Love Your Neighbour: A laugh-out-loud love from the author of One Day in December

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Did he really think that that was all there was to this? That she was simply being squeamish? Unfortunately for Marla, he chose that moment to smile at her again and temporarily robbed her of the ability to speak.

‘Look. I promise you won’t be suddenly seeing dead bodies all the time or anything. Scout’s honour.’

He was trying to make light of it. The need to clarify the situation burned in Marla’s gut until she finally regained power over her vocal cords.

‘Gabe, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. This,’ she spread her hands to encompass the building around them, ‘this is a wedding chapel. It’s a happy place.’

Trouble seeped slowly into his dark eyes, but he held his tongue and let her speak.

‘It’s a place where people come to celebrate love, and life, and to enjoy the best day of their lives, you understand?’

He nodded, and for a second he looked as if he really might. Maybe there was hope, after all. Marla crossed her fingers underneath the table and waited.

‘Okay.’

Okay? Even in her wildest dreams, Marla hadn’t expected him to give in that easily.

‘Okay. I can see that our businesses are very different, but I’m also pretty sure we can work something out. A little give and take, you know?’

Damn it. Either he hadn’t listened, or he was being deliberately evasive.

‘Give and take? Give and take?’ She couldn’t hold her voice steady as it helter-skeltered up several octaves. ‘Gabe, people won’t book to get married here if they see a dirty great hearse parked up in the street or a wailing family outside.’

His brows knitted together at her harsh words. Gabe, in turn, watched pink spots burn on Marla’s cheeks.

‘Look, that probably sounded heartless, and honestly, I’m really not, but I … I just won’t let this happen.’

His expression was unreadable as he stared at her across the table. She went for broke.

‘The bottom line, Gabe, is this. Your business will kill my business.’

Gabe steepled his fingers in front of him, and any trace of merriment died in his eyes when he looked up.

‘Then we have ourselves a problem.’

Marla’s stomach flipped over.

‘Because here’s the thing, Marla.’

His voice was soft enough for her to have to lean in close in order to hear him.

‘People come to me to celebrate love too, it’s just at the other end of life’s spectrum. It might not be happy, or frothy, but my services are just as important as yours. More so, probably.’

Distaste dripped from his every word, and pure steel underscored his deceptively soft tone.

‘You’ve made it very clear that I’m not your ideal neighbour, and trust me, I’ll make every effort to minimise the impact I have on you.’

He shook his head with a look of derision and scraped his chair back. He crossed the tiny kitchen in a couple of paces, before turning in the doorway to deliver his parting shot.

‘But make no mistake. Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely will be opening for business next door.’

Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all-too-familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely seen each other, let alone made love.

What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.

Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.

They hadn’t expected to score a home run on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in alphabetti spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?

In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside-down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.

‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’

In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the old ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.

Emily was just glad Tom was away on business. Again. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.

Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet-hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.

Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long-distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty Halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.

How in hell had it got this bad?

God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.

‘Let’s make a baby.’

He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.

Since then, somewhere along the way, sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly be any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.

He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.

A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.

But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?

The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.