33.
How did you get on?’ Lou asked.
Effie held her phone to her ear and sighed, closing the door behind her. ‘It was a waste of time. I can’t get a divorce because we’ve been married less than a year.’
‘What about an annulment?’
‘Nope. I don’t qualify.’ She put her handbag on the sofa and sat down. ‘If he’d given me an STD on the other hand, there’d be nothing stopping me.’
‘Seriously? You mean battery isn’t a good enough reason to split from your husband, but being given chlamydia is?’ Lou asked with more than a touch of sarcasm.
Effie sighed again. She’d spent all morning at the local Citizens Advice Bureau, having secured an appointment, and after thinking she’d have to wait for weeks to get one, she’d taken it as a good omen. She’d expected to hear good news and had stepped out of the house full of optimism. The day after getting back from Ibiza, she’d got a new number and mentally crossed it off her to-do list. She’d wanted to do the same with the start of divorce proceedings, as she was eager to try to get her life in order. The idea of waiting another three months before she could start the process to dissolve her marriage made her feel grey inside.
‘The good news is, I could get legal aid after November because of the violence.’
‘I don’t understand. Surely if you went to the police, this could get expedited? We have the photos we took too, remember?’
‘I’m not going to the police,’ Effie replied, kicking her shoes off. ‘I told you already. It happened ages ago, and it’ll be my word against his.’
‘No, it won’t. They take it seriously now.’
‘Lou . . .’ Effie ran a hand through her hair. ‘He knows the law inside out, and his dad was one of the best QCs in the country. I’d be stuck with a solicitor through legal aid. I wouldn’t stand a chance, and I don’t want the ins and outs of our relationship to become public. And even if I did go to the police, it wouldn’t change the facts. We’ve not been married long enough to divorce.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll have to wait it out until then, I guess. There’s not much else I can do.’
Effie scowled. She should never have married him in the first place.
‘He doesn’t know you’re at mine, does he?’
‘No, thank god. He doesn’t even know I’m back in the country.’
‘Well that’s good,’ Lou offered, raising the tone of her voice in an attempt to cheer Effie up.
‘I know. I just wanted to get the ball rolling, you know?’
‘It’s just three months,’ Lou replied. ‘It’ll fly past, and come the fifth of November, you can be the first in line for a solicitor.’
‘Don’t worry, I will be.’
‘That’s my girl. Twat-face won’t know what’s hit him when the time comes. Serves him right. Listen, I’ve got to go, but I’ll be home by six. We’ll talk more then, okay?’
Effie nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll see you later.’
She hung up and rubbed her hands over her face. The optimism she’d come back from Ibiza with had disappeared in the space of one morning, and as she inhaled, a sharp pain made her catch her breath. She’d thought her ribs had almost healed. The doctors had said it would take around six weeks, and she hadn’t needed to take her painkillers for ages.
Tears loomed in her eyes, but it was more from disappointment than pain. She took a deep breath, clenching her teeth as her ribs protested. She couldn’t fall apart, not now. Her appointment was a setback, but it was only three months. She could do it. Come Monday, she’d be back at work, and the days would pass more quickly. Oliver couldn’t contact her anymore, and he didn’t know where she was. She could keep it up until November. She just had to keep focused.
‘One smoked-chicken and sun-dried tomato panini and a bottle of water.’ Smith put the paper bag down on her desk as he perched on the end of it.
‘Thanks.’ Effie sat back in her chair and smiled at him.
‘How’s it going so far?’
‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘I’ve got a mountain of emails to get through, but it’s nothing major.’
Her first morning back at Archive had passed quickly. After walking into the office to see her desk covered with balloons and a welcome back banner, she’d spent more time catching up with her colleagues than working.
‘It feels more like a Friday than a Monday,’ she said, tearing the wrapping from her panini.
‘We’re happy to have you back,’ Smith replied, leaning over to take one of the doughnuts from the box she’d brought in. ‘Nobody else can work that spreadsheet like you do.’
‘Thanks. It’s how I make myself indispensable.’
‘You don’t have to make a spreadsheet for that.’ He grinned and took a bite of the doughnut. ‘Did Lou mention the open-air cinema thing? Mickey got the tickets this morning. It should be fun.’
She shook her head with a smile. ‘Did nobody ever tell you it’s rude to talk with your mouth full?’
‘Blame my parents.’ He took another bite, bigger than the last one. ‘Shit.’
Effie laughed as a blob of raspberry jam dropped from the doughnut onto his jeans, and handed him a tissue. ‘Serves you right.’
He took it from her and scooped it away.
‘What do you think about him and Lou?’ she asked, unscrewing the lid from her bottle. ‘Do you think they’ll get back together? Has he said anything to you?’
‘Are you scoping out information for Lou?’ He raised an eyebrow and scrunched the tissue up in his hand. ‘Because if you are, you’re not getting anything from me.’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘As if.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s just that she’s really nervous about it. It’s the proper first date they’ll have been on since they started talking again, right?’
‘Yeah, but we’ll be there too. It’s not like it’ll be an intimate kind of thing.’
