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‘Fine,’ Liv pursed her lips and stood up, limping along to the edge of the path. ‘We’ll just go back.’
That’s right. For some reason, the voice sounded an awful lot like my big brother. Go back to the hotel, don’t propose, wait for Liv to leave you then you can die alone with a massive beard, tissue boxes on your feet instead of shoes and hundreds of bottles full of your own wee to keep you and your eighteen cats company.
‘Fuck it,’ I murmured, fishing around in my pocket for the ring and bending down. Slowly. I really needed to see someone about my back.
‘There’s a taxi!’
Before I could stop her, Liv hopped off the path and into the street, flagging down a white car with a red stripe down the side. It screeched to a halt at her side. I watched her, the headlights of the car lighting up her flowing white dress as it swirled around her slender legs, her hair flying out behind her. She was beautiful. She was clever and caring, she made me laugh, she took care of me even when I didn’t know I needed taking care of and she always watched Star Trek Next Gen with me, even if we’d seen it a dozen times before. Olivia Addison was perfect.
And I couldn’t even get her to a bloody restaurant on time.
‘I can’t,’ I realized, staring at my grandmother’s engagement ring. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Adam?’
It was too late, Liv was already inside the taxi, staring back at me. ‘What are you doing?’
It felt as though everything inside me had stopped working, like even my organs were waiting to see what came next before they bothered to carry on keeping me alive. Her eyes widened and she blinked at the sight of me kneeling on the dusty street.
‘Fastening my shoelace,’ I replied, dropping the ring on the floor and covering it with my shoe. ‘Sorry.’
Better start saving up my tissue boxes and adopting those cats, I thought, as I stood up, stashed the ring back in my pocket and forced one foot in front of the other to join her in the back seat of the taxi. You couldn’t just walk into an RSPCA and take eighteen. Could you? Surely there was a limit.
The taxi driver pulled out into the speeding traffic, turning the radio up full blast and soundtracking my misery with a song I had loved until that moment. Now I was going to have to hunt down Mumford and all of his sons and murder them all to death.
Liv stared out the window with her shoes in her lap as I closed my eyes, trying to work out just how I’d managed to get everything so wrong. Slipping my finger into the tiny pocket of my jeans, I traced the setting of the sapphire in my grandmother’s engagement ring and squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying not to cry.
Well. That went well.
2 (#uadc231fc-d253-51b5-8486-94961251f189)
‘Have you got everything?’
‘Yeah,’ Adam replied, looking back over his shoulder. ‘I think so.’
‘Did you check all the drawers?’ I asked. ‘The little ones in the nightstand?’
‘I’ll double check,’ he said, disappearing back into the bedroom.
The second we got back to the cottage, Adam had retired to the bathroom, claiming an upset stomach and didn’t reappear until I’d given up any hope of a romantic proposal and swapped my beautiful white dress for my Garfield pyjamas. The whole evening had been a complete waste of make-up. Neither of us had slept a wink but neither of us was prepared to admit anything was wrong. Adam kept saying he still felt unwell, even though he’d managed to put away all the beer left in the fridge after I’d gone to bed, and I was only just keeping my shit together.
‘Are you not taking all this sun cream?’ he shouted, waving half-empty bottles of Ambre Solaire in the air. ‘There’s loads left.’
‘I couldn’t fit it in my case,’ I said as I heaved said case out of the front door and onto the deck, waving at our very early taxi driver. ‘Leave it.’
‘But there’s more than half left in one of them.’ He appeared in the living room with the three bottles in his hands. ‘Why didn’t you use one up instead of starting all three?’
‘Why didn’t you use any sunscreen the entire fortnight?’ I replied. ‘They’re all different. SPF 50 for the first week, 30 for the second and 15 for my legs.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ he muttered, opening his suitcase and jamming the bottles inside. ‘Such a waste of money.’
‘It’s sunscreen, it doesn’t matter, we can buy more. And it’s going to explode all over your sodding case if you keep shoving it in like that.’
He looked up, defiance all over his broad features.
‘No, it won’t.’
I raised an eyebrow and shrugged. ‘Fine.’
‘You’re not right about everything you know.’ He yanked the zip closed and pushed past me, chucking the case through the door. ‘It’s such a waste of money.’
‘Arsehole,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘I’m totally right.’
He stood on the deck, staring at his phone as I locked the cottage door behind us. I’d already checked out when Adam went for his morning swim. Because like I said, he wasn’t feeling well.
