One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

Author:Jojo Moyes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ed

Ed Nicholls had thought that spending eight hours in a damp car park was the worst possible way to spend a night. Then he’d concluded that the worst way to spend a night was hoicking your guts up in a stationary RV somewhere near Derby. He was wrong on both counts. The worst way to spend a night, it turned out, was in a tiny room a few feet from a slightly drunk, good-looking woman who wanted to have sex with you and whom you had, like an idiot, rebuffed.

Jess fell asleep, or pretended to: it was impossible to tell. Ed sat in the world’s most uncomfortable chair, staring out of the narrow gap in the curtains at the black moonlit sky, his right leg going to sleep, and his left foot freezing cold where it wouldn’t fit under the blanket. He tried not to think about the fact that if he hadn’t leaped out of that bed, he could be there, curled around her right now, his lips pressed against her skin, those lithe legs tangled with his . . .

No.

Either (a) the sex would have been terrible, they would have been mortified afterward, and the five hours spent traveling to the Olympiad would have been excruciating. Or (b) the sex would have been fine, they would have woken up embarrassed, and the journey would still have been excruciating. Worse, they could have ended up with (c): the sex would have been off the scale (he slightly suspected this one was correct—he kept getting a hard-on just thinking about her mouth), they would develop feelings for each other based purely on sexual chemistry, and (d) would then have to adjust to the fact that they had nothing in common and were just completely unsuited in every other way, or (e) they would find they were not entirely unsuited, but then he would be sent to prison. And none of these considered that Jess had actual kids, kids who needed stability in their lives and not someone such as he: he liked children as a concept, in the same way that he liked the Indian subcontinent—that is, it was nice to know it existed, but he had no knowledge about it and had never felt any real desire to spend time there.

And all this was without the added factor that he was obviously crap at relationships, had only just come out of the two most disastrous examples anyone could imagine, and the odds of his getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think of how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.

And the whole horse conversation had been, frankly, weird.

And these points could be supplemented by the wilder possibilities that he had completely failed to consider. What if Jess was a psycho, and all that stuff about not wanting a relationship was just a way to reel him in? She didn’t seem that sort of girl, sure.

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