Chapter 5
TJ
Iwanted to go after her, but my ego wouldn’t let me.
So I stayed at the table, drinking my coffee, which arrived the moment she left.
I shouldn’t have come here, but I wanted to see her.
I desired it so badly that I borrowed Laurie’s phone without his permission to get her class timetable, to find out when she would be here.
I even took a book from him to have an excuse to be around South Kensington at this hour.
Every term, they exchange schedules. She used to send me hers, too, but not this time, for obvious reasons.
It used to bother me how close they are, especially considering Laurie used to have a crush on her.
But that was just puppy love. Now, I’m grateful for their closeness because I can use it to my advantage.
I know I sound pathological, but that’s what she does to me. She’s like a drug. She gives the best highs and the worst lows, and even when she makes me feel horrible and is bad for me, I want more. Always more.
So much so that seeing her wasn’t enough anymore—I wanted to touch her.
But I wouldn’t tell her that. Instead, I complimented her necklace and touched it, knowing full well she would unconsciously do what she always does when someone compliments her jewellery: touch it.
And she did. For a few seconds, our fingers touched.
The most glorious few seconds I have had in months.
In my opinion, the interaction was a step forward on the road to eventually having something resembling a cordial relationship.
For once since the gala night, the air between us wasn’t so tense that you could cut it with a knife.
But I ruined it. I messed it up by bringing up college and work, topics I knew were mostly off-limits between us. However, I couldn’t help myself.
For a long time, my job was to get rid of anything that bothered her or made her unhappy.
I know she’s unhappy with the current plan for her future, but she refuses to tell her brother.
It frustrates me because I can’t fix it.
Not without it blowing up in my face. A part of me also feels guilty because I might’ve pressured her to come back.
But I only did it because we were fighting and it seemed like a good comeback.
Maybe if she’d stayed away longer, she would have eventually told Anthony that what he wants for her isn’t what she wants for herself.
He wouldn’t be mad like my dad when I told him the same.
If you knew Anthony, you’d know that the only thing he wants is for Cornelia to be happy.
But Cornelia feels like she owes him because he stepped up as a parental figure for her.
I finish my coffee and pay the bill. I gather the money she left on the table, count it, and transfer the amount into her bank account.
The sun’s out in London, a sharp contrast to my current mood. With nothing better to do, I walk home and soak in the brightness. Laurie’s book can wait another day. He hasn’t noticed it’s gone. I would know if he had.
As I stroll by some houses, I notice a few still have their Christmas decorations up, despite it being nearly February. Each one I pass only makes my mind drift further back to the last big fight Cornelia and I had.
It was Christmas Eve, and I went to Selfridges to do some last-minute Christmas shopping.
Cornelia used to handle all of my Christmas shopping except for her own gifts.
She loves shopping. She’d plan in advance and have every gift bought by November, each one perfectly tailored to the person’s taste. She’s the best gift-giver I know.
So it deeply shocked me to see her shopping, not just because it was strange for her, but because she was supposed to be in another country.
I’d learned from West, via Annabelle, that Cornelia was spending Christmas in Paris.
Now I know she was lying. I’m not sure how much Annabelle knows, but she wasn’t happy with me at the time.
For a moment, I thought I had gone mad, that I’d gone from everything reminding me of her to actually seeing her everywhere. It took me a minute to realise she was really there, looking at some Prada bags.
She looked radiant—it was so annoying.
What caught my eye was that she was wearing sunglasses.
She didn’t often wear them, and thank God for that.
Hiding those eyes should be a crime. She only ever wore sunglasses when she wanted to go unnoticed.
I wasn’t sure if she was trying to avoid me knowing she was in town or the press, who had finally noticed we were no longer together and were desperately chasing the story. Probably both.
I didn’t care if she didn’t want to see me; once I saw her, I knew I had to get closer to her and talk to her because she’s her and I’m me, and how could I not?
I followed her around the store until she stopped to examine some candles on the lower ground floor, in an area with only a couple of people—probably the emptiest spot I could find in the store on Christmas Eve. I didn’t want a big audience in case we fought. I wasn’t keen on being tomorrow’s news.
I approached her, acting as if I had just seen her, not like I had been following her around the whole store.
“Hey,” I said.
Cornelia looked at me, a little startled. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
In response, she simply lifted the two shopping bags she was holding.
Her answer made me a bit mad. I knew our last encounter had ended badly, but she was acting like she’d rather be talking to her Uncle Roland, which said a lot about how she was feeling about me.
“I meant in London,” I clarified.
“Oh,” she said, looking up and thinking for a second before answering, “I live here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you live in Paris?”
“Well, yes, at the moment—”
I cut her off. “So technically, you don’t live here.”
“Po-ta-toes, po-tah-toes. It all depends on your definition of living. At the moment, I’m living, and I’m in London. So technically, I live here.”
I could tell she was either uncomfortable or nervous.
She has a tell: every time she feels either of those emotions, she touches and twists the ring on her right hand’s ring finger—the one she always wears—and she was doing it.
It gave me a strange satisfaction to see her like that.
She deserved to feel that way after what she did to me the last time I saw her.
“I don’t know from which dictionary you got that definition from, but to me, living means where you have your main residence and spend most of your time,” I told her.
“Fine,” she sighed, exasperated. “Then I live in Paris, not here.”
