Czytaj książkę: «We Were On a Break»

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It really doesn’t matter how brilliant your life is, the last day of your holiday is always depressing. I’m talking Monday dread plus post-Christmas blues multiplied by a maxed-out credit card with the added bonus of knowing there are at least another twelve holidayless months stretching out in front of you before you’ll be able to get away again. Unless you’re Beyoncé. I imagine nothing other than dinner with Kanye is quite that depressing if you’re Beyoncé, but for the rest of us, the last day of a holiday is right up there with doing your taxes, getting a bikini wax and that time you went to the fridge for your favourite bar of chocolate and found out someone had already eaten it.

Kneeling on the sofa, I rested my chin on my forearms and stared out the window. Bright blue skies bled into dark blue seas with flashes of pink and purple smeared through the middle to let me know that night-time was on its way. The sun was literally setting on my vacay and it just wasn’t on. I had a tan, seventeen insect bites, a suitcase full of tat I didn’t need – but I still didn’t have the one thing I’d been waiting for which could only mean one thing.

Tonight was the night.

‘Liv?’

‘Adam?’

‘Is it me or can you see my knob through these trousers?’

Not exactly the question I was waiting for him to ask.

I craned my neck to see six feet four inches of blond boyfriend framed by the bedroom doorway, thrusting his crotch in my general direction with a vexed expression on his face.

Hmm. He was wearing his Best Trousers. My heart started to beat a little bit faster.

‘I don’t think so?’ I said, squinting at the general area. You could sort of see it, but only if you were looking for it and, really, how many people were strolling around Tulum on a Monday night, staring at my boyfriend’s crotch? I hoped it wasn’t that many. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘“I can’t see anything” isn’t exactly what I want to hear when you’re looking down there.’ Adam bent his knees slightly and bounced up and down in front of the mirror. ‘You sure there isn’t, you know, an outline? I forgot how thin these trousers are.’

‘You look nice,’ I reassured him with a smile while he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and checked his reflection at every angle. ‘I like those trousers.’

‘I’m going to get changed,’ he said, more to himself than me. ‘I can’t put anything in these pockets. And you can totally see my knob.’

‘What do you need to put in your pockets?’ I asked, the attractive high pitch of desperation squeaking into my voice. ‘I can put your wallet in my bag.’

‘My phone?’ Adam muttered, giving the mirror one last thrust then pottering back into the bedroom. ‘Stuff?’

‘Stuff?’

I glanced down as my own phone buzzed on the windowsill.

‘You know,’ he called from the other room. ‘Stuff.’

‘Oh, OK,’ I replied, nodding as I opened the text message. ‘Stuff.’

HAS HE DONE IT YET?????????

Cassie had sent me the same text thirty-six times in the last fourteen days. Anyone would think she was the one whose blood pressure had been hovering around stroke-inducing levels every day for the last two weeks. And that wasn’t an exaggeration, I’d been checking, such were the perks of a background in medicine.

No, I tapped out as quickly as my little fingers would allow, not yet. I added three sad faces just in case she wasn’t sure how I was feeling and then a unicorn, just because. There’s always room for a unicorn.

Three little dots thrummed across the bottom of the screen while Adam sang an off-key Rihanna song to himself in the bedroom.

Maybe he’s nervous? Cassie suggested. Give him an in.

I looked up from my phone just in time to see our very large, very hairy neighbour in nothing but a pair of tiny trunks walk right by my window and raise his hand in a polite hello. There were downsides to staying in a cottage on the beach. They certainly hadn’t shown him on the website. Waving back quickly, I stood up and leaned against the arm of the settee, shaking out the creases in my long skirt.

Give him an in?

That was easier said than done. Maybe I could start a casual conversation on the way to dinner with ‘Did you know nine out of ten boyfriends that want to live to see another day propose to their girlfriends on holiday?’ Or perhaps ‘Hey Adam, the third finger on my left hand is cold; do you have anything sparkly I could borrow to warm it up?’

Working on it, I replied, despondent.

No emojis this time.

