[2007] Pillow Talk by Freya North

Author:Freya North [North, Freya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Humorous, Romance, Love Stories, Contemporary Women, London (England), Sleepwalking
ISBN: 9781402254468
Google: zEbrg9qpsZ0C
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Published: 2007-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Milk? Sugar?

Just black, please.

‘Nice place,’ said Arlo. ‘How did you come by it?’

‘It belongs to Charlton Squire.’

‘Who? Sounds straight from the pages of a Brontë novel.’

‘Hardly. He was named after Bobby and Jack. He's a famous jeweller who sometimes I work for and he has a gallery where I sell some of my pieces. He owns this place. He's from around here.’

Arlo thought for a split second. Well, it had to be asked. ‘Is he your boyfriend?’

‘He's gay,’ Petra said, pleased to have been asked. Now ask me if I have a boyfriend, then I can say no.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

‘No.’

As she sipped coffee, she begged herself to enquire if he had a girlfriend but she dreaded an affirmative answer and left the question unasked.

‘Do you want to see the studio?’ Petra suggested because there's only so much gazing into coffee cups that two people can do. She led Arlo through the dark garden.

‘Is this yours?’ Arlo asked, putting down his mug and picking up some copper Petra had been working on.

‘Yes, it's a rough. I plan to do it in white gold when I can afford the material.’

‘It's beautiful.’ Arlo looked at it intently, turning it this way and that. ‘I remember watching you with your pots – great thunking things they were, and you so tiny.’

Petra's turn to redden. She sipped loudly at her coffee, now gaggingly cold.

As they stood there, the workbench still between them like some benign chaperone, the time gap seeming to diminish with every new moment, a natural ease increasing, they shared a glance. They liked what they saw and what they saw was transmuted into a feeling. The comfort of strangers who somehow know each other so well. In a glance, so much could be said.

‘Will our past be enough?’ Petra whispered, her eyes drawn to his.

‘I think it's a really good foundation,’ Arlo whispered back, dismissing the negativity he'd felt last night as a senseless byproduct of insomnia.

Slowly, she reached out to him; her arm, her hand, her fingers – like a swan unfurling its neck. They touched fingertips before interlocking their hands. The contact, the affection; a connection that made communication easy.

‘I wonder why we never—’ Arlo stopped.

‘I've been wondering about that,’ Petra said.

‘I suppose logistics played its part,’ Arlo mused. ‘I traipsed in to school from Potters Bar – did you know that?’

Petra cast her mind back. Reluctantly, she had to shake her head. However much she felt she knew about Arlo, or remembered from seventeen years ago, she had to acknowledge there was much she might have forgotten or not known about at all.

‘Maybe that's why – you know – you and me, we never.’ He paused and shrugged. Petra nodded, felt bolstered again. ‘But there again, do you remember how people not in the same school year seemed either much younger or way older?’ Arlo smiled wistfully. ‘And it's different nowadays – schoolkids can flirt by email and text. They have their own phones for privacy and independence.

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