‘I suppose.’ She took the panini from the bag.
Smith was too astute for his own good. She’d promised Lou she’d try to sound him out, but Smith wasn’t budging, and his view that it wouldn’t be intimate unexpectedly stung.
‘Okay, fine. All I’m going to say is, it’s looking hopeful.’
‘Really?’ Effie grinned.
‘He loves her. She loves him. It’s only a matter of time, right?’
He looked her in the eye, and she blinked. Why had that sounded like it was about much more than Lou and Mickey?
‘It’s all about the long game.’
He grinned, took another bite of his doughnut and went back to his desk. As she watched him, a wave of warmth started in her stomach and spread throughout her body in seconds. She turned her chair so he wouldn’t be in her line of sight.
The long game. Was that what he was doing, waiting until the opportunity presented itself to . . . what? Kiss her? Tell her he loved her? Assuming that he really did love her, of course. She wondered what would happen if she were the one to make the first move, and then she bit into her panini, determined to think of something else. She was in no position to do that, no matter how much she wanted to. And besides, she still wasn’t sure that he was for real. Smith was competitive, and if he was looking at this as a game, she’d end up being a pawn. He’d told her himself, he wanted to be Just Friends.
She picked up her small desk calendar, flicked through to the fifth of November and drew a circle around it. The red ink looked stark against the white background. Smith wasn’t the only one with a long game to play.
A few days later, Effie sat on the grass in the park close by their office and took her salad box from a brown paper bag.
‘Hang on,’ Smith said and pulled out a paper napkin from his bag. ‘Here.’
She took it from him and pulled her sunglasses down fro
m her head, looking around them. She sighed dreamily as she lifted the lid on her salad box.
‘Do we really have to go back to work?’ she asked.
He smiled and crossed his legs. ‘Yep. But not for another forty-four minutes.’
‘Ooh, lucky us.’ Effie drizzled the lyonnaise dressing from the small sachet over her salad. ‘Forty-four minutes isn’t that long.’
If she could, she’d lie back on the grass until the sun went down. She hadn’t banked on missing the Clapham garden, and Lou’s tiny balcony was no comparison. For now, snatched moments in the park would have to do, and if she had to share it with half of London, so be it. She looked around at the dozens of other people squeezed into the little patch of green between her office and the Tube station.
‘Had enough of being back already?’ Smith asked and bit into his baguette.
Effie shook her head and looked at him, his jaw flexing as he chewed his food. ‘Not at all. It’s just such a beautiful day, it’s a shame we have to be stuck in the office.’
‘I’ll play hooky if you will. We can escape for the afternoon.’
She laughed at his cheeky grin. ‘You’re a bad influence, Smith.’
‘I don’t even try to deny it.’
She stuck her plastic fork into her lettuce leaves. Since she’d returned to work, the days had flown past, exactly as she’d hoped. She’d settled straight back into her routine with ease, and everything was as it had been before, with three notable exceptions.
The first was obvious. Instead of leaving her marital home each morning, she left from Lou’s flat. It had been two and a half weeks of unashamed fun. They ate together almost every night and had breakfast together in the mornings. The evenings had been spent watching old films, both of them with their feet propped up on the sofa as they wore face masks or painted their nails. Even though Effie was camping on the sofa, she wouldn’t have traded it for her luxury memory foam mattress back in her marital home for anything.
Secondly, Oliver was still firmly off Effie’s radar. She’d half expected him to turn up at her office at some point, pleading with her to take him back, but he’d clearly accepted that they were over, because she’d heard nothing. And she wasn’t surprised to realise that she didn’t care. If anything, it only made her resolve even stronger to go for a divorce when the time came.
‘Okay, I’ve got a question for you,’ Smith said, holding his baguette with one hand and sticking his hand into a bag of crisps with the other. ‘Imagine there were only forty-four minutes left to live.’
Effie grimaced. ‘Jeez. This sounds like a fun conversation.’
‘Maybe there’s an asteroid racing towards us, or the ice caps have melted and a massive tidal wave’s going to kill us all. What would you do?’
‘Apart from panic and cry?’
Smith nodded and tipped his head back, dropping a few crisps into his mouth. How could anyone eat salt and vinegar crisps and a tandoori chicken baguette at the same time? Through the dark lenses of her glasses, she watched as he washed it down with a mouthful of Coke and thought about his question.
The third and most obvious difference to her life before was Smith. If he was playing the long game, then he was the star player. Every day, he’d get to the office with an extra hot latte for her in addition to his Americano. They’d started lunching together when his schedule allowed it and fallen into a pattern of ‘I’ll pay this time, you pay next time.’ At the start of her second week back at work, the Northern Line had messed up on her way home, and she’d ended up being stuck in a tunnel along with a seemingly inhumane number of other commuters for twenty minutes, all packed together and sweltering in the August heat. Smith had offered her a ride home the next day, and ever since, he’d brought his spare helmet as a matter of course. He looked out for her as much as he could, so much so that she knew they were attracting strange glances in the office. She could only imagine what their colleagues thought was going on, but the fact was, nothing had changed. Fundamentally, they were the same as before. Just Friends. There’d been plenty of opportunities for him to make a move, to get to the final stage of his game, but he’d placed himself firmly in the friend zone.
