Chapter 18
.?.?. nothing.
I’d watched as the double ticks next to my latest overly long apology turned blue, confirming he’d read it, only for him to go offline again a second later without even the briefest appearance of three dots to show that he’d considered responding.
He just didn’t want to talk to me. Period.
And, it would seem, neither did Joe, who I’d also not seen since that day, the expression on his face before I hit the tarmac still branded on my mind.
A constant reminder of that ever-present ache deep in my chest, the hole where something used to be.
‘Any messages?’ I asked Beryl, pausing at her desk on the way to mine after returning from a particularly harrowing trip to Autumn Lodge, the local care home that had been hit with a chlamydia outbreak.
You’re never too old to get a cheeky leg over was the exact quote I’d scribbled down from one resident, who looked about ninety and was wheeling his oxygen tank behind him en route to collect his course of antibiotics.
Beryl swivelled slowly in her chair to face me, her lips pinched into a tight pout of annoyance.
‘No, Jennifer. Once again, no one called for you,’ she said coolly, no doubt still pissed off from the last time I asked her a few hours ago. Or because she didn’t take kindly to being a glorified PA, even though it was literally her job to field incoming calls.
‘So how are the Viagra-popping residents of Autumn Lodge?’ Jacob asked with a grin as I eased myself gently into my chair.
After two weeks off work, my ribs were healing nicely and the bruising was all but gone, but they were still tender and I was under strict instructions from Alice to take it easy.
‘Apparently the gentlemen operate a colour-coded tie system to state their sexual preferences. Not sure why it’s just the men that are allowed to be picky, but I didn’t have the energy today to get into a debate about gender inequality with a bunch of Churchill-loving octogenarians.
Blue means can’t go on top – presumably for medical reasons but I wasn’t about to ask for details – while green is code for no foreplay and red means up for anything,’ I read, squinting at my scribbled notes.
‘Let me guess. A man in a red tie told you that?’
I rolled my eyes at Jacob, hitting refresh on my emails.
My heart sank deeper in my chest when Luca’s name failed to appear in the list of three unread emails that materialised on my screen.
My phone buzzed atop my notebook and my heart leapt upwards again, a constant boomerang of hopeful highs and crushing lows.
I lunged for it, all fingers and thumbs as I knocked it to the floor in my haste to see who the message was from.
‘Woah there.’ Jacob held out a hand to stop me from bending down, reaching for my phone himself and placing it slowly back on the desk. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ he said with a warning tone to his voice. I tapped the screen, everything inside of me plummeting at the sight of my mum’s name.
Just checking in love. How’s your day going? xx
I sighed, turning the phone over. The subtext to that message was just checking to see if you’ve had any visions of your dead ex-fiancé today?
She’d been ‘checking in’ multiple times a day since I’d been discharged from hospital, fussing around me like a mother bird.
Thankfully she’d drawn the line so far at regurgitating food for me, but the way she was going, I didn’t think it was far off.
‘You still not heard from Luca then?’ Jacob guessed, not looking up from his screen.
He was reading the latest ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ list which just added to my rage.
I was tired of fucking ‘30 under 30’ lists.
You know who I wanted to see? The 55-year-old who’d just graduated university.
Or the 70-year-old who’d set up their first business selling hand-knitted scarves on Etsy.
Show me that person. Not the bleary-eyed twenty-somethings killing themselves to exceed some unrealistic benchmark set by a society that declares if you haven’t ‘ made it ’ (whatever the fuck that means) by thirty, you’ve essentially failed.
‘Nope,’ I said, stabbing my mouse with excessive force on the delete button of one of Beryl’s twice-weekly company-wide emails.
(This one was requesting that employees refrain from drinking milk directly from the cartons in the fridge.
I noticed Rahul shrinking down in his chair to my right, doing a very bad job of not looking guilty.)
‘Well, you can talk to him tomorrow night at the concert,’ Jacob declared simply, as though that were the answer to all my problems, not the very thing I’d been dreading these past two weeks.
‘Call me crazy, but I think two weeks of radio silence means he probably won’t be jumping for joy at seeing me in person. Besides, whatever this’ – I waved my hand through the air, racking my brains for a way to describe what Luca and I had – ‘ thing was between us, it was a mistake.’
Jacob paused his scrolling, spinning in his chair to face me.
‘Oh no, you don’t get to do that,’ he said, wagging his ballpoint pen at me.
