Page 13 of Before You Say Goodbye

“What?” He sounded a little defensive.

“Of course you are.” She smirked sarcastically, watching him in her mirror.

“Don’t be like that. I bet it annoys you to death when people snicker at you being a writer, and look at you. You’re wildly successful.”

She looked pointedly around her tiny flat. It had four rooms: a living room she had struggled to squeeze a sofa, a television, a coffee table and a dressing table into, a bedroom with just enough floor space for two people to slip past one another if they needed to, a functional kitchen and a teeny tiny bathroom. Autumn could walk across the entire apartment in ten strides. Bowie could probably do it in five. Still, she’d done her best with it. She’d ripped the shoddy carpets up and painted the floors white to lighten up the rooms, adorning each of them with pale pink rugs that matched her curtains. There were blankets andcushions everywhere, and attractive antique furnishings. She had made it the best it could be.

She scoffed. “Wildly successful?Sure I am.”

“You live in Manhattan,” he said.

“I can only afford to do that because I flirted with my landlord, Walter, until he asked me what I could afford to pay.” She was worried about how he might react to her admission, but he laughed.

“Doesn’t he want anything in return?”

“He’s about a hundred and two years old,” Autumn said, exaggerating. Bowie laughed again. “He doesn’t need the money. He just wanted a tenant who wouldn’t cause him any trouble.”

“Well, you look like all sorts of trouble to me.”

“I’m not the kind of trouble he’s afraid of,” she said. “I bring him food and cigarettes. Sometimes I clean his apartment for him. I’m undisruptive and quiet.”

“That’s not my experience of you.” Bowie smirked. She blushed and he smiled. “Well, you can afford to live in New York. That’s impressive. And success isn’t measured by the things you own, it’s measured by how happy your heart is.”

He stood up and walked towards her, leaning down to bring his face close to hers. It was an incredibly intimate gesture.

“Is your heart happy, Autumn?”

She kissed him. She thought it might be the first time she had ever moved in to kiss a man first. She pulled away before they got too caught up in each other.

“What are you doing to me, Bowie?”

“Magic,” he said, standing up. He looked thoroughly pleased with himself. He reached out and gestured for her to join him on his feet, cupping her face in his hands. “Can I see you tonight?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good. I don’t have a mobile phone, but write your number on my hand and I’ll call you later.”

“From a payphone?” she asked.

“Probably.”

She shook her head as she wrote.

“No mobile phone, no Facebook. You’re the most bohemian person I’ve ever met.”

He smiled, kissed her nose and turned on his heel. Hopeful and excited, Autumn watched from the door as he lumbered, ungracefully but with absolute purpose, down the stairs and across the hall, swinging his arms to a tune and whistling a song as he went.

* * *

How sure she had been before she’d met Bowie that instant connections were the invention of romantic minds. How adamantly she had believed that real love did not exist. Autumn revisited their first evening together many times in the years that followed. She could never figure out what it was he had done differently to everybody else. She’d compared him to the dozens of other men she’d slept with in the run-up to their meeting, analysing their conversations, desperately searching for something he might have said or done to forge the connection that had formed between them the second their eyes met. Why had her heart chosen this man? Plenty of perfectly adequate potential partners had presented themselves over the years, some more impressive than Bowie at first glance, and Autumn had never been interested in any of them.

She searched, but there was nothing there out of the ordinary. No perfect storm, no algorithm, no rhyme or reason, no explanation. It just was. Their love for each other had been instant and impossible to ignore.

Celestial, even.

Chapter 4

He possessed her every thought that morning. Her entire body felt invaded by him. Everywhere she went, despite the stench of petrol fumes and food, Autumn could smell Bowie on her skin. It was incredibly distracting and she could think of hardly anything else except when she would see him again. It made her mad. She needed to be sensible. She had not been exaggerating the importance of this meeting. The UK branch of her publishers was in love with her, but the American branch might not be so easily influenced. She needed to focus.

---