The Ex Effect

Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Max

She grabbed the cheese, tucked it under her arm defiantly, and then jumped off the rock before making her speedy escape. On her hurried way down the path, she pulled her shorts down a few times because they kept creeping up—something that definitely did not go unnoticed by me. She craned her neck round like an ostrich and glared at me.

“Shit,” I mumbled, and then sat back down on the rock and poured myself a glass of champagne. I drank it as I stared at the villa, waiting and watching for her light to come on upstairs. When it did, I saw her silhouette for a few moments before she rushed up to the balcony, stuck her head through the door, glanced in my direction briefly and closed the curtains with a dramatic flourish. Her silhouette disappeared.

“ Shiiit! ” I moaned, and then lay back down and looked up at the stars. I was slipping into some serious trouble here. Maybe I’d already slipped and was firmly in the “serious trouble” already. I was shocked, but maybe not totally surprised, by how quickly the slipping had happened. From the moment I’d heard her name, the moment I’d seen her ID photo, to the moment I’d walked across the tarmac and stood in front of her. Slipping, slipping, slipping . . . slipped!

She had been back in my life for all of three days, but I could feel the resolve of the last thirteen years crumbling in front of me, and it felt as if I had zero control over the crumbling. Every second I spent in close proximity to her seemed to erase an entire year spent away from her, until it felt like I was almost right back at the very beginning. The more time I spent with her, the more I remembered why I’d been so in love with her in the first place. And when she’d run that ice cube up and down her neck and chest, I remembered why I still considered her the sexiest woman alive.

I’d tried so hard to extinguish my feelings for her by pouring all I could over the raging flames, but clearly there had been some unseen ember silently simmering away that had now set everything ablaze again. And I was sure the fire had only just began. Yup, I was slipping once again, like I’d slipped all those years ago. I still remembered the day we met with the kind of crystal-clear clarity that is only reserved for the most important moments of a person’s life. The day had been cold, windy and drizzling, there was this loud, repetitive car alarm blaring in the distance and a smell of antiseptic floor wash hung in the air, not exactly designed for romance, but romance had definitely happened.

I’d just turned fifteen, tall and pimply, silver braces across my teeth, and I’d transferred in from another school. I was late for my first class and had my nose in a book where the lady from the office had quickly scribbled a map of the school, so when Ash came round the corner unexpectedly, I’d crashed into her. She’d wobbled and looked like she was about to topple over, so I reached out and grabbed her wrist. I’d stopped her from falling, but I’d started another kind of falling entirely.

The second my fingers had come into contact with her body, a feeling hit me from all sides, all at once. From the inside as well, as if the entire universe was made up of one thing and one thing alone, the feeling. It was all-consuming; it had a sound, a taste, a physical sensation to it. We didn’t say a word to each other. Instead, we’d just stayed there like that, me holding on to her arm, just looking at each other, as if we were seeing for the first time ever. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life and I had not been able to tear my eyes away from her. I don’t know how long the moment had lasted, maybe only a second, but it had felt like decades. In that one moment, it felt as if I’d lived an entire lifetime with this person. We’d let go of each other eventually, but then struggled to walk away. And when we did, we’d kept glancing back at each other, and then she’d smiled at me and I knew that my life would never be the same again.

That small moment turned out to be the biggest of my life, perhaps it still was—well, apart from when it had ended four years after we’d met.

I was exhausted when I woke up the next day, I’d tossed and turned all night, thoughts of Ash running through my mind. Staring at the ceiling for hours, me mentally playing out every single “what if” scenario I could think of. What if I hadn’t left? What if I’d come back after six months? A year? What if I hadn’t been that nervous boy who’d known nothing about his own body, let alone the body of a woman and fucked it all up like that? What if I hadn’t plugged in her phone that night . . .

I dragged myself out of bed and made the strongest cup of coffee I could before pulling my phone out and sending off a message to a close friend of mine, also a client. In fact, he’d been one of the first people to hire one of my locations for a very high-profile stills shoot, and had then encouraged me to begin my business. He’d supported me from day one. I’d kept him in the loop about Ash, since he’d also been there for me all those years ago when I’d been a broken-hearted boy.

Max: Hey.

Max: So things here, with her, are actually worse than I could have ever imagined.

Vincenzo: Sorry to hear it, my friend.

