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“Wait,” I said, and sat up, holding the towel in my lap. “Claire. We should talk about this first.”
She blinked at me, breathless, cheeks pink. “Talk?”
“I don’t want this to be something we both regret at Christmas.”
For a second I thought she’d be angry. Then her face crumpled into something softer, and she sat down on the stool beside the table.
“God, you’re so annoyingly decent,” she said. “That’s half the problem. You know that?”
We talked. Really talked, for the first time in eleven years. About the wedding. About how she’d cried in the toilets afterwards. About Helen and me, how we’ve been more like flatmates for two years, separate hobbies, separate bedtimes. About her last boyfriend, who she dumped because he wasn’t, quote, “enough like you, which is fucked up, I know.”
Her hand found my knee while she talked. Mine found hers. Our fingers laced together.
“So what do we do?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know.”
She looked at the clock. Twenty-five minutes left on the session. Then she looked at the towel in my lap, which was doing nothing at all to hide that I was still rock hard.
She gave a slow, wicked little smile.
“Well,” she said. “You’ve got twenty-five minutes paid for. And I’ve got a steam room out back that’s closed for cleaning till four.”
My throat went dry.