at all that stuff than I am. It’s like having the little sister I never had but one that is much more talented at being a girl. Which is totally ironic because she’s the one with the pixie cut and the combat boots, a tiny fierce tomboy with huge brown eyes, and I’m the one with the waist-long hair and the lacy tops.
I like a bit of frill. Not too much, I’m pretty much a jeans girl when I’m not working, and a black-skirt-white-shirt one when I am because that’s hotel bar uniform, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like a pretty dress and nice shoes sometimes.
Kalina goes to a language school three times a week and works in a thrift shop another three. You can hardly get into her room because she’s hoarding all sorts of shit in there that she’s bought to take back to Poland. I think she’s got an eye for good vintage stuff. Not sure if she’ll keep it or sell it when she goes home but she’ll need a truck to go back if she carries on like this. She’s staying another two months.
I wish I was.
When I went to the Grand, I took Sheena with me. I wanted to thank her properly for putting me up, but also because I would have felt weird doing High Tea on my own. Halfway through tea, she leaned over and told me I was starting to sound more British by the day. Made me feel really happy, closer to Mum. I’ve felt more contented since I got here than I’ve felt in a long time.
So I’m not sure what is different tonight.
I’m tossing and turning in bed and sleep just won’t come. I’ve had some trouble with jetlag before, but the fresh sea air around here seems to help with that, so I know this is not that.