Chapter 21
Twenty-One
CLARA
I wouldn’t say that my morning alone with my thoughts—in the corner of the indoor gym that this villa boasted—made a lick of difference to my confused feelings about Jesse, but it did give me enough time to prepare myself to see him again without turning into a bumbling mess as my mind replayed the way he called me ‘baby’ in my dream.
As noon approached, I headed back down in search of food and my friends but came to a halt when I heard a new voice.
There was a unique kind of sadness attached to hearing a voice that used to feel like home and only feeling dread. It was a sadness that I wasn’t expecting to feel, but it was quickly overruled by worry that Jesse was in Drew’s direct warpath, and I wasn’t there to defend him.
When I heard the steely tones of my best friend cut in to do it for me, I quickly turned around and headed outside.
I had spent all morning focusing on making sure I could be normal around Jesse, that I forgot I should have been preparing to see my ex-boyfriend for the first time since we broke up.
Maybe getting outside would provide me with the perfect environment to get into the right headspace for dealing with people who tried to bait me into speaking with them.
As I walked in the general direction of the pool, I caught sight of my parents at the dining table not too far from it. For the second time in less than five minutes, I stopped in my tracks and went to turn around.
“Clara, where are you going?” Dad called out to me in English. I paused.
“I didn’t want to disturb you both,” I answered.
Mum and Dad probably weren’t conscious of the fact that they were sitting in a love bubble. Hands casually intertwined, heads close together, their voices barely above a whisper. I couldn’t see them because they were obscured by a chair, but their legs were probably linked together in some way. It always felt intrusive to walk in on that.
“Disturb away. What brings you outside?” Mum asked.
I dropped into a chair opposite them and turned my head up to the sky, a brilliant blue that reminded me of something.
“Drew’s here, and I forgot to mentally prepare for his arrival. I just need a moment.”
“Do you think you can ever truly be prepared to see him, given the way things ended?” Dad asked. I brought my head back down and narrowed my eyes.
“Was that supposed to be helpful?”
Dad laughed softly as he untangled his hand from Mum’s and held his palm out to me. He had the beginnings of a tan warming his skin already. I took his hand, and he squeezed it.
“I just meant that there will probably never be a good time to see an ex, whether you’ve mentally prepared for it or not. It might be best that you rip the plaster off. But I can cushion the blow with ice cream. Or a reminder that you’ve made it through worse situations.” He smiled, green eyes warm as he released my hand.
I leant back and pulled out my phone, shooting off a text.
Or three.
“Isn’t it lunchtime? Are you condoning dessert before main?” I teased once I’d put my phone down.
“You know as well as I do that that rule only applied to save you and your sisters from yourselves when you were kids.”
My head fell back in laughter. In the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Jesse walking towards the table.
Any ‘preparation’ I thought I had done this morning immediately disintegrated when I saw Jesse’s forearm flexing and the way his fingers curled around the tub of ice cream he was holding. The only thing in my head was the imagined press of him against my back, that forearm and that hand working me over, a never-ending stream of baby, baby, baby .
“Lovely to see you both,” Jesse said. To my parents. Who were still sitting opposite me while I spiralled over a dream I was supposed to have buried by now.
As Jesse sat down next to me, he deposited the ice cream on the table and then dropped his hand down against my thigh. The shock of cold against my sun-warm skin made me jump, and I looked down at his hand, a brand splayed against me. I watched his fingers squeeze against the muscle of my quad, and then he let me go, leaving behind five blooms of white in my brown skin for a fraction of a second.
I felt my nipples pebble, and that was when I remembered that I was still in my pyjamas, and the thin material of them wasn’t hiding a damn thing.
I opened the ice cream and shoved a spoonful in as quickly as I could in a bid to pass my hardened nipples off as a reaction to the cold of that instead of Jesse’s touch.
“Lovely to see you, Jesse. You caught us just as we were about to remind Clara of times she’s dealt with embarrassing situations,” Dad said. My next spoon of ice cream paused on its way to my mouth. I didn’t think he was serious about that.
I did not want Jesse to hear anything that he was about to say.
