You Belong With Me

Prologue

‘It’s someone for you.’

Edie frowned after Meg spoke. She took off the oven glove and placed it next to the pigs in blankets, crossing the room and weaving past her grinning, flushed sibling. Meg reflexively removed her paper hat as if a hearse rather than her elder sister was passing.

Edie knew exactly who was at the door, and yet she still didn’t know, both at the same time. Perfect certainty and the precariousness of hope.

The Christmas Day cook’s cava had her bumping along merrily as it was; now she faceplanted down a log flume of it.

The caller at the end of the hall came into focus, his face partially obscured by a large, brown-paper wrapped bunch of white roses. Fireworks went off inside Edie.

‘Are roses kind of “cheating husband” cheesy? I don’t speak fluent “flower”,’ Elliot Owen said, lowering the roses and offering them to her.

He somehow looked better than she remembered.

He was in a grey winter coat with a turned-up collar, that whispered at least a grand, possibly even two. His dark hair had been unusually short for a role but was now grown out a little and starting to curl.

Edie accepted the roses with a small exclamation of gratitude, momentarily unable to respond.

‘You’re not pissed off I’ve crashed your Christmas Day?’ Elliot said, an anxious look she knew so well crossing his face.

‘No … I’m merely stunned at seeing you,’ Edie said, inclining her head towards the flowers. ‘Thank you. Cheating husband.’

‘I haven’t, obviously,’ Elliot said.

A few beats of creaky silence followed as the remark landed heavily: first the idea of marriage and then the notion that he could somehow cheat on her in their current circumstances.

Edie had absolutely no idea what to say, so they were left looking at each other with a you go first intensity and longing. She was glad she’d declined the ‘Santa’s Chimney Legs’ deely boppers.

‘I didn’t come round only to be a flashy shithouse with a bouquet,’ Elliot said eventually.

‘I was going to say – I’m pretty sure delivery isn’t that much extra if you’d wanted to pay for it,’ Edie said, trying to emulate a level of savvy comeback composure she didn’t feel.

She was incredibly touched and excited that he was here. She also didn’t think microdosing Elliot Owen was ever going to work, so she had the rollercoaster sickness.

Call her a pessimist, but an inner voice was already scoffing: yeah, lovely, he wants to call in and see you on Christmas Day, but imagine the emptiness next year when he doesn’t. When he can’t. When you know why he won’t.

This was precisely why she’d ended it. She wasn’t going to perform the emotional equivalent of barefoot free-climbing the Burj Khalifa to prove it couldn’t be done and confirm that falling the distance would break her. What they’d had was too perfect and good to end that way. She foresaw inevitable outcomes.

And yet, he was here. And suddenly nothing else mattered.

Elliot cleared his throat. ‘I wanted to say …’

Edie glanced over her shoulder as there was a scuffle behind them and a ceremonious closing of the dining-room door – as if a festive table full of people who’d been trying to listen in to catch the mood of the interaction had decided they probably shouldn’t.

‘The reasons you gave for dumping me – they were bullshit,’ Elliot said, breaking into a wide smile of nervous relief that he was finally risking saying the thing, and that Edie was at least smiling back.

‘I’ve thought about nothing else but you since I last saw you,’ he said, as Edie tried to look intelligently neutral and not to fall forward into his arms. ‘You said you couldn’t fit in with my career? And that I couldn’t manage with your wanting to stay here.’

‘That was the size of it, yes,’ Edie said, leaning on the door jamb, supposedly casually but actually a little bit for support.

‘… Thing is, I want you more than I want the career. Why am I binning you off to make way for it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?’

Edie felt faint and hot in the misty December air. She was wholly unprepared for this and would need to hide in flippancy. ‘Is the plan for you to retrain as an electrician and plumber?’

‘It’s recession-proof work,’ Elliot said.

‘Haha. You’d look like Derek Zoolander as a coal miner.’

‘Listen, I’m a twat who can’t do anything else – I mostly enjoy acting. And I need to keep all my hot sluts in bunches of roses.’

Edie properly laughed. She was a fool for him when he dropped posh actor Elliot and used his real accent.

‘But I’m the only person in charge of my life. If I want the jobs I take to suit having a girlfriend in the East Midlands, they will. Simple as that.’

A pause.

‘Elliot …’ Edie began. ‘It’s amazing you’d offer.’ She adjusted her hands on the brown paper around the roses, felt her fingertips dappling it with sweat marks. ‘But I didn’t give you up for trivial reasons. It was the hardest, most grown-up decision I’ve ever made, but I thought about it from every angle, and there wasn’t any other way.’

‘You sound like my mum when she had our cat, Inspector Boursin, put down.’

‘Inspector Boursin?’

‘Don’t ask – Fraser named him. OK, look. Saying this next thing is more intimidating than when I auditioned for Christopher Nolan and he said nothing for thirty seconds and then kind of nodded …’

‘Name-dropping, even now,’ Edie said with warmth, rolling her eyes.

‘I’m gabbling because I’m so nervous,’ Elliot said, and whether he knew it or not, Edie was already in love with him harder than ever.

