Page 146 of For Real

“Then—” My head is spinning. It must be adrenaline. “I think you could do a bit better than £5.03 an hour.”

He laughs this crazy Tim Curry laugh. “Don’t push your luck.”

I get out of there, texting Laurie with trembling fingers to tell him I’ll be back soon.

I still can’t quite believe how easy that was. How simple.

Greasy Joe got it wrong, though. I’m starting to think you should always push your luck. No, you can deal with. Don’t know is the most frightening thing of all.

When I get back to Laurie’s, I babble the whole story. I don’t lie, but maybe I make myself a bit bolder and a bit less squeaky. I can tell he’s proud of me. Hell, I’m proud of me. When I’m done talking, he drops to his knees and gives me a celebratory blowjob. And I don’t just feel like a prince. I feel like a fucking king.

* * *

It’s a good week. Just me and Laurie. Together. In love.

We do have another argument. He gets sick of my pants on the floor, so he gives me a drawer—a fucking drawer, like this is supposed to be enough. I don’t make him sleep on the sofa though, and the next day he offers me a room.

Like a whole room. In his home. Just for me. He says I can do whatever I like with it. Make it my own space. I take the Bluebeard room, of course. The light up there is beautiful, and Laurie’s mine now.

But basically, things are good. So good I sometimes feel guilty for falling so easily into happiness. We watch black and white movies and have all the sex and eat takeaway every night, and talk about…everything.

And when I’m ready, we talk about me.

I tell him how I wanted to be an astronaut, then a palaeontologist, then a marine biologist, then a spy, then an explorer, then an artist, then a poet. About how I had so many dreams, and they all just went away, one by one, until there was only me left.

It’s kind of a relief, in a way, to get that out there.

But I’m also terrified because this trusting-people shit is hard. It’s this naked feeling like when he kneels for me, and part of me can’t quite believe it’s me he wants. Still wants.

The reality of me.

He tells me how being a doctor wasn’t his dream, either. How his parents put a lot of pressure on him to live a certain kind of life and be a certain kind of man, which is an odd thing to learn about him, since I have sort of the opposite problem. It’s one of those moments when I realise that the gaps between people are always less than you’d imagine. Though I’ve honestly been hoping there comes a point in your life when you stop worrying about what your parents think.2

“So, you see,” he says, “my career was just something to work towards to please my parents. And now it’s just something I’m good at and helps me be…useful.”

“But are you happy?”

He gives me this smile. “Deeply.”

When he puts it like that, in his straightforward way, it doesn’t seem so terrible a way to live. We can’t all be my mum, after all.

I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to be. I just wasn’t sure if there was an alternative.

My mum’s never really cared what I’ve done—to her there’s art, and there’s everything else. No difference between a lawyer or public lavatory attendant.

Laurie does care, but only because I care. And it turns out that’s just the right type of caring. The truth is, he’d probably be okay if I just kind of…lived with him. But I’m not the househusband type. I want my own life, whatever that means, and Laurie understands, and we spend ages trying to figure out what that might look like.

I’ve never had someone to do that with me before. I’ve always just been trying to figure it out by looking at what other people were doing and hoping nobody noticed I was just miming.

We come back to the cooking a lot. The restaurant and the Michelin star. I don’t know how or when it happens, but somehow—just by loving me and believing in me—Laurie nurtures this little flame inside me until it remembers how to burn on its own. I get that cooking is a tough thing to make a career out of—long hours and hard labour—but it’s still the thing I love most in the world.

After Laurie and Granddad, of course.

Laurie disappears onto the internet and comes back with lists and lists of catering colleges, some of them in Paris, for fuck’s sake. He tells me I shouldn’t be curtailing my life to be close to him, and if this is what I really want to do, he’ll wait for me. But I don’t want to go to Paris. It’s full of French people. That’s a joke. Well, kinda. But mon français est très mal.

And, besides, I’ve seriously had it with school and all that hoop-jumping learning. Whatever Laurie thinks, it’s not for me. I’m not getting another D because I quenelle with my left hand, not my right. So that’s out.

I do some internetting of my own, and it turns out if you’re willing to start at the bottom, the staff turnover in kitchens is so ridiculously high that somebody will probably take you if you ask them nicely. It’s a fucking terrifying idea, but Laurie thinks I’m brilliant. We make this list of all the places I like best in a reasonable commuting distance, and then I bottle it for a while.

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