Truth be told, we’d had a lovely holiday but it would have been considerably lovelier if I hadn’t been constantly waiting for Adam to drop the P bomb. Nothing kills the mood like waiting for a proposal that never comes. And I want to be clear, it’s not as though I’ve been sat around the house for the last three years, draped across a fainting couch and waiting for him to swoop in with the promise of a yearly allowance of a hundred pounds and a new topcoat every winter. The chance would have been a fine thing. When you’re the only local vet in a five-village radius, you spend most of your time in surgery with your hand up a Chihuahua or in your bed, fast asleep. After you’ve washed your hands, of course. Ideally, at the end of a dog-bothering day, all I wanted was to be up to my eyeballs in a Real Housewives marathon and two-thirds of a bottle of rosé with Adam by my side. Marriage hadn’t really crossed my mind. There were so many other things I still had to accomplish, I wanted to travel, I wanted to start drinking whisky, I wanted to finish watching the last series of Doctor Who before the new one started.

However, things had changed. Supposedly, Adam had told his brother he was going to propose in Mexico, then his brother had told his wife, who just so happened to be my best friend. Of course, everyone knew Cass couldn’t keep a secret and it only took half a bottle of Pinot Grigio before she was bursting to tell me everything, and now here I was at the end of our trip, still unengaged. I had been told there was a ring, I had been told the ring was coming in Mexico – and now I wanted the bloody ring. I was Gollum, only with slightly better hair.

‘Ready?’ Adam re-emerged from the bedroom, best trousers replaced by regular jeans, paired with a nice, but hardly special, shirt.

I looked at him and wondered. Why would you tell someone you were going to propose to your girlfriend and then not do it?

‘Ready,’ I replied with a curtsey, dropping my phone in my bag, out of sight and hopefully out of mind.

He frowned for a moment, giving my ensemble the once-over before fastening and then unfastening his top button. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ I stood up and let my long, floaty white dress drift down to the floor. ‘I love this dress.’

It was a great dress. It was loose around my backside, tight around my boobs and, most importantly, I could eat in it without feeling like I was wearing my nana’s girdle. It had also cost an obscene amount of money but Cassie had assured me it was The Dress and I’d put it on my credit card without thinking about the damage. That was until the bill came. He had better propose – I needed a joint income to pay for this bugger.

‘Makes me feel a bit of a scruff, that’s all. Are you sure you’re all right to walk in those shoes?’

‘I could run a marathon in these shoes.’ I picked up a foot to inspect my three-inch heels. Maybe a marathon was pushing it. ‘We’re not walking that far, are we?’

‘Google Maps says it’s ten minutes,’ he replied, patting himself down then sticking his thumbs in his jeans pockets like a Topman-clad cowboy and all the while his eyes were still on my sandals. ‘You can do ten minutes?’

I nodded and made a disgusted noise in the back of my throat. Of course ten minutes were doable. Generally I was of the opinion that no good could come of strapping tiny stilts to your feet after a particularly nasty incident involving a spiral staircase in a club called Oceana during Freshers’ Week. More than a decade may have passed but if you’d spent your first semester of university on crutches, you’d be wary of anything higher than a kitten heel as well.

‘I really do like that dress,’ Adam said, crossing the room to rest his arms on my shoulders. I shuffled my feet apart and pulled him in closer until we were nose to nose. ‘Is it new?’

‘Quite new,’ I replied, hoping there were no follow up questions. Adam hated spending a lot of money on clothes, hence only one pair of Nice Trousers.

‘It’s like a proper lady dress.’ He nuzzled his face into my hair, pressing his lips against the nook where my neck met my shoulder. I shivered from head to toe. ‘It might be the nicest thing I’ve ever seen you wear.’

‘Just checking that’s a compliment,’ I whispered as he slid his hands around my waist and a flush bloomed in my cheeks. Adam was no slouch in the bedroom department at the best of times but on holiday it wasn’t just the bedroom that got him going. The living room, the bathroom, the beach, the toilets at a restaurant we could never go back to … Not that I was complaining. The restaurant manager maybe, but not me.

