Michael Blooming Bublé is playing in the background again.
It only takes me and Alex a moment to clear up the table, shoving the rubbish and recycling in the bins, and loading up the ancient dishwasher.
‘My last place didn’t have one,’ Alex says, unwrapping a dishwasher tablet and shoving it in. ‘This thing might be prehistoric, but it’s a luxury. No more waking up in the morning to last night’s dishes.’
‘Were you in a house-share before?’ I ask.
He pauses for a second. ‘Mmm, sort of.’
I get the feeling there’s more to it than he’s saying, but I don’t want to push it.
‘And you used to work with Becky?’
I am standing by the sink, rinsing my hands, aware he’s standing close beside me and putting glasses back on the shelf. I can feel the heat of his body and it makes the tiny hairs on my arms stand up. This is the tequila talking, I think. Tequila, and the fact that I have been single for a year and the only reason I fancy him is because I’ve been told there’s no relationships allowed in this house so my brain is being contrary. He is Alex, a friend of my friend Becky, and my new housemate. And he is one hundred per cent off limits. I take a step sideways, drying my hands on the dishtowel and spending an excessive amount of time hanging it back up, neatly.
‘I used to work with Becky, yeah,’ says Alex, after a long pause.
I turn around.
‘Turns out that thirty is the perfect time to have my first oh my God what am I doing with my life crisis.’
I find myself smiling. ‘Me too.’
‘So she’s found herself a houseful of strays. That’s very Becky, isn’t it? She likes to think she’s all corporate law and hard as nails, but I reckon she’s just as much of an old hippy as her mum. So what brings you here?’ he asks.
‘Oh God. It’s a long story.’
Alex takes four limes from the fridge, then passes me two and a kitchen knife. ‘Chop these, then, and tell all. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one making what everyone thinks is the biggest mistake of my life.’
He’s taken a lemon zester and made a stack of bright green furls of lime zest, and he’s putting them all together in a little grassy heap. I realise I’ve stopped chopping and I’m staring at his hands like some sort of weirdo.
‘So I did English literature at uni. I’ve always loved books, and I used to dream of living in London and working in a publishing house, but it just seemed like you had to know someone in the business or have enough money to get an internship and work for nothing, and I had student loans to pay off, and bills to pay, and …’ I pause, thinking of the responsibility of making sure that Nanna Beth and Grandpa were okay, because my mum was never around. I take a deep breath. ‘Anyway, so I’d pretty much given up on that idea – I did look, but the money was terrible, and there was no way I could afford anywhere in London to live that wasn’t basically a broom cupboard.’
He laughs. ‘I actually know someone who lived in a cupboard. His bed literally folded down at night, then he’d fold it up, close the door, and go off to work.’
‘Exactly.’ Our eyes meet for a second and we laugh at the idea of it. London is strange.
‘And then Becky came along?’
‘Not quite. Basically, I was helping look after my grandpa and then he died.’
‘Oh.’ He turns to look at me, his brown eyes gentle. ‘I’m sorry.’
I shake my head and curl my fingers into my palm, because I’m still at the stage where tears sneak up unexpectedly, and alcohol helps them along. ‘It’s okay. Anyway, my grandma – Nanna Beth – decided that she wanted to move into a sheltered accommodation place, and I’d been staying in their spare room.’ I smile, as I always do, thinking about her. Everyone should have a grandma like mine. ‘And then – when I’d moved back in with my mother, temporarily, Becky called and asked if I’d be interested in joining her house-share. My Nanna Beth kept telling me I should follow my dreams and do what I really wanted to because we only get one life, and I was trying to convince myself that actually, I was perfectly happy. Then I saw a job in The Bookseller – because I couldn’t help looking, even though I knew it wasn’t ever going to happen – and I thought I’d apply even though I had no chance, and I still can’t believe they’ve given me it. And—’ I stop and draw breath. It’s all come out in a huge garbled sentence, just the same way that it all happened. ‘One minute there I was thinking about it, and wondering how I was going to find somewhere to live and deal with my mother, and then next thing—’
‘Here we are. That feels like fate,’ Alex says, finishing my spoken and unspoken sentences.
‘It does, a bit,’ I say, trying to make a joke of it. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh I was all set. Law career on the up, nice – tiny – flat in Stokey, the lot. But I knew something was missing.’
I chop the limes into pieces, waiting for him to carry on.
‘Anyway, I kept going for a while, but it was nagging away at me. I went into law to make a difference, but I realised that most of my life was going to be spent behind a desk pushing paper around, and it was boring me to death. And – some stuff happened.’ He pauses for a second, and then says. ‘And here I am.’
‘So you’re not doing law now?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. That’s how I knew Becky – we worked together. But unlike most other people, she was brilliant when I told her I was giving up. You need a friend like that on your side.’
‘I agree,’ I say, thinking of her insistence that I come and stay here, and the ridiculously low rent she’d suggested. I’d looked up Rightmove to see how much it would cost to rent a place like this, and I’d almost fainted. Basically a month’s rent for a house this size was my annual publishing salary. When I’d mentioned it, Becky had just snorted and said something about redressing the balance, which had sounded suspiciously like something her mother would have said, so maybe the hippy stuff had rubbed off a bit after all.
‘So,’ I say, wincing slightly as a bit of lime juice squirts up and hits me in the face. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Training to be a nurse,’ Alex says.
‘No way.’ I put down the knife and look at him. ‘That’s amazing.’
‘Yeah.’ Alex gives me that same lopsided smile and looks relieved. ‘That’s not quite the reaction I got when I told people. It was more like: Oh my God, why are you giving up a job that pays megabucks to be treated like crap, working for a failing NHS?’
Not only is he gorgeous, but he’s noble and ethical as well. He’s like a unicorn, or something.
‘Well I think what you’re doing is brilliant.’
Alex tips the limes into a cocktail shaker and looks at me, his face serious. ‘Thanks, Jess.’
I feel a bit wibbly. Like we’ve had a bit of a moment here together. Like we’ve bonded.
I pass him a glass, and we drink our cocktails and look out of the window at the Notting Hill street. He looks at me for a moment, just as I’m glancing at him.
For a second, our eyes meet again, and something inside me gives the sort of fizzing sensation that I’ve read about in books (oh, so many books) and never once felt in real life, not even in the four years I was with Neil, and he and I had talking about getting married.
I’m almost thirty, and I’d pretty much accepted that my secret love of terrible,