Chapter Twenty Three
It took me twenty minutes to finish tidying up the kitchen. I was moving much better now on the crutch, and despite Josh’s gloomy prediction, not a single piece of crockery had been lost.
I hesitated for a long time with the snow globe still in my hand. I could slide it back into the drawer and pretend I’d never found it, or I could stop running away from answers I might not want to hear. With a new resolve, I placed the snow globe front and centre on the kitchen window ledge, where it couldn’t be missed. As I did, the memory of a long-forgotten Christmas present that never was suddenly made sense.
‘I’d really wanted to get you that cute snow globe with the polar bear,’ Adam had said regretfully on Christmas morning. The floor was a sea of colourful wrapping paper from the many gifts he’d given me. ‘But when I went back to the Winter Wonderland the following day, the stall holder said someone else had bought it.’
At least now, seven years later, I knew who that had been.
‘So, that was Josh.’
I smiled around the toothbrush in my mouth. I’d been waiting over an hour for this conversation, but I hadn’t anticipated Adam would choose to begin it when I was frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog.
To be honest, I’d thought it would come in the taxi on our way home from the Winter Wonderland. We’d been lucky and had snagged a cab almost as soon as we’d left the beer tent, and as I’d sunk back on its cracked leather seats, I was eager to hear what Adam thought of my old friend.
But I never got to find out, because Adam had given both of our addresses to the driver, and with hardly any traffic on the road we’d probably reach my flat in less than ten minutes. I had a feeling this conversation deserved longer than that.
As we drove towards my home, it was hard to ignore the niggling concern that perhaps this wasn’t a discussion that should be allowed to fester overnight. Acting purely on impulse, I leant forward to speak to the driver.
‘Actually, can you just forget about that first address and take us both to the second one, please.’
Adam looked surprised. Pleasantly so, I hoped.
‘I thought you said you couldn’t come back because you had an early client meeting in the morning?’ he queried.
I did. And I loved how he never complained when sometimes I had to put work before our time together. But tonight was about priorities, and there was something in his eyes that had been there since we’d run into Josh that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t want it – or anything – driving a wedge between us.
‘I can get up super early to make my meeting,’ I assured him, snuggling against his side. He slid an arm around me, and I tilted my face up for a kiss.
Before my eyes closed, I’d searched his for the thing that had been vaguely worrying me for the last hour or two and had made me decide to change my plans. It was still there.
Now, I rinsed my mouth and patted it dry with a towel, which conveniently prevented Adam from seeing the way I was anxiously gnawing on my lower lip.
‘Yes. That was Josh. What did you think of him?’
The answer shot back so quickly I didn’t entirely trust it was his honest opinion. It was a knee-jerk response. ‘He seems very nice.’
I picked up my comb and smoothed out the tangles in my hair as I tried to navigate my way through an unexpected obstacle course.
‘No, he didn’t,’ I said, talking to Adam’s reflection in his bathroom mirror. He was wearing only a towel, having stepped out of the shower just moments earlier. The temptation to drop the conversation and slide myself against him was strong, but I resisted. ‘Josh was being weird tonight. I don’t know why, but he’s not normally like that. He’s not usually that . . . prickly.’
It hadn’t gone well from the moment Adam returned to our table with the beers and unfortunately overheard Josh making some totally unnecessary comment about never having imagined I’d go for a ‘stuffed shirt, suit and tie kind of guy’.
Adam hadn’t reacted, but I’d noticed the way his lips had tightened. On the surface, if you read a transcript of the rest of the evening, there had been nothing said by either man to hint at any animosity or underlying aggression. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t been the world’s biggest silent pissing contest.
‘I think Josh was thrown to find out I was seeing someone, and that it was serious.’
Some of the tension went out of Adam’s features at my words.
‘Because he’s been carrying a torch for you for years?’
I shook my head so vehemently I messed up the smooth strands I’d just combed into place.
‘God, no. That’s not how he feels about me at all. We’re just mates. Josh was just pissed off that I hadn’t told him about us.’
There was a long pause, and I held my breath waiting for Adam to ask the obvious question: Why hadn’t you? I was very glad he chose not to, because I didn’t know the answer to that one myself.
