‘Think who is what?’
‘Janos. You don’t think Janos is a billionaire.’
She rolls her eyes at me.
‘Of course he’s not! Have you seen billionaires? Most of them look like something you’d find under a bridge. At the very least, none of them look like Janos Kovacs.’
‘Excellent point, well made. But come on … you can hardly blame me for wondering.’
‘Haven’t you even Googled him?’
‘I didn’t dare. I was afraid of what I would find.’
‘Like all his mounds and mounds of money.’
‘I kept imagining a swimming pool, like Scrooge McDuck.’
‘And maybe a lair in Antarctica, where he keeps his mutated menagerie.’
‘I bet they can all shoot lasers out of their eyes.’
‘And soon he’ll use them to strongarm the UN into giving him the moon,’ she says, and I’m laughing with her, I am. It’s funny to reduce all of this mess to a silly story about super-villainy.
Even if I still have to face it, in the end.
‘You realise all of this is just making it way worse.’
She nods, as she wipes away tears of laughter. And once they’re gone she’s suddenly serious again. She erased the humour with those little droplets, and now we’re back to the awful, terrible matter at hand.
‘Yeah, I do. And you know why? Because you don’t want to be some rich guy’s pet. That’s what it boils down to, in the end. You don’t want to think about his money and you don’t want to be dressed up to play some part in his rich life – and that’s OK. It’s OK to want to be yourself. It’s better to want to be yourself. I couldn’t have this weird conversation about laser-eyed animals with anyone else. You shouldn’t have to change.’
I’m breathless by the time she’s done – too breathless to say what I want to. I’ve got all of these thank-yous to give her and lots of garbled words of probable agreement, but in the end I’m glad I keep them inside. They’re too silly, and they don’t go with the measured proviso she adds about a second later.
‘That being said … it might have helped if you actually spoke to him a little bit about these concerns. Did you speak to him about these concerns?’
There’s really nothing I can say to that.
I think my silence says it for me, anyway.
‘Even a little bit? A word or two? A note?’
‘There might have been a note.’
‘Alissa.’
‘What? You only left a note!’
‘Yeah, but I’m not your one true love.’
‘I didn’t say he was my one true love.’
‘You didn’t say he wasn’t.’
She has me there. It makes my guts twist and my eyes bleed, but I can’t deny her point, or the love thing, or any of this really. All I’ve got are silly excuses.
‘I just didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t know how to tell him.’
‘You never know how to go about things when someone’s hurt you. Like now – just now. That’s the first time you’ve mentioned the note I left you in a way that suggests you maybe weren’t so happy about that.’
‘Well … maybe I am happy about it. I think it’s cool that you did this.’
‘But?’ she asks, and I know then that she’s right. I hate confrontation. I hate it so much that this paltry version of an argument is akin to being inside an iron maiden. Every time I speak or she speaks the screws get tighter. Any second now I’m going to be riddled with holes and screaming for mercy.
‘But I … I felt like … you maybe … possibly abandoned me.’
‘And you feel better for getting that off your chest.’
‘Possibly,’ I say, but only because the iron maiden is now five per cent looser.
‘Good. So go call him. Go tell him. Don’t pretend it doesn’t matter, so you no longer have to hope and believe that it does. Hope isn’t poison, Lissa. Hope is the thing that keeps you going when everything is awful and dark and you don’t know which way to turn. It made you pick up the phone with me because you believed I was still your friend – and I am. I didn’t abandon you. That’s just what you tell yourself in your little reverse-hope world. You think the worst to protect yourself, baby, but it’s not protecting you. Not really.’
She pauses just long enough to give her words weight, but she doesn’t need to.
They sink to the bottom of me before she’s even finished.
‘If it was,’ she says. ‘Then why on earth are you so sad, huh?
‘Why are you so sad?’
Chapter Eighteen
I try for the first time a few hours later, once I’ve eaten and had a shower and then eaten again. I’m eating when I dial, in fact, and bouncing on the spot. From across the room Lucy makes a calm down gesture, but if anything that makes it worse. I try to restrain my bouncing and end up in a spasm, and instead of compulsively eating I’m tapping and squeezing my fingers into fists and oh, God, why isn’t he answering? Why? Why?
I shouldn’t expect him to answer, and yet still.
Why isn’t he answering? The persistent prrrrriiiinng of the phone is starting to drill into my head. It’s becoming a taunt: it’s as bad as you think it’s as bad as you think it’s as bad as you think. And it ends on the most horrible thing possible.
You shouldn’t have hoped.
Though I suppose that last part is mostly Lucy’s fault. I wish to God she hadn’t told me that about myself. I mean, I knew. I did know. But even so: it’s hard to take when it’s shoved right in your face.
And it’s definitely turning this into the phone call from hell. The damned thing just keeps ringing and ringing like there’s suddenly no such thing as voicemail. Either that or he’s turned off his voicemail service in anticipation of this moment. He’s torturing me with technology, and no amount of fist pumps from Lucy are going to help me with that.
I deflate the moment I hang up. I deflate so much that it takes me a whole day to try again. I need twenty-four hours to forget the torturous agony of waiting to see if he will pick up, so I can come to it fresh. I can pretend I’m blasé, this way, and hardly concerned at all.