I felt pleased with myself for winning the argument—something I normally never do against her. “Now that we’ve finally agreed on that, can we get back to my original question? What are you doing in London?”
“If you must know, I’m here for a quick visit. I arrived yesterday and will fly back tomorrow night. I didn’t want anyone to know—only Annabelle and Anthony knew I was coming. But now it’s all ruined, and it’s all Cat’s fault.” She let out a frustrated sigh.
“What?” I asked, frowning. I got everything except the part about the cat. What did Cat have to do with why she was here? Cornelia’s cat is named Cat—she named him after the cat from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
She has both a cat and a dog, though neither of us ever knew exactly how she got them.
They just sort of… popped out one day. Cornelia says she’s about 80% sure a weird ex-boyfriend of her mother’s, who used to always carry a backpack with a different cat every time I saw him, left the cat behind.
The other 20% of her thinks her mother stole the cat from the same ex-boyfriend.
It is a nice cat—a white Persian. On the other hand, Cornelia is almost 100% sure her mother brought the brown field spaniel into the house because she wanted the cat gone.
She wouldn’t admit it, so she got a dog, hoping it would get rid of the cat.
I don’t know why her mother wanted the cat gone.
It’s not like she took care of it—the maids did.
Either way, the joke was on her because the cat and the dog ended up really enjoying each other’s company.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving my house the entire time I was here, but I noticed Cat had gained weight, and I had to come to change the jumper I got him.
If I hadn’t, he would have been sad because Dog was getting a present and he wasn’t.
And while I could have told him it was his fault he didn’t have a gift since he wouldn’t fit in the jumper I had gotten him, that would be body-shaming, and body-shaming is so rude.
So, my plan of staying incognito was ruined because he went up two sizes,” she explained in almost one breath.
Cornelia only has two settings when she’s nervous: either she goes into verbal diarrhoea mode or barely-talks-at-all mode. It was obvious her choice that day was verbal diarrhoea.
I looked at her, a little amused. I love how her brain works a little differently from most people’s.
Most wouldn’t give a second thought to a gift for a cat, but these are the things that would bother her all throughout her visit if she didn’t do something about it.
I also love how much she cares about a cat’s feelings, who would probably prefer not to receive an uncomfortable jumper at all.
But I know that if she didn’t get him a gift, she’d constantly have intrusive thoughts about the cat being upset with her for not getting him a Christmas present for weeks.
I took a moment to look at her a little more closely—her eyes, her hair, her hands, her fingers—and then I felt a surge of anger hit me as I remembered what was missing, remembered what had happened in Paris, the time I went to see her, and what she had done before that.
It infuriated me that she seemed to care more about the cat’s feelings than mine at that moment.
All the suppressed anger of the past few months burst out, and soon it took control of me as if I were possessed.
“Brat,” I spat out.
She blinked, confused. “What?”
“After what you did to me in Paris, all you have to talk about is a stupid gift for your cat.”
“First of all, it isn’t a stupid gift—it’s a very expensive jumper from Gucci. And second, what I did to you? What about what you did to me?” she retorted, hurt lacing her voice.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re such a child.”
Cornelia chuckled bitterly. “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t realise I was speaking to Mister Maturity. By the way, how’s not studying and not working going for you?”
“You’re the one to talk,” I shot back.
“I’m going back to school in January,” she said abruptly.
Our voices had been rising with every exchange, drawing the attention of a few nearby shoppers.
I caught sight of a girl in my peripheral vision discreetly pointing her phone at us, but at that moment, I didn’t care.
“And I’ve been working with my brother since I finished high school,” she added.
“At least I’m not insane. All those little intrusive thoughts you have don’t make you cute—they make you whack in the head. You should really get checked,” I lied.
They are a part of who she is; without them, she wouldn’t be the person I fell in love with. So how could I not love them?
She looked at me—horrified, hurt, and angry all at once. I knew I’d crossed the line and regretted it the moment the words left my mouth. I wanted to stop myself, but I couldn’t. Instead, I went even further. “Like mother, like daughter,” I muttered under my breath.
I shouldn’t have said the last part. I shouldn’t have said anything at all. I know how much she hates being compared to her mother and everything about her struggles with mental health. And I used that knowledge to hurt her.
That’s the thing about knowing someone the way I know her and the way she knows me. We don’t just know our favourite songs or whether we talk in our sleep. We know the fault lines. We know exactly which words to use to tear each other apart.
She took a deep breath to compose herself. “Speaking of my mother, you should get checked out for an STD. But according to what I’ve seen in the media, you might already be too familiar with them.”
I may have been sleeping around a lot, but I always used protection. And it was just to stop me from going to Paris and seeing what I really wanted.
“Fuck off,” I yelled, my voice laced with venom.
I think I hate her and love her in equal measure because hating her is all I have left, but I could never stop loving her.
I saw tears form in her eyes, and I felt like shit.
“Gladly,” she said, then walked away—more like ran away.
I looked over at the girl who had been recording us.
She wasn’t even trying to be discreet anymore; she all but followed Cornelia with her phone.
I considered going up to her, but what good would it do to fight with a sixteen-year-old?
I accepted what I knew was going to happen—and what did happen.
The video was in CB London by the next day.
I’d ruined Cornelia’s plan of keeping her visit a secret, but honestly, I’d probably ruined it the moment I saw her, not with this conversation.