Page 8 of Before You Say Goodbye

“Your sister is the only person who makes me feel like I can be myself,” Autumn said, dropping her one-woman tirade against nameless men everywhere.

“She says the same thing about you.” Bowie smiled. “Most people think she’s nuts. She’s too confident for them, I guess, too shameless. It’s good to finally meet you because she never stops talking about you and we were starting to think you might not be real.”

Autumn grinned at him, an authentic gesture she normally suppressed around strangers. She was having an unusually good time. She had to be up at seven, but she didn’t want to leave. She could barely believe she hadn’t known Bowie an hour before. She felt, as with Bluebell, as though she had found someone really special. She searched for a new branch of conversation.

“Bluebell didn’t tell me you and Marley were twins,” she said.

“Yeah, we don’t look that much alike to her anymore, so I think she forgets. It might also be the drugs.”

Autumn laughed. Bowie smiled. They locked eyes for three seconds or so before Bowie blushed and looked away.

“I have a book I think you’d really like,” he said. “I’ll give it to Bluebell to give to you.”

She was a little perturbed by his insinuation they might not see each other again soon. She didn’t know if it was because her ego didn’t like the idea the decision to meet again might notbe solely hers — since she was typically the one who did the rejecting — or because she genuinely liked him.

She was still trying to work it out when they finished their cake and saw no alternative except to give herself more time to decide by inviting him back to her apartment to watch a movieor something.

Autumn had no idea what ‘or something’ meant and immediately wished she hadn’t said it. It was too open to interpretation and she was worried it might be misconstrued. Most men saw an invitation home as a penetration invitation. Why else would you invite someone back to your house in the middle of the night?Sheonly did that when she wanted to fuck.

Autumn wasn’t sure how she felt about Bowie, but that wasn’t the only complication. She’d had to remind herself more than once that Bowie was just as much Bluebell’s brother as Marley was. She’d need permission from her friend before she let anything happen. And Autumn was adamant, no matter how intense her growing attraction to him — no matter how lovely and attentive she found him or how comfortable he made her feel — they should not sleep together tonight. It was too complicated.

Still, that rationalisation had not stopped Autumn imagining what Bowie would be like in bed. Though she hadn’t fully registered it when she first met him — especially when comparing him to a twin who carried himself as though he was ten times better-looking — Bowie was sexy in his own right. There was something about how good he was that made her want to coax him into badness, and she wanted to know what he looked like when he was lost to ecstasy. She was enthralled by this sudden desire for a man whose shyness masked his looks and had made her feel at first and second glance that he wasn’t as physically appealing as his brother because of his lack of confidence. Bowie was quiet and shy, humble andreserved, and those were attributes that typically turned her off, but she could no longer deny that her attraction to him was inexplicably visceral. With hair that was shorter round the sides and untidy on the top, a long face and large features, Bowie was stereotypically good-looking, but it was almost certainly his lips and his use of them over the course of the evening that had done something to her. He didn’t say anything at first and she dared to hope for a second that he might be too well-behaved to accept her invitation. She held her breath and willed him to get them out of the mess she had put them in, but he didn’t.

Instead he blushed, mumbled something, and agreed to go home with her.

Chapter 3

Autumn’s tiny top-floor apartment had actually been the attic of the flat below, but her landlord, Walter, had knocked a hole in the ceiling forty years ago and put in a wrought-iron spiral staircase. He’d been renting the space out, illegally, as far as she understood, ever since. The apartment was thirteen stories up, but the lift, when it worked, only went up as far as the sixth floor. It had been fixed for several weeks now and experience had taught her it was almost certainly due another breakdown soon.

Autumn and Bowie climbed the staircase in absolute silence. She really wished he would say something. She thought about trying to make conversation, but he looked breathless and consumed by something, so she went back to focusing on not falling over instead. It felt like the longest climb she’d ever done. She was relieved when they reached the door and she finally let them in. There was no hallway, the door opened straight into her very small, neat and tidy living room.

“This is lovely,” Bowie said, smiling kindly.

“Make yourself at home.” She tossed her bag onto her dressing table — irritatingly positioned in the living room because her bedroom was too small and there was nowhere else to put it — and headed to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

“What’s your favourite movie?” he called from the living room.

“Stand By Me,” she said immediately. He set about navigating her television set to a streaming service. She realised as she added soya milk to their teacups that she was smiling to herself. She forced her face straight before rejoining him in the living room.

“You’ve seen this, right?” she asked, handing him a mug of tea. He tutted a yes.

She sat down beside him and stared at the television. They were silent for the longest time, but she got the distinct impression he was not watching the movie. She wasn’t, either. She was too busy feeling confused and a little bit ashamed of herself.

Seeing Bowie sitting on the sofa had imprisoned her self-control and restrained her capacity for rational thinking. She was stopping herself from kissing him now, not because he was Bluebell’s brother but because she was not sure if he wanted her to. She felt reasonably guilty about that, but she liked him too much to hold back anymore.

She watched Bowie from the corner of her eye, wondering what he would do if she straddled him, or took off her tea dress, or hiked it up and touched herself. He moved, distracting her from her sexy thoughts by stretching his legs a little wider so that his knee was warm against hers. She didn’t know if it was deliberate or not. She was not usually so confused about how men felt about her, but Bowie was different. He seemed like the type of man who might innocently accompany a woman to her home in the middle of the night. He caught her eye once or twice and smiled. For a while she felt something fizzing between them, but then he ran his hand through his straight, blonde hair, trying and failing to stifle a yawn. He was tired. He might be bored. He could be here without intention. She might make an idiot of herself.

She admired him from head to foot for what must have been the sixth or seventh time. He was tall, but apparently uncomfortable with it, because there was a little stoop in his neck when he walked. His demeanour was far from what she normally went for. She usually liked men who were much more confident.

Yet men usually expected her to be better behaved. They could rarely believe she really wanted them to come home withher. One of her most recent conquests had asked her if she was secretly a serial killer.

“Why would a girl like you take a man home on the first night?” he asked her. “Don’t you think you’re worth a little more than that?”

Autumn slept with him once then never called him again. He left forty-two messages on her answering machine in three weeks. Autumn thought that spoke volumes about who was worth what.

She knew that there were people out there who might describe her as loose, but Autumn didn’t care for one-dimensional descriptions of people based on something as trivial as who they slept with and how often.

But with Bowie, it was different. She cared how he felt about her. It was all very confusing and it was making her act weirdly. Typically unshakably confident, she did not feel like herself tonight.

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