Chapter Seven
My hotel wasn’t as luxurious as the places I usually stayed in when away from home. There was a simple reason for that: I’d booked it myself, using the not so tried and tested method of carrying out zero research, typing ‘hotel in central’ Paris in the search bar, and then booking a room in the first place that had rooms available, rather than letting Amrita handle it.
There was nothing wrong with it, though. It had a bed to sleep in, a perfectly serviceable room service menu, and a phone I could use with mine languishing at the bottom of the Seine. I smiled at the memory of Finn’s face as he’d watched it sink below the surface. Seeing that moment of genuine surprise had been worth every occasion since that I’d reached for it, only to find it wasn’t there. Although I’d never admit it to Finn, it felt like someone had chopped my left hand off, the temptation to buy a new phone a constant niggle. So I could hardly blame Finn for his lack of belief in me.
I turned on my laptop and waited for it to fire up, automatically opening my email once it had. Regret was instantaneous, as hundreds of new messages loaded. The ones from Amrita stood out a mile, mainly because for the last few she’d abandoned any attempts at subtlety and gone for block capitals for the subject line, the most recent entitled TALK TO ME, OR SO HELP ME GOD, I WON’T BE RESPONSIBLE FOR MY ACTIONS!!!!!!!!! I clicked on it, the message content simple and to the point: If you’re dead, I need to know that. You’re not answering your phone and you’re not responding to emails, so I don’t know what other conclusion I’m supposed to reach. I guess if you’re dead, you won’t care how many people are on my back because they’ve also tried to reach you with just as little success. But on the off chance you’re not dead, call me and let me know you’re still breathing.
I didn’t bother reading through the rest she’d sent, guessing they’d be variations on the same theme. As I’d only been incommunicado for two days, it made me think I was too accessible if going off grid caused that amount of panic in such a brief space of time. You think , Finn’s voice drawled in my head. I accessed the cloud backup, where thankfully all my numbers were stored, one name catching my eye before I found Amrita’s.
Acting purely on impulse, I picked up the hotel phone and called the number. “Adam speaking,” a cheery voice said after only a couple of rings.
“Hey, Adam. It’s Cillian.”
“Cillian?” He made no effort to keep the surprise out of his voice. “What can I do for you after all this time?”
“Has it been that long?”
“Three years. Maybe even four.” A momentary pause followed. “Yeah, bloody hell, four. Time flies. I’m surprised you’ve still got my number.”
Despite the man on the other end not being able to see, I shrugged. “I was hoping you could answer a question for me.”
“Go on.”
“What was I like as a boyfriend?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line that I interpreted as stunned, before Adam let out a laugh. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Humor me.” Adam and I had been together for close to a year, which was about the longest I’d spent with any one person, so I figured if anyone was qualified to answer the question, he was.
“What are you angling for here?”
“The truth.”
“Okay…” A longer pause while Adam thought about his answer. “As a boyfriend, you were no more and no less than what we both needed at the time.”
I frowned at the rather cryptic answer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means neither of us wanted anything serious. We wanted someone around to scratch an itch when the urge took us. Which, if you remember, we were both so busy with work, wasn’t that frequent. It meant neither of us had to waste time dating or hooking up with some random, and we could just get right down to the nitty gritty.” Adam seemed to read between the lines of my lack of response. “I’m guessing that’s not what you wanted to hear. I thought you wanted the truth?”
“I did,” I gritted out. “That doesn’t mean it’s easy to hear. You make it sound like I used you.”
“We used each other,” Adam said, his voice calm. “Our split was mutual, remember?”
“Yeah.” I remembered. And I’d lauded myself for the incredibly adult way we’d gone about things. Now, though, it was taking on a different slant. One that neatly slotted in with Finn’s reading of the way things had gone between us. Only, unlike Adam, he hadn’t been on board with it and had expected more from me, and I’d either been too blind or too stupid to see it. Probably both. The gut-wrenching thing was, I’d wanted more, too. I just hadn’t known the work required on my part to achieve it. I’d had genuine feelings for Finn. I still did. It was why I was here. It was also why I’d rung a man I hadn’t spoken to for years to conduct a post-mortem of our past relationship that I expected he would rather have avoided. I cleared my throat. “How are you doing now?”
