You Belong With Me

Chapter 1

Actually, Elliot Owen’s presence was the headline miracle, what the newspaper trade called a one-fact story.(And thank God they weren’t sniffing round this tiny Nottingham suburb with its solid Victorian housing stock and a large Lidl today.)

There was more than one unexpected marvel here, as far as Edie was concerned. Not least her formerly cantankerous if not quasi-estranged sister acting as her effusive co-host.

Meg, with her round face, blue eyes, and blonde hair in a dreadlocked ponytail, looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid after a week at Reading Festival. You would never know that she and dark-eyed, Clara Bow-esque Edie were related, and for a long time that had felt like a reflection of their relationship.

In this crowded room with steamed windows, the aroma of porcini mushroom gravy and a Bluetooth speaker pealing ‘Somethin’ Stupid’,Edie’s world had taken a definitive, beautiful leap into a better future.

She’d never been the greatest fan of Christmas Day’s suspended reality. Reality might’ve been a disappointing grind, but she could handle it. Suspending it left her adrift and exposed.

When she was living in London, Edie had dreaded navigating the politics of returning for the holiday, with her widowed, apologetic father and ornery little sister.

Her dad felt awful that it wasn’t the celebration it would’ve been before their mum died, and Meg was constantly boiling, substantially correctly, with a sense that Edie didn’t want to be there.

Edie felt painfully conscious their December twenty-fifth didn’t look or feel like the spray-snow-encrusted vision of matching-pyjamas and hot chocolate togetherness that it was supposed to.

There was a psychic deadlock of guilt, more guilt, and resentment that she couldn’t spring them from. Not until Edie was forced back home in a social media shaming following The Jack Marshall Incident, their flamboyant elderly neighbour Margot died, and they collectively confronted the unresolved grief and regret about the loss of her mother.

The familial reconciliation and Edie reordering her life accordingly had ended up being more surprising than her falling in love with a famous actor who’d starred in a swords-wolves-and-tits fantasy saga.

So, despite there being a newly minted superhero here – Elliot’s latest onscreen incarnation was The Void – it was already magical.

Edie was glad that she and what the tabloids termed her ‘superstar beau’ had been sufficiently serious and/or relaxed enough about each other’s status last time that he’d already met her dad, Meg, and her two best friends from sixth form, Hannah and Nick.

Hannah, a willowy and acerbic kidney doctor (‘nephrologist!’) and Nick, a mod-dressing misanthrope and local DJ, had been lost to Edinburgh and an unhappy, controlling marriage respectively, and both were now back.

They beamed in warm recognition at the newcomer. Her old friends were plenty intuitive enough to interpret Edie’s stunned, bashful glow and Elliot’s handshaking with everyone in turn. It wasn’t a meal you just dropped in on as an ex.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s girlfriend, Chloe, looked bedazzled by her first encounter, and Nick’s girlfriend, Ros, sat nearest to them, completely neutral.

‘Nice to meet you, Elliot. You’re with Edie? How did you two meet?’ Ros said, grinding pepper over her plate.

She had limpid, thoughtful eyes behind rectangular, amber-rimmed glasses. She was the sort of person to ask direct questions. And how do you feel about that?

Hannah and Chloe were each other’s first same-sex relationship, in their thirties, and Ros had probed the intricacies with the unembarrassable, purposeful clarity of a first responder paramedic.

‘I ghost-wrote his autobiography,’ Edie said. ‘I do copywriting for my day job in advertising. As a special project, it kind of skill-mapped.’

‘Autobiography? You’re very young to have an autobiography?’ Ros said to Elliot, frowning in confusion. ‘Was it self-published?’

Edie stifled a laugh. She suspected that Nick had told Ros his friend had dated a celebrity, and Ros, New Agey and not much caring for conventional accolades, had forgotten. She was yet to put together that tale, with a photogenic man drinking red wine from a beaker.

