Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss

by Sarra Manning

  It was Jack hidden behind the biggest bouquet of mixed blooms I’d ever seen. If Dylan had done that, I’d have burst into soppy tears of happiness but Grace gave a horrified squeal and pushed the flowers back at Jack who promptly fled.

  Then Poppy bawled out Grace loudly and publicly for being ‘a selfish, emotionally crippled, thoughtless cow’ and Grace fled. I should have been more concerned but Dylan was being sultry, which mostly involved nibbling my neck and telling me in no uncertain terms what he was planning to do to me when we got home, and Atsuko and Darby kept aiming their water pistols at us so I forgot all about Grace and Jack.

  But (and it’s a big but) when we got out of the club at some godforsaken hour, sitting on the wall opposite, sharing a bag of chips and looking morose were Grace and Jack. I think that’s progress.

  19th February

  Dylan and I have just had what has to be the most scary, intense argument ever. ’Cept it never really got to be an argument; it whooshed out of control like someone had just thrown lighter fuel on a bonfire.

  See, in between brooding and more brooding and, hmmm, brooding some more about my not-very-imminent move to London, Dylan found time to get hold of a copy of every US fly-drive brochure that’s ever been written. I cashed in my Crimbo book tokens and bought a load of travel guides and we started to plan our amazing road trip adventure.

  Actually we weren’t getting very far. We knew where we wanted to go but planning out the route takes organisation, military precision and levels of concentration that neither of us seemed to possess.

  ‘We should start in New York,’ I said decisively, as I peered at the map I’d pinned to my corkboard.

  ‘But New York’s on the right and a lot of the places we want to go are on the left. Maybe we should start at the top in Seattle and work our way down.’ Dylan traced his finger along the middle of the States.

  I gave a frustrated groan. ‘We have to do this in a scientific way? God! This is like being back at freakin’ school.’ I find in times of great stress that it helps to use not-quite-swear words.

  ‘Maybe we should make a list of all the places that we want to go to and just draw a line that connects them together. And that’s our route.’ A very smug note was creeping into Dylan’s voice, which I tried to ignore. It was not very becoming.

  Instead I shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess that would work. Might be a pretty crooked line but, hey, I got nothing here.’

  We started our US wishlist:

  New York (both)

  Seattle (both)

  Portland (Dylan)

  Las Vegas (both)

  Palm Springs (Edie)

  Hollywood (Edie)

  San Francisco (Dylan)

  Chicago (both)

  That’s as far as we got before we had a big argument because I had the audacity to point out that we’d have to go to other places to get to the places we wanted to go to. And then I might have had a teensy weensy little temper tantrum because it was getting really complicated and making my head hurt. I might even have thrown myself on the bed and pounded the pillows with my fists, while Dylan told me to grow up. But I didn’t want to grow up so I lay there for a while, face down on the pillow and eventually Dylan stopped snarling at me, sat down on the edge of the bed and ignored me! He ignored me in my moment of pain. I sulked for about three more seconds and then, with great effort, managed to lift my head and say, ‘Hey. What you doing?’

  Dylan tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorting through my wallet while I wait for you to stop regressing. You think you might be done soon?’

  ‘Hunh,’ I grunted and half sat, half rolled over so I could rest against Dylan’s back, even though he’s far too knobbly for comfort.

  ‘Sorry, Eeds, I don’t speak Neanderthal. Want to run that by me again?’

  I reached up and kissed the back of his neck and tried to tug him round so we could have a cuddle but he was being all stiff and uncooperative.

  ‘Give me a hug,’ I ordered and then looked over his shoulder to see what was distracting him. ‘What’s that?’

  Dylan was looking at a small, dog-eared photo. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said far too quickly and tried to shove the picture back in his wallet but I was quicker and managed to get him in a weedy but effective headlock so I could snatch it away from him.

  ‘Give it back!’ Dylan twisted out of my hold but I scrambled off the bed and squinted at the photo. ‘Is this you? Is that your mum and dad?’

  Dylan pounced on me and held my arms by my sides so I couldn’t move. ‘I said, give it back!’ he growled in my ear but he wasn’t using his sex voice, he was using a very scary voice that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and say hello.

  He tugged the photo out of my hand, stuffed it in his jeans pocket and stomped towards the door, while I just stood there opening and shutting my mouth and wondering what the hell had just happened. I was still trying to process it, when I heard the front door slam. And even though I didn’t have any shoes on, I suddenly had this gut feeling that something big and weird and potentially serious had happened so I ran down the stairs and out into the street in my bare feet because he couldn’t leave just like that. And of course it had to be pelting down with rain. It just had to.

  Dylan was a tiny but clearly bad-tempered little stick figure in the distance as I ran after him, the wet pavement stinging the soles of my feet. I was going to have to have a hardcore pedicure this weekend.

  ‘Dylan! Hey! Hey!’ I couldn’t run and call out; I was no good at multitasking my oxygen supply so I concentrated on running as fast as I could.