“Married,” Adam said with a smile in his voice. “Coming up on two years in March. We’ve just started looking into surrogacy, actually. We’re hoping two will soon become three.”
“That’s great!” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. How about you? I’m guessing something triggered you asking me what you were like as a boyfriend?”
“I met someone, but I screwed things up. I guess… I wanted to work out if my behavior was a new thing or part of a pattern.”
“I see. Sorry to hear things didn’t work out between you.”
“I’m going to get him back,” I said with far more conviction than I was feeling. “I’m going to prove that nothing is more important to me than him.”
“Yeah? Well, good luck!”
We made small talk for a couple more minutes before saying our goodbyes. And then I made the second call, Amrita taking longer to answer than Adam had.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Where the…” The pause provided the swearword she wasn’t prepared to say in the office where someone might hear. “…are you?”
“Paris,” I admitted.
“Oh, well… lovely. I hope you’re enjoying your jolly that you didn’t bother telling me you were going on? How’s the Eiffel Tower? Still standing? How about Notre Dame? Have they finished rebuilding it yet?”
“Not a jolly,” I said quickly, before she could really get going and list every major landmark in Paris. “Finn moved to Paris.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah… oh.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yeah.”
“And how did that go?”
I thought back over the last couple of days, recalling the look on his face when he’d opened his door to find me standing on his doorstep, how he’d let rip and pulled no punches in telling me why he’d left, and his reaction to the restaurant I’d taken him to. I remembered how quickly time had passed last night while we’d chatted over dinner, how I’d found out so many things about him I’d never known, and the disappointment in his eyes when I hadn’t kissed him goodnight when he’d expected me to. “It’s had its ups and downs.”
“And you couldn’t call me and tell me what you were doing?”
“My phone is at the bottom of the river.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard.”
“I heard, but I couldn’t make sense out of it.”
“I threw it in there. It was a… grand gesture.”
“Right.”
“Listen… I need you to hold the fort until I get back. Tell anyone that asks for me…” I shook my head. “I don’t care, really. Tell them whatever you want to tell them.”
“Can I tell them you’ve gone abroad to throw yourself on your ex-boyfriend’s mercy and to beg for his forgiveness?”
“I’d rather you didn’t tell them that.”
“That’s what you’re doing, though, right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And is it working?”
I grimaced. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it is, and then other times… It’s only been two days. I need longer. I’m taking longer.”
“You’re the boss. I can’t tell you what to do.”
I smiled at the blatant lie. “Yet, you frequently do.”
“Well, I would have told you not to throw your phone in the river. To come up with a different grand gesture.”
“Too late.”
Amrita let out a little sigh. “I always liked Finn.”
“Me too.” I cleared my throat against the wistful tone that had slipped out. “I just wasn’t very good at showing it. I’m going to get better.”
“Flowers,” she said, “and chocolates. Go old-fashioned. Don’t take no for an answer. Well, unless it’s sex. Then you should always take no for an answer. You should also take maybe as no, and basically anything that’s not yes as no.”
“Great advice,” I said with an eye-roll.
“What if you’re successful?” she asked. “What then? Are you going to drag him back to London by his hair?”
“I’m not a caveman.” Amrita might have phrased it in her typical call-a-spade-a-spade fashion, but it raised a good point about what would happen if I was successful in winning Finn back when we lived on opposite sides of the English Channel. “I don’t know. I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it. Maybe I’ll sell the agency.”
“No, you won’t.”
“No, I won’t,” I admitted. “Maybe I’ll open a Paris branch and put you in charge of the London branch.”
“What if I want to move to Paris?”
I shook my head at how ornery she was being, even though I knew her well enough to know that I should have expected it. “As always, you’ll do whatever you want and I’ll thank you for it.”
“As you should.” There was amusement in her voice. “It’s like they say, ‘behind every great man is a great woman.’”
“And no one is greater than you.”
“You should save your sweet words for Finn.”