‘I’m far too young for one, Ros,’ Elliot said, with the practised ease of someone who performed for a living. ‘I’m not sure I’m worth one full stop. But other ones were being written, and I was advised to do my own to counter theirs. It’s not advice I’d take now, to be honest. Then again, if I hadn’t, I’d not have met Edie.’

‘Did it sell well?’ Ros said, clearly trying to ascertain Elliot’s grip on sanity. And are the other autobiographies in the room with us now?

‘It paid for my kitchen you like,’ Edie said, smiling.

She was delighted with her turquoise units, the shade of a Cadillac. After an adult lifetime of landlord magnolias and biscuits, she’d gone to town on colour. Edie loved this bay-fronted, red-brick semi with its 1930s stained-glass door so much. More than you perhaps should love things, she thought, but to Edie, it signified arrival, security, and belonging.

With her sister as lodger and her father a frequent guest, Edie was looking after them. And, whether they knew it or not, they were looking after her.

‘Oh, did it now? You owe me a full English tomorrow then,’ Elliot said. ‘A Meg-compliant full English.’

He smiled a sly smile over his cup, having soft-launched the expectation that he was staying over.

Edie raised her eyebrows, though it had never really been in doubt.

‘And you’re a couple? I thought you said you were single, Edie?’ Ros said, with more of her disarming frankness. She clearly wasn’t going to squirm on worries like: what if this is an on-off hook up without a label.

‘… Yes, we’re a couple?’ Edie said, a statement with a question mark, looking at Elliot, her heart skipping a beat. They’d not ever used the word that she could remember, and Ros was bouncing them into agreeing formalities. It was the obvious conclusion of the doorstep chat, and yet it was all brand new. Frank was singing ‘Fly Me To The Moon’.

‘We’re a couple,’ Elliot said, answering her note of doubt with confidence.

They locked eyes in private wonder for a moment.

‘As of today?’ Ros said. Ros was a loss to Notts CID.

‘We were seeing each other for a few weeks, four months ago. I guess it was a … fling?’ Edie said, making an apologetic face at Elliot. ‘“Affair” makes it sound like there was infidelity involved.’

‘Wouldn’t call it a fling,’ Elliot said.

Nick offered Ros another glass of wine.

The chatter around them resumed, and they were relieved to be speaking one to one.

‘Why not?’ Edie said.

‘A fling has built-in obsolescence,’ he said. ‘Did you ever think, oh, here we are, having a fling? I thought we felt serious from the start.’

‘We did.’ The introductions to each other’s loved ones was proof they’d embarked on it in the style of it mattering. ‘I thought it was … I didn’t know what it was, other than a very rewarding experience,’ Edie said.

Elliot laughed. ‘Like volunteering?’

‘Exactly. Giving back to the high-profile thespian community.’

‘Very kind of you to extend a helping hand. Mucking in with the grunt work.’

‘Honestly, I think it gave me more satisfaction than the people I helped.’

‘I’ll say.’

Edie shook with laughter; Elliot grinned, and she had to stifle it before anyone tuned in to the intense flirting.

Elliot had sent Edie a postcard not so long ago, which was tucked into the vanity-table mirror in her bedroom. She could dart upstairs at some point to hide it. But what was cool – or indeed necessary – about pretending not to value it? It read: I notice when you’re not around.

That he felt her absence enough to bother telling her about it had been incredibly touching to Edie. They’d cared about each other a lot, but his world contained so many distractions and opportunities that she thought he’d surprise himself by healing faster than he thought possible.

After all, wasn’t acting about inhabiting another identity, intensely yet briefly, stepping back out of that skin and moving on? What was temporary could be fully sincere.

Actors,their late neighbour Margot had once said, after lighting a Sobranie Black, have vagabond souls.

Yet he’d missed her sufficiently to come back. It was too huge a turn of events to be processed upfront; Edie was still preoccupied with its enormity.

‘What was it in your mind, back then? If never a fling?’ Edie asked.

‘The beginning,’ Elliot said, without hesitating.