Not that this pretending thing works. I’ve now progressed to biting my nails, even though I’ve never bitten them before in my life. And I wait, too, until Lucy’s down at the market, so she can’t give me moral support that only serves to remind me how much I need moral support.
A lot.
I’m staring at the ceiling and clenching my jaw by the time it gets to the third ring, and by the seventh I’m close to certain. I more or less was yesterday, but this is confirmation. He’s already moved on. He’s just not the sort of guy to wait around while someone he’s dallying with decides what she wants, and even if he was … haven’t I been cruel enough? If he cut out on me without a word I’d be devastated. I’d never forgive him.
It’s not right to expect him to forgive me – though somehow I’m still doing it. I’m still doing the thing I never do. I’m hoping. Or at least I’m trying on hope for size. Lucy said I was sad anyway, so why not? Why not just let it take root inside me, and see where it leads?
Even if it leads to me lying awake at five in the morning, waiting for a call that will never come. Somehow I’ve turned into the kind of woman I never wanted to be, hanging everything on a man who simply isn’t interested. He’s no longer bothered, and it makes me want to be the same way. I don’t want to toss and turn, wondering how things will turn out between us.
I want to get rid of him.
I want to not feel like this.
Which is probably how I end up on the beach in dawn’s early light, still in my nightie and stumbling bleary-eyed like some fool. But if I am a fool then at least I’ll be the strong kind. The independent kind. The kind who takes a snow globe to the ocean, with every intention of tossing it in. It’ll be fitting, I think, for an idealised island to disappear into the waters around a real one. It’s nice and symbolic. It’s perfect and circula
r.
But when I get down there I can’t do it. It’s just too much. It feels like I’m giving up more than a stupid gift, or a chance of a passionate relationship. It feels like I’m giving up any chance of ever hoping about anything ever again.
This is it, I know. Once I’ve done this I won’t believe any more. I’ll go back to the way I was, eking out an existence in tiny cautious portions, never going for something more because something more is this. Something more is daring to go to an illicit meeting with a strange man; it’s calling him and talking to him and doing all the things you thought you never could. I never thought I could be with someone like him.
I never thought I could be with anyone.
And if I throw it, then I’ll know I can’t. I’ll just be this melodramatic idiot who refuses feelings, the way other people refuse meals at terrible restaurants. Lucy will look at me with pity and I’ll spend the rest of my days knitting afghans, and all because I couldn’t make a phone call or hold onto a snow globe.
I have to hold onto it, I think, but that just sends me into a spiral of options that make no sense. I’ll put it in a sock drawer, I tell myself. A really deep sock drawer that probably doesn’t contain socks. It’ll have thorns in it instead, so I’ll never be tempted to put my hand in and take it out.
Only that doesn’t seem any better than tossing it away, to be honest. The end result is still the same, when you really think about it. I’m just locking my feelings away instead of hurling them into an ocean, and my mind doesn’t take kindly to that. Just get rid of the thing, it shouts, but I think my mind may well be an idiot. Because the moment I raise my hand up to throw – that’s when I see him.
I see him coming down the beach towards me, like some insane mirage.
Oh, Lord, please don’t let this be a mirage. It could be, because he’s wearing something other than a suit and I’m sure that’s never allowed. His suit is his secondary layer of skin, as essential to him as teeth are to a shark. It’s just not him. And his feet are bare, which is even less like him. It’s actually much closer to some romance hero on the cover of a book, and that definitely makes me think I’ve gone temporarily insane. I’m losing my mind, one piece at a time.
But if I am, that’s OK.
I’ll gladly trade my sanity for the sight of Janos striding towards me over the sands like something out of the Sheik’s Runaway Mistress, dressed in white cotton and with his hair hardly brushed at all. You can see the slight curl to it and there’s almost no parting, and after a moment of intense study I realise what that means:
His hair is tousled.
He’s all rumpled.
I may well be swooning. Is this what swooning feels like? My head is suddenly too heavy for my body and my body has turned to jelly, and there’s this incredible urge going through me – one that doesn’t quite fit with fainting on a chaise longue. It’s more like … it’s more like I really need to break into a run. And I know it is, because the sensation is so unfamiliar it stands out a mile. I never run. I hate running. I don’t know why I want to run here – I only know that I do.
For once I hoped, and it turned out OK.
It’s OK, I think, and then I barrel down the beach to him at something just past the speed of light. If my feet had wings I’d fly. I fly anyway. I don’t even feel the sand as I run, and I hardly care how I look – probably crazy, I know. And definitely crazy when I get to him and just fling myself at his body.
You don’t fling anything anywhere near Janos. He likes measured handshakes, arm’s-length greetings, polite hellos. He’s probably going to pat me now and laugh and tell me to calm down – though I swear I won’t mind. He can do anything he likes as long as the end result is me and him together.
I actually want to be together with someone. Even if it’s hard and there are conversations about hurt feelings and confrontations I don’t like. Even if he hates me. Even if he’s the kind of man to stop and offer a handshake. I’ll take handshakes, I think.
But I don’t have to.
