Chapter 38
38
Evie
Bree and I didn’t plan on spending our summer holidays hanging around in a hospital cafeteria, but a week after Drew and I had that almost religious experience together in Jervis Bay, she and I fall into a routine where we visit him in the café most lunchtimes.
“Are your parents okay with you staying here a bit longer?” she asks me as we’re walking from the bus stop. She knows they’re not. My mum has been on the phone to hers, and we listened down the hallway while her mum made the argument for me staying just a few more days in Sydney while we support our friend.
“Drew is on his own with his mum. How would it look if they told me to ditch him?” I ask.
She pulls my elbow and stops me on the path. “You and Drew are getting pretty close?”
I don’t understand the question. “I thought you approved of him.” Why is she always acting like my gatekeeper with boys?
“I really do,” Bree says. “And he really likes you. Be careful, Evie.”
“I’m with Oliver,” I remind her.
She looks at me like she’s unable to think of a response to a statement this obvious. It’s the look of a person with tons on her mind, but nothing will make its way through her vocal cords and come out of her mouth. “Yes, on that,” Bree starts. “With the formal …”
“Oh, there he is!” I wave at Drew near the hospital entrance, quickening my step. “We can talk about the formal later.”
“It’s a forensics necklace,” Oliver explains weeks later, as I unwrap the silver chain he’s brought me back from a police museum in Amsterdam. There’s a tiny silver fingerprint pendant hanging beside a microscope and a strand of DNA. This is a million times better than some sort of gemstone. It represents the future I want to create. And the fact that he knows this about me—and how much it matters to me.
I throw my arms around his neck, my fingers threading through his still-wet hair. He’s freshly showered after the long flight and smells of shampoo and some expensive cologne that’s so different from the Lynx Africa other boys reek of.
He pulls me even closer and kisses me like a person who’s been forced to go on a six-week European trip with his parents when he wanted to be in Sydney with his girlfriend. It’s a six-weeks-in-one kiss, and when we emerge from it, we’re both hot and flustered and I barely know which way is up.
“We need to talk about our gap year,” he says breathlessly, between kisses, pushing me across the luxurious room, past the doorway to his own en suite and walk-in wardrobe and toward his bed, the back of my calves hitting the mattress as I tumble and land on his pillow. It’s like a scene from a movie where they’re hungry for each other—and I am definitely as hungry as he is, just also anxious, which is making me feel sort of nauseated, but I don’t let on because right now I’m the main character in this big love scene that’s playing out in Oliver Roche’s lavish Lane Cove bedroom. Just grow up, Evie. It’s fine.
I’ve already planned my gap year with Bree. We’ve been working on the itinerary since Year Eight. Fly to London, do a Jane Austen tour of Bath, attend a live screening of Pride and Prejudice on picnic blankets at Chatsworth House, where the Pemberley scenes were filmed, then Paris and Prague and Venice and tossing coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome, wishing for everything we’ve always wanted …
“Travel with me,” Oliver says. He’s been staring into my face while I was running through the trip in my head, and his statement takes me by surprise. I mean, of course he’d imagine we’d travel together. That’s what gap-year couples do. But in every version of the itinerary Bree and I invented, neither of us accounted for a future romantic lead.
“Oliver, can we talk about …”
He kisses me on my neck, and I lose track of the sentence.
“I just, I’d already sort of planned …”
His lips close over my mouth and I can’t say the rest of the words as his hand travels down my neck and across my shoulder, sweeping aside the shoestring strap of my top in a way that thrills me and scares me and makes me forget about Pemberley and picnic screenings and my best friend.
“We don’t have to think about it now,” Oliver whispers. I’m relieved, because I don’t want to argue about anything. That said, given the dangerous route his hand is now traveling, I’m tempted to reraise the topic. Or any topic. And slow this down.
“Oliver, wait …” I try to sit up, but he shifts his weight, and I can’t. So I place my hands on his chest and push him back. “Oliver, stop. Please.”
He does stop. He moves back. I feel really bad, because I know this was the plan. He’d get back from Europe and we’d do this. Look at him! As far as your first time goes, he’s a knock-it-out-of-the-park partner.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I’m close to tears now.
“It’s okay,” he says, flopping back on the bed beside me.
But it’s not okay. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He takes my hand, and I try to stem the tears and prevent myself from becoming even more pathetic in this already mortifying situation.
“Evie, it’s fine. I’ll wait.”
And we lie there in silence, while I play with the forensics pendant around my neck, imagining Oliver is reliving all the times he’s had sex with less-awkward girls, probably wishing he wasn’t stuck with me now, while this gap-year clash looms impossibly in my head. I resolve to be a more courageous and less uptight girlfriend in the future.
Starting tomorrow.