What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  And he seemed to be looking at my teeth, which didn’t help me to feel any more relaxed about the situation. Note to self: a mojito is not a good important-date drink. All those itty-bitty little pieces of mint. I must have looked as though I had been sifting for krill. I stretched my lips over my teeth. The really stupid thing is, I’d only chosen the mojito in the first place because I thought all that mint would give me extra-fresh breath for our first reconciliatory kiss.

  When were we going to have that kiss? Were we going to have that kiss? Callum still hadn’t made any move towards me.

  Maybe I would have to be the one to take the first step. I considered just wrapping my arms round him, but nothing about Callum’s stance definitively suggested a move like that would be welcome. I suppose it was more understandable in his case. After all, I hadn’t seen him for more than a month and the last time we’d spoken, he’d told me that I had to get over him and move on. I had every right to be angry with him and he knew it. Perhaps he was waiting for me to tell him where he could stuff his grand gesture. Or maybe seeing me had been enough to convince him that he had been right to dump me after all.

  I don’t know how long we stood on opposite sides of the table like that. It was probably only a minute, but it seemed to take for ever. At last I held out my arms. Callum stepped into them, wrapped his own arms round me in a big bear hug and lifted me off my feet. He whirled me round until I had to ask him to stop. My Dutch-courage cocktails were swilling around dangerously inside me.

  ‘Put me down,’ I shrieked.

  ‘I never want to put you down again,’ said Callum.

  But he did. He had to. I’m not that small.

  ‘Shall we have a drink?’ I asked while I waited for my head to stop spinning.

  Thankfully, Callum was not as tight as Evan and he was never one to refuse a cocktail.

  ‘Let’s have two,’ he said.

  I ordered another mojito. He had a James Bond-style martini.

  ‘I have missed you,’ he said, proposing a toast when our drinks arrived. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  ‘I can’t believe you came on holiday on your own, though. I was convinced you would stay home.’

  I felt myself reddening. ‘Well, sometimes a girl has to take a risk.’

  ‘I was impressed. Have you been OK without me?’

  ‘I’ve had Clare here,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t believe Evan put up with that. Not when they’re getting a new kitchen. He wouldn’t shut up about it all the way across the island. Shoot me if I ever get like that . . . Here, I brought you this.’

  He reached into the rucksack he used for hand luggage and brought out a bottle of perfume: Chanel’s Coco. Not something I’d ever worn. It was a jumbo-sized bottle from duty-free. The price tag was still on it, but it is the thought that counts.

  ‘I got this too.’ He pulled out a smaller box. My heart skipped. This had to be my real thirtieth-birthday present.

  No, it wasn’t. It was a man’s watch.

  ‘I’ve always wanted one of these,’ said Callum, strapping it onto his wrist. I sat on my disappointment. It was presumptuous of me to have expected anything more than the perfectly nice bottle of scent.

  Two more cocktails arrived. As we drank, Callum told me what hell he’d been through during his week without me.

  ‘I decided not to take any holiday,’ he said. ‘I went into work.’

  ‘I did hear something like that,’ I told him, trying to play it cool.

  ‘I bet you did. Hannah and Alison never let up in their campaign to make me miserable,’ he said. ‘Not an hour went by without one of them reminding me that I was at work while you were out here having a fabulous time.’

  ‘Not such a fabulous time,’ I tried to reassure him.

  ‘While I had the week from hell. Listening to a running commentary about what a wonderful trip you were having while I was stuck in Stockwell. I tried to keep my head down, but when Alison and Hannah weren’t banging on about how good it is over here, Candace was asking if I’d heard from you. She was worried that you were OK.’

  ‘Really?’

  Candace was on my Christmas list. Meanwhile, I was feeling a little bad for Callum. It sounded as though he had really suffered stuck there in the office. The girls had not been kidding when they said that they intended to make his life miserable on my behalf.

  ‘Believe me,’ I told him, ‘whatever Hannah and Alison told me, not an hour went by without me thinking that I’d far rather be here with you than Clare. Great company though she is.’

  ‘She needs to have a good sense of humour,’ said Callum. ‘God knows what she’s doing with that berk. I nearly throttled him on the drive from the airport.’

  ‘Love, eh?’

  ‘Love.’

  Callum reached across the table and took my hand. He looked deep into my eyes. I felt as though a live fish was flipping in my stomach. Was he about to tell me that he loved me too? In the eighteen months we had been together, he had never actually used the ‘l’ word. I let the silence grow between us and waited for him to fill it with the combination of three words I so wanted to hear.

  ‘Anyway, are you going to show me where our room is or what?’ Callum broke the moment with an altogether less romantic question than I had hoped for. ‘I could do with a shower and some fresh clothes.’

  ‘You want to go to the room?’

  ‘Of course.’ Callum’s expression changed from dewily romantic to slightly wolfish. I knew what was on his mind. It had been on my mind since the moment I found out he had booked a flight to Majorca, but there was no avoiding it now. I had to tell him what Clare and I had planned.

