Dex shook his head.
‘You cut it up and you can peel the protective film off my laptop.’
He raised a brow. ‘That sounds like some kind of kinky computer geek fetish.’
‘OK, you can’t do it any more.’
Dex laughed. ‘Oh please.’
‘No. You’ve made it too sexual.’ He snorted.
Jessica turned to her screen and started to do some work. Dex did the same, leaning over every now and then to see what she was doing.
The sun was streaming in the window. Dex kept yawning. Every time the WiFi dropped out he sat back on his stool and peered round the room.
‘What are you looking at?’ Jessica said in the end, unable to hold it in any longer.
‘Nothing. It’s just funny, that’s all.’
‘What’s funny.’
‘That we’ve been here mere hours and you’ve managed to make your room exactly the same as your office. Like, exactly the same. The books, the scarf, the make-up bag, that hand cream, the way the glass is on the coaster.’
Jessica looked around and realised he was right. It was pretty much the same as her bedroom at home as well. She hadn’t realised she needed such familiarity and structure around her to feel comfortable. It was as if she had become so self-sufficient it was to the point of robotic. Carrying her life around like a snail. She frowned. ‘Well, that can’t be good, can it?’
Dex shrugged. ‘I think it’s sweet. A bit anal, but sweet. But that’s what you’re like, isn’t it?’
Jessica made a face. ‘Don’t say it like it’s a given.’
Dex looked confused. ‘Well it is, isn’t it?’
‘No it’s not. Anal but sweet? That’s not how someone wants to be described.’
‘Why not? It’s what you are.’
‘It’s not a fact.’
Dex shrugged. ‘It kind of is.’
‘Well, I don’t want it to be.’
He half grinned. ‘Well do something about it then.’
Jessica shook her head and, ignoring the challenge in his eyes, went back to her computer.
They worked again in silence.
After a couple of minutes she said, ‘Oh, and what’s this about Miles coming? Is Miles coming? Have you invited Miles?’
Dex smirked, keeping his eyes on the screen. ‘Maybe.’
She saw the delight on his face reflected in his laptop screen and kicked herself for asking. She looked back at her own without saying anything more, refusing to give him the satisfaction of asking again.
After a couple more minutes Dex said, ‘It’s fun working next to you. I like it. We should do it more often.’
‘No we shouldn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘You breathe too loudly.’
He snorted a laugh. ‘I do not breathe loudly. I breathe. I have to stay alive.’
‘It’s distracting.’
‘Remember that whole anal but sweet thing?’ he said.
Jessica turned to look at him, one brow raised.
‘Perfect example.’
She scoffed.
‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ Dex said with a grin, then he leant forward and peeled the film straight off her laptop screen before she could stop him.
Jessica gasped. Dex laughed, waving the sheet of plastic triumphantly. So she reached over and, grabbing his dad’s credit card from the table next to him, she chopped it up with the scissors from her makeshift pen pot and chucked the four little bits into her waste bin.
Dex jumped up from his seat and stared down at the bin, his hand on his chest. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’
‘You’re much better without it, Dex.’
He looked forlornly at the quarters of credit card.
Jessica patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re much less vacuous without the money.’
He glanced up at her, then laughed. ‘It’s all coming out today, isn’t it?’
‘Let’s finish this work,’ she said.
When they’d wrapped it all up and sent it off, Jessica turned to Dex and said, ‘I don’t really think you’re vacuous. You used to be, but you’re not any more. You’re probably the most solid person I know. Like, inside,’ she said, ‘you’re good.’
He looked at her, surprised.
She shrugged. ‘I just, you know, thought I should say that.’
Dex nodded. ‘Thank you, Jessica.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, closing her laptop. ‘You’re now welcome to say that I’m not anal and sweet. If you wanted.’
Dex thought about it for a bit, studying her with narrowed eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t need to say that.’
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ she huffed, bashing him on the arm. ‘Take it back.’
He laughed. ‘But then I’d be lying.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘OK, Jessica, you are not anal and sweet.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, picking up his laptop and standing up. ‘Although really you absolutely are,’ he added, before jogging out of the door with a grin.
Alone in her old lemon scented room Eve checked her phone. A text from Peter saying ‘That’s good’ in response to her previous ‘Landed safely x’. He hadn’t put an x. But then Peter never put an x. He had whole dinner party discussions about the fact it was an x not a kiss and that it was completely unnecessary and ridiculous to include on a text message let alone an email. She often wondered if the script he was writing was full of rants about the misuse of letters in instant messaging. He’d asked her to read it once a couple of years ago and she’d been so sleep deprived and so stressed with the twins that it had taken her two weeks to get round to it by which time he’d changed his mind and gone into her email and deleted it from her inbox and then her deleted items.
She wanted to write something back; her fingers hovered over the keys of her phone, but she didn’t know what.
In the end she thought it best to leave her phone where it was, get changed into more weather appropriate attire, and get outside to stop herself from dwelling on it all.
Wearing a pair of skinny blue jeans cut off at the knee, a yellow vest top that was showing its age, and an equally dilapidated pair of espadrilles that her daughter Maisey said made her feet look like lumps of cheese, Eve made her way out of the hotel, across the terrace, and down through the lemon grove in the direction of the lake.
The scent of citrus intensified the closer she got, the huge waxy great lemons hanging heavy from the branches, all knobbly and pitted. She wanted to reach up and take a bite straight through the skin; feel her eyes water as she squeezed the juice into her mouth.
It made her think of the first perfume she’d ever made—from a bag of Limoncello lemons Silvia had sent as congratulations on having the