London
Two Years Earlier
We were gathered in the office for our usual Wednesday morning planning meeting and the whole team were expected to be present.
Not turning up was punishable by … well, I wasn’t sure, because I’d always turned up.
Even when I was ill and probably should have called in sick, I’d drag myself in, determined not to ‘let down’ my bosses.
I didn’t know who I thought I was kidding – they probably didn’t notice whether I was there or not half the time, but it made me feel better, so I went with it.
‘Danish?’ said Lou, passing me a plate of dry-looking pastries. The free food was the only exciting thing about the meeting.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ I said, grabbing one and then passing the plate along to Kiely, the other assistant producer.
She’d only been at Holiday Shop for a few months and already she’d ingratiated herself with the SMT clique (headed up by Executive Producer, Mel).
I worried constantly about whether, if a producer role did come up, it would go to her and I’d be savagely disappointed and uncontrollably angry.
Not that I’d ever really lost it like that – I’d learned not to bother, it never got me anywhere – but I imagined that it would be something like this that would tip me over the edge.
‘Right,’ said Mel. ‘Shall we make a start?’
I opened up my notebook. I rarely wrote anything in it, but it made me look on-the-ball, I thought.
‘Let’s start with the Loch Lomond footage.
Tim has done a brilliant job of making a not-very-exciting destination look like a must-see.
And Ruthie has really pushed herself out of her comfort zone with this one, which Tim tells me was something he worked hard on.
We’ve got her on a lake cruise, we’ve got her eating a cream tea in a local tea room – and you know she doesn’t like to eat on camera – and, best of all, we’ve got her on a kayak!
It all makes for some very exciting footage, which we’ll be using for all of our UK promos, as well as our Scotland Special. Well done, Tim!’
Everyone clapped.
Lou pressed her knee against mine.
Tim lapped up the attention and then, when he saw mine and Lou’s faces, he made some attempt to include the rest of the team in this love-fest.
‘Thanks to the rest of the team, too,’ he said, in the tone you might use if you were agreeing to have root canal surgery.
‘He’s such a twat!’ said Lou later when she swung by my desk to see if I wanted to go to an early-morning yoga class at the top of the walkie-talkie building on Sunday morning (that would be a no!).
‘Don’t get wound up, you know what he’s like,’ I said, worried she’d be overheard.
‘And what’s her excuse?’ hissed Lou. ‘Mel. Can she not see that Tim’s completely useless and that actually what made that shoot work was mainly you but also me? Is she blind?’
I looked anxiously around the office. It was one thing to slag Mel off in the comfort of our own homes (or at least out of earshot), but the prospect of being caught doing it was quite another.
‘I’m literally going to start looking for a new job at lunchtime and I seriously advise you to do the same,’ said Lou.
Luckily I was prevented from having to answer her by my phone ringing in my bag.
My heart immediately started racing, as it had done repeatedly since I’d got back from Scotland (on a VERY expensive direct train, thanks to my dad and Sharon).
Aidan and I had texted a couple of times.
He’d sent me a photo on WhatsApp of him on a surfboard in Cornwall, which I’d found unbelievably sexy.
But I knew he was back now and I didn’t know if he was as desperate to see me as I was to see him because he was all I had thought about for the last five days.
I bent down and took my phone casually out of my bag, so as not to alert Lou to the fact that I’d turned into an Aidan-obsessed lunatic.
I glanced nonchalantly at the screen and then nearly dropped the handset on my desk when I saw the words Aidan Calling on the screen.
Aaargh! I wasn’t prepared for this despite having run through the scenario again and again in my head since he’d left Loch Lomond.
I stared at the phone, wondering how to answer, if to answer, whether it would be cooler and less obvious to let it go to voicemail or whether that might mean that he’d think I wasn’t interested.
I couldn’t stand it when I had a running commentary in my head like this because there was never any clear answer and one thing always cancelled out the other.
‘You’ve gone bright red,’ said Lou, unhelpfully.
‘It’s Aidan,’ I said, my voice sounding all tense and tight.
‘Well, you’d better answer it, then,’ she replied.
I took a deep breath.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How was Cornwall?’
He came round later that evening after calling to tell me he’d be a bit late.
I was usually reluctant to invite people back to my tiny studio flat.
I always thought they’d be put off by the fact I lived on the fifth floor of a block of flats; that my bed was in the same room as my lounge and, for that matter, the kitchen.
But I loved it here. I’d rented it when I got promoted to assistant producer, which, although it didn’t pay much, gave me enough money to move out of the student house-share I was living in at the time.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I had my own, proper space.
It wasn’t a room at my dad’s that was in the basement away from the rest of the family (and which always gave me Harry Potter locked-in-a-cupboard vibes), and it wasn’t a room at my mum’s that also doubled as a snug for the girls when I wasn’t there (which, to her great relief, it seemed, was most of the time).
‘I love all these pictures,’ said Aidan, looking at the framed photographs lining my walls. ‘Where’s this?’
‘Hong Kong.’
‘And this?’
‘Peru.’
‘Have you been to all these places?’ asked Aidan.
I shook my head, opening a bottle of red. ‘No. They’re on my wish list. The places I want to visit. It gives me hope that one day I’ll have the money to go, or that I’ll somehow wangle a proper TV job and will be zipping across the world on a plethora of exciting assignments.’
‘It’s definitely possible,’ said Aidan, watching me pour two glasses of wine. ‘You’ve got to think big.’
‘And there’s only so many times I can go to Fuerteventura, right?’ I said, grimacing and handing him a glass.
‘Tired of Fuerteventura, tired of life?’
We laughed and then drank in silence for a second or two. It wasn’t awkward exactly, but I thought I might feel the pressure of everything having been so sexy and a bit intense in Loch Lomond. Would I feel the same way? Would he?
‘So, I’ve missed you,’ he said.
Yes!
‘Same,’ I replied.
‘Sorry I got held up on the way over.’
‘No problem. Do you want to sit down?’ I asked, ushering him onto the sofa. I sat next to him, my knee falling against his. ‘You said you had an appointment?’
‘Hmmmn. I had to have a blood test.’
I looked surprised. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Hopefully,’ he said, breezily. ‘There’s some stuff going on with my mum, that’s all. Everything feels a bit … difficult at the moment.’
I put my wine down on the coffee table.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ I said.
‘You think your parents are invincible, don’t you? But then stuff happens out of the blue and it’s like the rug has been pulled out from under you.’
I nodded. My parents were young still, only in their fifties. I wasn’t there yet, with the worrying, but I supposed there would come a time when I would be. And I felt bad for Aidan that he was already having to deal with it.
‘It might not be as terrible as you think,’ I said. ‘You’re not googling stuff, are you?’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘Course not.’
I raised an eyebrow at him.
‘OK, maybe just a bit,’ he admitted with a wry smile.
I reached for his hand, threading my fingers through his.
He sighed. ‘Sorry. All this is a bit of a mood-kill, isn’t it?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I hope you feel you can … you know, talk to me? Even though we haven’t known each other very long.’
Aidan sat back on the sofa, resting his head against it, looking relaxed and comfortable. It was like he belonged here, in my little flat. He liked it, I could tell, and I liked him being here. It was perfect.
‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Don’t ask me how, because I’m not usually the most intuitive person, but I already know there’s something special about you.’