  ‘Well, you can go upstairs and have a quick shower if you like,’ I said. ‘I’m sure nobody will mind, but you’re going to have to find another place to stay overnight. There are no spare rooms at the hotel this week, and Clare and Evan are staying in the room I booked for us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Clare and Evan are in our room.’

  ‘They can’t be staying there. Tell them to find somewhere else. Why should we have to move out?’

  ‘We aren’t moving out,’ I said. ‘You are. Just you. I’m staying with my sister and Evan, on a camp bed. The hotel provided it.’

  ‘But that’s just ridiculous. Come on, Sophie. You booked that room for us months and months ago. Tell Clare to sort herself out. Evan earns enough to find them somewhere nice. He spent enough time telling me how successful he is on the drive over here.’

  ‘No,’ I said, surprising myself at how firmly it came out. ‘I’m not asking Clare to go anywhere. She really put herself out for me this week. I don’t know what I would have done without her. And Evan was really good about it too. They’re staying where they are. I’ll be fine on a put-you-up.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And,’ I continued, ‘I think it’s better if we take things slowly in any case.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do? Sophie, I have flown to Majorca to be with you.’

  ‘And you can be with me,’ I said, mustering as much self-esteem as I had ever found. ‘During the day, you can be with me as much as you want, but as far as I am concerned, we are still broken up and we have a lot of talking to do before we decide whether or not to get back together properly.’

  Callum clenched his jaw so hard that I could see the muscles twitch. He was not happy. That much was clear. Was he going to accept what I’d told him, or was this going to be it, the moment when we fell apart for good and for ever? It could have gone either way. He looked so annoyed that I would have put money on the probability that he was going to tell me to stuff it.

  ‘Fine,’ said Callum at last. ‘You’ve made your point.’

  Phew.

  ‘I’ll just have to hope there is another empty room in this town. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before I got a flight out here. I might not have . . .’

  ‘Bothered to come?’ I finished his sentence f
or him. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I told you that I wanted some time to myself. You went ahead and booked the flight anyway.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, I have better things to do than traipse around this town looking for somewhere to sleep. Come on, Soph. Where am I going to go? It’s nearly midnight. And I didn’t exactly budget for finding myself a room. I’ve already paid to stay here.’ He growled at the injustice of it. ‘This is taking the piss.’

  ‘You could always fly back in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, Soph.’ Callum suddenly softened and took my hands. ‘I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I’ve missed you. It’s not only this week I’ve been missing you. All the time I was up in Newcastle . . . that whole month.’

  ‘Every weekend of which you spent in London,’ I reminded him. ‘Where I would have been very happy indeed to see you, had you wanted to see me.’

  Callum bristled again. ‘Don’t bring that up. I was confused. Look, why don’t you come to another hotel with me? We don’t have to do anything except talk. We can keep our clothes on. I’ll even sleep on the floor if you want me to. It just seems crazy for me to be on my own while you play gooseberry to the others.’

  To be honest, it didn’t seem like such a great idea to me either, but I held firm.

  ‘I’m staying with my sister,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll find somewhere good. Ask at reception.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Callum, picking up his bag. ‘I’ll let you know where I end up. Probably on a bench outside the bus station . . .’

  Callum knocked back the last of his drink and half of mine before he left. It was hard to watch him go, after having waited so long to see him. I very nearly ran after him and told him I’d changed my mind and would spend the night wherever we could be together. I didn’t want to do anything that would make him angry and jeopardise us getting back together.

  Upstairs, Clare commiserated a little when I reminded her that it had actually been the best part of five weeks since Callum and I were last in bed together, but she insisted I had done the right thing. She and Evan were more than happy to share the room with me (especially if it meant they didn’t have to pay for their accommodation, Evan added). So I stuck with Clare’s plan, even when Callum texted to say he had ended up in some fleapit near the dual carriageway, where he would no doubt be attacked on all sides by mosquitoes and bedbugs. There wasn’t a single decent room left in town.

  ‘It will do him good. Nobody values something they haven’t had to work for, whether it’s a free drink, a free car or a relationship,’ Clare told me, as she made me a cup of tea using the tea bags that Evan had helpfully secreted in his hand luggage along with a loaf of brown bread and six tomatoes that would have gone off in the time they were going to be away. ‘If you make Callum work hard to get you back, he will work hard at keeping you too.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Evan, who had mellowed with the brandy and a reviving tomato sandwich. ‘I think of you as my little sister too, you know. I don’t want you throwing yourself away on someone who doesn’t appreciate you. You deserve the best.’

  I held that thought close through another sleepless night, though it wasn’t my concerns about Callum that kept me awake for once. Clare had not been kidding about Evan’s night-time noises. The way he snored really put her horrific nocturnal honking into perspective. Compared with Evan’s fog-horn-style exhalations, Clare’s hundred-decibel snores were like the snuffles of a newborn kitten. I moved into the vestibule of the room, where the wardrobes were, but I could still hear Evan through a closed door, earplugs and a pillow. No wonder Clare had so enjoyed a week in my flat.