  Turns out I can run pretty fast. Who knew? It did help that Dylan had reached the bus-stop at the top of the road. He was peering at the timetable when I eventually caught up with him and practically collapsed onto the bench. I slumped there for a minute trying not to hyperventilate then Dylan folded his arms and regarded me stonily.

  ‘I don’t know what that was back there,’ I panted, pushing wet rat’s-tails of hair out of my eyes. ‘If I crossed a line, I’m sorry.’

  Dylan was doing a good impersonation of someone chewing on a wasp. He kept flaring his nostrils, which just made his cheekbones hollow out so his face looked like a death mask.

  ‘I know that sometimes I don’t quit when I should and I’m not even going to ask about the picture, but will you please just come back with me because I hate it when you get like this and we need to sort stuff out before it gets all grrrr and then we’re not speaking and…’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I should come back with you,’ Dylan said flatly. Hadn’t he heard a single word I’d been saying?

  I threw him a pleading look, which totally underwhelmed him. But he did move nearer to me though it could have been because the rain was sheeting down like it does in pop videos and he wanted to get under cover. He shook out the collar of his leather jacket and looked down at the bottom of his jeans, which were soaked, just like mine. Plus my feet couldn’t decide whether they were numb with cold or burning in pain.

  Maybe a combination of the two.

  I reached out a hand and placed it on Dylan’s arm. ‘Hey,’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t the end of the world. We had an argument, don’t make it into something that it isn’t just ’cause you’re angry about other things that you don’t want to talk to me about.’

  ‘And there she goes again.’ Dylan’s mouth twisted into a smile entirely lacking humour and I threw my hands up in defeat.

  ‘Fine, whatever,’ I bit out. ‘Go on, disappear then if you’re going to be like that.’

  I got up and although all my muscles seemed to go into screaming spasms as I put my weight on what felt like the bleeding and battered soles of my poor feet, I was determined not to let it show.

  Dylan was all stiff-backed like a furious cat as I inwardly shuddered at the painful walk back to the flat in the rain.

  ‘See you then,’ I said, like I didn’t care, when I did care. I cared a whole lot and I
didn’t know if we were just having a fight and we’d make up so we could go to America and probably have more fights. Or if he’d just dumped me for something I didn’t even know I’d done.

  It was only 100 metres back up the road but it seemed like 500 miles. I also had a sudden sinking feeling akin to the Titanic hitting the iceberg when I realised I hadn’t picked up my keys before I left and that I’d have to sit on the doorstep until one of the others got home.

  It felt like someone was jabbing gazillions of red-hot pokers, sharp knives and other pointy implements into the soles of my feet and I decided I was now far enough away from Dylan to exhibit huge signs of being in pain. I started crying, not that anyone would have been able to tell thanks to my fabulous impression of a drowned rat.

  My front door was in sight but it seemed so far away…

  ‘Jesus wept, Edie!’ It sounded like Dylan or maybe I was suffering from a mild delirium but yes, it was Dylan scooping me up, which would have been very romantic in a completely embarrassing way if I wasn’t cold, wet, in pain and with a ton of snot dribbling out of my nostrils.

  ‘Put me down,’ I bawled, even as I rested my head against his sodden chest. ‘You’ll give yourself a hernia.’

  ‘You are a bloody pain in the arse, do you know that?’ Dylan shouted at me. I nodded slowly because it did pretty much sum up the whole situation and his features shifted, melted, softened out and he kissed the top of my head before shifting me slightly.

  ‘Can you get my keys out of my pocket?’ said Dylan.

  I managed to tug the button on his jacket pocket undone, though the wet leather was stubborn.

  Dylan bent his knees so I could negotiate the lock.

  ‘You can put me down now,’ I told him once we’d got inside but Dylan ignored me and took a deep breath before he began to slowly climb the stairs. He shouldered the door to my room open, dropped me on the bed and walked out without saying a word.

  I collapsed back on the pillow and then wished I hadn’t as the tears that were still spilling from my eyes ran into my ears.

  I thought Dylan had decided to carry on with the whole disappearing act but then I heard him opening drawers and cupboards in the kitchen.

  When he came back I’d hauled myself into an upright position and was examining the very icky soles of my feet, which were filthy and bleeding.

  ‘Don’t touch them,’ Dylan snapped, putting a bowl of water down on the floor. ‘You’ll just make it worse,’ he added in a more mollifying way. ‘I put some Dettol in here.’

  I shuffled to the edge of the bed and gingerly put my feet in the almost scalding hot water. ‘Ow, ow, ow!’

  Dylan was scrabbling through the piles of junk on my dressing table until he found my tweezers, which he held aloft and my heart sank. ‘Oh no!’

  ‘You’ve got pieces of grit in there, which need taking out before they cause an infection,’ he said sternly.