‘Do what?’
‘Give up on the chance of anyone getting close to you after being scalded one time.’
‘I think my fiancé dying did a lot more than just scald me, Jacob,’ I snapped. ‘It fucking destroyed me, burnt everything to the ground until there was nothing left.’ The deluge of emotions I’d been holding in these past few weeks were teetering on my lashes, threatening to overflow at any moment.
‘I know it did,’ he said softly, wheeling closer until our knees were touching.
A shadow passed across his face that made me instantly regret my outburst. Sometimes I forgot that I wasn’t the only one who’d lost Joe, that I didn’t have a monopoly on grief.
‘But Luca healed you in a way that none of us could this past year,’ Jacob continued, dropping his head until he caught my eye.
‘He brought you back to life, sparked something in you that had been snuffed out, and that’s been a beautiful thing to watch.
Nothing has the power to hurt as much as loving someone, Jenny, but nothing heals quite like it either.
I mean, Christ, I would have given up this whole dating game years ago otherwise. ’
‘I’ve tried, Jacob. I’ve phoned, I’ve texted, I’ve emailed. I even arranged for the restaurant we had our date at to send him a pizza with I’M SORRY written on it in tiny pieces of pepperoni. He returned it. Uneaten.’
‘Well, that’s just wasteful,’ Jacob tutted, horrified that anyone would turn down pizza. ‘It’s a good thing that the Jenny Thompson I know doesn’t give up easily, then,’ he said, holding my gaze challengingly.
My eyes narrowed. ‘Seriously? You’re really appealing to my competitive side right now?’
‘Is it working?’
‘Not even a little,’ I lied, pushing his chair back towards his desk.
A familiar wheezing ahem ahem behind me made me close my eyes; this was so not what I needed right now. I took a long, calming breath in for five seconds before spinning around in my chair, forcing my face into something vaguely resembling a smile.
‘All set for the concert tomorrow night, Jenny? Mrs Kingston and I are greatly looking forward to it,’ Derek bellowed, running his thumbs up and down the too-tight straps of his braces.
‘Yeah, about that. Something’s come up and I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it tomorrow,’ I lied, turning my bottom lip downwards in a fake picture of disappointment. Jacob’s brilliant white Veja came down purposefully on my own battered Converse. I ignored him.
‘What do you mean, you’re not going to make it?’ Derek huffed, beads of perspiration already gathering on his forehead. ‘I’ve reserved the front page for a write-up, Jenny, I don’t need you letting the side down.’
‘I’ve asked Sally to cover it for me,’ I said quickly, making a mental note to fire off an email to Sally ASAP as Jacob pressed down harder on my toe.
Derek shook his head so fast he looked like he was malfunctioning, a strand of his greased-back hair breaking free from its normally impenetrable Brylcreem shell.
‘No, that won’t work. That won’t work at all.
Sally’s off work for the foreseeable – doctor signed her off with stress ,’ he tutted, waggling his fingers in little air quotes as though mental health were a made-up concept.
A dog-ate-my-homework-style excuse. ‘No, you’ll have to go, Jenny; the show must go on, as they say.
’ He chortled, an awkward silence as he waited for one of us to commend him on his play on words.
When we failed to oblige, he slicked the rogue strand of hair back against his head with the palm of his hand, clearing his throat loudly.
‘Yes, well, that’s settled then. I will see you both there tomorrow.
No excuses,’ he added firmly, when I opened my mouth to argue.
‘No excuses,’ Jacob mouthed silently at me as Derek waddled off to terrorise some other employee. I ripped a page out of my notebook, screwed it into a tiny ball and lobbed it at Jacob’s head.
‘It’s quite the turnout, isn’t it?’ Mum remarked, her eyes sparkling almost as much as her green sequin jumpsuit as we joined the queue of people snaking their way round the car park towards the community centre.
‘Mhmm,’ I managed, my voice shaky. My brain was incapable of forming words right now, of thinking about anything except Luca.
What I’d say when I saw him. What he’d say when he saw me.
Oh God, what if he didn’t say anything at all?
Or worse, gave me a tight smile and a firm handshake as though I were just like everyone else here tonight?
I stood on my tiptoes, bobbing this way and that to try and catch a glimpse of the front of the queue, but there were too many people, my view obstructed by the back of Terry’s head several inches above everyone else’s.