‘All right?’ I asked as he began to type madly, all fingers and thumbs with his phone. His hands were so big, they even dwarfed his iPhone 6. ‘Is something wrong?’
He shook his head without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘I need to call someone, I won’t be a minute. It’s not a problem.’
I stared at him as he strode across the beach but kept my mouth closed for fear of accidentally screaming ‘Where is my riiiiiing?’ right in his face. Instead, I nodded and wheeled my suitcase over to the waiting taxi while he paced up and down the sand, shouting at someone in Spanish. For someone whose only opinion on weddings before finding out about Adam’s supposed proposal was that if it wasn’t an open-bar reception, I wasn’t going, I was beginning to worry I’d lost my mind.
‘No!’ Adam barked in his laboured accent. ‘Eso no es lo que acordamos.’
It was strange to see him so close to losing his temper. Generally speaking, my boyfriend was so laidback and offensively agreeable that I once went round to his house to find Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to come up with an excuse to leave.
‘Who was that?’ I asked, intensely casual as he clambered into the back of the taxi beside me.
‘No one,’ he replied, clicking in his seatbelt and turning towards the window. ‘Nothing.’
Oh good, I thought, smiling beatifically. I was going to have to kill him.
‘No one,’ I repeated. ‘Right.’
He looked back at me for a moment, seemingly on the verge of telling me something.
‘Really,’ he said with fifty per cent less huff. ‘No one. The manager of that restaurant wanting to know why we missed our reservation.’
He was such a terrible liar.
‘OK.’ I kept my eyes on the horizon as we sped away from our beautiful cottage, in the beautiful resort by the beautiful beach, and realized I had wasted two weeks waiting for a proposal that wasn’t going to happen. ‘OK, then.’
‘Yeah,’ Adam replied, shifting back towards the window. ‘Everything’s fine, don’t worry about it.’
Because that was definitely a sensible thing to say to a woman, wasn’t it?
‘Here, give me that.’
Adam held out his hands for my suitcase as I jostled it up onto the headrest of the seat in front of me, hair stuck to my sweaty forehead.
‘It’s all right,’ I said with a tired but determined smile. ‘I can do it.’
‘I know you can,’ he replied, lifting the case out of my hands easily and sliding it neatly into the overhead locker before kissing me on the top of the head. ‘Just let me help.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, hurling my handbag onto my seat. He shrugged agreeably, staring at his ticket as I curled up in my uncomfortable seat.
‘Oh.’
‘Oh?’ I looked up to see Adam staring at his ticket. ‘What’s wrong? Are we not sat together?’
‘We are,’ he said, jamming his ticket into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘But you’re in the window seat.’
I looked out of the tiny porthole at the steaming tarmac below and saw three men in orange hi-vis vests chucking suitcases onto a conveyor belt. I watched as one fell off, bouncing along the floor before one of the men came over to kick it all the way back to the conveyor belt to try again.
‘Did you want the window?’ I looked out at my little square of sky reluctantly. ‘We can swap?’
‘No, I don’t mind,’ he wrestled his man bag from across his chest and dropped it in the aisle seat. ‘It’s just, you had the window on the way out.’
‘You can have the window,’ I told him, nursing my handbag. ‘You sit here and I’ll sit in the middle.’
‘I said I don’t mind.’
It was funny, because he certainly looked like he minded. He looked like he minded a lot of things but since he’d been almost silent ever since we got in the taxi it was impossible to know what was going on in his head. I had read every single gossip magazine the airport had to offer while he paced up and down the terminal, shouting at the supposed restaurant owner in broken Spanish. It had been a long three hours. I wasn’t a woman renowned for her patience when it came to human beings and the thought of a twelve-hour flight back to the UK was not helping me be my most sensitive self. If he wasn’t going to explain what was going on and the rubbish app I’d quickly downloaded to translate him couldn’t explain either, I was just going to have to pretend it wasn’t happening.
‘Uh, I think I’m sitting next to you guys.’ A young woman with an American accent waved her hand awkwardly behind Adam’s immense shoulders. ‘22C?’
‘Oh, hi.’ I gave her a manic smile and nudged my boyfriend in the thigh. ‘Adam, can you move your bag.’
‘I’m Maura,’ she said, slipping travel-sickness bands onto her wrists and sliding assorted medications and sick bags into her seatback pocket. ‘I’ll probably sleep the whole flight, so if you need to get by to use the bathroom, just like, climb over me.’
‘No problem, I’m Olivia, Liv,’ I replied, pointing at myself before gesturing at the six-foot-four human partition standing between us. ‘This is Adam.’
