by Beth O'Leary
This is Dylan. He left me. I don’t love him any more.
But God, that orange-wood scent of him. My body’s forgotten the misery and the heartbreak and it only remembers my face pressed to the hot skin of his neck as he moves inside me. The gasps, the euphoria. The joy of falling asleep naked and hot in his arms.
‘Flapjack, anyone?’ says Rodney.
I swallow and press my legs closer together. My heart is beating a bit too fast. I feel as if Dylan can tell somehow. He’s holding himself still, like he doesn’t trust himself to move. The radio, playing something hot and pulsing – ‘Lover’, maybe – is not helping.
I’ve forgotten what it’s like to want someone like this. Has anyone else ever made me feel this way? Will anyone else ever make me feel this way again? God, what an awful thought.
I lean forward so I can see Rodney past Dylan. He’s holding a large Tupperware of homemade flapjack. No idea where he conjured that up from. As I examine the contents of the plastic container in Rodney’s lap, I can feel Dylan’s eyes moving over the bare skin of my shoulders. The hairs rise on the back of my neck. Sweat prickles between my shoulder blades. I want him to touch me. Run his finger down my spine.
I lean back quickly, looking straight ahead.
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
‘Just me, then,’ Rodney says cheerfully, tucking in.
Next time we stop I’m going to make sure I’m sat between Marcus and Rodney. That’ll sort me out.
THEN
Dylan
I’m giddy with her. Intoxicated.
We’ve had a week of bare skin and syrupy heat, the sun setting behind the vines like an egg yolk dropping into a bowl. The nights are languid, long, ours. Terry has come to tolerate Addie being around for some of the day, but really I only have her once he’s gone to bed – she’s not herself when Terry’s there, but once she’s closed the door to the flat and kicked off her flip-flops, she’s pure, undiluted Addie.
Tonight we’ve arranged to meet on the terrace once Terry’s gone to sleep; she’s dressed in her pyjamas, the silky peach-coloured ones with the little shorts, and her long dark hair is loose around her shoulders. She holds out a hand to stop me as I approach her, and she’s smiling the sort of smile that promises new, delicious things.
She strips off slowly. Her pale skin looks almost silver in the starlight, and a line comes to me, silver slip of a starlit girl, but I shake it gone as she approaches the water and dives in, her slim white form a shooting star in the dark. She breaches the surface smoothly, barely a ripple.
The pool alarm sounds.
Christ, it’s so loud. Addie yelps and covers her ears, wading over to hit the right buttons; I’d help if I weren’t bent double laughing, but I’m hard, still hard, quite honestly always hard when Addie’s around. We spin in unison as soon as the alarm ceases its roaring, and there it is: the tell-tale light on in Uncle Terry’s window.
‘Fuckity bollocking Uncle Terry,’ I groan under my breath, still laughing.
Addie just lies back on the water, arms spread, star-shaped. ‘He’ll just think the wind set it off. Come on. Come in.’
I watch the light warily.
‘All your talk about living every moment, finding meaning and seeking “pure, undiluted joy” and you won’t join your naked lover in the pool?’
Lover. The word has made its way into the poems I’ve scrawled in my notebook after leaving her bed, and already it’s begun to shift, losing its languid R, fast becoming love.
I have no doubt about whether this feeling is really love – how can it be anything else? It’s excruciating, euphoric, so big I can’t seem to write it down.
After a moment’s indecision I strip off and jump in the pool.
‘A very elegant dive,’ Addie tells me, smiling, swimming over and pulling my body against hers. She’s cold, her skin pimpling, miniature diamond droplets catching on the tips of her eyelashes.
The villa door creaks open. We freeze. Addie puts a finger to my lips.
‘Hello?’ Terry calls.
Addie presses her face against my neck, trying not to laugh. There are no lights out here, just the stars, but if he comes on to the terrace, Terry will see the shape of us, pale against the dark blue water.
The door closes again. He’s gone back inside.
‘See?’ Addie says. ‘Told you.’
We circle in the water, holding each other, unhurried. A few days ago I couldn’t have managed this – I’d have hitched her up on to the edge of the pool and begun kissing my way up the inside of her thighs. But seven long nights of holding her like this, naked against me, and I can just about manage the luxury of savouring her.
‘Addie,’ I whisper.
‘Mm?’
‘You’re amazing. Do you know that?’
She presses wet lips to my collarbone. I shiver. Savour, I remind myself, though it’s becoming a less tempting option by the moment.
‘Here I am . . .’ I tell her, then steal a quick, deep kiss. ‘Spending my summer flopping like a fish, shape-shifting, trying to figure myself out . . .’
