Free Late Night Shopping: by Carmen Reid Page B

. and certainly not his.
     
So he swung a left into the sunny bedroom he shared with Annie. If Ed were to be ruthlessly honest, he'd admit that Annie had made this room just a bit girlie.
     
There was white and pink paper with a bold pattern on the wall, a white and crystal chandelier and an ornate white mirror above the fireplace.
     
A whole wall was taken up with the bank of white wardrobes she'd insisted they would need. And it turned out she was right. She had enough things to fill them almost single-handedly.
     
Planning to hang up his jacket, change his shirt for a T-shirt, then go down to join Owen, Ed had just pulled the shirt over his head and was heading over to drop it into the laundry basket, when he saw them.
     
Lana and Andrei were lying almost completely naked underneath the leather-upholstered bed: Annie's Christmas present to him, bought for some small fortune on who knows what credit card. Something he didn't like to think about.
     
'OK,' he said firmly. 'Game over.'
     
This was met with little gasps of horror from under the bed.
     
'I don't want to know,' Ed added, 'I really don't. But you have a room of your own upstairs, Lana. I'm going to go down to the kitchen now and maybe you two should . . . tidy up, then come and join us there.'
     
Ed and Owen ate peanut butter and plum jam toast steadily, working methodically through the loaf. Owen, now happily changed into his favourite combat trousers and fluorescent orange and white T-shirt (in case he wanted to disguise himself as a traffic cone lost in a wood) ate with much more enthusiasm than Ed, because Ed knew he was about to have to have a really awkward conversation with Lana.
     
Finally the romantic duo appeared at the foot of the stairs, where Andrei pulled his rucksack onto his back in the lobby and scarpered out of the front door. Clearly he didn't want to hang about to see what Ed, who was also his teacher, thought of the situation.
     
'Goodbye, Andrei,' Ed called after him, then couldn't resist adding, 'hope we'll be seeing more of you.'
     
Ed, who'd been at a boys' boarding school from the age of seven till eighteen, had no recollection of ever being caught doing something like this. But, as he'd taught in co-ed boarding schools all over Britain for the first seven years of his career, he'd certainly come across a few teenagers in slightly comical states of undress.
     
'Owen, would you mind going out to the trampoline for a few minutes? Just don't bounce too hard because . . .'
     
Owen, cramming the remains of his third sandwich into his mouth, nodded with understanding and headed out of the room as Lana came in slowly and slouchily.
     
Even Ed could appreciate that Lana was very pretty in a sort of pale and gothy kind of way. Her long hair was dyed a shade or two darker than the original colour, her pretty freckles had been blanked out with foundation and she was wearing a black top, black leggings, bare feet and dark-green nail polish on all twenty nails.
     
'Are you going to tell my mum?' was Lana's first question as she sidled into the room, slinking along the wall.
     
'Come in and sit down,' Ed tried to reassure her. 'Do you want some tea? Some toast?'
     
'Yeah, please,' she agreed.
     
As Ed boiled the kettle, put bread in the toaster and fetched mugs, Lana chewed nervously at the skin around her nails.
     
'We were just . . .' she began.
     
'It's OK,' Ed told her, 'I don't need to know – I really don't.' Although he might actually quite have enjoyed listening to whatever excuse Lana had been about to give him . . .
     
'Andrei had a wasp in his trouser leg and he had to take them off and then the wasp went up my skirt . . . I was just coming out of the shower when . . . we were playing strip poker, I don't know why . . . but my contact lens rolled under the bed.'
     
'Ed, do you think I'm old enough to have sex?'
     
Lana didn't even look round at him, just continued with the skin-chewing as soon as the words were out.