Max: She can barely look at me.

Vincenzo: Maybe she needs a bit of time. It’s a shock.

Max: Maybe. I just wish there was something I could say or do to make it better between us.

Vincenzo: Have you spoken about everything that happened?

Max: Not yet. She can barely speak to me about normal things—not sure I can speak to her about that.

Vincenzo: I think if you two are going to have any kind of relationship, even if it’s just a working one, you have to clear the air.

Max: You’re right.

Vincenzo: And you should tell her your side of the story. The full story.

Vincenzo: Maybe she will understand what happened better then?

I put the phone down on my lap. Maybe it was time that Ash and I spoke about what had happened all those years ago—we never had. Maybe I needed to finally tell her the full story of what had happened, from my perspective anyway. Maybe then she wouldn’t hate me so much for running away. Maybe . . .

I sipped my coffee and stared out the window. The sun had come up, the early morning rays illuminating the boulders beautifully. I would definitely sign this place on. I could see a lot of potential production companies wanting to shoot something here. Not to mention some of my other international clients wanting to holiday here too. Not only did I run a film-location agency, either showcasing some of my own properties that I had bought over the years, or listing other people’s properties, like this, but I also organized travel for a very niche clientele. Most of them were celebrity clients in the entertainment industry or wealthy studio executives that I’d gotten to know through my location work. It wasn’t advertised on my website, but I acted as a travel agent for them, finding them the best locations for memorable holidays, booking and handling everything. At the moment, I had a famous pop star wanting to escape some recent scandal that he’d gotten himself into, and this seemed like the perfect escape for him, definitely no paparazzi here. I dropped him a quick email and attached some of the casual photos I’d taken of the place. I finished my coffee and walked onto the balcony, and the first sight that greeted me, was her.

She was working in the distance. She worked with a hyperfocus that was almost intimidating to observe. Not that I knew much about cinematography, but I knew enough to appreciate how precise and thorough she was being. She was a pro. When I’d last seen her, she’d been going off to study accounting at university. She’d been good at math, but I’d always thought she would hate being an accountant. In fact, I’d even tried to talk her out of it once, so I was really happy to see her working in a field like this now. I’d been dying to ask her the story of how she’d gone from accountancy to this, but we weren’t exactly on conversational terms yet.

Watching her, so absorbed and passionate about something, so caught up in her own world, gave me that flipping sensation in my chest again. I rubbed it as the flipping became a tightening. God, seeing her and being near her was actually giving me physical discomfort. It was making my heart stop one moment, and then beat fast the next. She was doing so many things to my heart that I felt as if I was on a roller coaster, but I wasn’t prepared for what she did to my heart next, because suddenly she screamed in agony.

Without thinking, I raced down the stairs and rushed to her side. When I reached her, she was sitting on a boulder, one leg up on her opposite knee, wincing.

“What happened?” I asked.

She grimaced and pointed down at her foot where a long acacia thorn protruded from the sole of her shoe.

“Those things can be nasty,” I said, bending down for a better look.

“It’s all the way through my shoe.” She continued to wince in pain.

“Let’s get you inside so we can take a look at that and get it out.”

She stood up on one leg and then started trying to hop.

“You’re not seriously considering hopping all the way to the villa, over those rocks, and that uneven surface.”

“If not hopping, how do you propose I get back to the villa?”

I turned my back to her and patted it, realizing for the first time, that I wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Climb on.”

“On your shirtless back? And why are you shirtless?”

“Sorry, I just woke up. I always sleep shirtless.” I almost added, “ don’t you remember? ” but didn’t.

“No, thank you. I can hop.” She started hopping. “If you’ll remember I did gymnastics at school and my balance is excell—Oh my GOD !” She started falling forwards and I grabbed her by the back of the shirt and yanked her towards me.

“You were saying something about your balance? I didn’t quite get it.” I smiled at her, which, judging by the scowl she flashed me, had not been the best thing to do.

“I just need a stick, like a walking stick, and I’ll be fine.” She held on to one of the rocks and started looking around. I scanned the ground too, but couldn’t see one. “I’ll just use the rocks then.” She started trying to hop from one rock to the other, grabbing hold of them as she went, but stopped when the gap to the next rock was far too wide.

“Please can I help you?” I felt desperate watching her struggle like this.