I swallow. Even talking about it brings that shuddering panic back to my throat, the weight like a heavy hand pushing at my chest, my father’s voice in my ears; I concentrate on Addie, her slicked-back hair glossy in the dark. Addie, my answer to everything.
‘And here you are,’ I say. ‘Already perfect.’
She huffs, a little laugh against my neck.
‘That’s nonsense. Nobody’s perfect. Definitely not me. Don’t do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Make me your manic pixie dream girl.’
I drift back so I can see her face, indistinct in the darkness.
‘What’s that?’
‘You know, in films? The girl who’s there to help the hero find himself? She never has her own story.’
I frown. She often does this, turning a compliment into something uncomfortable.
‘I didn’t mean anything like that.’
‘Just because I know what I want to be, and where I want to live, and all that, it doesn’t mean I’m . . . done. I’m figuring things out too. I mean, God knows if I’m going to survive Teaching Direct when the summer ends.’
I shake my head, pulling her in again, no longer treading water. ‘You’ll be brilliant. You’ll be a wonderful teacher. A natural.’ I dip my head to kiss her. ‘You’re always teaching me new things.’
She smiles reluctantly, and I move closer, shifting her up so her legs wrap around my waist.
‘I worry nobody will take me seriously.’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
She chews her bottom lip, stroking my wet hair back from my face. ‘I don’t know. People just don’t.’
There’s that rare, raw vulnerability in her eyes again; she’s watching me closely, and I have a creeping sense that this is some sort of test.
‘Maybe I give off a vibe. A low-potential vibe.’
‘Low potential?’ I pull back, genuinely aghast. ‘You?’
She laughs, low and throaty, and turns her gaze aside. ‘I’m just . . . I’ve always been kind of middleish. Middle sets in school. Average grades. The only thing about me that isn’t average is my height.’
She is pint-sized. I love it, how I can almost span her back with one hand, how she has to tilt her head right back to kiss me.
‘Addie Gilbert,’ I say, in a serious voice. ‘This is very important.’
‘What is?’
I lean forward so our lips are barely a centimetre apart. ‘You. Are. Extraordinary,’ I whisper.
‘Oh, shush,’ she says, breaking away from me and swimming backwards.
I lunge for her. ‘No, no,’ I say, as imperiously as I can manage. ‘Enough of this absurdity. You’re going to take this compliment if it kills y
ou.’
She’s laughing now. ‘No, God, don’t start,’ she says, as she eludes me again, ripples slipping between my fingers.
‘You’re absolutely extraordinary. Do you know what people would do to be as together as you are, aged twenty-one? You don’t take shit from anybody, not even me, and I’m very charming.’ I lunge again, catching her ankle until she kicks away, giggling and spluttering. ‘You care about people – don’t think I haven’t noticed you trying to curb Uncle Terry’s excessive drinking, and helping Victor with the weeding since he hurt his back.’
‘Oh, please,’ Addie says, treading water in the deep end. ‘You’d have to be an idiot not to see Terry’s a liver problem waiting to happen. And I ought to have helped Victor with the weeding before he hurt his back. That would’ve been the above-average thing to do.’
I roll my eyes. ‘You care about doing your job properly. Even though it’s just me and Terry here, you’re still on top of everything, noticing every detail.’
‘So I got you a fresh towel this morning and sorted the dodgy fridge door. Big whoop.’ Addie ducks under the water to dart away from me, dolphin-style.
‘Addie,’ I say, getting exasperated. ‘It’s not about that on-paper nonsense, not really. It’s about all this. You’re just good at life. All of the important bits. I mean, you say I’m always talking about finding joy and meaning and living in the moment, and I am – we all bloody well are—’
‘Well,’ Addie says, ‘those of us who have the luxury of time for musing on life’s meaning.’
‘Right, right, but I mean . . . you’re just so good at taking life as it is. Nobody I know does that.’
‘Everyone you know goes to Oxford University,’ Addie points out. ‘And, by definition, thinks too hard.’
‘Are you ever going to accept a single nice thing I say about you?’
She swims towards me, at last. ‘You can tell me I look beautiful tonight.’
‘You look beautiful tonight.’
‘Ah, now you’re just saying that . . .’
I grab her and tickle her as best I can in the water – she flails and splashes and laughs, her head thrown back, eyes shining with glee.
I chase her to the end of the swimming pool. As she twists, she spreads her arms against the pool’s edge, dreamlike in the darkness, and locks her legs around me again. We slow, chests heaving, then still. She rakes her fingers through my hair again, a little harder this time.
‘I like you, Dylan,’ she whispers. ‘More than I ought to.’
My pulse quickens. ‘There’s no ought.’
