‘Nora!’ I say, already feeling approximately six thousand per cent more cheerful as her face pops up on my phone. ‘I’ve caught you!’
‘Hi!’ she says – or rather, mouths at me. Her eyes are rather wide and she’s looking slightly terrified. ‘Hang on a sec …’ she adds, still mouthing, before vanishing from the screen for a moment. Everything goes rather wobbly, and then black, before she reappears a couple of moments later, still looking faintly terrified but talking normally. Well, in a loud whisper. ‘Sorry! I’ve literally only just got her down for a nap! In five minutes’ time a bomb could go off in her room and it wouldn’t wake her, but right now a pin might drop in the street outside and she’ll bloody wake up again. I’m just going,’ she adds, ‘up to the top-floor bathroom. It’s the opposite side of the house, so if I lean out of the skylight there, she won’t hear me talking.’
‘Lean out of the skylight?’ I’m slightly alarmed; I’ve only been to Nora’s new house up in Glasgow once, but it’s a four-storey townhouse with a paving-slab patio for a garden. ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, I do it all the time! And frankly, Lib, I’d rather risk plummeting to my death on the patio below than risk waking her up!’ Nora adds, cheerfully. ‘How’s everything down there?’ she asks. ‘I gather you had an evening out with Olly last night?’
‘Yes. Um, did he tell you that, or did—’
And suddenly, I’m taking off.
Literally, I mean: into the air. My feet are leaving the pavement, and I fly up, up, sideways and up … before landing – ow – on my backside on another bit of the pavement about five feet away.
I sprawl there for a moment, too dazed to really understand what’s happened, until I see a man’s face hovering over me.
‘Oh, my God! Are you all right?’
‘Hnh?’
‘Can you move? Can you talk? Do you think anything’s broken? Did you hit your head?’
I don’t know how to respond to any of these questions. So I just say, again, gormlessly, ‘Hnh?’
‘Oh, God, you can’t talk … I’m calling an ambulance … Esti, call an ambulance!’ he says, over his shoulder, to whoever it is who’s with him.
‘No, no, don’t do that!’ I sit bolt upright, and it’s only thanks to his sharp reactions that we don’t end up cracking our foreheads together.
He is, I notice the moment I sit up, incredibly handsome.
I mean, incredibly.
He’s dark-haired, blue-eyed and long-lashed, with skin the colour of vanilla fudge. It’s quite an astonishing combination.
I’m interrupted, though, in my reverie by the sudden appearance of the Esti he just called out to.
‘Everything OK here?’ she asks, sticking her head over the man’s shoulder. ‘What can I do?’
‘Don’t call an ambulance. I can talk! Fine I am. I mean,’ I say, correcting myself from talking like Yoda, or one of the characters from a Dr Seuss book, ‘really, I’m absolutely fine.’
‘But you went right over.’
His accent, like his delicious skin colour, is also hard to place. It’s a little bit American, a little bit British, a little bit … Dutch? Scandinavian? As he starts to help me to my feet, I can feel some impressive muscles in his arms and back. Which makes sense, because he’s wearing running gear and a jacket that says FitRox Training. He must be one of the trainers from the gym just along the road, the one Cass mentioned she’d trained at. And this Esti woman is, presumably, one of his clients – or, more likely, even another trainer, because she’s super-fit-looking, too, with Madonna-esque arms and Ninja Turtle abs visible under the edge of her cropped running top.
‘And you look a bit … pale.’ The personal trainer guy looks worried. ‘I think you should have a hot drink, something with sugar in …’
‘Oh, that’s OK, I was actually just on my way to get milk for tea.’
‘I’ll get you a cup of tea.’
‘That’s all right, honestly.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m buying you a cup of tea. It’s the least I can do.’ He turns to point up to the main road. ‘Starbucks OK?’
‘Yes, sure, but really—’
‘Esti, maybe you could pop up and get some tea?’ he suggests, to super-fit Esti, who is still jogging, slightly annoyingly, on the spot. ‘I’ll wait here with … sorry, I didn’t even get your name before I knocked you into next Tuesday.’
‘Libby.’
‘I’ll wait here with Libby,’ he adds, ‘so she can have a bit of a sit-down for a moment. Here,’ he suggests, guiding me to a low wall outside one of the houses on the street. ‘We’ll just sit here for a moment, and my very kind – er – friend Esti will go and get you something to drink.’
‘Sure,’ says Esti.
Although, come to think of it, it was probably more of a sure? As in are you sure? Because the personal trainer guy gives a little nod of the head, and it’s only then that she jogs off in the direction of Starbucks.
I’m still a bit dazed, as I watch her pert, Lycra-clad buttocks round the corner and disappear.
‘Can we chat a little bit?’ the personal trainer asks. ‘Just so I can reassure myself you don’t have a terrible concussion, or anything equally alarming.’
‘Oh, yes, right.’ I glance at him. Wow. He’s even better-looking, now that I’m upright and a bit more sentient, than I realized. Once you can see past those incredibly bright-blue eyes and that vanilla-fudge skin, you get to see that he’s also got a handsome jawline, and full, soft lips, and … bloody hell, even his ears are attractive. ‘Are you supposed to ask me who the prime minister is, and stuff?’
‘Yeah, that’s the sort of thing. Days of the week might do, too.’
‘Ah. Trouble is, I’m never that good on days of the week even under normal circumstances. I had a head injury about a year ago, and even then I was never sure if I couldn’t name the day of the week because I was concussed, or because I honestly for the life of me can never remember if it’s a Tuesday or a Thursday.’
‘Oh, God, you’ve already had a recent head injury?’ He looks appalled. ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t be getting a cab to the hospital?’
‘I’m honestly fine. Besides, it was a year ago. And it’s Wednesday today. See?’
‘Impressive.’ He smiles at me, looking a little bit less stressed.
I smile back. ‘So, you work on this street, right?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The jacket. You’re a personal trainer, obviously. At FitRox.’
He glances down at his jacket and touches the logo for a moment. ‘That’s … well-spotted.’
‘My sister trained there a while ago, when she thought she might get a spot on Strictly Come Dancing.’
‘How … er … extraordinary.’
‘That she thought she might get a spot on Strictly Come Dancing? Well, in a way, yes, because she can’t really dance for toffee. But she is reasonably well known, so it wasn’t a total shot in the dark, I guess. I mean, she wasn’t just some random fan of the show, thinking she might get given a chance to go on it, or something …’ I’m blithering, I know. It’s the effect very handsome men have on me. ‘So, what’s your name?’ I add, because if I can get him talking, that