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“At least pass me your bag and camera.” I held my hand out and she looked at it as if this was a massive decision to be made.

“Okay.” She sounded so reluctant, as if I were forcing her to do something against her will. It did not feel good. She started hopping again, but with nothing to support her she only managed a few meters before she had to stop again, balancing precariously on one leg.

“Ash, we should really get that thing out of your foot—it could get seriously infected—and at this rate it’s going to take ages to get to the villa,” I said as blood started oozing out of the bottom of her sole, dripping onto the earth below.

“Birds stick dead animals on acacia thorns too,” she said suddenly, and then turned and looked at me, a bolt of panic in her eyes, as if imagining the kinds of life-threatening infections she could get from the thorn. “Fine. But I’m not climbing on your shirtless back!”

“Then what?”

She gestured for me to come closer to her. I approached slowly.

“I’ll put my arm around you and you can put yours . . . uurgggh .” She delivered a loud, frustrated-sounding sigh and then looked at my body as if it might jump at her and maul her. I took a small step backwards, giving her the space she clearly needed. Perhaps I’d downplayed how bad this all was to Vincenzo. Because even when faced with a medical emergency, she still didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not even if a bird had hung a dead, decaying mouse on the thorn that was now in her foot and she was headed towards sepsis.

“Okay, fine, come back.” She gestured to me again and I inched my way over. I waited for her to touch me first. She made a show of sighing and huffing as she draped her arm over my shoulder and then moved closer to me, until we were standing side by side. I waited for her to tell me what to do next.

“I suppose you should— uuurgggh , I can’t believe I am going to say this—just put your arm round my waist. Now! Do it!” she declared, sounding really put out, and I bit back a smile. I knew I shouldn’t be finding this funny—she was bleeding and hobbling—but fuck she was cute. And I knew I shouldn’t be finding her cute either, because that just seemed so patronizing in the worst way possible, but fuck it! She was.

I slid my arm round her slowly and rested my hand on her waist. The effect this physical contact had on me was immediate and dizzying. My head swam as my fingers wrapped round her soft hip. God, I’d forgotten how her body felt in my hands: warm and delicious. And this seemed like the most inappropriate time to remember that, but it was unavoidable. We started walking together, me lifting and supporting her with each step she took, trying to push all those thoughts aside as I focused on helping her.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered as we walked together.

“It is making this easier for you,” I offered as consolation.

She huffed in response, and I glanced down to look at the way my hand sat on her waist. It looked good there. It felt good there. And most of all, it felt right and familiar there.

I got her into the villa and placed her on the couch. By this stage her face was contorted in pain, which stirred something deep inside me: a primitive, caveman-like instinct to protect her. Once I’d found the first-aid kit, I sat cross-legged in front of her on the floor. I gestured for her to give me her foot and when she did, there was only one thing to be done.

“You know I’m going to have to pull that out. And we don’t know how deeply it’s gone in.”

She nodded. “Make it quick.”

“I will,” I said, and then lowered my fingers to the thick white thorn. She winced immediately. “Sorry.” I hated hurting her like this, although I’m sure the pain I was causing her now was nothing compared to the pain I’d caused all those years ago.

“Ready?”

She nodded and before she was able to finish the move, I pulled as fast as I could.

“Fuck it!” she yelped, and instinctively pulled her foot away.

“Sorry, let’s get your shoe off.” I pulled her foot back and started undoing her shoelaces. “While I have you like this, somewhat incapacitated and unable to run away, I want to take this moment to really, truly apologize to you. I should have told you who I was the second I saw your ID photo.”

“I’d like to know why you didn’t?”

I peered up from her foot and then gave her a look that I hoped portrayed the obviousness of the answer. But when she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew it was time to address the pile of Everest-sized elephants in the room.

“Well, after what happened, you know, and then me leaving like I did, I . . .” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how lame and vague they sounded. “Sorry. This isn’t easy to talk about,” I admitted. “But I suppose we need to. It’s time. Maybe that’s the problem—we haven’t actually talked about it.”

“You never gave us the opportunity to talk about it,” she said snappily.

She winced as I took her sock off, blood immediately dripping from the wound. I pulled some cotton-wool balls out of the first-aid bag and applied pressure to her injured heel.

