chapter052
‘I think you might’ve added two plus two and got thirty-four, that’s all,’ Edie said carefully.
‘I wish I had.’
Elliot’s jaw clenched, and Edie had never seen this mood before. She knew right now that she wasn’t able to reach him by any usual route.
‘I haven’t detected Declan has any special feelings, and I’m still not remotely convinced he does.’
‘You’ve never sensed an attraction?’ Elliot said, with evident disbelief.
‘No, we’re mates. I’m the only person he knows here – he’s probably clung on to me a bit. Plus, I don’t go around thinking, oh no, I hope this man working with me isn’t into me. I’m not a femme fatale. I wear a coat with Pret tomato soup stains on it.’
‘The fact you need to get your coat dry cleaned doesn’t change the fact you’re very easy to fall in love with. I may know what I’m talking about.’
Edie thought, more likely, Elliot Owen had picked her, and her stock value had shot up. Declan’s introduction to Edie Thompson, as a concept before a person, involved two stories involving highly newsworthy amounts of male attention. It wasn’t a fair test; he didn’t meet her cold, in her thoroughly overlooked era. If there was too much noticing going on, it might ironically be more to do with Elliot than Edie.
‘Could it be your natural protectiveness, making you—’ she began, instead.
‘Oh, don’t you dare, Edie,’ Elliot said, with another flash of temper. ‘Don’t use how much I care about you to pretend it makes me unable to tell the difference between a nuisance and a threat. You once accused me of gaslighting – well, that’s gaslighting.’
‘He’s not a threat! Can I remind you I have to be OK with you play-act boning total goddesses?’
‘That is shit beyond belief for you, but this is different.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s real.’
Elliot kept dropping these certainties at Edie’s feet like bombs.
‘Except it isn’t – you’re speculating about Declan’s feelings while mine don’t exist.’
Elliot said nothing. Edie wasn’t sure why she felt so culpable: she’d done nothing wrong, unless ‘immediate rapport’ was a crime.
Yet, as she thought it, she realised immediate rapport between straight members of the two sexes could be deemed something else entirely. Had she really made a huge category error, then custard-pied it into Elliot’s face? It was never comfortable to do a high-speed recalculation of whether you were in fact in the wrong, mid-argument.
‘… The fact remains, if anyone was sizing you up, strengths and weaknesses, they’d give up instantly. That’s got to be a comfort.’
‘Of course he has a huge advantage over me, Edie. Time with you. The boring days and the funny anecdotes and being there when you get a bad phone call. Proximity.’
She’d had whispers of it from their earliest acquaintance, but Edie finally confronted just how lonely Elliot’s life could be. He was, for all the stardust and riches, a glorified contractor for hire, of no fixed address. The earthbound gravity of ‘pint after work?’ didn’t exist for him and likely never would again. He was Doctor Who, with British Airways business lounge as his Tardis. For the first time, she could see he’d won huge and missed out.
‘It’s not going to make any difference to how I feel about you.’
Elliot looked downcast. ‘The fact you’ve done this emotional super-injunction on yourself about him – it worries me.’
Edie swallowed hard. Had she? ‘I don’t know how to defend myself against this charge. I’ve seen nothing and done nothing, and that means I have, what, feelings I’ve hidden from myself? What do I do with that?’
Edie grasped this low-key wrangle might be quite serious and felt sick.
‘I don’t know what to do with it, either. I spent a whole evening with ringside seat for your spark with the man you’d have gone out with if I’d not come back. A role he’s still auditioning for. My understudy, hoping I break my leg.I’m sure he’s a nice enough person, but no one’s really nice in this scenario. His attitude to me can be summed up as: “tick tock motherfucker”.’
‘How do you know I’d have gone out with Declan?!’
As Edie said this, a series of moments flashed through her mind. Jolts at physical closeness, eyes meeting in laughter, the ways he’d looked out for her. The way he’d held her. Here was a tall, winning Irishman with a physique that could grace a Calvin Klein ad, who was Tim to her Dawn in The Office.This representation of Declan was a shock to her; it wasn’t, in fact, a reach.
‘You’re telling me Declan wouldn’t have been the next person? The “Last Time” person, if I’d left it another six months?’ Elliot said. ‘You don’t know yourself very well if you’re denying that.’
His words hung in the air as evident, unassailable truth. Elliot’s incisiveness was considerable. Edie had never asked herself this, and now she did, and he was right.
‘I’ve never thought about it for a moment,’ Edie said, glad that much was true. ‘I’m with you. I’m very much with you, whichever country you happen to be in. What do the What Ifs matter? Or the Who Elses? Those people don’t stop existing – they stop mattering.’
Edie was quite relieved she had produced this, under duress.
‘If you’re adamant I have nothing to worry about with Declan, then I accept that. I trust you. Also, I desperately want it to be true.’ Elliot smiled an unhappy smile.
‘You have nothing to worry about. Whatever you need me to do for you to believe that, I’ll do it.’
As she said it, Edie realised that she’d resist any demand to stop working with Declan. That’d be a great email. Hi Richard, I need to request a transfer for Declan: he allegedly looked too covetously at my clavicle area.
‘OK, then I do have a request,’ Elliot said. ‘The day soon when he comes to you and tells you he knows he’s completely out of order as you have a boyfriend and blah blah, but that he has to tell you that he wakes up thinking about you, goes to sleep thinking about you, and he only exists now to make you laugh, that if there was the smallest chance you felt any of this, too, blah blah – I want you to tell me he’s done it. He doesn’t get to keep secrets with you. Promise?’
‘Promise, but what the hell …?!’ Edie trying to joke Elliot out of it was obviously futile. ‘All we did is go for birthday tacos, and now I’m in some … scripted fiction love triangle?’
Elliot spoke of trusting her; it certainly didn’t feel like the whole story.
‘How do you know he’ll do this?’ Edie said, concealing that she was thoroughly rattled by the diatribe.
Elliot leaned back against the headboard. ‘It’s what I’d do if I was him.’
‘I don’t think you would. You’d not go after someone in a relationship?’
‘As I said, nobody’s nice in this scenario.’
‘What scenario?’
‘The one where you can’t bear to let someone go.’