Page 83 of For Real

“Well, what do you expect me to say?”

“‘I love you too, Toby’ is kinda traditional. Would be nice.”

“You can’t nag someone into falling in love with you.”

He gave a sad little smile. “Yeah, I noticed.”

We walked up George Street, between the interchangeable pizzerias, in not-quite-comfortable silence. It was probably fortunate we were not in Prague, Venice, or Paris.

At last, Toby tugged on my arm. “It’s just you let me feel you up all the way here, even though it looked like you were going to actually die, and then you said all that stuff like you’d peeled it off your soul just for me. And my heart got so, like, big and heavy and squishy that I thought it might literally explode if I didn’t tell you I loved you. Don’t you ever feel like that even a little bit?”

“I–I don’t know.” It was a cowardly answer. And it wasn’t even true.

“Okay.”

God. That was his crushed voice. “I mean, yes, sort of. A bit. I mean, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But that’s not love. It’s just happiness and…and the moment.”

“And that,” said Toby triumphantly, “is just semantics.”15

I shoved him, and his little grinning face, into Debenhams, and we rode the escalator up to the cosmetics section. The perfumes and colognes were arranged in long, brightly lit aisles, separated by designer.16

Toby turned bewildered eyes up to mine. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Truthfully, neither did I, but I set off as though I did, and soon we lost all our inhibitions, picking up outlandishly decorated bottles largely at random, spraying and sniffing, and bickering. Toby was fatally drawn to heavy, woody musks, which he was at least self-aware enough to recognise were wrong for him.

“I’m different in my head,” he explained, reluctantly setting down something redolent of sandalwood and cedar. He went up on tiptoes, leaning into me, and inhaling deeply against my neck, before I pushed him away in case we got spotted canoodling like teenagers in the middle of Debenhams. “What do you use? I like that.”

“Uh, nothing. That’s just soap and me.” I grabbed for the nearest bottle and shoved it at him, hoping to distract him. His merciless attentions on the train had left me…reactive. “What about this? Cool Water.”

He held out his hand and pointed at an unscented spot on the back of his wrist. We went through the now familiar ritual of spray, shake, wait, and sniff.

“Actually”—surprise and relief, along with peppermint, orange blossom, and sandalwood rolled over me—“that’s quite pleasant. Inoffensive.”

“Is that how you see me? Quite pleasant and inoffensive?”

“How about this, then?”

It was childish of me, but I handed him a tester of Vera Wang’s Princess, in its purple crystal, heart-shaped bottle. Laughing, he pushed me out of the way as if intending to put it back on the shelf. Then spun, at the last second, enveloping me in a sticky-sweet mist of sugar and flowers.

“You little bastard.”

He blew me a kiss, utterly unrepentant, and disappeared into the next aisle. Soon we’d lost all ability to smell or recall what we’d smelled previously. We were sense drunk. Slightly giggly.

“I liked one of these… I’m sure I liked one of these…” Toby was running his nose up and down his bare arm like the world’s most peculiar code cracker. “Was it Eternity?”

“Or the Givenchy?”

“No, you said that one smelled like I’d been lying on the floor of a public lavatory and a nice attendant had poured disinfectant on me.”

“Right. Um. How about Cool Water?”

“But I don’t want to be pleasant and inoffensive!” he wailed.

Oh I was laughing again. “Believe me, you’re in no danger.”

We’d run out of Toby, so I sprayed the sample from the next bottle onto my own wrist. It was too sweet for me, floral but not feminine, the top notes deepened by a hint of those woody base notes he loved so much, lending it balance and just a hint of machismo. “Toby. This one.”

I lifted my hand for him, and he breathed the air over my pulse point, his eyes closing as he savoured. He hadn’t even touched me, but somehow, it was shockingly sensuous. I might have gasped. At last, he looked up again. “Yeah. That one.”

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