I ran my hands down his broad back and rested them on his hips. ‘Perhaps we should stay in tonight?’

‘No, we’re going to the restaurant.’ Adam checked his watch then dropped me like a bag of burning dog shit and backed away, jostling the front of his jeans to dispel the beginnings of a boner. ‘And we need to leave now or we’re going to be late.’

‘Adam, we’re in Mexico. Nothing has happened at the time it was supposed to happen since we got here,’ I said, brushing my blonde hair forward to cover the stubble rash on my throat and delicately draping my dress back down over my thighs. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘They were really funny about it when I made the reservation. It’s supposed to be dead fancy,’ he insisted as he checked his reflection and smoothed down his eyebrows. What a weirdo. ‘Plenty of time for doing it when we get back.’

My boyfriend was such a romantic.

‘Dead fancy,’ I repeated. Dead fancy sounded like the kind of place where you would propose to your girlfriend, or at least the kind of place that would have proper toilets and honestly, either of those things would have been welcomed at this point in the trip.

Following him outside, I nabbed a quick glance in the mirror as we went. Hair looked good, make-up looked good, but nothing I could do about my sunburned nose except filter it into oblivion. I was as ready as I’d ever be.

The next time we walked through that door, we would be engaged.

Or I’d have stabbed Adam through the heart with a spatula. Or a teaspoon. Or whatever was handy, really; I was a resourceful girl.

‘Do we really have to go home tomorrow?’ Liv skipped along beside me as I tried to slow down.

‘Aren’t you ready?’ I squeezed her hand and smiled, hoping that my palm wasn’t as sweaty as I imagined it was. ‘I’m gagging for a proper cup of tea.’

‘Yeah, this is just awful,’ she replied, waving at the white sand and screensaver-worthy sunset. ‘I’d trade it all for a cup of Tetley.’

‘You know what I mean,’ I said, looking at the time on my watch. We were definitely going to be late. ‘Come on, let’s pick up the pace.’

‘We have definitely been walking for more than ten minutes,’ she said in a tight voice, a few minutes later. ‘How much further is it?’

‘Not far?’

A dark look crossed her face as she gripped my hand hard and attempted to match my long stride. A word of advice: if you’re over six feet tall and you end up going out with someone under five-five, you will never not be frustrated with how slowly they walk.

‘I will miss the sunsets,’ I admitted as she walked on beside me in silence. I wrapped my right arm around her red shoulders, keeping one eye on the time. ‘The sunsets are good.’

‘The sunsets are good?’ Liv repeated, one eyebrow raised. ‘If it weren’t for the cat, I wouldn’t be going back at all. We’ve got everything we need right here. Sun, sea, sand and surprisingly good internet service? I’m in no rush to go home.’

As casual as possible, I ran a hand over my hip, checking for the telltale bump in the tiny pocket. I was certain she’d found it back in the cottage when she was packing up my clothes, but if she had, she was doing a fine job of pretending and there was no way she could fake something like that: she was a terrible liar.

‘Loads going on when we get back though …’ She carried on talking, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers. ‘Are you excited to get started on the bar?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nervous?’

‘Nah.’

I was so nervous I was bricking it. Just before we left, a friend of a friend of a friend had set me up with a guy who was opening a bar in London and needed someone to design and build the interiors. Since he had next to no budget and I was looking for a project, we’d managed to come to a financially dubious but still exciting accord. But it was still my first major project and there were a million things that could go wrong. Was my estimate right? Was my timeframe realistic? Was I even capable of pulling something like this off without it looking utterly crap? But Liv didn’t need to know how worried I was. Men shitting themselves over their big break wasn’t exactly a turn on for most women to the best of my knowledge.

‘It’ll be amazing,’ she said, with an assured nod I couldn’t return. ‘And there’s my dad’s sixty-fifth coming up, Gus’s christening, your birthday, my birthday …’

I made a noncommittal noise, trying to hold her hand, remember if I’d had a response to my last email from Jim, the guy who owned the bar, and open Google Maps to check where this bloody restaurant was supposed to be. All I could see was beach, beach, and more beach. We’d already been walking forever and I certainly couldn’t see a five-star restaurant with sunset views and a ridiculously-expensive-to-hire string quartet hiding anywhere nearby.

