He shakes his head. “No, just you.”
Thank God.I inhale and exhale.
But it’s Davey who opens the conversation up. “I really like you, Hannah.”
My stomach does that tightening thing again, but in such a good way. I’m going to get abs without even trying. Saying it when drunk is one thing, but he’s sober now. “I really like you too,” I say, “I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can’t wait, either. I picture you a lot, y’know? I wonder what you’re doing when I wake up and you’ve already begun your day. I think about you long after you’ve gone to sleep. Is that crazy?”
I exhale a long, happy sigh. “No.”
The light from his fridge shines in his face and he fumblesaround, the camera briefly showing me that the contents within are dwindling. He’s winding down his life there, piece by piece, getting ready to start over here.
“We’ve already had this time,” I say, “and I feel we know each other quite well.”
He cuts in: “I think we know each other really well.”
I nod. “We do. But I’m curious about so much.”
“Such as?”
“What you look like in the flesh?”
He holds the phone out at arm’s length and says, “Like this.”
“I know, but it’s the little things. For instance,” I say and then prop my head up on my elbow, “I have a little scar by my eyebrow, where I fell over when I was five on a marble step. It could have been so much worse, but there’s a little reminder on my face forever of what happens when you run around hotel stairs with too many Barbies in your arms and don’t hold on to the banisters.”
I show him up close and he nods. “I can’t wait to discover all these things about you,” he says. And then, “My right arm—a bone sticks out a little further than it should, by my wrist. It got set a bit strange when I broke my arm when I was eleven.”
It’s these little things I want to know. “I can’t wait to find out the rest—all the things that make youyou—when you get here. I want to know what it’s like to walk alongside you. I want to know how many steps I have to take to keep up with your giant stride.”
“My giant stride?” His six-foot-two frame shakes with laughter. “I promise to go slow or I’ll just hold your hand and pull you alongside me.”
I don’t tell him I want to know what it’s like to kiss him, whether I’ll have to get on tiptoes to reach him or whether he’ll lean down toward me. Maybe a mixture of both. I look at his mouth, his lips, and want to kiss him now. Will we kiss when we meet?
He must be thinking the same thing as he asks, “Will you meet me at the airport?”
“Yes,” I say instantly. “Would you like me to?”
“Yes,” he says.
By the time we’ve talked about his flight times and he’s promised to send me his flight number for me to track his landing, it’s about three in the morning for me, and I need to get up for work in a little under four hours. We hang up in our usual way, a simple but emotive good night that seems to be laced with so much from each of us—so much hope, so much of everything.
Chapter 9
Davey and Ihardly speak over the following days and instead send an array of poorly timed texts that neither of us manages to answer in any semblance of time. I have two lots of birthday drinks to go to this week, and work is so crazy I barely get out on time, but I don’t mind. All this only makes time pass more quickly, and the countdown speeds up to his arrival.
He messages that he’s sorry he keeps putting his phone down and finding my messages hours later. He’s in a frenzy of finishing work, packing boxes that are going to his parents’ garage for now, and struggling to work out those final few items he wants to bring with him and those that he’s going to donate to charity. He says he’s only bringing two rucksacks of clothes and it’s too expensive to ship all his furniture over, so he’s going to leave it all; that he’s not looking forward to going shopping for kitchen items and furniture. I tell him about the equal joy and pain of shopping in Ikea, and he replies that they have those in Texas too. I had no idea.
He messages me early one morning, and I know it’s the middle of the night when he’s sent it.Do you want to have a date night?he asks and I inhale slowly and exhale even more slowly, merely reading the word “date.” He seems to be tentatively putting a name to what we’re doing. And I, equally tentatively, agree.
He asks what I’m doing tonight, and although Miranda hassuggested that we meet for drinks—just her and me, for a change—I blow her off, which I hate myself for. But when a fit, kind man asks you on a video date (which I know is not a thing), you simply have to go for it. At least I don’t lie to her. I tell her what I’m doing, and Miranda tells me to “crack on” and that drinks will keep for another time. I’m so grateful. Davey arranges to ring me much earlier than usual. He’s suggested that we watch a movie together, and I’ve no idea how that’s going to work, but he told me it was “ladies’ choice,” so I selected my favorite film and then worried about my choice. All. Day. Long.
I’ve dressed up, because it’s a date and I’m always either in pajamas or my weekend “bumming around” clothes, or even my office wear, when we speak. I rush home from work, put on lip gloss and a navy jumpsuit with spaghetti straps. I don’t bother with shoes because I’m indoors, but I do bother with perfume, even though Davey can’t smell it.
He calls at the time he says he will. We ease in with our respective updates on how our days have been and what we’ve been doing. Davey says he’s on the “homestretch”—mentally in London, but physically still present in the US. Somehow we end up on the subject of our future selves: where we see ourselves settling down. I still have no idea who asked this question first. I think it was him, because he waits for me to answer.
“Kent,” I say. “It doesn’t have to be Whitstable, but around that way. It’s easy to commute to London for work, but I suppose it really depends on who I end up with and where they want to be.”