  ‘I don’t mind having an infection,’ I informed him with a slight edge to my voice because I suddenly realised that this was All His Fault. ‘I can live with an infection.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dylan reasonably like he was talking to a retarded kid. ‘Then you’ll get gangrene and then they’ll have to amputate your feet and you’ll expect me to push you round in a wheelchair, so…’ He clicked the tweezers together in a very uncomforting manner.

  It hurt a lot. Really a lot. Dylan knelt in front of me with a towel on his lap and picked out all the tiny bits of glass and grit, while I bit my lip and clenched great handfuls of the duvet and tried not to scream. He kept making soothing noises and talking to me about… I can’t really remember. I think it was where we were going to go when we got to the States, something about Memphis but I was too busy waiting for my endorphins to kick in to pay much attention.

  Then he slathered my feet in Savlon, gave me a couple of Ibuprofen for the pain and tucked me into bed.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ I whimpered and my voice was all broken from crying. The words seemed to hang in the air between us, more loaded and desperate than three words had the right to be.

  Dylan reached down and stroked my still damp hair back from my face. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Well, just to the kitchen.’

  I rubbed my cheek against the back of his hand. He felt cold. ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise. And sorry for being such a drama queen,’ he smiled ruefully.

  I snuggled down under the covers. ‘I thought I was the drama queen in this partnership.’

  ‘We might have to take it in turns,’ Dylan murmured, scratching his head. ‘I’m a moody git, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yup, you really are,’ I agreed.

  He was back five minutes later with a cup of hot chocolate that he’d filched from Shona’s secret stash that she thought no-one knew about. He’d even stolen some of her little marshmallows that were floating on the top.

  ‘Yum,’ I said happily as he placed the steaming mug on my bedside table and sat down next to me.

  He had the photo in his hand.

  ‘That’s me when I was five,’ he said, holding it out so I could see the blurred image of a pint-sized Dylan wearing naff clothes because it was the Nineties and people always wear naff clothes in those kinds of photos. ‘That’s my mum and that’s my dad.’ They were just smudged faces that told me nothing.

  All of a sudden I wanted to know everything. Why his dad had walked out. When was the last time he saw him? What his mum looked like when she smiled. When did everything start going crazy? But I realised that I had to walk this path with baby steps and now wasn’t the time. So I handed the photo back to Dylan. ‘You looked cute,’ I said and he gave me a grateful smile as I stroked my hand along the curve of his spine.

  24th February

  I managed to wear kitten heels today so I guess my feet are officially healed. Hurrah! Though I will miss a guilt-ridden Dylan waiting on me hand and foot.

  Our living room became the hang-out while I was recovering. Which was slightly annoying when Poppy, Shona and I wanted to slump around in our PJs and watch Friends and talk about Jennifer Aniston’s hair in a completely un-ironic, ‘we’re not actually as cool and edgy as we pretend to be’ way.

  Even Grace deigned to honour us with her presence. Truth be told, Grace has been pretty elusive ever since she bonded with Jack on Valentine’s Night. I think she’s fed up with me and Poppy badgering her for details on whether they’ve actually spoken/gone on a date/snogged.

  ‘God, you two are like something from the Salem witch trials!’ Dylan snorted, having witnessed the pair of us in action.

  ‘We’re just looking out for her,’ Poppy protested, looking completely unrepentant. ‘Did I tell you I’ve asked Jack to roadie for us?’

  ‘But Dylan and Jesse are doing it,’ I said. ‘We’re not paying him.’

  Dylan shifted on the sofa. ‘Well, you’re not paying us either, remember?’

  Poppy looked indignant. ‘Why should we? Jack’s doing it because I told him that Grace was coming. We should get more lovesick roadies, they’re very cheap.’

  Dylan stood up. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Saturday when I roadie for you out of the goodness of my heart,’ he said morosely.

  I jumped up in a manner that wouldn’t hurt my feet so we could have a cheeky little kiss but Dylan muttered something about having to dash and dashed.

  ‘What the hell is the matter with him?’ Poppy asked.

  I sank back down on the sofa. ‘Huh! It’s London, isn’t it? He’s all depressed about it again.’

  ‘But we’re only going to play a gig!’

  ‘Yeah but in a few months I’ll be moving there permanently,’ I scowled. ‘No wonder I’ve got a rash!’

  I forgot to mention the rash. I’m covered in patches of itchy red spots. It’s not even anything dramatic like chicken pox or an allergy to second-hand, man-made fibres. Mum took one look at it when she came round and made me pull up my jumper because my flesh is like her own personal proper
ty and diagnosed stress rash.

  ‘Not that you have anything to be stressed about,’ she declared in a very annoying manner. ‘You don’t know the meaning of being stressed.’

  Which, hello! I mean, you try working the lunchtime rush when the deep fat fryer’s on the blink. Or waiting outside a cinema for a sculpture-obsessed Dylan who’s completely forgotten the time. Or there’s the gig in London with your band in a week’s time and you feel like throwing up every time you think about it.