“Are you fucking kidding me?” Milla said into one of those random silences that fell in crowded rooms.
Billy choked on a swallow of Guinness. Heads turned at the tables in their vicinity.
“Sorry,” Milla apologized to the room in general.
Kaitlin leaned over her shoulder. “Is that from...?”
“Lamborghini Man? Yes, yes, it is.” She sat in the ready position, thumbs poised over the keyboard, considering her options. She’d snapped a photo of his car before she knew her blind date was sitting in it. She could post it with the registration tag blurred. Compensating much? would make a perfect tag.
“What’s going on?” Charlie said, standing by the table.
“Milla’s date texted her,” Elsa said.
Charlie lifted an eyebrow. “Apologizing for being an arse, I assume.”
Milla showed him the text. The smile disappeared from his mouth, and the muscles around his eyes tightened; in an instant Charlie went from being a good-natured artist willing to offer opinions on outfits to the girls who shared his house to someone who looked like he’d pull out a knife in an alley. And there’s the East End boy, she thought.
“It’s no big deal, Charlie,” she said.
“It means whore. Bitch. It’s a big fucking deal.”
“It happens,” she said, and showed him the tweet with the picture of his car. “I posted about going on a date. People are asking why I’m at the pub quiz already. I could post this.”
A muscle tightened in his jaw. “You’d do that?”
Her anger passed as swiftly as it came. “No. I’m going to ignore him. It’s the worst thing I can do to an attention whore.”
Elsa, Billy and Kaitlin were arguing over what to grab for dinner. “It’s not the worst thing I can do to him,” Charlie said, his tone hard and flat.
He’d never gotten this angry at one of her dates before, although none of them had crossed the line into name-calling. They’d just been self-centered, angry, living with parents, fixated on a previous girlfriend or, as she saw now, just plain old lacking in chemistry.
There was no lack of chemistry between her and Charlie. She took a chance. “I’d rather you walked me home. It’s been a very long week.”
The light in his eyes changed, the heat tempering his anger into something softer, more interesting, more dangerous. “I can do that,” he said.
“Curry it is,” Kaitlin said decisively. “You coming?”
“I’m going home,” Milla said, keeping her voice casual. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
“I’ll walk her home,” Charlie said. “I’m knackered, too.”
London’s summer sunset stretched across the sky in hues of orange, pink and red. The air was warm, scented with city smells, exhaust fumes, rubber, the curries and kebabs from the Bangladeshi restaurants on nearly every block. Milla unlocked her bike and together they strolled down the street, Charlie with his hands in his pockets, Milla pushing the bike with one hand and snapping pics with her phone in the other. Charlie paused and looked around while she did. His movements were quick, glancing around, conveying an impression of contained energy, as if he’d learned to keep himself under control, but just barely. He’d told her once he was twenty-eight. She could only imagine him at her age, twenty-four. The price he’d paid to learn control was evident in his wary eyes, the set of his shoulders.
“How’d you get into the habit of putting your life online?” he asked as he watched her.
“My dad was an MP—military police, not member of Parliament—in the Marine Corps. We lived all over the world, just me and him, and the internet was the best way to stay in touch with family back home and with other kids I met and then moved away. I was pretty young when I started taking pictures and writing a travel blog. By the time I was in high school in Guam...” She paused to think. “No, it was Oman, just before Dad left the Corps. By then, I wasn’t just blogging, I was making videos and posting them to YouTube.” She shrugged. “By the time I started college, it was more than a hobby. Then my grandmother shared the YouTube channel with a friend who sent it to her daughter who worked at HuffPo. That’s when I started getting more followers, getting a little more traction.”
“And here you are,” he said lightly, but shadows lingered in his eyes.
She quickly cropped then uploaded the photo of the sunset. “You’re offline enough for both of us. We’re yin and yang, maintaining balance in the universe,” she added, flicking him a smile.
He smiled back and opened his elbow, inviting her to loop her arm through his. She did, and once again the heat of his body seared through the thin cotton of his shirt. With her arm looped through his she couldn’t take pictures, but she didn’t want to let go, either. She tucked her phone in her front pocket and matched his slower pace. Funny, she thought. I couldn’t wait to get away from Lamborghini Man, but I don’t want to miss a moment of this walk.
“How did you learn so much about ‘80s music?”
“It’s the music my dad listened to, and I could count on VH1 or MTV in English wherever we were living. I watched Behind the Music, Where Are They Now, that kind of thing.” Something clicked into place inside her. With a sweeping gesture she took in Spitalfields. “The song. It’s about London’s East End.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “You didn’t know that?”
“The lyrics didn’t mean anything until now. So my date was doomed before it began. He’s a West End boy and I’m an East End girl,” she said with a laugh.
Charlie’s lips twisted into a smile. “You’re not really an East End girl.”
“I live in the East End,” she protested.
“I live in the East End,” he replied. “You use it as a base for all your travels. You must be getting itchy feet. Where’s the next trip?”
“The Orient Express,” she said. It was a total turnaround for her. Rather than hopscotching through Europe on discount airfare, she would travel by train through to Istanbul. It was romantic, large scale, with a rich history to mine, and maybe the kind of thing that could catch an editor’s attention. A millennial’s perspective on a decidedly twentieth-century method of travel, through lands reshaped by war to a city with a history dating back nearly ten thousand years. The idea was either brilliant or complete pants. She wasn’t sure which.
“The Orient Express still runs?”
“Not as a single trip, but you can cobble together the same itinerary. I’ve almost saved up the money. Another couple of weeks and I’m off again.”
“Sounds cool,” he said.
His hip brushed hers with each step, the shift and flex of muscles and bones heating her from the inside out. “We haven’t seen much of you lately. The pub quiz, mostly. What’s going on?” she asked lightly.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, but his attention was focused mostly on her thumb, gently tracing the old burns on his forearms revealed by his rolled-back sleeves. “I’ve been busy.”
“A creative rush?” she asked, pushing a bit, curious to know how much he’d reveal, trying to piece together what she’d picked up from Elsa and Kaitlin, who had lived in the ground-floor flat longer than she had. Charlie was a glass artist who sold pieces in galleries around the world, he was from the East End and...he’d been married before.
“You could say that,” he said as he unlocked the front door of the house he owned in Princelet Street. Milla bumped her bike up the steps and into the foyer, tiled in the original black-and-white