“I should,” I agreed. “I’m going to need them.” I went over to the hotel window to gaze out of it. Given I was in Paris, the view was uninspiring. I craned my neck to see if I could glimpse the Eiffel Tower, but there was none to be had, the hotel room facing the wrong way. “Why didn’t you ever tell me I was fucking up so badly with Finn? You’re never usually shy about sharing your opinions. If I’d known, I might have been able to fix things before he left the country.” The silence told me Amrita was reluctant to answer. “Go on. I can take it.”
She sighed. “Because I thought he was like all the rest.”
“‘All the rest!’ You make me sound like a complete lothario.”
“There have been quite a few over the years.”
“Maybe,” I admitted grudgingly.
“And none of them were ever that serious. So… I assumed Finn was the same. I even thought about warning him off you.”
“You what?” There was no need to fake the outrage in my voice.
“I told you. I liked him.”
“And you didn’t like”—I paused to make mental quotation marks—“all the rest.”
“Not as much as Finn. He’s a sweetie. And completely oblivious to how good looking he is, which is an endearing quality.”
“Maybe I should give him your number.”
“Darling, if there was any part of him, or me for that matter, that was remotely straight, I’d already have given it to him. Although, I invited him out for coffee many times after you giving him a good rogering made him sad.”
“Me, giving him a good rogering did not—” I gripped the phone tighter. “Can we not use the word rogering? We’re adults.”
“One of us is. The other lets their boyfriend move to a different country.”
“You’re fired.”
“Again?”
“I mean it this time.”
“Course you do. That’s why you’re smiling.”
“I’m not smiling.” I made a concerted effort to straighten my face. “Was he really sad?”
“Sometimes!”
“Shit!” The word was hard to force out around the sudden lump in my throat. “He shouldn’t give me another chance. He should forcibly march me to the airport and put me on a flight back to Heathrow.”
“He should, but him not doing that should tell you something.”
“What?”
“That he still has feelings for you. Don’t fuck it up this time, Cillian.”
“Don’t say fuck in the office.”
“Or what? You’ll fire me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m still fired from the last time.”
“You’re reinstated.”
“Thanks.”
“And now you’re fired.”
“Oh, I’m devastated.” We both laughed at the conversation we’d had so many times before. “Are you going to get a new phone?” Amrita asked.
“Not yet.”
“How am I supposed to contact you, then?”
“I’ll call you.”
“Fine. Say hello to Finn for me. Tell him he deserves a really nice man in his life and not to settle for anything less than the best. And then make sure you prove to him, that’s you.”
“I will. I intend to. No matter how long it takes.”
“Call me if you need me.”
By the end of the second conversation, I felt wrung out, and the hardest phone call lay ahead. A check of my watch told me Finn would still be at work, so I grabbed my coat and went for a long walk.
It was strange to have time on my hands when I wasn’t used to it. Finn was right about one thing: my life did mainly consist of work. I loved my job, but if I carried on the way I was, I risked that being all I had. And was that what I wanted in twenty… thirty years’ time? A successful advertising agency that made shitloads of money, but no one to leave it to when I died because I’d never had the kids I’d thought I would. Did Finn want kids?
I laughed to myself, a passing woman shooting me a strange look. Pondering Finn’s attitude to an extended family was somewhat getting ahead of myself. I could see him as a father, though. He’d make a great one. The kind who attended all his son or daughter’s school plays without fail, and who had brilliant advice to offer no matter what stage of their life they were at.
What kind of father would I be? An absent one , my subconscious insisted. The kind who doesn’t get home from work until after their son or daughter is already in bed. Rinse and repeat until one day you wake up and they’re in their teens and you wonder why all you get them from on the rare occasions your paths cross is backchat. And that’s assuming your marriage actually lasted. It’ll be far more likely that your husband got fed up with being the sole caregiver and left you. Just like Finn did when he came here. As glimpses of a possible future went, it was bleak.
It was so bleak that I did a U-turn and headed back to the hotel, newly bolstered with plans of creating a different future. And that all started with Finn. My feelings for him had been strong enough to bring me here, and strong enough to ignore all the telltale signs of him not exactly being thrilled to see me, of him not regretting what he’d done, and of him doing it again if he got the chance. I needed to press on with my original plan: a fresh start where we did things the right way. And then, and only then, could I ensure the bleak future I’d just envisioned never came to pass.