‘We’re not supposed to change seats before take off.’ He grabbed his bag from Maura’s seat without acknowledging her and hugged it like a sulky toddler. She sat down, cheek to cheek against his backside. ‘But whatever. You sit in the window, I’ll sit in the middle. Again.’
I looked up at him, all tanned and sullen, and hoped against hope that my ring was wedged right up his arse.
‘Why can’t we change seats before take off?’ I asked, watching as Maura in 22C swallowed a handful of little white pills without so much as a sip of water. Total pro.
He sat down in the middle seat with a heavy thump. ‘Because if we blow up during take off, they might not be able to identify the bodies so they need to know where everyone was to distribute the remains.’
Maura in 22C froze.
‘I think it’s actually something to do with weight distribution,’ I replied loudly. ‘And I don’t think it really matters that much, let’s just swap.’
‘No, that’s helicopters,’ Adam corrected, still cuddling his backpack. ‘With planes it’s in case all the bodies get burned up beyond recognition, then they can bury the right remains in the right—’
‘Just swap with me.’ I stood up and hoisted him to his feet while Maura in 22C began to cry. ‘And for god’s sake, shut up.’
‘What?’ he asked, wide-eyed and completely oblivious to my neighbour shaking silently as she stared at the safety card through red eyes. ‘What did I do?’
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, hiding behind my hair. ‘Sit down.’
Adam kicked his bag under the seat in front and pulled his hood over his head, smiling for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long.
‘Liv.’
From deep inside a dream about going out for ice cream with Brad, Ange and all the kids, I felt a stiff poke in my shoulder.
‘Liv? Liv.’
Why? Why would he wake me up when it took me so long to fall asleep?
‘Liv.’ Adam tapped my shoulder over and over again. ‘Are you awake?’
‘No,’ I replied without opening my eyes. ‘I’m really not.’
‘I’m bored.’
I cracked open one eye to find his face so close to mine that everything but his freckles was a blur.
‘Talk to me,’ he pulled the strings on his red jumper so that the hood cinched in tightly around his face until just his eyes and nose were showing, the strain showing on his stupid, handsome face. ‘We’ve still got ages.’
‘I know, that’s why I was asleep,’ I said, swiping at his hood. ‘Can you take that down? You look like Little Red Riding twat.’
‘You love it.’ Adam tied the strings in an elaborate bow underneath his chin. ‘I look amazing. I’m the amazing red-hooded yeti.’
‘If you say so,’ I replied with a yawn. ‘And I’m not just saying that because you’ve got food in your hand.’
Abi had been the one to christen him ‘yeti’ when we first met. She always labelled our dates, refusing to acknowledge their real names until the relationships had been established. Adam came to be known as the yeti because none of us really believed it was possible for an eligible, handsome man over the age of thirty to move to our village with his family and therefore she considered his kind to be as rare as the abominable snowman. With his sandy blond hair, longer and shaggier than it was now, yeti worked, and yeti had stuck.
‘Open your mouth,’ he ordered, opening a packet of M&Ms. ‘I bet I can do it in one.’
Somewhere far, far away, I felt my grandmother spinning in her grave. Somewhere closer, I heard Maura in 22C let out a stuck-pig snore.
‘You’re not throwing sweets at my face on a plane,’ I said quietly, holding up a hand in front of my face. ‘Stop it.’
‘You know I can do it,’ Adam repeated, readying a blue M&M. ‘Open your mouth.’
With lips pursed tighter than the average cat’s arse, I shook my head, still mad about being woken up and slowly remembering all the other reasons I was upset with him. Last night’s weirdness, the airport phone calls and, oh yeah, the complete and utter lack of a bloody proposal.
‘Fine, whatever,’ he muttered, emptying half the bag directly into his mouth, slumping back down in his seat and producing a tiny can of Coke from his backpack. ‘Sorry, Mum.’
‘Excuse me?’ I turned so sharply a curtain of my own sun-bleached blonde hair slapped me in the face. ‘What did you call me?’
‘Nothing,’ he replied with a smirk. ‘Mum.’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ I replied, mostly peeved because he was right. It was happening more and more often, I would open my mouth and my mother’s voice would come out instead. I had Motherettes. ‘That’s so not funny.’
‘Oh, it’s so not funny?’ He let down my tray table without asking and placed his can in the little indentation without a napkin underneath. ‘I hate when you talk to me like a child, you’re not my mother, you know.’
