Chapter 20
CHAPTER 20
Max
It had been expensive, but seeing the look of relief on her face had been priceless. And seeing her with her head back, looking relaxed and at peace while sitting inside, even better. I watched her drift off to sleep. She still made the same little noises from time to time that she used to make. She was always so embarrassed when I told her about them, but honestly, I’d missed them. I watched her sleep for a while, hoping like hell she wasn’t going to open her eyes and find me staring at her.
I finally pried my eyes from her sleeping face and turned my attention to the landscape. We were flying from Zimbabwe to Botswana, to the middle of nowhere once again. I was very much looking forward to seeing this place, a tented safari camp in the middle of the Makgadikgadi salt pans. A beautiful, almost desolate expanse of land. The Makgadikgadi pans looked almost otherworldly, flat and white, broken up with majestic baobab trees that looked as if they didn’t belong in this time or place at all. But the area was also teaming with wildlife, and it was so remote and private that I could definitely see a celebrity couple coming here for the ultimate African safari experience. In fact, I’d asked the camp manager to take me out on one, so I could see what their offering was like. And, of course, if someone needed to shoot an advert to showcase some of the best of southern Africa, like this ad, the tented camp was the perfect backdrop.
When the pilot asked us to put on our seatbelts, I looked over at Ash and thought about waking her. She looked so peaceful, though, and probably needed all the rest she could get. One side of her seatbelt was lying across her lap; the other had fallen and was hanging from the chair. I reached across the aisle carefully and took the hanging part in my hand. Then my arm accidentally grazed her knees as I reached for the one in her lap and I froze, hoping she wouldn’t wake up. When she didn’t, I continued, but it was the noise of the buckle that finally made her stir.
“What the fuck?” She jumped in her seat and batted my hands away. “Why are you touching me? Get your hands out of my lap.”
“My hands are not in your lap. I’m doing up your seatbelt.”
“But why?” She smacked my hands away and I pulled them back and held them in the air in a “hands up” gesture.
“You should have woken me!” she stammered, pulling the seatbelt towards herself.
“Sorry, you looked so . . .” I wanted to say peaceful, angelic, beautiful, but didn’t. “You seemed like you needed the rest, and we’re only landing in twenty minutes. I thought you could do with the extra twenty.”
Her face softened somewhat as she pulled the seatbelt tightly across her waist and clicked it closed. “I got a fright, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting to wake up with your hands in my lap.”
I chuckled. “You’re deliberately trying to make it sound like I was feeling you up while you were asleep.”
“Were you?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“You know me—I would never do something like that.” I held eye contact with her. It was almost painful to do so, because as each second passed I felt as if I was slipping further and further, deeper and deeper.
“I don’t actually, not anymore.” Ash broke eye contact abruptly and looked away.
“What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”
“Okay.” She turned in her seat and faced me. “Do you own llamas?”
I looked at her for a second before laughing. “Seriously? That’s what you want to know—out of every single thing you could ask me in the world—do I own llamas?”
“Well, do you?” she asked, more emphatically this time.
I stopped laughing. “Where did you hear that?”
“From around and about. It was a rumor. There are a lot of rumors about you, actually.”
“What kind of rumors?” I asked, and I could see her weighing something up. But then she shook her head.
“You know—some people talk.”
“And some of those people say I own llamas.”
“Yes. They do!”
I looked away and fiddled with my watch strap. She didn’t know this was a loaded question, but it was. Not that I could tell her anything more personal at this stage, because I’d basically bared my soul to her yesterday. “My mom—I told you she has dementia—I bought one for her. Strange choice, but she said she wanted an animal and when I asked what kind, she said llama. Apparently, she’d always been fascinated with them, from the time she was a girl and saw a picture of them. It’s one of the only things that still makes her happy, going outside and watching Lucy—that’s what she called the llama.”
There was silence in the plane, a silence so big and heavy it somehow swallowed up the noise of the engines.
“Do they spit?” she asked, which I wasn’t expecting, but for which I was grateful and relieved.
“Lucy has never spat on us. She is smelly, though, and have you ever tried washing a llama? Not possible. And do you think any mobile pet groomers will wash one either?”
“No, I imagine that washing llamas is not their thing. How big is she?” she asked.
“She’s not that big, shorter than me. She’s actually kind of cute.”
“Cute?”
“You want to see a picture of her?” I pulled my phone out and started flipping through my photos.
“You have a photo of your pet llama on your phone?”
I chuckled. “I suppose I do.”
“Do you want to see my cat?” She didn’t wait for my response and pulled her phone out too. Once we’d located the photos, we swapped phones.
