‘Shall we just go?’ he asked, his eyes glowing and his voice gruff. I nodded and let him pull me roughly to my feet. His hand burned into the small of my back as we wandered out across the park. I didn’t want to drag him, but it almost felt as though he was walking extra slowly, dragging it out, making me wait. But I couldn’t wait. I squeezed his hand gently, but he just squeezed back and gave me a promising smile.
‘You’re in a rush?’ Tyler held me back as I made for the gate at something between a canter and a gallop.
I didn’t have a response that didn’t make me sound like a massive slag, so I went with the truth ‘Aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘Good point,’ he replied, pulling my chin upwards and kissing me hard. I felt my legs completely melt away, there was nothing else in the world apart from me and Tyler and, fingers bloody crossed, his apartment in less than ten minutes.
My second visit to Tyler’s was just as educational as the first. More than anything else, as I lay in his huge, soft bed, watching him doze, it was a complete wake-up call as to how long mine and Mark’s relationship had been dead. I couldn’t actually remember the last time we’d had sex in the daytime, but it really was like riding a bike. Not that I ride a bike. And it was remarkable just how bendy you can really be if you put your mind to it. I slipped silently out of the bedroom and recovered my knickers and top for a trip to the bathroom. After some quick reparatory work to my mascara and a cold flannel pressed to my stubble-grazed chin, I did the obligatory ‘check out the bathroom cabinet’ thing.
The first thing I noticed was that, for a man, he had a lot of stuff. It had taken me months of hint dropping and several advertorials in GQ for Mark to even start using Nivea for Men aftershave balm, but Tyler had more products than I did. Shampoo, conditioner, hair mask, gel, mousse, wax, eye cream, scrub, face wash, moisturizer with sunscreen, night cream with retinol. I wasn’t sure whether to be intimidated and impressed, but then I remembered how great he always looked, and settled on accepting. Maybe I should look into some of this stuff. Beyond the creams, gels, lotions and potions were several bottles of painkillers, some off the shelf, some prescription. Anyone can have painkillers, I told myself, I still had tonnes of Cocodamol from when I had my wisdom teeth out. Right at the back, on the top shelf, was a black travel wash bag. With a quick look at the door, I whipped it down. I couldn’t help myself. If he had cute little travel-sized toiletries, I was moving in. But it wasn’t full of men’s toiletries. It was a morning-after kit. For a woman. Deodorant, a new toothbrush, eye make-up remover and Jesus, even Tampax.
I replaced the bag and sat back down on the edge of the bath. So, he really did date around a lot. Reality check. I had absolutely no room for complaint here, I was dating someone else and hadn’t really told him about it, maybe he was dating other girls too, but something about the whole thing just felt off with me. The idea of dating two people and sleeping with two people seemed mutually exclusive. Perhaps if I’d slept with Alex I’d feel differently, one way or another.
I ran my hands under the cold water tap to cool down. There was just one problem with that theory. I hadn’t slept with Alex, and for the longest time, I’d had virtually no sex life at all. But with Tyler, it was like, God, I didn’t even have anything to compare it with. Even when it had been good with Mark it had never, ever left me shaking from head to toe, unable to breathe but unable to stop. As soon as I was with Tyler, the rest of the world just melted away. It was utterly intoxicating, but somewhere inside it didn’t feel real, didn’t feel permanent. I tried to think of what Jenny would tell me, that I was sabotaging my own happiness, trying to find a reason not just to enjoy a fun relationship for what it was.
‘Angela?’ Tyler knocked gently on the bathroom door. ‘You OK?’
‘Yep,’ I looked around for inspiration, finding nothing, ‘I think I got a bit sunburned, I was just cooling down.’
‘I have some lotion in there somewhere,’ he said, peering around the door. ‘Want me to find it out?’
‘Yes, please,’ I nodded. He was so wonderful. So what if he was seeing other girls? When he was with me, he was only with me.
‘Let me see.’ he took a large bottle of after sun from a cabinet and squeezed some out into his hands. ‘Where’s the sunburn? You don’t look red.’
‘Oh, it’s my back,’ I said, pulling the shoulder of my top down an inch. It wasn’t red because it wasn’t burned, but it was the best lie I had at the time. ‘It’s just really sore. I don’t think the red has come out yet.’
‘I don’t want to get this on your clothes,’ he held up cream-covered hands and nodded at my top. ‘You’d better take that off.’
‘I suppose I had,’ I smiled, trying not to think about what I had found in his cabinet. Not thinking was all the easier as he slid his cool hands onto my warm skin, massaging in the after sun.
‘Better?’ he asked, rubbing gently up and down my back.
‘Better,’ I said softly, feeling his hands slide all the way down to the waistline of my knickers. His thumbs hooked under the elastic as he pulled them down gently.
‘I was thinking,’ he whispered into my ear, his bare chest sticking to the lotion on my back. ‘If your back is burned, you’d better go on top.’
He was a very, very thoughtful man.
The afternoon turned into the evening and the evening turned into night with nothing to do but each other. After we’d finished with the bathroom floor, we headed back into the bedroom for more lazy fumbling and dozing and eventually, surfaced in the kitchen after christening his new granite work surface. Some hours later, I found myself curled up on his sofa, wearing a vintage Yankees shirt and eating Chinese takeaway. Apparently it was cute that I called it takeaway. I loved that it was cute. Patronizing, but very sweet. If everything I did naturally was cute to him, this was going to be really easy for me.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, looking around at his impeccably designed penthouse. Everything was stainless steel and shiny and new. Apart from where I’d been, obviously.
‘Ah, what, two years?’ he mused, wandering over to the kitchen and rifling through an invisible drawer. ‘Why? You don’t like it?’
‘I love it,’ I replied, willing him not to pull out a bottle opener. ‘Did you design it yourself?’
‘Like I have the time,’ he shook his head and pulled out a bottle opener. ‘It pretty much came this way.’
‘Oh,’ I frowned, resting my chin on the arm of the square sofa. The apartment was gorgeous, totally luxe, but now it felt sort of impersonal. I wondered if every apartment in the block had the same art on the walls.
‘You want to stay over?’ Tyler asked, wandering over from the kitchen with the open bottle of wine. ‘I don’t have to be anywhere in the morning.’
‘It is sort of late,’ I said, waving the wine away. I’d had quite enough for one day. For one week actually. ‘Oh, but I don’t have any stuff.’
The words were out of my mouth before I could take them back. I waited for him to offer me his secret sleep-over stash.
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ he said, settling back onto the sofa and taking custody of his remote control. Didn’t matter to me, I couldn’t work the damn thing. ‘But I have some girl stuff. I’m not sure what though, my mom left it last time she stayed over.’
‘Your mum?’ I smiled at his blushes. ‘Now who’s cute?’
‘She lives in Florida,’ he said, pointing towards a small family picture hidden up high on a shelf. The whole brood. Wow. ‘But since my dad died she comes to visit a lot.’
‘That’s really lovely,’ I said, snuggling down against him. ‘I think it’s great when people are close to their parents.’
‘You close to yours?’ he asked, flicking through the channels.