‘It’s really none of your business,’ Tina said, coming back into the room and pulling some dry clothes out of her suitcase.
‘He’s still in love with you.’ Lottie said, in the same hateful voice. ‘What’s your excuse?’
‘Well what was your excuse when you slept with him?’ Tina fired back. ‘At least I don’t have a bloody fiancé.’
‘No, you don’t, and you probably never will because you’re just too self-centred to care about anyone else.’
‘Well, technically you don’t have one now either!’
Lottie stared at her with wounded eyes, and Tina immediately regretted her spiteful words.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was unkind of me.’
‘Spike probably thinks you feel something for him,’ said Lottie. ‘He doesn’t know you’re as cold as ice.’
‘I don’t know why you’re getting so wound up about this,’ Tina said. She scrambled into sweatpants and a T-shirt and began to tackle her hair with the brush that was lying on her bedside table. ‘It’s not as if you want him. You’ve made that very clear.’
‘But you don’t want him either, do you? I mean, you wanted him enough to have sex with him, but tomorrow you’ll just let him walk away without caring about his feelings at all.’
‘Since when were you responsible for Spike’s feelings?’ Tina asked. ‘And exactly how’s what I’ve done any different from what you did?’
‘I never made Spike think what we had was anything more than what it was. I was honest with him.’
‘Are you sure about that? And in any case, what makes you think I haven’t been honest, too?’
‘I told you he was in love with you, and you still went selfishly ahead.’
‘You really need to get a grip, Lottie,’ Tina said.
‘I bet you slept with him just because I did,’ Lottie said.
‘Don’t be so childish!’
‘You never could bear not being the centre of attention.’
Tina was infuriated by her sister’s condemnation. Lottie always thought she knew everything.
‘You weren’t the centre of attention, Lottie,’ she said. ‘I told Spike to seduce you. He took quite a bit of persuading, actually.’
As soon as she said the words, Tina knew she had gone too far. Her hand went up to her mouth as if to cram the words back in.
Lottie stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said finally.
‘Nothing. Really nothing. It’s the middle of the night and my head is scrambled.’
‘No, say what you just said again.’ Lottie’s voice was dangerously quiet.
‘Take no notice of me,’ Tina said.
Lottie stood up. ‘I want you to tell me what you just said,’ she repeated. Her fists were bunched at her sides and her face had gone so pale, her freckles stood out in livid contrast.
‘It was nothing really. It was kind of part of the challenges . . .’ She tailed off lamely.
‘When did you ask Spike to do this?’ Lottie asked.
‘Shortly after he joined us. He didn’t take me seriously. You got together because he really likes you.’
‘So, knowing I was about to get married, you decided to get Spike, who would clearly do almost anything you asked, to flirt with me and pretend he found me attractive.’
‘I didn’t tell him to sleep with you,’ Tina said.
‘You are such a bitch!’ Lottie said. ‘What gives you the right to play with people the way you do?’
Tina was alarmed to see that tears were rolling down her sister’s face. ‘All I wanted to do was make you certain that you really wanted to marry Dean,’ she said.
Lottie put her face in her hands.
‘And I was kind of right, wasn’t I? You didn’t exactly fight Spike off.’ Now she had started, she couldn’t seem to stop, even though she knew she was hurting Lottie. She wanted to explain that it hadn’t been malice, but rather concern for her sister that had prompted her actions, but the words all seemed to come out wrong.
‘You know so little about me,’ Lottie said, taking her tear-smeared face out of her hands. ‘But you know even less about yourself.’
‘You can’t blame me because you were attracted to him,’ Tina said, almost pleadingly.
‘But I can blame you for manipulating us both and for humiliating me.’ Lottie said. ‘I will never forgive you.’ She started putting her clothes into her suitcase in a most un-Lottie-like way – scooping up her toiletries and bundling up her nightdress and throwing everything in carelessly.
‘What are you doing?’ Tina asked.
‘I’m getting the hell away from you.’
‘Where are you going to go? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘What do you fucking care?’ Lottie hissed and walked out of the room, dragging her suitcase after her.
*
Lottie sat huddled up in one of the sticky leather chairs in the hotel lobby. It was raining so hard that a pool of water had forced its way under the door and gathered on the floor by the entrance. She had been told by the bleary-eyed receptionist that she would have to wait until the morning if she wanted to hire a car. She was furious enough to take the Mustang from the car park outside and leave the other two stranded, but unfortunately Tina had the keys. Her plan was to drive to Phoenix and get the first available plane home. It was going to cost a fortune, but she could afford it since she no longer had a wedding to pay for. Ever cautious, she had insured herself against wedding disaster, and this certainly qualified as one. It didn’t matter what it cost – she would spend any amount of money to get away from Tina.