“So should we have the conversation now?” I asked.

“No time like the present.” She leaned back on the couch while I cradled her leg and foot, waiting for the bleeding to stop.

“Okay, then, I’ll go first . . .” I took a deep breath and tried to start. “Funny, I’ve rehearsed this conversation in my head a million times over and now I don’t know where to start.”

“The beginning is always best.”

“Fine.” One more deep breath. “It was really bad, that night. The sex. It was a fucking disaster. And it has haunted me since it happened. I’ve had actual nightmares about it.”

“Me too,” she confessed, and I didn’t doubt that at all.

“I think we’d put too much pressure on ourselves,” I said.

“I agree. We’d waited so long and built it up so much in our heads,” she replied. “Maybe we should have just done it like everyone else back then? Quickly. Ripped the bandage off.”

“Our intentions for waiting were good, Ash. We’d wanted it to really mean something. But I think our expectations were totally unrealistic too. Our expectations were set way too high and, well, they were definitely not me.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“And for the record, I wasn’t actually trying to have ana—”

“ WHOA ! No. No. Nope. Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say what I think you’re going to say. Ever!”

I couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped, despite the serious subject matter.

“It wasn’t funny!” she said quickly.

“Oh, trust me, I know it wasn’t. It was a shock for me too—believe me. I had no intention of landing up . . . there .”

“Okay, can we please stop talking about . . . that part of it?”

“Fine, but I just wanted to get it clarified.”

“It’s clarified! Totally clarified. Got it.”

“Good. I’m glad,” I said, and smiled at her, even though she was looking a little red in the cheeks. I’d always imagined this conversation as awkward and embarrassing, but for some reason, despite the subject matter, there was a certain freedom to finally being able to talk about it with her.

“You had this look on your face that night,” I continued, “and I just knew . . . it was so, so bad. It felt like one of those pivotal make-or-break moments and that look in your eyes, combined with your message to Sarah, the whole situation seemed much more break, than make.”

“What message to Sarah?”

I met her eyes. “Your phone was dying and I plugged it in for you, only to discover you’d been messaging Sarah in the bathroom.” Her eyes widened at the memory, and then she lowered her head. “I only read the messages on the screen—I didn’t scroll.”

“Fuck.”

“That’s probably why I drank too much that night. I was trying to block it out while simultaneously trying to redeem myself. As you know, that didn’t exactly work.”

“You weren’t meant to see that.”

“Obviously not. ‘ How can I love someone so much but hate having sex with him? ’ ”

“Shit, I did say that, didn’t I?”

“Not to mention, ‘ Maybe that means we’re not sexually compatible. And if we’re not sexually compatible, what does that mean? That we’re not meant to be together? ’ ”

“And you can quote that verbatim after all these years.”

“Good memory. It’s a curse.”

She bit her lip and looked away from me for a while. She looked as if she was wrestling back tears.

“I was so awkward and uncomfortable in my body back then. And my only idea of how to have actual sex came from my friends’ locker room talk, and watching porn, which we all know is acting. Not exactly the most reliable sources. And I just wanted it to be so perfect for us that night, perfect for you. But the truth was, I just had no real idea of what I was doing. And the more it went wrong, the more panicked I got and then I read those messages and drank far too much and, you know how it ended.”

“I am so, so sorry about those messages. What I said, it was, was—”

“True,” I stated simply.

She nodded, still not looking my way.

“And that’s what made it so much worse,” I continued. “You were one hundred per cent right. In that moment, we were as far from sexually compatible as two people could ever be, and you were also right in saying that sex is really important in a relationship and without that spark it’s probably not going to work long-term. It was all true what you said.”

“We didn’t have a spark that night.” She finally turned back to look at me, eyes slightly shining. It broke my heart.

“Understatement,” I said, and smiled up at her to try to infuse this situation with some lightness, even though it was far from it. She smiled back at me, a small feeble smile.

“I couldn’t face you after that,” I said.

“Neither could I.”

“In the week that followed, I picked up the phone so many times to call you, but I couldn’t.”

“Me too,” she admitted. “Not talking on the phone is one thing, though, but you just left. Forever. Without so much as a message even. A message .”

“I was so emotionally immature at that age. I didn’t fully understand what the long-term consequences of leaving would be. And I hadn’t planned on leaving—it was only after I saw you again that I knew I had to go.”