‘Things have been mental at the surgery, it feels like everyone on earth just adopted ten dogs and they’ve all got ear infections or worms or something else disgusting—’

‘Liv?’ I interrupted.

‘Yes?’ she looked up at me with big blue eyes, all smudgy with make-up but in a good way.

‘No.’

There was nothing like a woman talking about putting her hand up a dog’s backside to put you in the mood for a romantic proposal – not.

‘Sorry,’ she opened her mouth to say something else and then clamped it shut, staring out to sea. She didn’t look happy.

‘Liv?’

‘Yeah?’

‘What do you think Daniel Craig is doing right now?’ I asked.

She turned round, shielding her eyes from the sun and gave me a look.

‘The actor or the cat?’

‘The cat.’

‘Eating, sleeping or having a shit,’ she replied, pulling on my hand as she began to lag. ‘That’s more or less all he does these days.’

‘What do you think Daniel Craig the actor is doing right now?’

‘Eating, sleeping or having a shit? That’s more or less all he does these days.’

‘Weirdo,’ I laughed, flapping my elbows slightly as I tried to find a phone signal and hoped there wasn’t a massive sweat stain on the back of my shirt. Should have worn an undershirt. Should have put deodorant on my back. Should have done a lot of things.

Liv pressed her lips together into a thin smile. ‘You’re a weirdo.’

‘Yeah, but that’s why you love me.’ I choked on the words as the map came up. We were nowhere near the restaurant – it was a ten-minute drive away, not a ten-minute walk.

‘I knew there had to be a reason,’ she said, trying to subtly pull a strand of hair out of her lip gloss. ‘Are you excited about the christening?’

‘I can’t believe my brother is a dad,’ I replied, still staring at my phone. ‘He wasn’t even allowed to bring the school guinea pig home during the holidays and now he’s got a baby.’

Recalculating the route, I looked down at Liv, wincing with every step she took.

‘Anyway, it really has been the best holiday ever,’ she said slowly. ‘I can’t imagine anything nicer.’

‘Yeah, incredible,’ I agreed, a cold sweat running down my back. How could I have messed this up? ‘Total once-in-a-lifetime thing.’

‘And I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather be with, yeti.’ She looked up and gave me the smallest, sweetest smile and I thought I was going to be sick. In a good way. Sort of. ‘Ever.’

Oh god, I was actually going to be sick. Everything had been planned so carefully, right down to the smallest detail, and I had cocked up the directions. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to propose after all.

‘You obviously haven’t given it enough thought,’ I said, forcing out a laugh to distract from the fact I was dying inside. ‘You’re saying you’d rather be on holiday with me than Channing Tatum?’

‘Why Channing Tatum?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’s good looking, isn’t he? All buff and that. And he can dance. Women love men who can dance.’

‘You can’t dance – and I love you,’ she said, curling her fingers tightly around mine. ‘And I’d definitely pick you over Channing Tatum.’

‘Really?’

‘You’ve got better hair,’ she nodded thoughtfully. ‘And I couldn’t do that to his wife. She seems lovely.’

I’d been so worried about what to wear, about getting the music right, the menu right, about fixing my massive Teen Wolf eyebrows, I’d completely messed up our timing. We were supposed to get to the restaurant in time to watch the sun go down. At this rate, it would be the middle of the night before we got there.

‘Really, though,’ Liv started with a crack in her voice and my stomach turned over again. ‘I don’t want to be with anyone other than you, Adam. There’s no one else for me, ever.’

I let go of her hand and wiped my sweaty palms on the back of my jeans.

‘Yeah, better the devil you know,’ I said, my tongue tripping over my words. ‘It’s like Star Wars. You’ve got the original trilogy and they’re great, but then George Lucas says he’s going to make new films and you get all excited but you end up with The Phantom Menace.’

Liv knitted her perfectly groomed eyebrows together. I always hoped our children would have her eyebrows.

