found Charlie hugs reassuring. He was so tall, he even dwarfed me when I wore heels and I was five ten. In bare feet, it was like being cuddled by a considerably cuter Bigfoot. I felt his chin on the top of my head and heard a purr-like noise emanate from his entire being.
‘Let’s go back to bed …’ His hands slid down my back and up underneath my borrowed T-shirt. ‘This is the first time I’ve been happy to not have a job since we got fired.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, writhing out of his reach and grabbing hold of both of his hands before I got carried away. Again. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
Even though I was congratulating myself for listening to my brain instead of my vagina, it was still hard not to fall right into Charlie’s arms and let him carry me back to bed. This was what happened when you didn’t have sex forever and then had all of the sex at once – you lost control of every single sensible impulse in your body.
‘A meeting?’ Charlie casually pushed his erection down like a bad dog. ‘Who have you got a meeting with? At this time in the morning?’
‘It’s an agent,’ I replied, my eyes squarely locked on his. ‘So … I was taking photos in Hawaii. For a magazine.’
‘You were taking photos?’ he asked, finally leaving his penis alone. ‘Like a photographer?’
‘Just like a photographer,’ I nodded and looked at my hands. How did I keep this as brief as possible? ‘I didn’t just decide to go to Hawaii. I went to take pictures of this man for Gloss magazine. He owns a fancy department store in New York and he’s retiring so they were doing a feature.’
‘And you were the photographer?’ Charlie crossed his arms, making his biceps pop. ‘You took the pictures?’
‘I took the pictures,’ I said, not looking at his arms at all. ‘I was the photographer.’
‘But you’re not a photographer,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re a creative director at an ad agency.’
‘Technically, I’m more of a photographer than a creative director right now,’ I replied. ‘You know I was always interested in photography.’
‘Do I?’
‘Anyway, they really like the photos – the magazine, and Al, the guy I was taking the photos of. So now he wants me to go to Milan and take some more photos for a project he’s working on. I guess it’s a career retrospective or something?’
‘Woah.’ Charlie breathed out, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. ‘That’s bloody amazing. Mental but amazing.’
‘I can see how you would get to mental,’ I said, wiggling one big toe and then the other. ‘But I really love taking photos and it turns out I’m good at it.’
‘Are you going to go?’ he asked. ‘To Milan?’
I scrunched up my face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘I want a cup of tea,’ I answered, standing up and walking straight into the kitchen. I knew his flat as well as I knew him and before he had even followed me, I had two cups on the counter, his instant boil kettle bubbling away.
‘You always want a cup of tea,’ Charlie said, opening the fridge and taking out the milk. ‘But do you really want to do it? This photo thing?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ I couldn’t look at him while I spoke. Why was this so hard? I placed a teabag in each cup and felt my eyes prickle with the tears of an awkward conversation.
‘When do you have to make a decision?’ he asked. This was why he was a great account manager, always on the details. ‘When would you have to go? Do you know how long you’d be away?’
‘Soon,’ I said, splashing my moo juice onto the kitchen top. ‘And I’d be away for a little bit.’
‘And how long is a little bit?’ He put the milk back in the fridge and took his tea. ‘Three days? Four?’
I stirred my tea with a teaspoon that didn’t match any of his other cutlery and watched the milk swirl away into an evenly coloured cuppa.
‘I’m not sure.’
I was lying. I did know. Agent Veronica had sent me several long and detailed emails about the job, each with an increasing degree of foul language. Agent Veronica did not believe in mincing words.
The job would take at least three months, probably more. The rest of July, August, September and some of October. I could easily be away until Christmas. Stood there in Charlie’s kitchen in my pants, holding a hot cup of tea, everything seemed to slow down to a complete standstill and I couldn’t quite seem to find the right words to tell him that. So I didn’t tell him anything. It was a serious problem I appeared to have developed.
‘Sounds like an amazing opportunity,’ Charlie said, heaping mounds of white sugar into his mug. I wasn’t allowed to put sugar in Charlie’s tea, I never added enough. ‘I mean, you never went travelling or anything after uni. It might be fun.’
‘It’s not just as easy as packing a bag and getting on a plane.’ I breathed in and felt the world shift back to a normal speed, rattling off the excuses I’d been telling myself, every time the tiniest buzz of excitement swelled up in my stomach. ‘I don’t have anywhere to live, I don’t have any money, I don’t even have a camera. And yes, the pictures from Hawaii worked out but this is a much bigger deal. It’s not a fun thing, it’s a proper job that a real photographer would kill for. I honestly don’t know if I’m up to it.’
‘You, Tess Brookes, are up to anything you put your mind to,’ Charlie said, his dark brown eyes clear and resolute. ‘You know that. Or at least I know that. How many times do I have to tell you?’
I looked up at him with a half-smile hidden behind my mug. Of course, he had to go and remind me that he wasn’t just a great shag and my lifelong crush, but my best friend as well.
‘A camera is easy enough to get, isn’t it? And you haven’t bloody shown me the pictures from Hawaii yet but I don’t believe you would do anything less than a perfect job. You always do.’
‘You mean because I’m OCD?’ I asked.
‘I mean because you work hard and you’re good at whatever you do,’ he said, splashing his tea around his bare feet. ‘As for the not-having-anywhere-to-live thing – you could always stay here.’
‘I’m not a very good roommate, as I’m sure Amy would tell you,’ I said, tearing off some kitchen towel and wiping up his mess, vaguely impressed in the back of my mind that he actually had kitchen towel. ‘And really, your spare room isn’t big enough to swing a cat. Plus you’ve got a surfboard in it. When was the last time you surfed?’
‘I didn’t mean move in as a roommate,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t want you in the spare room.’
I stood up slowly, clutching the grubby kitchen towel. His floors needed cleaning. ‘What?’
‘How’s your tea?’ he asked.
Leaning against his kitchen cabinets, resplendent in a creased-to-buggery boy’s T-shirt, with bird’s nest hair and a handful of dirty paper towel, I searched for the right words. Charlie crossed his legs, leaning against the fridge in an impressively casual display.
‘Did you just ask me to move in with you, in a non-roommate capacity?’ I asked, scrunching the paper towel into a tiny ball in my fist. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’d say “I know it seems a bit quick” but it doesn’t.’ He put his tea down and took the paper towel out of my hand before throwing it at the bin. And missing. ‘I’ve had two weeks to think about this and it was two weeks too many. I know how I feel about you. You’re my best mate and I reckon last night proved the amazing sex wasn’t just a one off, so why mess about?’