Lottie did not for one moment believe her sister had had her best interests at heart and, in any case, who was she to decide who was worthy of love and who was not? She knew nothing at all about real feelings. This terrible trip had taught her an important lesson – or perhaps reaffirmed what she already knew – which was that if you lived your life as if every day was your last, you were likely to fuck up what was left of your life. Tina had always had a taste for this sort of crass, spongy philosophy, along with all those other awful life quotes dim-witted people posted on social media: Let your smile change the world, don’t let the world change your smile. Everything happens for a reason. Difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations. Well, there was nothing beautiful about sitting in a lobby in the early hours of the morning, with yesterday’s knickers on, feeling as if you had lost everything, including your pride. She gave a middle-aged man in a sweaty suit who cast a hopeful smile in her direction an evil-eyed glare.
How could Tina, her own sister, have done what she had? Lottie winced inwardly at the thought of how easily she had been duped. Was she really so weak and insecure that she had allowed herself to fall for Spike’s commissioned attentions? She was someone who prided herself on knowing what was true, on her ability to spot bullshit – and yet she had so readily succumbed to the cheapest of ploys, all those intent looks, the oh-so-casual touches on the arm, the jaded rituals of seduction. And how could Spike have agreed to such a plan? She had thought him kind. She imagined the conversations he might have had with her sister, she laughingly setting out her idea, he, not in love with the task, but in love with the puppetmaster. He was a weak bastard, along with pretty much every other man on the planet. The middle-aged man, too drunk perhaps to have registered the venom in Lottie’s gaze, sat down opposite her.
‘What you doing all on your own?’ he asked. He had red lips and a thick neck and the air of someone who was used to getting what he wanted. ‘How about you come to my room for a little drink?’
‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ Lottie said.
He made a kind of hateful ooh-mark-her noise that made Lottie want to stab him with a knife, and got to his feet.
‘There’s no need to act so rude,’ he said. ‘I was just being friendly.’
Lottie watched him lurch away. You couldn’t even sit quietly without some man getting into your space and acting
as if he had a right to speak to you. As if he thought she should be grateful for it. Her father, as ready with his charm as he was with his fists; Rick with his unswerving belief that Mia belonged to him; Spike’s sly perfidy; and even, although she had to accept culpability for her own actions, Dean’s jealousy that blinded and deafened him – it seemed to her that they were all cut from the same cloth.
Lottie was glad she was angry. It stopped her feeling so helpless.
Chapter 32
‘LOTTIE’S GONE,’ TINA SAID, shaking Spike awake. When he opened his eyes, blinking in the sudden glare of the overhead light, he smiled and made to pull her to him, but she batted him away.
‘Lottie’s gone,’ she repeated, and this time her words registered. Spike sat up abruptly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She stormed out of our room a few minutes ago.’
‘Why did she do that? She sure makes a habit of wandering around in the middle of the night.’
‘We had a row,’ Tina said.
‘What about?’
‘I told her that I asked you to flirt with her.’
Now Spike was fully awake and looking alarmed. ‘Why the hell did you do that?’
‘She was being all sanctimonious about me sleeping with you. I lost my temper.’
‘That wasn’t very smart,’ Spike said, and then saw how stricken Tina looked. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’ve ruined everything,’ Tina said.
‘She’ll come round when I explain it to her,’ Spike said, getting out of bed and pulling on his jeans. ‘Let’s go and try and find her.’
‘I don’t think she will ever come round. She looked at me as if she hated me.’
‘She doesn’t hate you. You’re her sister.’
‘The sister who has ruined her life.’
‘She has to accept some responsibility for what happened. Lottie and I slept together because we wanted to and we were a little drunk. You didn’t engineer that. You didn’t make her tell Dean about it either.’
‘But I started the whole thing. I’m sure she would never have fallen for you if you hadn’t appeared so smitten with her.’
Even in her distressed state, with her wild hair and mascara-streaked face and with the urgent task of finding Lottie underway, he wanted to take Tina in his arms and kiss her so that she would look at him again as she had a few hours before. He was completely lost. He had opened himself up to her in exactly the way he had vowed he never would again and with no certainty that she felt anything for him in return. Maybe he was nothing more to her than Greg or that slimy cowboy in Lone Pine or her photographer friend who she had mentioned a couple of times in that archly casual way that convinced him he was her lover. He loved Tina for the joyful, freewheeling way she lived, the fact that she did handstands against walls and stood up yelling in cars and didn’t care at all about what other people thought of her. Yet the very things that drew him to her were also the source of his pain because he knew she was enough without him. She would never need him as much as he needed her.
*
Lottie was asleep in a chair in the lobby, curled up under her cardigan. She woke instantly when she felt someone shaking her.
‘She told me to let her sleep until the car arrives,’ the receptionist said wearily, clearly inured to the strange, night-time perambulations of hotel guests. Why anyone travelled half way across the world to have such an apparently terrible time was beyond her comprehension. Home was most definitely sweet home and she couldn’t wait to get under her newly acquired broderie anglaise duvet just as soon as this darn shift came to an end.
‘Get off me,’ Lottie exclaimed furiously, shaking off Tina’s hand.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been a complete witch.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Lottie said, deliberately ignoring Spike, who was hovering in the background.
‘What are you planning on doing?’
‘I’m going back to England to pretend none of this ever happened.’
‘You can’t do that. We’ve got to sprinkle the ashes,’ Tina said.
