Chapter 22.
Now
Ash and I start seeing more of each other. He doesn’t revisit the question he’d been going to ask me that day at the beach, and I am relieved.
We have to work to make the time. But when we do, it’s always for something that fills my heart, like a long, lazy brunch or a late film, a candlelit bistro supper.
Dating Ash feels romantic. Dating Leo was more like dodging enemy fire.
If Ash has trust issues, after what went on with Tabitha, I never detect them. He is unfailingly open-hearted and thoughtful – messaging if I have a big presentation at work, suggesting a late drink to help me wind down, offering to call his guy when my boiler packs up. There are no obvious clues that he’s nervous about getting into something with me, or that he’s holding anything back. If he is, he’s very good at hiding it.
‘Gabi would laugh if she could see me now,’ he says to me one Sunday morning, over coffee and pastries at Bread Source.
I smile. ‘Would she? Why?’
‘All this being up with the lark and eating breakfast like a functional human... I used to spend a lot of time just lazing around in bed, waiting till it was time to go out again.’ He sips his coffee, meets my eye across the rim of the cup. ‘I’m so glad you never knew me back then.’
‘But your sister still misses that version of you?’
‘So she says.’
‘Why, though? If you were basically a jail sentence waiting to happen.’
He laughs. ‘That actually sums it up pretty well. I don’t know – maybe because she’s still kind of... back in that place, waiting for me.’ He looks wistful for a moment before his eyes return to mine. ‘It’s nice that I can talk to you about this stuff.’
‘I like that you do.’
‘Tabitha used to tell people about my accident at dinner parties, like it was an amusing anecdote. My sister actually thought it was funny, too, for a while. Like, Who gets hit by lightning? ’
I find myself thinking about Jamie’s brother Harry.
Could it be possible that in fact, he is Ash’s true sibling?
No. The idea is absurd. But still, I can’t resist the urge to float it.
‘Have you ever wanted a brother?’ I say, but lightly, like my mind’s just wandering.
‘Sometimes. I mean, not really, obviously. But occasionally...’
I lean forward. ‘Go on.’
He shrugs. ‘Everyone fantasises about the sibling they never had from time to time, don’t they?’
The moment passes. I take the last bite of my cinnamon swirl. ‘Absolutely. I’d love to have someone I could bitch about my mum with.’
Ash tells me Gabi met her current boyfriend at Coachella. ‘They’re this... complete toxic whirlwind, from what I can work out.’
‘I’ve been there,’ I say, sympathetically, thinking of Leo.
‘Right. And so have I. But then... you get out.’
‘Sometimes it’s not that easy.’
His forehead furrows. ‘Yeah. I guess. I’m being unkind, aren’t I?’
I nudge his knee with mine. ‘No, you’re being a brother.’
I help Ash style his apartment, sourcing rugs, light fittings, console tables, cushions, bar stools, lamps and bookshelves. I ask Parveen to find him some affordable art. And I avoid that scrap of paper bearing Jamie’s handwriting like my life depends on it.
We spend long nights together drinking wine, or whisky, and talking till it’s almost dawn. He cooks. I rave to him about the Before trilogy, so we watch all three back to back. He comes with me to spin class. We revel in the romance of empty beaches. We play poker, at which I have always been terrible, despite the fact I am forever being told I have an excellent poker face. One night, fuelled by rum – and weirdly buoyed by some cigars he has left over from a stag weekend that we decide to smoke for a laugh – it turns into strip poker. And this is the night I realise – with a clarity that I hope isn’t down to some hallucinogen in the tobacco – that I have no inhibitions whatsoever with this man.
It’s almost as if I have known him for years.
I meet his friends, and they make me feel comfortable straight away, sharing anecdotes and asking me questions and hugging me warmly at the end of the night, even though we came last in the pub quiz, which was largely down to my wrong answers (tzatziki, the Danube, John Travolta). I can see how different they must be to the crowd Ash says he used to run with. Nobody has been rowdy, or got steaming drunk, or picked a fight with a parking meter or ex-professional boxer or whatever it is they used to do.
‘I liked your friends,’ I say to Ash later.
We’re in bed, breathing hard, our skin glazed with sweat. My heartbeat is a long, liquid rush in my chest.
‘They liked you too,’ he says, stroking the hair from my face. ‘No, actually, they loved you.’ And then he holds my gaze, as though he wants to say something else, before changing his mind.
Later, after he’s showered, I go into the bathroom to find a heart traced into the steamed-up screen.
I know he wants to meet my friends, too. And though I’ve mentioned Lara, I’ve skirted most of the details. He seems to sense it’s a difficult subject, and hasn’t pushed it.
But he’s a good listener. I can ramble endlessly on about work, or politics, or my neighbours, and not once does he try to hijack what I’m saying, or change the subject. I know I could tell him about Lara, if I wanted to.
Picking up my phone at work to check for messages from him becomes a reflex. I try to hide this from Kelley, and keep finding myself in the ladies’, crouched down on the closed lid of the loo, typing away like a maniac, hoping no-one will catch me. I don’t have the time to behave like a teenager with a crush, but I compulsively do it anyway.