After a second of my desperate hugging, I realise he’s hugging me back. In fact, he’s not just hugging me back. He’s squeezing me hard enough to deprive me of oxygen. One hand is going to leave an imprint on my back, and the other is definitely doing something to my head. He’s got hold of the back of it like he doesn’t want to let go.
I don’t want him to let go. We could just stay like this for ever, and I would be fine with that. And even better:
I suspect he would be fine with that, too.
‘Don’t leave me again,’ he tells me, only he doesn’t just do it once. He says it over and over, until I’m melting. He’s going to have to let go, because hands traditionally can’t hold onto liquidised people.
But I’m glad when he doesn’t. He keeps holding me and holding me and saying all these awesome things, like ‘Never leave’ and ‘I need you’ and ‘I want you’. So it’s unfortunate that all I can think to say back is ‘I’m sorry’. I mean, it’s good to get it out there. And he seems to appreciate it. However, it’s not quite as committed as:
‘What would I be without you?’
Because he also says that, while cupping my face in his hands and staring deep into my eyes and oh, I must have broken the no-hoping machine. It’s somehow operating backwards. I dared to hope and I got all of this, instead of absolutely nothing.
Despite the fact that I probably deserve nothing. I’ve just offered him the weakest apology in the world, and after five minutes of his unconditional love and his unrestrained hugging, the best I can do is this:
‘I didn’t mean to run away.’
Which is pretty poor, even by my standards. It has the word ‘mean’ in there, as weak and wishy-washy as a wet sheet on a windy day. And no matter how hard I search through it, there’s no hint of an explanation. If I was on trial for freaking out on him, I’d be on death row right now. The judge and jury have heard it all before – I’m guilty as sin, and everyone knows it.
Apart from him.
‘I know,’ he says, then just for good measure: ‘It’s OK. It’s always OK.’
I never realised how lovely that word is, before. OK. Though I know why I feel that way. It’s because I’ve never heard a man say it to me like that – until now. None of them have ever told me it’s OK to be this way, and that this state may continue for an indefinite amount of time. Not a tiny amount of time, or the amount that elapses before I blunder in some way.
Just this:
Always.
‘Even though I messed up?’
‘You didn’t mess up.’
‘I did. I did. I thought –’
‘You thought I wanted someone else,’ he interrupts, but I’m glad he does. The words I wanted to say were high and tight, whereas the one I actually end up offering is as soft and sighing as the falling wind.
‘Yes.’
‘And that I could only love you as that new person, that perfect person, that glamorous Gucci-wearing doyenne of the social scene.’
‘Yes,’ I tell him again, only the word is not the wind any more. It’s the sound of something breaking, after being too long held in. He isn’t just willing to overlook. He understands. He understands me, completely.
‘But you’re sure you can never be that. You need to be yourself.’
‘I do.’
‘And you didn’t know how to tell me.’
‘I didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, God, you really do have psychic powers. I should have just waited a while for them to kick in,’ I say, and now he laughs. It isn’t cruel, however. It’s warm and good and so easy to sink into. I’m crying like a massive imbecile, but I find myself joining in.
And especially when he says:
‘I don’t have psychic powers, Alissa – your friend told me all of this. I called her the moment I couldn’t get in touch with you, and she told me everything,’ he says, like it’s just so simple. He must have searched her out and tracked her down and God knows what else, but it’s simple. And so i
s this, apparently: ‘Then I took the first flight out here.’
‘You took the first flight?’
‘Of course.’
‘You just … dropped everything?’
‘I couldn’t do anything else. She said you were hurting and I didn’t – I couldn’t – think of anything else. I couldn’t think of anything else anyway. But if that’s too much …’
‘Too much?’
‘If you need more space, more time, if you’re afraid of something serious –’
‘Ohhhh, she told you that too. She told you that I’m an emotional moron,’ I moan, and for the first time since I ran to him and glued my body to his, I want to step away. I need to step away so I can put my face in my hands. I can’t let him see me like this – hiding is the only option.
But thankfully he doesn’t let me.
‘She may have done,’ he says, and as he does he strokes the hair away from my face so he can see everything, all of me, right down to the roots. He studies every inch of me for signs of pain, and oh, oh. I’ve never felt so safe. I’ve never felt so loved.
‘I don’t need more space. I need less space. I need the minimum amount of space possible. This right here –’ I say, then gesture to the place where our bodies are glued together ‘– is too much space.’
‘How about this?’
‘That’s better.’
‘And this?’
‘Oh, yes, I can definitely deal with that.’
‘I love you, Alissa.’
‘Also very good,’ I tell him, only now my words are up and down and inside out. They’re clotted with tears, and all the better for it. Otherwise, how could he possibly know how I really feel? I can’t say it back – not even after he’s said:
‘I love you the way you are.’
Instead, I go with the only thing I can.
‘You do?’
‘How could you ever think anything else?’
‘Because of the dress. Because … because of the place and the makeover,’ I say, as he strokes my tears away. ‘You just seemed to like it so much.’
‘I didn’t like it, love. I was asking you a question.’
‘What sort of question?’ I ask, and in answer he puts his lips to my ear.
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