‘You sprinkle the bloody ashes by yourself,’ Lottie said.
‘I can’t do that. It needs the both of us.’
Spike approached nervously.
‘How about you let Lottie and me have a chat on our own?’ he suggested, giving Tina a gentle push.
‘I don’t particularly want to talk to you, either,’ Lottie said, crossing her arms and looking pointedly in the other direction. Spike met Tina’s eye and she nodded and left them to it. Spike sat down in the chair next to Lottie’s.
‘I honestly don’t think Tina meant any of this to have turned out like it has,’ he began.
‘Yeah, you would say that. You are so bloody besotted that if she’d asked you to kill me, you would probably have done it.’
Lottie felt humiliated by Spike’s solicitous look. He was acting as if she was ill or insane, not someone who had been mortally betrayed by the pair of them.
‘It wasn’t as you imagine it. OK, it was a stupid idea and I was dumb enough to go along with it, but it didn’t end up where it started.’ He paused as if struggling to explain himself.
‘She doesn’t love you, you know,’ Lottie said. ‘She’s never really loved anyone.’
‘She loves you,’ he said softly.
‘Yeah,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s really the action of someone who loves someone to concoct a plan to break up their engagement.’
Spike looked at her gravely.
‘You did that all by yourself,’ he said, and Lottie flinched. ‘When we started this stupid game, that’s exactly what it was – a stupid game that I joined in on because yes, you’re right, I would probably do anything she asked of me. It felt like a kind of dare. I wanted her to see how heartless she was being. I’m not proud of myself, but I think I wanted to hurt her. And then I discovered how lovely you are and I felt genuinely attracted to you and for a while it stopped being a game and began to feel like something real. That night in Death Valley was real. At least it was for me. It felt like kindness and friendship. Not to mention you’re very hot indeed when you’re not scowling and behaving like a child.’
‘You were a complete idiot for agreeing to it,’ Lottie said. ‘But what she did was cruel.’
The rain had stopped at last, and the day was gathering over the pines and the fountain and the desert landscape in promising pink strands.
‘The fact is, Lottie, you chose to be seduced. You wanted an adventure. You can blame your sister for her poor judgement, even for her carelessness and manipulation, but in the end the buck stops with you.’
‘She thinks she knows everything, even what’s best for me. But she has no idea.’
‘There may be an element of truth in what you say, but none of us is perfect.’
Lottie looked him squarely in the face.
‘You really do love her, don’t you?’ she asked, suddenly gentle.
He nodded wordlessly.
‘Well both of us are completely screwed then,’ she said, getting to her feet.
‘Won’t you at least see the trip to its end?’ Spike asked.
‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ Lottie said. ‘I still hate her, but Mia would expect me to be there.’
‘Give me a hug then,’ he said, smiling at her, and she embraced him tightly. Despite it all, she didn’t want to part from him on bad terms. He was as heartbroken as she was.
‘I won’t say goodbye, I hate saying goodbye,’ she said.
*
Spike packed his bag and took a last look around the room, which despite its standardised blandness was a place he would always remember. It would become yet another memory to torment himself with. He had to get to Mexico and work, and it was time to leave the sisters to sort themselves out. He should have gone before, but he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from Tina. It would be all right. He would be able to lose himself in this project and the next one and in time he would reco
ver. He had no choice.
He had gone to her room while Lottie had been downstairs having breakfast. Tina wouldn’t sit still and talk to him. She kept moving around and going in and out of the bathroom.
‘My bus leaves in an hour,’ he had said, standing by the window, watching the sun stirring up the day – setting cars and people into motion, making the monuments things to wonder at again.
‘Do you want a lift to the station?’ Tina asked, looking up at him briefly and then resuming whatever it was she was doing as if she was impatient for him to be gone.
‘No, I’m fine. I’ve got a taxi booked.’
‘Well, it’s been mostly great having you on our road trip. Could have done without some of the drama, but I guess it made for a memorable holiday.’ She was meticulously folding things she had never bothered folding before. She was usually a cram-everything-in kind of a packer.
‘About last night . . .’ he started, but she interrupted him.
‘Don’t worry. It was just something that happened, right? It was a perfect storm – John Wayne and the rain and an end-of-trip feeling and sex. Makes perfect sense.’
‘So that’s what you think it was about?’ he asked, holding on for a few moments longer to the memory of how her face had moved beneath him.
‘Maybe it was something that needed to be done to give us a better ending than the one we had the first time round,’ she said, looking at him properly at last, her face expressionless. His throat closed up. What he had suspected was true – sleeping with him had meant nothing more to her than a tidying-up of something left incomplete, a kind of epilogue. Perhaps it was even less than that. Perhaps it had simply been a chance to assert herself over her sister. He didn’t want to think that, but he could see no tenderness in her.
‘When you’re all sitting round the campfire, or whatever it is you do in the evenings when you’re away, you can entertain your colleagues with the story of how you went on a road trip with two sisters and slept with both of them.’ She turned to carefully fold a towel, edge to edge.
‘Right then,’ he said, holding back his anger at her words. ‘I’d better be off.’
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