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘I’m saying, our relationship is like the original Star Wars,’ I explained. ‘So I can’t dump you in case I end up with The Phantom Menace.’

The sun had already started to slip away over the horizon but it was not difficult to make out my girlfriend’s expression. She didn’t look nearly as pleased with the analogy as I was.

‘What I’m saying is …’ I rubbed my palms together then took her hand back in mine. ‘You’re A New Hope. That’s good! And it’s better to stick with you because who knows if the next girl is going to be a Force Awakens or a Phantom Menace.’

‘If I were you, I’d probably just stop talking.’ She looked around the deserted beach, clearly confused. ‘Yeti, where is the restaurant?’

‘So, there’s a small chance I was looking at the driving directions when I said it was ten minutes away,’ I replied, reviewing the map. ‘It’s further than I thought?’

‘How much further?’ she asked, a noticeable hobble in her walk.

I bloody well knew those shoes of hers would be trouble.

‘The good news is, we’ve already been walking for twenty minutes,’ I replied with a tentative smile. ‘And it’s only fifty minutes away altogether.’

‘Fifty minutes!’

Liv stopped dead in her tracks, looking at me as though I’d just told her she had to walk the rest of the way barefoot, over hot coals.

‘I can’t walk another half an hour in these shoes.’ As she leaned forward, her blonde hair fell in front of her face, showing off her long neck as she messed around with the miniscule gold buckles. I hated those shoes but I loved that neck. I wanted to kiss it. But this really was not the time. ‘My foot is killing me.’

I bloody knew it.

‘Well, take your shoes off and we’ll walk on the sand,’ I suggested, looking at the uneven path that ran down the side of the beach. Even my leathery Hobbit feet wouldn’t fancy that much.

‘I can’t,’ she said, wincing as she removed her left shoe. ‘My foot is a bit of a mess.’

‘Oh my god, there’s a hole in your foot!’ I made an involuntary gipping sound as she pulled the shoe away to reveal what must have been a particularly nasty blister about fifteen minutes ago. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘You were in such a rush.’ She leaned against the low tidal wall and poked gently at the weeping mess formerly known as her foot. ‘I didn’t want to be late.’

‘I told you not to wear those shoes,’ I said, mad at her foot, mad at Google and possibly, very slightly mad at myself.

‘You also told me the restaurant was ten minutes away,’ she snapped back. ‘I can’t help it.’

I checked my phone one more time before taking another look at Liv’s gammy foot. It was utterly disgusting but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

‘If we walk around the beach, we’ll be there in ten minutes,’ I said, enlarging the map to make sure of my short cut. ‘Then we can clean that mess up there.’

‘There’s no way I’m walking down the beach,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘It’s filthy. Do you want me to get an infection in my foot? Do you want me to get septicaemia?’

No, I almost shouted, I want to bloody propose to you! Instead, I took a calming breath, put my phone away and smiled.

‘Have you got a plaster?’

‘Of course I haven’t got a bloody plaster!’ she exploded. ‘Why would I have a plaster?’

‘Because you’re a vet?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t you carry that sort of thing?’

‘What, in case we pass an Alsatian with a splinter?’

I turned my back on her and looked out at the setting sun, the last sliver hovering over the sea, and fingered the ring in my pocket. We were supposed to be there by now. We were supposed to be drinking champagne, surrounded by white roses and enjoying all the other amazing things I’d paid an arm and a leg for Pablo the events manager to organize in The Arse End of Nowhere, Mexico. I should have been the one down on one knee with a ring in my hand, instead Liv was crouching on the floor and tending to an open wound.

‘Maybe we should go back to the hotel,’ I suggested weakly as the sun drowned itself in the ocean. ‘It’s dark; it’s late. We’re not going to get there on time.’

‘You want to go back?’ she asked, hesitating over every word. ‘You don’t want to go to dinner?’

‘Well, I don’t want to sit here,’ I replied. ‘What would you suggest?’

Do it now, hissed the little voice in my head. Do it now, do it while she’s not expecting it.

‘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.