Instead, he dropped the towel that was fastened around his hips and returned it to the rail. I felt my heart rate immediately quicken, the way it did every single time I saw him naked. I wondered if it would always be that way. I really hoped it would.
‘If you got to know him – when you get to know him,’ I quickly corrected, ‘I think you’ll like him. I know he can be a bit of a prat at times, but beneath it all he really is one of the good guys.’
‘Maybe we just caught him off guard or on a bad night,’ Adam said reasonably, and I heaved a silent sigh of relief as he turned off the bathroom light and took my hand. I thought the topic was over and done with, but as we walked side by side towards his bed, Adam said softly, ‘He didn’t look the way I’d imagined.’
Suddenly it wasn’t carpet beneath my feet, but quicksand, and if I did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, an uncomfortable situation could easily turn catastrophic.
‘Oh?’
Adam gave a small self-deprecating laugh. ‘In my head, I’ve always imagined him shorter.’ He paused. ‘Maybe with a beer belly.’ He paused again. ‘And uglier. I definitely imagined him uglier.’
I laughed, hoping it was the joke it seemed to be, all the while glimpsing an unexpected insecurity in the man I’d fallen in love with that I’d never seen before.
‘He’s just Josh,’ I said, as though that explained everything, even though I knew it didn’t. ‘He’s the boy who showed me how to climb trees and taught me all the best swear words. He had a really shitty start in life and sometimes I think he isn’t done yet putting all of that behind him. He’ll be a great partner for someone someday, when eventually he does. But it won’t be me. Because I’m off the market.’
Finally, at last, Adam’s eyes cleared, and he pulled me into his arms. And as we tumbled back on to his bed, and he began sliding off my underwear, I sent up a silent prayer that Josh was as far from Adam’s thoughts as he was from mine.
Josh returned to the kitchen with a surprisingly contrite expression on his face. It was weird how his sheepish charm still had the ability to flip a switch within me.
‘I’m sorry, Lily. I didn’t mean to be a dick.’
I was startled but found a retort that hit exactly the right note.
‘But you just couldn’t help yourself, huh?’
He paused for a beat, long enough for me to wonder if I’d misplayed it, then he laughed.
He looked genuinely sorry. ‘I don’t think living alone has improved my ability to play nicely. I need to work harder on that.’
I shook my head, willing to draw a line under the sour note our earlier conversation had taken, but Josh held up his hand, stalling me. ‘For what it’s worth, my reaction to Adam was never entirely . . . rational . . . back in the day. I’m not proud of how I behaved in the past, Lily.’
It was a huge admission that seemed to suck all the air out of the room. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard Josh admit to being at fault. It made him seem oddly vulnerable and more like the boy I used to know.
‘I think you were both as bad as each other. Let’s just leave it there, shall we?’
And that would have been the end of it, had his eyes not gone to the window ledge, and the polar bear snow globe. I watched his face carefully for a reaction, but there was none. When the silence stretched too long to feel comfortable, I filled it.
‘I found that in the back of the kitchen drawer. Does it look familiar?’
Josh shook his head, trying to appear indifferent, but I was an old expert on studying his expressions. He recognised the globe; I knew he did.
‘I used to pick them up all the time when Janette was alive,’ he said with an attempt at nonchalance. He took his eyes from the globe and swivelled them to meet mine. ‘I’m sure if you rifle through other drawers in the cabin you’ll find some more.’
The rebuke – which he’d done little to disguise – stung, but not as much as the realisation that this was one more thing that Josh was refusing to tell me.
‘I’m certain I recognise this one,’ I said, giving him one last chance to come clean.
But Josh simply shrugged, seemingly bored with the conversation. ‘They all look the same to me,’ he said, before changing the topic with absolutely no attempt at subtlety. ‘I think I’ll put on a DVD. Fancy watching a movie?’
I shook my head, disappointed on so many levels it was hard to know what bothered me most.
‘No, I think I’ll have an early night.’
I left the room with Fletcher padding loyally beside me, and was almost at the bedroom door before realising I’d left my cardigan on the back of a chair. I retraced my steps, but never made it back into the kitchen. For as I paused in the hallway, hidden by the shadows, I watched in fascination as Josh lifted the globe from the window ledge and stood motionless, cradling it within his large, work-callused hands, with an unfathomable expression on his face.