Nearly every memory she had of the time since she’d come back from Ibiza had him in it – at the airport, in the car, on his bike. If the world was going to end in forty-four minutes’ time, she wouldn’t care what she did. As long as she did it with him.
She looked at him again as he squinted his eyes against the sun. Her salad had suddenly taken on the consistency of cardboard, and she struggled to swallow it. Her mum had told her about positive thinking, saying that the more she thought about something, the more likely it was to come true. She hadn’t bought into it, but what if her mum had been right? She’d wished for Oliver to leave her alone, and he had. Maybe if she’d wished for Smith to make a move, instead of wondering about his motives, he would have.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘No idea,’ she replied with a shrug and put her salad box on the ground. Her appetite had disappeared.
‘Oh, come on. There must be something you’d want to do?’
‘I don’t know.’ She rubbed her hands and shrugged again. ‘The usual, I guess. Say my goodbyes and stuff. What about you?’
‘I’d like to think I’d do something profound, but let’s face it – that’s unlikely.’ He laughed. ‘I’d probably go up on a roof somewhere really high and play some good tunes. It’d be cool to see everything happen from a height.’
‘Rather you than me. I wouldn’t spend my last few minutes on earth scaling a tall building.’
‘You’re going to die anyway; you might as well do something you’ve been afraid of your whole life first.’
‘You get your kicks in some weird places, Smith.’ Effie laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you rather spend it with people you love?’
‘Of course, but it’s only forty-four minutes. It’s impossible to get everyone together that quickly, and transport would be all kinds of crazy.’
She shook her head, laughing. He’d clearly thought this through, right down to the last detail.
‘And you’d be there.’ He shrugged. ‘So it’d be all good.’
Her laughter stopped abruptly. Thank god, she was wearing glasses, or her eyes would have given her away. She was sure they were as wide as saucers.
‘I would?’
‘Well, yeah,’ he replied as if it was the only obvious answer, and he smiled.
It was so genuine that she couldn’t not believe that what Penny and Lou said was true. She fanned her face with her hand, grateful that the redness creeping up her neck could easily be put down to the heat.
‘I dunno, though,’ he said, leaning in close so their shoulders touched.
He looked up at the sky and then turned his head to face her. He was about to kiss her – she was sure of it. Her heart raced in her chest.
‘Don’t know about what?’
Why had she ordered salad with onions in it? And why was she wearing her sunglasses? Should she take them off? She wanted to see his eyes properly, to look at the grey irises, flecked with dots of blue.
‘Can’t see any asteroids. I think we’re safe.’ He smiled, and she swore it had more than a hint of regret to it. ‘Shame.’
34.
For the rest of the afternoon, Effie had been able to think of nothing else, so much so that she’d almost wished there were an asteroid hurtling towards the earth. She’d sat at her desk, looking at the digital clock in the bottom corner of her screen, counting down the minutes to the moment she’d be able to get on the back of Smith’s bike for him to take her home.
Could he tell that she’d been willing him to kiss her? He’d handed her the helmet with a knowing look, as if she’d left herself wide open, and she tried not to hold on to him too tightly for the drive back to Lou’s. She’d grown used to being on th
e bike and his way of riding, and the truth was, she could easily sit on it without having to hold on to him at all. Instead, she kept her hands loose around his waist, all too aware of how close she was to the one part of him she really wanted to touch. He kept up the habit of putting his hand on her thigh and turning to check on her when he stopped at a red light, and unless she was completely delusional, she was sure his grip was firmer and higher than it usually was.
By the time they got to Lou’s, her top was stuck to her back, and she didn’t know whether it was from the heat of the sun or her body going into overdrive over the tension she was sure she’d felt between them all day. He turned the key and killed the engine as he put his foot on the ground to stabilise the bike.
‘Wow, it’s hot,’ she said, passing the helmet to him. She was certain her hair was stuck to her head where it had been under the helmet, and with the curly ends being windswept, she must have looked a complete state.
He took the helmet from her and removed his. ‘It is.’
Effie bit down on her lip. God, this was going to sound so lame.
‘Do you want some water or something?’
‘Or something.’ She saw the hint of a smile on his lips. ‘Sounds good.’
The blush almost burned her skin as he climbed off the bike. Why was she so nervous? This was Smith. It wasn’t like they hadn’t been in this place before. Why were her insides shaking as they walked up the stairs to Lou’s flat?
He followed her in and exhaled loudly. ‘Ah, this is nice. My place is like an oven, even with the windows open.’
He flopped on the sofa, his legs splayed wide, and Effie left him to go into the kitchen. She stood by the sink and gripped the edge of it, feeling the cool steel under her palms. Or something. That was pretty clear, wasn’t it? She never could tell with him. It was why it had taken them so long to get together in the first place. She could never work out whether he was simply flirting or stating his intent.
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