  I got maybe fifteen minutes’ worth of decent rest that night, but the adrenaline of having told Callum he had to work to get back into my heart kept me feeling pretty good when I woke. When Callum texted me again at eight in the morning, to tell me that he’d had a sleepless night, I was overjoyed. It wasn’t just the dual carriageway outside his window that had kept him awake, he said, but the thought of how much he had missed out on by letting me go away on my own.

  Callum’s text brought happy tears to my eyes. I told him I had been thinking about him too.

  ‘Can I come over to your hotel now?’ was his next text.

  Had Clare been awake, she probably would have had me hold out for a little while longer, but I texted to let him know that I was already up and couldn’t wait to see him. We agreed to meet by the pool.

  I was so excited. The romantic nature of his text, saying he’d been thinking about how much he’d missed, convinced me that we were heading for a breakthrough. Callum and I had never really talked about us with any degree of seriousness before. Sure, I thought that we had, but over our week of being broken up, I had come to realise just how superficial our relationship had been. I’d realised I didn’t know Callum’s views on so many things and he was in the dark about my opinions too. We hadn’t talked about a future beyond this summer holiday. He would change the subject when I talked about the lease on my flat and how much easier it would be to afford somewhere decent if there were two people to pay the rent. It’s little wonder I didn’t dare raise the really big stuff like marriage and kids.

  Right now, that morning, things were going to change. Since Callum announced that he would come to Majorca after all, I had been receiving a virtual pep talk from Hannah via text. She told me that I had Callum on the run. My going away without him had shown him that he didn’t know me as well as he thought and that had hooked him in again. I would probably never find myself in a stronger position where he was concerned and thus I had to take advantage of that fact when setting out my conditions for getting back together.

  ‘Remember,’ she wrote, ‘Anne Boleyn got Henry the Eighth to change the religion of a whole country by refusing to sleep with him before she got a ring on her finger.’

  I didn’t want Callum to wage war against the Vatican on my behalf, but I did want him to consider moving our relationship forward properly at last. I wanted to meet his family and I wanted him at least to think about moving in with me as soon as his lease ended (in a couple of months, I knew). After that? Maybe, just maybe our living together would go so well that Callum would start thinking about the sort of steps that involved serious paperwork: mortgages, marriage . . .

  I forwarded Callum’s text to Hannah. She agreed that it was possible that Callum would agree to everything I suggested, provided I did not sleep with him first.

  Oh, that bit was going to be hard. When Callum appeared by the pool that morning, he was wearing my favourite of his shirts, a soft blue number that made him look both gentle and super-masculine at the same time. He was one of very few men who actually look good in shorts. When he sat down beside me, I had a very strong urge to put my hand on his knee, but I didn’t. Instead, I was perfectly polite. I let him kiss me on the cheek. We ordered coffee and pastries for breakfast. He told me about the hotel he had ended up in, which was fine apart from its unfortunate location. There were no bedbugs and the only mosquitoes he saw were already squashed on the wall.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to go looking for somewhere so late.’

  ‘It’s OK. You were right,’ he added. ‘I was pissed off at having to find somewhere else to stay, but when it comes down to it, I was the one who pulled out of the holiday at the last minute. There’s no reason why you or your sister should put yourselves out for me.’

  He was making me melt all over again.

  Later, I applied suntan lotion to his back. Those muscles. I remembered them so well. It was hard not to fall upon them with kisses. Just touching them sent shivers of delight all over my body. When Callum returned the favour, I felt weak with pleasure. When we finally did get to spend the night together, it was going to be one of the best nights of our relationship so far.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  We settled down for a day by the pool. It was everything I had dreamed it would be when Hannah first told me about Puerto Bona. Callum and I picked two sunbeds side by side and lay there
all morning in companionable silence. I had decided it would be a good idea to spend some time simply chilling out together before we started to tackle the elephant in the room that was our break-up. From time to time, Callum would reach across the gap between us to grab my hand and give it a squeeze. I’d give him a smile as wide as a melon slice in return. Everything was exactly as it should be.

  Evan and Clare joined us briefly at around ten o’clock. They didn’t stay long. Evan wanted to see some of the sights that Clare had been texting about that week. For Evan, holidays had to have an element of culture or self-improvement. Topping up a suntan wasn’t enough for him. While Evan went back up to the room to get a guidebook, Clare showed me how her beach bag was full of bread rolls and apples that Evan had purloined from the breakfast buffet.

  ‘He’s determined not to spend a penny more than we have to.’

  I commiserated.

  Evan returned with the guidebook and a sunhat. He plonked it on Clare’s head.

  ‘You’re not burning your nose on my watch,’ he said.

  Clare rolled her eyes, but I thought it was rather sweet of him to think of it.

  While Evan and Clare ate their bread rolls on a bench somewhere, Callum and I had a lovely lunch in the poolside bar. Delicious salad with local ham and a perfectly chilled white wine. In the afternoon, we moved on to cocktails and beer. I drifted into a doze listening to the music from the bar: a series of smoochy summer tunes. I was in heaven.

  It was all going perfectly until about three o’clock.

  ‘There’s a guy over there keeps staring at you,’ said Callum.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That guy. He keeps looking at you.’