“Oh? Like when?” Jesse asked. His arm draped over the back of my chair.
“She got her robes stuck in a grate in front of her whole graduating class and managed to seamlessly style that out,” Dad said.
I leaned into Jesse’s side, just about stopping myself from burying my face in his neck. I ate more ice cream instead.
“What happened?” Jesse asked me.
“My heel got stuck in my robe, which then snagged on a grate as we left the venue. It took nearly two minutes for me to get it out. Thanks for bringing that up, Dad.”
Dad shrugged.
“He did you a favour, macaron. He could have mentioned Barcelona,” Mum said.
I almost choked on the ice cream I had just put in my mouth. Jesse’s hand moved to the space between my shoulders, and the shock of his touch against my bare skin made me inhale too quickly, and then I was choking.
His hand started tapping firmly against my back, which did help. But it also made me wonder if I might be into spanking if he was the dealer.
“Don’t you dare. Either of you,” I eventually managed to say. My parents held their hands up in matching gestures of surrender.
“But what happened in Barcelona?” Jesse asked. His hand was still on my back, rubbing in circles. I should have told him I was fine, and he didn’t need to keep touching me.
I shoved another spoon of ice cream into my mouth.
“You will never know,” I said around the spoon. I dared to look at him and saw his eyes sparkling with amusement. “And no more embarrassing stories. I get it, I can overcome, and this will be no different.”
“Papayas don’t even cross my mind.” The sound of Rachel’s voice drifted over to us, and I wondered why she was talking about papayas so loudly before I remembered it was a code word.
We used papaya when we needed to get out of situations. It was just random enough for us to notice if any of us said it, and it was a less stressful message to receive than an SOS, which was saved for actual emergencies.
Sometimes, we used it as a warning word.
I had five seconds before the reason Rachel called the warning to prepare myself.
As Drew came into my line of vision, I noticed how he immediately zoned in on me and Jesse. Me in my black satin pyjama set, and Jesse’s hand, a reassuring weight over my shoulders. I was leaning into him again, finding his body heat comforting, even under the midday sun.
“Good to see you again, Darren, Vivi.” Drew was talking to my parents, but his eyes were on me and Jesse.
He’d had a haircut since he’d told me I wasn’t the girl he fell in love with and stole my sofa. It was a tad too short and made his features look harsher. His eyes, which used to hold a certain warmth whenever he saw me, looked cold. Uninviting.
“How are you, Andrew?” Dad asked.
Drew finally dragged his gaze away from us to my parents. “It’s been a rough few weeks, as I’m sure you can imagine. Yourselves?”
“Nous es sortons tres bien, merci d’ovaire demande,” Mum replied. Not typically a petty person, she often recommended that my sister and I take the high road, and it was something she practised. But Addie and I also learned how to be petty from our mother because she was a master at it. Vivienne Henry never messed up on which language she spoke first. If it was family only, she spoke French, but the moment someone from outside the four of us was around, she spoke English unless she knew they understood French.
Drew still couldn’t say much beyond hello and goodbye.
He paled and looked at me to try and save him.
I wasn’t the one who provided the translation.
“She said they’re fine, thanks for asking.” I could feel the rumble of Jesse’s voice against me.
“Right, thanks,” Drew mumbled.
Becky was next to appear. “You’re back with us,” she said as her eyes zeroed in on me and Jesse. I realised that Jesse’s fingers were playing with the strap of my top.
“Was hungry,” I said before more ice cream ended up in my mouth.
“We’re gonna go round by the pool. You coming?”
My instinct was to say no. There was no way I should be around Jesse. Especially a shirtless one.
“Yeah, I’ll come. I’ll go get changed.” I put the lid back on the ice cream and reluctantly extracted myself from Jesse.
As I went to walk back into the villa, I realised that Drew and I had yet to address each other. I felt a pang of sadness again at the fact that we had gone from lovers to practically strangers in the last month, but it quickly passed.
“It’s good to see you,” I said to him.
It wasn’t the truth. But it made me feel better that I was the one to get the first words in. Drew seemed surprised to hear me talk to him directly and just nodded his head.
I walked away from Drew knowing that that chapter of my life was done.