Love in London by Flora Ferrari

Chapter Twenty-One

Gabby

Before.

The word still rings in my head when I wake up the next morning, wrapped in the sheets of Oz’s bed. Before.

He said I wasn’t ever serious about anyone before.

All I can think about is what that means. Does it mean, he’s never been serious about anyone in the past, and that’s all?

Or does it mean, he’s never been serious before – but he is now?

I can’t figure it out, and I’m too afraid to ask. Because if he says it’s the first and not the latter and that he isn’t serious about this, then it’s going to hurt. It will make everything between us awkward – and it will also shatter my dream.

I don’t want that to happen yet. I’m not ready for it. I want to hang on, still, to the thought that this could be something real.

“Are you getting up?” Oz asks, his voice a lot less sleepy than I expected. I twist in the sheets and look up at him, finding his eyes open and fully awake. “It’s not long until we have to get going.”

I look at the clock beside his bed and sigh. He’s right. I have another tour to go to.

Wait.

“We?” I ask. “You’re coming with me again today?”

He shrugs lazily. “Why not? I already arranged the time off work. I had a feeling I was going to be too busy this week to make it to the office.”

I raise an eyebrow. “When did you get that feeling?”

“Oh. Tuesday morning,” he says, with a grin.

Right before we met up for the first tour together. That figures. I give him a second raised eyebrow to join the first. “So confident?”

He laughs. “Well, if you turned me down, I could always have spent the time drowning my sorrows. Now, come on. Shower?”

“Shower,” I nod, suppressing a yawn. For all his talk of being an old man, he definitely seems to be coping better than I am with spending half the night awake – and engaged in some serious physical activity.

We head to the shower, and it feels so strange and yet so right yet again to be showering in front of someone else like this. But it’s not just ‘someone else’. It’s Oz. That’s why it’s right. He pours expensive shampoo into my hair and lathers it up, given that all my things are back at my hotel, and I lean back into his touch. It almost makes me want to fall asleep again.

It’s strangely intimate. Showering together and yet not getting up to anything more than cleaning one another. I know we’re under a time limit, so even a quickie probably wouldn’t be a good idea if we want to make it to the tour on time. But, still.

It’s almost a little uncomfortable to feel so close to him, not knowing if this will last at all. Jarring. But I take a breath and push that aside, and focus on the moment.

And when we get out of the shower and I dry my hair and then realize that I smell like him now, I decide I like it a lot, either way.

I dress in the new clothes that Oz picked out for me – the least dressy ones of the whole selection, a pair of fashionable, designer jeans, a plain blouse, and a blazer. I would have thought, before, that it would be a waste to buy these kinds of staple items at such a high price. But now… I see. I see how the quality makes a difference. How it makes me more comfortable, changes the way I feel and think about myself.

I could get used to this. Which is a bad thing, and I should probably stop trying to.

“Ready?” Oz asks, and I nod. I forget to ask about how we’re going to get there until we step outside the elevator and I realize we’re not in the lobby from yesterday, but instead an underground garage. Oz leads me to a sleek sports car and tells me to get in, and I shake my head to myself in wonder.

Looks like I’m going to be arriving in style.

I find it hard to concentrate the whole day. On our way to the college, all I can think about is whether I’ll ever ride in this car with him again, or if today is the only time it will ever happen. When we start the tour and wander around after the guide, I keep thinking about whether or not I could stay here and keep him, if I just chose the right college.

And I can’t also help wondering if we’re going to find another convenient closet, but we never do.

“What about the student bar here?” Oz asks as we start to reach the end of the tour. “You said it’s undergoing refurbishment right now – do you know when it’s going to open? Are they going to be able to use it as soon as the semester starts?”

“The builders should be done a few weeks before the start of the semester, so we’ve got a little wiggle room just in case,” the tour guide says, flashing Oz a smile. “Of course, I don’t know if you were looking for reassurance that your daughter wouldn’t be able to spend her whole student loan on getting drunk in the first month, haha!”

I’m slightly behind him when it happens, and I see Oz’s shoulders stiffen. Daughter. That tour guide thinks that Oz is my Dad.

I step up beside him, deliberately taking his hand, lacing our fingers together. “Do you have a daughter I don’t know about, honey?” I ask, making my tone as sugary sweet as possible.

Oz looks down at me, and for a second I see how troubled his eyes are. But then he catches onto what I’m doing and his expression clears. In fact, it goes right past clear and straight into a roguish grin. “Not that I know of, sugar.” He yanks me closer, slaps my ass, and then puts his arm around my hips for good measure.

The tour guide colors and stammers some kind of apology, and I don’t miss the fact that others in the group are watching us now with strange looks. Some of them, anyway. Some look amused. I’m sure it can’t have escaped everyone’s notice that we are pretty far from acting as though we’re related.

But still, I think it leaves a bitter taste in Oz’s mouth. I think it bothers him. And that upsets me.

“You know it doesn’t bother me, right?” I murmur when the tour is over and the others are starting to disperse.

He looks down at me in surprise. “What?”

“The age thing.” I squeeze his hand a little more tightly. After that incident, we ended up walking hand in hand the rest of the way. “I don’t care what people think.”

He nods, smiles, even though it looks stretched a little tight. “I know. I just found it a little… jarring.”

“I know what you mean,” I assure him. “But people are stupid. I don’t have a problem with idiots assuming things about me. They’re going to anyway. And what they assume doesn’t reflect anything about me at all.”

He stops dead in the street, which makes me almost stumble when I turn to see what’s wrong. Did I say the wrong thing?

But he just grabs my face in both of his hands and kisses me right there, then pulls away to look at me and shake his head in wonder. “You were right about being older than your years,” he says. “How did you get to be so… balanced?”

I chuckle. “I honestly don’t know,” I admit. Then I fix him with a flirty grin. “But if your old bones are up for it, I wouldn’t mind getting the chance to show you just how little I care about whether people think we’re right for each other.”

He licks his lips briefly in a way that suggests he really would be up for it, grabs my hand again, and starts walking me back towards the parking lot so fast it makes me squeal and laugh.