‘What has?’
‘You and me.’
‘There is no you and me. You made that perfectly clear on the phone, remember?’
He didn’t reply to that. Instead he said: ‘You know you asked me if it was going to be a London date, or a Manhattan one?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it made me think. Layla… I’ve known you almost since you were born.’
‘That’s an exaggeration.’
‘Only a slight one. How old are you now? Twenty-three?’
‘Twenty-two.’
He groaned. ‘Layla, I’m thirty-nine years old. That’s…’
‘I can do the maths.’ Oh, she’d done the maths, about a billion times. ‘I know all that. And I don’t care.’
Alberto was shaking his head. ‘You know what I am.’
‘I don’t care about that.’
‘Hear me out, OK? I want to give you the full story. When I got back from Essex, after your dad saved my life – and I’m telling you, if he could see us now, he’d reconsider that decision in a heartbeat – it blew my mind when I saw you. You’d changed so much.’ He paused, half-smiling, and ran a hand through his hair. ‘When you were a little girl, you were always searching me out – you loved to be around me. Then you hit puberty and you couldn’t get far enough away from me. Suddenly you appear again and it’s, like, Pow! When I saw you that day in the Shalimar, when you’d changed your hair, it was as if I was seeing you for the first time. Everything was different, everything was altered. Not just the way you looked, the way I felt about you.’
‘I couldn’t deal with it when I was younger,’ said Layla. Her voice shook. ‘I’d get embarrassed around you. I felt awkward. And I don’t think I can cope with you blowing me out now, either. I’ve had a tough day. So if you’re going to do it, let’s get it over with and then forget it, OK?’
‘Shit, will you shut up? I’m laying myself on the line here. It would never be a casual Manhattan dating thing with you, Layla. I don’t want to date anyone else, I have no plans to do that. But this…’ He raised a hand, waving it in the air. ‘All this has happened at a bad time. That’s why I cancelled. I can’t ask you to commit yourself to anything with me, not now. It wouldn’t be fair. So I have to say, if you want to date other people, then that’s OK.’ Then Alberto shook his head. ‘Fuck it. No, it’s not. It’s not OK at all. But it’ll have to be. Because I can’t ask anything of you.’
Layla was watching him, her mouth half-open in shock.
‘Well, say something,’ he prompted.
Layla closed her mouth with a snap. Sat back. Thought about what he’d just said.
‘I don’t want to see anyone else,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t.’