Finn took long enough to answer his phone that I feared he was otherwise engaged. Maybe with Laurent—the handsome Frenchman who I’d itched to punch in the face for kissing Finn. “It’s me,” I said in answer to his slightly breathless hello.
“Oh.”
There was one of those small signs again. “Hotel phone,” I said. “Therefore, the number isn’t blocked.”
“Easily rectified,” he said semi-seriously.
“It’s Friday today.”
He gave a small laugh. “Interesting! A speaking calendar. I’ve heard of the speaking clock, but that’s a new one.”
“Tomorrow’s the weekend.”
“Yeah, the weekend always follows Friday.”
“Do you have any plans?” The pause was too long for Finn just to be thinking about his answer. “Spend it with me,” I said quickly, before he could make up a lie.
“Doing what?”
I made up an itinerary on the spot. “I’ll pick you up at eight and we’ll go for breakfast. I’ll find out who does the best croissants in Paris and we’ll go there. Then we can do something touristy. Visit The Eiffel Tower. Or go to The Louvre. Or do something else, if you’d rather. You’ve probably already done those things.”
“I haven’t,” Finn admitted. “Most of my friends here are French, so aren’t interested in doing anything touristy.”
Sensing a chink in his armor, I carried on. “We’ll find somewhere nice for lunch. Somewhere we can just watch the world go by. In the afternoon, we can take a stroll down the Champs-élysées or go on a river cruise. Wherever the mood takes us. And then we’ll go for dinner. Nowhere posh. I’ve learned that about you now. Just somewhere that does good food and where we can talk some more. Like we did last night. You enjoyed last night, right?”
“Cillian…”
The edge in his voice had panic coalescing in my chest. “Don’t say no. One weekend, Finn. That’s all I’m asking for.” There was pleading in my voice, but I didn’t care. “Let me romance you for two days. Let me show you what it could have been like if I hadn’t had my head stuck so far up my arse that I couldn’t see daylight.”
At least that got a laugh from Finn. “And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens after we’ve spent two days together?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe you’ll realize that everything you ever thought about me was right, and you’ll be pleased you can move on with your life with a righteous glow of satisfaction.”
“Maybe…”
I took heart from Finn not sounding too convinced. “Say yes.”
Silence. This time, I let it hang between us until it was excruciatingly painful. For me, anyway. I couldn’t speak for Finn. If I could, this conversation would already be over.
“What happens if I say no?” Finn finally ventured. “Do you turn up at my door, anyway? I moved to Paris. That was supposed to be a no, but you took no notice of it.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “You didn’t even tell me what you were intending, never mind give me a chance to say goodbye or talk you out of it. And yes, I take some responsibility for my part in that. Not all of it, though. You admitted yourself that it wasn’t the right way to go about things.”
“I feel like…”
When Finn went silent, I prompted him. “What?”
“I feel like we’re going around in circles.”
“One weekend,” I repeated. “How terrible can it be?”
“I’m not worried about it being terrible.”
I smiled at the nugget of honesty. “I know. You have my word that things will never go back to the way they were. I fucked up once. I’m not stupid enough to do it again.”
“Easy to say.”
“Which is why I’m asking you to let me show you. Just give me a chance. No pretending that we’ve only just met. No raking each over the coals for past mistakes. Just me and you enjoying each other’s company and having a nice time together. Two days. Forty-eight hours.”
“Is this how you do deals?”
“No. I go in a lot harder. Because I don’t care as much about the outcome. If they choose to go with someone else, it’s their loss. If you choose to go with someone else, it’s mine and no one else’s.”
Finn’s indrawn breath was shaky. “You never answered my question about what happens if I say no.”
“I leave you alone,” I said, the words scraping like razor blades in my throat. “I go back to London and you never hear from me again. I’ll think of you, but I won’t contact you. You have my word on that.” I got to a count of twenty before Finn spoke.
“Okay. I’ll spend the weekend with you. No baggage. No grudges. Just me and you.”
Relief had me feeling like I’d grown a foot taller. “I’ll see you at eight tomorrow.”
“I’ll be ready.”