Chapter Eight
Eight
Jelly
I’m walking. I don’t know where I’m going but it doesn’t matter. Here I can walk for as long as I like and disappear into the crowd. Nobody notices me, nobody cares where I’m going and nobody has any questions about why my face is stained with tears. I can be totally invisible.
Max had almost broken up with me once before. We’d been seeing each other for nearly a year when he’d come out with his doubt, breadcrumbing it, until I asked him what he was getting at and if he could please just spit it out.
He was looking into my eyes and telling me that he’d realised we were quite different. That he was a planner, and I was a floater. That he’d always just assumed he needed to be with a Type A woman who had a five-year plan. Someone who wasn’t drifting in the currents.
‘You’re making me sound like a jellyfish,’ I’d said.
He took my hand and squeezed it gently. ‘You know, jellyfish are actually kind of beautiful.’
‘You said they look like alien lifeforms.’
‘I say a lot of things.’
But he smiled and said maybe we could work through this. Maybe we could find a way to be more compatible. Live more harmoniously. And we did. For three years, we made it work.
Eventually, I sit down on a bench overlooking the Thames. Max’s territory. Greta’s turf. The setting of their own private love story.
No, I’m making too many assumptions. I don’t know anything for sure. All I saw was two people watching a movie together.
I dab at my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket.
Could we work this out? Perhaps it’s just a bit of harmless flirtation? Some minor infatuation? It doesn’t need to be the death knell of my relationship with Max. We could still salvage this.
If he can salvage six-hundred-year-old rotting leather shoe soles that emerge from the river mud, we can at least try to salvage this.
I’m just thinking it through, trying to look for the positives and take my mind out of panic mode, when my phone beeps with a message.
From Max.
I’m sorry you had to find out about Greta that way. I promise we’ve only been friends, but I think you’re right and there is something more there: something that in all honesty, I would like to pursue.