Chapter 15 #2
“This isn’t fair,” I complain to Paris when I emerge from the changing room a few minutes later, my cheeks red from the mini workout I’ve just had struggling in and out of a selection of bodycon dresses.
“If my life was a movie, this would be the moment where I take off my glasses and basically turn into another person. Like Superman.”
“You don’t wear glasses,” replies Paris, ever the pragmatist. “And your life technically is a movie, anyway. It’s just not the movie you want it to be.”
“Not yet, it isn’t,” I mutter, feeling like I should apologize to the sleekly sophisticated shop assistant at the door as we leave the store empty-handed. “But I’m working on it.”
Paris eyes me curiously, but whatever she’s about to say is lost as I step through the doorway of the little boutique and walk straight into something very tall, and very solid.
Something, in fact, very Elliot Sinclair.
“Holly,” he says politely, not sounding particularly surprised to find me almost falling over him for the second time in the space of a week. “How are you?”
“I’m great,” I reply, quickly scanning the street for any sign of Bloody Katie, and relaxing slightly when she fails to materialize. “Just been doing a bit of shopping with my friend Paris.”
Paris’s eyebrows almost disappear into her hairline at this, but she doesn’t contradict me, and I smile at her gratefully, relieved to be ‘showing up as my best self’, as she instructed me earlier.
“That’s nice,” says Elliot. “Is that a pencil in your hair?”
He reaches out and removes it, like a magician performing a trick — only in this case, the only ‘trick’ he manages to pull off involves my hair rapidly uncoiling itself like one of Medusa’s snakes, and absolutely no one is impressed by it.
“Oh, that’s where it was,” I reply, pushing hair out of my eyes and reaching for the pencil. “I was looking for that earlier when I was … when I was…”
“It was when you were working on your new book, Holly, wasn’t it?” says Paris, coming unexpectedly to the rescue. “You were so into it you must’ve got distracted.”
I stare wordlessly at her, not totally on board with the direction she’s taking this conversation in, but not quite sure how to turn it around.
“Your new book?” Elliot says, his eyes flickering with an emotion I can’t identify. “So you are writing again?”
“Oh. Um. Yes. Yes, I am,” I reply, feeling Paris’s elbow connect sharply with my ribs.
“I’m working on a novel, actually. I can’t say much about it, it’s—” I stop myself just in time, before I can let the fact that I’m just the ghostwriter slip out.
“It’s still just a very rough idea. You know how it is. ”
“She has a publisher and everything,” says Paris, apparently deciding that now is the moment to be my wing-woman. “So it’s a real book. She’s not just saying that to make herself look good.”
I cringe inwardly, making a mental note never to get on the wrong side of her, if this is what she thinks ‘being supportive’ is like.
“But Holly, that’s great,” Elliot says, with what looks like the first genuine smile I’ve seen from him since he arrived back in town. “That’s really great. I always said you should write a novel. So, what’s it called? Or can you not say?”
I start to shake my head, before Paris’s elbow changes my mind.
“It’s called If This Was a Movie,” I say, blurting out the first thing that comes into my head, then cringing as I realize how stupid it sounds. Then again, Elliot did name the town in his book ‘Hollybrooke’, so maybe it’s not the most stupid thing he’ll have heard.
“I like it,” he says, his grin widening. “I really like it. It’s very you.”
There’s a tiny window of opportunity for me to ask him what he means by this rather than simply filing it away so I can overthink it later (Which is also very me, actually…), but I’m distracted by the way he’s looking at me as if we’re still close enough to chat about our lives like this — and also by the little white scar just above his left eyebrow, which proves that we aren’t, because I know it definitely wasn’t there ten years ago.
Every time I see him, I notice some little detail about him that’s different, and every one of those details provides even more proof of the life he’s lived without me, and me without him.
I wonder if Katie Hunter knows how he got that scar?
“Oh! Hello there!”
The door behind us opens and Katie herself emerges from the boutique, laden with shopping bags, and looking from Elliot to me and then back again, almost as if she knows what I was thinking. That rogue memory attempts to surface yet again.
She reminds me of someone. I just can’t remember who it is.
“Katie! Um, this is Holly,” Elliot says, looking uncomfortable; as well he might, I suppose. “Holly, this is Katie.”
“Oh, yes! Holly! Of course!”
Katie says my name in a tone that suggests she knows significantly more about me than I know about her. I’m not planning to hang around to find out exactly what Elliot’s told her about me, though. I’m not that much of a masochist.
“Right, well, we better be going, Paris,” I say briskly, linking arms with my surprised assistant manager. “Books to sell, books to write. No rest for the wicked. Nice to meet you, Katie! Come on, Paris.”
I set off down the street at a quick march, dragging Paris along behind me, and feeling quite proud of how… breezy… I managed to be.
Yes. Breezy. That’s how I’ll be from now. I’ll be brisk and breezy, and that way Elliot will never know just how much it hurts me seeing him with someone else, in the place that used to be ours.
“Holly, let me go,” Paris squeaks, as I almost knock her off her feet in my haste to get away from them. “You’re being really weird, by the way,” she adds. “Even for you, I mean.”
Oh.
So, maybe not-so-breezy, then. Maybe I’ll just be “really weird” instead.
That sounds more like the old me. I know Paris would agree.
But ‘the old me’ isn’t going to write this book, ignore her ex, and change her life, is she? No, she isn’t. Which is why, as soon as we’re safely back at the bookstore, I thank Paris again for her shopping help, then head into my office and open up my laptop.
I will write the book I just told Elliot about. And, one day, I might even forget the reason I wrote it, or the man who inspired it, the way he seems to have forgotten me.
One day.
“Hi Harper,” I type, opening up the email chain I have going with her. “What do you think about this for a plot…”