“What do you mean, saw me again?”

I sighed and for the first time since the conversation started I felt a tightening in my throat. This memory always gave me the same feeling. “At the mall. Seven days later, I saw you there. You were just sitting on the bench outside in the food court eating a bag of chips.”

She looked confused. “What about me eating chips on a bench made you have to leave?”

“It wasn’t about you doing something, it was about me being incapable of doing something, doing what needed to be done.” I forced myself to look at her and hold her gaze, like I should have so many years ago. “I wanted so badly to go over to you. I knew I should go over to you. But it was as if I was physically paralyzed. My body refused to move. I just froze. No matter how much I told myself I needed to do it, I couldn’t. And in that moment I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stand in front of you, look you in the eye again, not at that stage anyway. And so I did the cowardly thing, but it was the only thing I could think of doing at that time—I left. It wasn’t meant to be for so long either.”

She broke eye contact with me and turned to look at the wall. I watched her closely, watched the emotions swimming over her features. She clenched her jaw, bit her bottom lip. This was still so real and raw for her, even after all these years. Just as it was for me too.

“I felt so shit about myself after that night. My stupid fragile teenage ego couldn’t take it, and leaving felt like some kind of self-preservation. I went to my uncle in the UK first. I told myself I was only going to be away for a while. A couple of weeks. A holiday, just to clear my head, and then you started messaging me.”

“Well, I didn’t know where you were.” She sounded defensive.

“I know. It wasn’t the fact you were messaging me that upset me, it was what the messages made me realize.” I paused and looked at her, waiting for her to drop her defensiveness so she could really hear what I was about to say next. “They made me realize how badly I’d hurt you by leaving. I know that should have been obvious—I should have known how badly you would be hurt—but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. And the more hurt I could see you were, the worse I felt, and then of course your last message came in . . . That’s when I decided staying away was for the best.”

“What did I say?”

“In your last message to me, um . . .”

“I said I hated you,” she said quietly.

I nodded at her and she looked away again. We fell into a silence that was so heavy and suffocating that it made me physically ache.

“I didn’t,” she finally said. “I never hated you. I just said that because I wanted to hurt you as much as you’d hurt me. I did . . .” She took a deep breath in. Her chest rose with the air filling it up, and she blew it out quickly, as if needing to get rid of it as quickly as possible. “I did . . . I—It was . . . I did love you.”

My heart felt like it was shattering in my chest. “I loved you so much.” The long-unspoken words left my mouth so quickly that I wasn’t even really aware of them until they filled the room around us, and shifted the atmosphere.

I removed the cotton-wool from her foot. “It’s stopped bleeding.”

“Thanks,” she said softly.

“I’m going to put some antiseptic on it. It might sting.”

She looked down at her foot and nodded at me. I reached for the antiseptic and wet a cotton-wool ball with it, I pressed it onto the wound, and she winced in pain again.

“Sorry,” I said. I cleaned the area thoroughly. “I’m sorry about everything, Ash. I’m sorry about how it went that night, and I’m especially sorry for how I acted afterwards. I was young and, honestly, a fucking idiot. I didn’t fully understand what I was losing when I left that day. I should have done it all differently, but I didn’t.”

She sat back in the chair and rubbed her neck, as if that hurt too. “Seems we both should have done things differently. I shouldn’t have messaged Sarah. I could have at least waited. It was wrong of me to do it there.”

I smiled at her. “You would have messaged her the second you left anyway.”

She smiled back. “This is true.”

“You needed her support,” I added quickly.

“Did you have any support?”

I nodded. “I didn’t tell anyone this story for years, until I got drunk one night on grappa with my first client ever and it all came pouring out. He actually encouraged me to talk to you about this now.”

“I’m not sure if I feel better or worse for this conversation,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. Because I wasn’t sure either. A part of me was glad to have had it, and another part of me just felt heartbroken when I looked back on the series of stupid decisions that I’d made that had led me to being so far away from the very thing that being close to now felt so right.

“Me neither,” I said. I stuck the last of the plasters over the small piece of antiseptic-soaked cotton wool and put her foot back onto the floor gently. “There we go, finished.”

I was finished with her foot, but after that conversation, it felt like I was nowhere near finished with her. Not in the slightest.