“I know. I know. Weird.”
“And looks like her, a bit, too?”
“A bit,” she agrees. “Yes.”
“Funny,” he says, plucking his coat from a coat rack, “that you’ve found yourself in a lookalike family.”
“A what?”
“Well, he looks a bit like me, too, doesn’t he?”
His tone is light but Laurel blanches.
“Er, no,” she says, “not really. Just the hair. And the clothes.”
Paul looks at her fondly, realizing that he’s crossed one of her many lines, the lines he knows so well. “Yes,” he says. “That’s true. I like him,” he adds conciliatorily. “He seems like a good man.”
“Well,” she says, briskly, “it’s early days yet. We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Yes.” He smiles. “Of course, there’s still plenty of time for him to prove himself to be an utter psychopath. Plenty of time.”
She laughs. It’s nice talking to someone who knows her better than anyone else in the world. It’s nice talking to Paul.
“You know,” he continues, “you know you deserve this, don’t you? You know you’re allowed it?”
She shrugs, feeling a rush of heat up the back of her sinuses. “Maybe,” she manages quietly. “Maybe.”
23
Laurel pulls herself from Floyd’s bed at eight o’clock the following morning. He groans and turns to glance at his bedside alarm clock. “Come back,” he growls, throwing an arm across the bed. “It’s the weekend. It’s too early!”
“I need to get home,” she says, wrapping her hand around his where it lies on the wrinkled sheets.
“No you don’t.”
She laughs. “Yes I do! I told you, remember. I’m going for lunch at my friends’ house.”
He feigns defeat and throws himself back onto his pillow. “Use me for sex and then just abandon me,” he says. “See if I care.”
“I can come back later?” she says. “If you can find it in your heart to let me, after my betrayal.”
He curls his pale naked body across the bed and he grasps Laurel’s hands inside his, pulls them to his mouth and kisses each of her knuckles in turn. “I would really, really love it if you came back later. You know,” he says, running her hands against the soft stubble on his cheeks, “I’m getting quite close to the can’t-live-without-you zone. Really, really quite close. Is that pathetic?”
The pronouncement is both surprising and completely predictable. She can’t process it fast enough and there is a small but prominent silence.
“Oh God,” he says, “have I blown it? Have I broken a rule that someone somewhere wrote about dating that I don’t know about?”
“No,” Laurel says, bringing his hands to her mouth and kissing them very hard. “Just—I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to matters of the heart. I can feel things, but never say them. And want things but then not want them. I’m...”
“A pain in the arse?”
“Yes.” She smiles, relieved. “Yes. That’s exactly what I am. But for what it’s worth, you are absolutely allowed to not want to live without me. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”
“Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll just wait here patiently for your return and hope that by the time you get back you won’t be able to live without me either.”
She laughs and extricates her hands from his.
“See,” he says, “you took your hands from mine. Is this how it is destined always to be for us? You take your hands from mine? You close the door without looking back? You put the phone down before I do? You leave first? You have the last word? I linger behind, in your wake?”