“Oh my God, she is cute!” She laughed. God, I loved her laugh. “She has a snaggle tooth.” She laughed even more. I’d missed that sound.
“Your cat is very cute too,” I said, looking more at her than the cat. Ash was holding the cat up to her face and smiling one of her full-blown, dazzling smiles. The kind that had the ability to knock grown men off their feet.
“Thanks. She’s the best, keeps me warm in— AAAAH ! Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . oops.” My phone went flying and when I picked it up from the floor, I could see why she’d dropped it.
I felt panicked. “It was on a beach. Everyone tans topless in Europe. It’s not like I—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“I want to explain it to you, though. They’re friends. We were on holiday. It’s just a—”
“Seriously, you don’t have to explain it to me. You are a grown man who happens to have a photo of two gorgeous, half-naked women on your phone. Really, it’s all cool.”
“They’re not that gorgeous,” I said.
“What?” She looked at me with a shocked expression. “Seriously? If you don’t consider that gorgeous, then I don’t know who you’ve been with since me. Because one looks like Cindy Crawford and the other looks like Claudia bloody Schiffer. It’s like a nineties supermodel revival. God, I would love to look like them. Not to mention those breasts. I’d take one third of them, please.”
I almost opened my mouth and said that they didn’t hold a candle to her, but didn’t. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was perfect, exactly how she was. She had this sense of comfort and confidence in her own skin that was ridiculously hot. The way she tied her hair back messily, didn’t care that she had a smudge on her cheek and no make-up on. This grown-up version of her had settled into her own skin and owned it. Fucking hell, it was hot. So hot that if I carried on looking at her, I was going to have a problem here.
I quickly looked out the window again when I realized I’d been staring at her hands, watching her fingers tap away nervously on the armrest as the plane began a descent that was a little bumpy.
“So, is that all you wanted to know?” I said in an attempt to distract her. “Just if I owned a llama? Seems like a pretty random thing to ask after thirteen years.” Ash was silent, then her fingers stopped their nervous tapping and she turned to face me.
“What happened with your dad, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Well, he decided he was sick of us, so took up with his dental hygienist—how’s that for a cliché?—married her and has two more children now.”
“What? He’s remarried?”
“I know, crazy.”
“And you have half-siblings?”
“Half-brothers, apparently. I’ve never met them. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to my dad in nine years.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. That’s . . .” She paused for a while and then started nodding. “I get it. Why you changed your name. Does he still speak to Alissa?”
I shook my head sadly.
“But she was such a daddy’s girl.”
“He sent her a birthday card one year, and then never again.”
“Shit! What an asshole!” She sounded truly angry and indignant, and for a moment, it felt just like old times—when I was angry at the people who made her angry and vice versa. This little team of two against the world.
“Alissa just got engaged. Can you believe my little sister is going to get married? And she’s immigrated to Iceland of all places. Her fiancé is Icelandic.”
“I can’t believe that. In my mind she’s still nine.”
“Nope, twenty-two and doing a masters in geothermal engineering in Iceland! Who would have thought, right?”
“Twenty-two is quite young to get engaged.”
I paused. Swallowed hard. “We spoke about getting engaged at nineteen.”
Her face immediately reddened. “What did we know at nineteen?”
“Maybe it’s considered young, but when you know, you know, right?” I held her gaze meaningfully and she reciprocated for a few moments, but then looked down and tapped her fingers on the arm rest again.
“I don’t think anyone can ever just know . I suppose at the time we think we might know , but actually we don’t. And then some time passes and you look back on it all and you wonder how you ever thought you knew in the first place.”
I leaned across the space between us and spoke up as the engines grew louder during our descent. “I knew. And once upon a time, you knew too.”
“But did we really know ?” she asked, glancing up again. “We were so young.”
“We clearly thought we did, enough to talk about our future life together. A house by the beach, one beagle and a pug. You joked about breeding puggles. And two kids, but only in our early thirties. Remember?” I said.
Her reaction to my words was instantaneous. She sat up straight and looked so uncomfortable like she was about to climb out of her skin.
“You and I, together , it feels like it belongs to a different universe. It was a lifetime ago and it feels as if it happened in a totally different reality to the one we’re living in now.”
But as she said it, and as I looked at her, I began to wonder if that was entirely true, for me anyway. If you’d asked me a month ago whether Ash and I lying in bed together, fingers woven into each other’s, planning our life together was in a different universe, I would have said yes. But now it didn’t feel as far away as it used to, or perhaps it should be.