‘The practicalities are pretty much irrelevant. You’re not …’ He paused and swallowed, hard. ‘… replaceable, Edie.’

‘Hah, well, you definitely aren’t.’

That was glaringly obvious. She wasn’t easily going to settle for John Bloke after Elliot Owen. She felt like Lois Lane after a night sky flight with Superman.

‘I don’t mean in superficial ways. The time apart has proved it to me. I already knew it when you ended things – I just couldn’t articulate it. It’s all so clear to me now. From my perspective, anyway. I don’t want to shake hands, leave you as some golden memory when I’m toothless watching quiz shows in a fireside chair, Edie. I don’t want to try to fill the space where you should’ve been with other people, because we didn’t even try. There isn’t another you, for me. If you feel as much as I do, then we shouldn’t be bothering with the “if”, only the how.’

Edie couldn’t speak. Her throat had seized up, and she had a dull pain behind her ears. Comprehending that she’d been made a surprise offer of true love replicated a sinus condition.

It was more than this overwhelming confirmation of his feelings; it was discovering that she’d so efficiently minimised and denied hers.

Edie honestly thought she was done with living behind expertly constructed facades, and lying to herself. It seemed she wasn’t, because Elliot had turned her case for their separating inside out.

He was right: the first principle was that they were, and remained, madly in love, not that his job involved a lot of travel. He had offered compromises – never demanded she leave her home – and she had still rejected them out of hand.

Why? All of Edie’s objections really meant: you’re destined for bigger and better things (than me). She hadn’t been able to bear attempting a relationship with him not because it was truly impossible, but because she was so certain of failure. She’d used these two concepts interchangeably, when actually, they weren’t the same at all. Acknowledging this put Edie’s insistence they split up in a very different light.

She hadn’t dumped Elliot. She had pre-emptively dumped herself.

‘… The only thing I don’t know is if maybe you didn’t feel quite enough for the huge hassle involved in being with me. If so, I get it,’ Elliot continued. ‘I’m sorry to put you on the spot. This definitely felt like a meeting not an email.’

She could tell that while his voice stayed steady, inside, he was writhing. As soon as she found the words, she’d put him out of his misery.

Elliot’s brow knitted. ‘Unless you’re seeing anyone? I told Fraser not to tell me if he found out you were, but I’d hoped he understood that meant he should still tell me, and then I could blame him for it when I lost my shit.’

‘No, I’m not.’ She paused. ‘I can’t find a single flaw in your argument, to be fair. Never seeing you has felt a lot like bullshit. Also, if you think I’ve got the strength of character to say no to Elliot Owen twice, you’re wrong.’

‘You’d be saying no to Elliot.’

She understood his meaning. ‘Well, the answer to either of them is yes.’

Elliot’s eyes lit up, and hers shone with incipient tears she was definitely not going to cry, not when they weren’t even at the trifle and cheeseboard course on the other side of that door. She owed him honesty about why she’d let him go, after his courage.

‘The truth is … I’m scared,’ she said. Saying it out loud it actually felt cathartic, rather than stupid.

‘So am I,’ Elliot said.

He stepped forward and kissed her, and it was exactly the right moment. It stopped them overthinking it. She’d forgotten how his mouth on hers could make her feel, in that way you did when remembering was too potent and inconvenient.

Edie held the flowers over his shoulder, muttering: ‘Fuck, you’re freezing’ in self-consciousness as they disentangled, because the repressed passion in physical contact somehow managed to say more than anything in the last two minutes. If they’d started there, they could’ve saved time.

Elliot put a cold hand to her face and said quietly: ‘We’re not making a mistake, you know. If you’re right and what comes next is a massive mess that breaks both our hearts, then I’m afraid that’s still what we’ve got to do. The only way out is through.’

He glanced up and added at normal volume: ‘Oh, hi! Mr Thompson!’

Edie turned to see her dad over her shoulder.

‘Hello! Huge apologies for the interruption, but Megan’s at the side dishes like a groundhog and wants to know if anyone has rights to second helps,’ her father said. ‘I quote her verbatim: “Edith will go full Miss Trunchbull if we finish the roasties, Dad – you know what she’s like.”’

‘Edie, you should’ve said you were having dinner – I’m so sorry!’ Elliot said.

‘I feel sure you’re more of an attraction than the sprout and lemon stuffing, delightful as it is. Are you joining us, Elliot?’ her dad asked.

Elliot looked to Edie. ‘Ehm …?’

‘Yes,’ Edie said, without hesitation. ‘Yes, he is.’

She hung up his ridiculous coat in her hallway, alongside normal items of outerwear, like a nineteenth-century nobleman was time-travel visiting.

She found Elliot a chair, reintroduced him to Nick and Hannah, and made introductions with their plus ones, now that she had one of her own.

‘Parsnips with maple syrup glaze, not honey, so no bees were exploited,’ her sister Meg said, as she heaped his plate. ‘Beekeeping is like sending bees to war.’

‘Inglorious bee-sterds,’ Elliot said, and vegan ultra Meg actually giggled.

Edie watched, amazed.

Elliot was, in so many ways, a miracle.