Parveen notices, of course. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before. Not even with Leo.’
Especially not with Leo , I think. There’s not another person on this planet for whom I would even think of risking Kelley’s wrath.
We become the kind of couple that people have to sidestep. We hear, ‘My God, get a room ,’ more times than we can count. We kiss and touch in cars and taxis, on street corners, outside cafes, inside bars. One night, we get so stirred up in a restaurant that I find myself whispering into his ear, ‘Meet me upstairs.’
A ripple of laughter, on a caught breath. ‘You’re not serious.’
I nod and slide away from the table, attempting to keep my composure as I head to the toilets, wondering even as I go what’s got into me. This is so unlike me. We’re just out to dinner. We don’t have the excuse of being on a plane, or come to that, amphetamines. Why can’t I control myself?
I think back to a particular conversation with Jamie.
We could have done it at the restaurant.
Next time.
Jamie and I never did end up going through with it. Possibly because we only ever usually went to fancy restaurants when we were in the company of Jamie’s dad.
A couple of minutes later, Ash approaches me at the top of the staircase where I’m pretending to look into a mirror. He is smiling disbelievingly, yet he knows this is happening, and is no more likely than I am to suggest we pull ourselves together and get the bill.
Thankfully, the ladies’ are empty, and – crucially – clean, because this is a nice restaurant (recommended to us, ironically enough, by Ash’s boss). We make for the end cubicle. To my relief, it smells only pleasantly floral, a bit like the perfume section in a department store.
Inside the cubicle, I put my back to the door and lock it, and in the next second we are kissing, fumbling, lips and hands everywhere. I am wearing a knee-length satin dress, which contains a useful amount of stretch. Ash hikes it up around my waist, and then there is the tug of a zip and my legs are around him. As we start to move, something begins squeaking inelegantly – I have no idea what – and if anybody were to walk in, they would be in no doubt at all as to what we are doing.
The trust between us is implicit. I’m confident he won’t message his mates to report on our bathroom encounter; that it won’t become an anecdote (except maybe between us). I never feel self-conscious with him, or awkward. He doesn’t crack jokes that make me want to crawl inside my handbag. And after dark, when the drug of him hits hardest, the connection we share feels once-in-a-lifetime.
Except that I know it isn’t. Once-in-a-lifetime, I mean.
Whenever I’m with Ash, I try very hard to push all thoughts of Jamie out of my head. But sometimes – usually as we’re drifting off to sleep, my head on his chest, our bodies knotted together – I catch myself thinking of Jamie’s joke that he’d come back to haunt me. And how I assured him nothing would ever come close to the physical connection we shared.
Pretty soon, I know I have to let Ash in on the most painful story from my past.
I mean, I don’t have to. I want to. It’s something I think he should know.
I do it as he’s shuffling a deck of cards one night. We are drinking Old Fashioneds, which helps.
‘Do you reckon you might... want children one day?’ It all comes out clumsily, but it’s the only way I can think of to start the conversation.
He glances up from the cards. ‘I mean, eventually I would. I think I want... a family life, at some point. I’m probably quite conventional like that.’
‘Have you ever . . . got anyone pregnant?’
He clears his throat, like he thinks (hopes) he might have misheard. ‘Have I ever what?’
‘Got anyone pregnant,’ I say more slowly, begging him silently, Think. Think. Think .
He does a little double-take with his eyes. ‘Is this... a trick question?’
‘In what way?’
‘Not sure.’ He laughs uncomfortably. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’
Maybe , I want to reply. But I manage to hold back. ‘Just curious.’
‘Nope, never got anyone pregnant.’ He punches out a breath. ‘Sorry, teenage flashback.’
I smile.
He throws me a look. ‘My parents convinced themselves I was going to get someone pregnant. Or should I say, they were apoplectically terrified. Mum used to sit me down at least once a week and remind me about safe sex. My dad used to buy me boxes of condoms.’
‘Oh. So you were—’
‘No! Actually, they had it all wrong. My crazy nights back then were more about drinking and pratting around. No legions of illegitimate children out there, I promise.’ He glances at me. ‘Might stop talking now.’
Weakly, I smile. ‘Actually... there’s something I wanted to tell you.’
And now the words are tumbling from my mouth, and his face is contracting in sympathy, and I would love to know if this is ringing any bells for him, if he has even the faintest sense of recollection as I’m talking. I tell him about what Jamie’s mum did, and the flesh wound of that conversation, the scar that still remains, all these years later.
When I’m finished, Ash sets down the cards. He reaches for my hand and says, ‘Neve, I’m so sorry.’
I feel a confusing flicker of disappointment when I see there is nothing at all in his eyes except surprise and sadness on my behalf.
I don’t tell him, of course, about the box I keep under my bed. The box that’s still filled with memories of Jamie. The tickets from Mamma Mia . Birthday and anniversary cards. The corks from the champagne his mother bought us, that first night in Edinburgh Road. Beer mats, even parking tickets. Answer sheets from pub quizzes. Cinema stubs. Things that would mean nothing to anyone but me. And finally, our pregnancy test, the one which once bore two tiny yet unmistakeable stripes.