‘Course there is. Give it a few months, you’ll be off chasing the next blonde from Atlanta. You with your romantic notions and your beautiful speeches and your notebook full of poetry . . .’ She leans her head back and looks up at the stars. ‘You’re going to break my heart, Dylan Abbott. I can feel it.’
I frown and reach to tilt her chin downwards again. ‘No. That’s – I was – we’re not like that. We’re different, me and you. I’ll never break your heart, Addie.’
She smiles wryly. ‘And so said every gentleman to the girl who lived in the servant’s quarters, eh?’
Addie
All right, I’m freaking out.
We’re moving way too fast. Anyone can see that. It’s only been eight days. Of course he still looks at me like I’m a queen – we’re sleeping together every night and he doesn’t actually know me well enough to have anything to dislike.
I wish I hadn’t said all that stuff about being middleish last night. I should be playing it cool, keeping him chasing. That’s what Deb would do, and men never fall out of love with her. She actually finds it quite annoying.
The problem is, Dylan’s just so sweet. His sleepy green-yellow eyes. The way he seems to see me. It’s all making me fall in love with him, and that is absolutely the stupidest thing any woman can do after one week of sleeping with a bloke on holiday.
I spend the morning away from the villa. We needed some food in, and I take way longer than I have to in the Intermarché. Afterwards I drive into the village and chat to the café owner in broken French while I munch my way through a huge pain au chocolat. I make him laugh and stand up a little straighter. I don’t need Dylan. This was my summer before he came, and look, it’s beautiful.
I mean to head straight to the flat when I get back, but Dylan’s sat reading poetry aloud on the stone balustrade around the terrace. He’s thirty feet up from me down here in the courtyard. His legs are dangling over and he says something to himself about silver slips of starlight. I can’t resist stopping to look up at him, holding my forearm up to block the sun. The feeling hits me in the chest, a huge gust of it.
‘Oh, good,’ he calls down. ‘Someone to serenade. Ever so embarrassing to be serenading without an object.’
‘An object!’
‘Purely a figure of grammar,’ he says hastily, and I laugh. ‘Subject-verb-object and all that.’
‘Is it one of your poems?’ I ask. He never shows me his own work, though he’s always happy reading me bits of sixteenth-century stuff. It doesn’t make sense to me. Where Dylan hears something incredibly profound, I just hear something you could say in way fewer words.
‘It was, but only because I’d got distracted. I’m reading Philip Sidney,’ Dylan says, waving a battered paperback down at me. ‘Sir Philip Sidney, actually. Courtier, diplomat, poet.’
‘Old guy?’ I guess.
He smiles. ‘Yeah. Died 1586.’
‘Very old guy.’
Dylan’s battered brown Havaianas dangle from his feet over the edge of the balustrade.
‘Read me something,’ I call. I want to get it, the poetry thing. It’s just so foreign to me.
‘My true love hath my heart,’ he begins, ‘and I have his.’
‘His?’
‘It’s a woman speaking, not Philip himself,’ Dylan says. ‘He’s not saying he’s in love with a man. He was almost certainly a homophobic bigot, what with being a rich chap in the sixteenth century. Come up here, would you? I want to hold you.’
I grin despite myself. ‘Philip!’ I say, making my way towards the steps up to the terrace. ‘First-name terms, are you?’
‘Phil. Phil-man. Philster,’ Dylan says, poker-faced.
I’m giggling now. ‘Go on. Your true love’s got your heart, you’ve got his?’ I climb up beside him on the balustrade and he wraps an arm around my waist, tucking me in close. I snag his beer and take a swig.
‘My true love hath my heart and I have his. By just exchange one to the other given. I hold his dear and mine he cannot miss. There never was a better bargain driven.’
I kind of get that, actually. I think. Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.
The rest of the poem is a muddle of words in the wrong order – For as from me on him his hurt did light and that sort of stuff. When he finishes reading I swap him his beer for the book.
‘Yeah?’ Dylan says. He looks so excited as I take the book. It’s adorable, but it kind of scares me too, because of all the times he’s read me something and I’ve not got it.
‘If I like this one,’ I say, ‘will you show me one of yours?’
He pulls a face. ‘Oh, God, it’d be like showing you my teenage journal. Or . . .’
‘Your internet search history?’
Dylan grins. ‘Why, what’s in yours?’
‘Is that what you need?’ I ask, arching one eyebrow. ‘Tit for tat?’
‘You’re calling my poetry tat, are you?’ Dylan says, then feigns thoughtfulness. ‘Though, tit would be a . . .’
‘Shut up. You know what I meant. You need me to tell you something embarrassing too?’
‘It’d help, certainly.’ Dylan sip
s his beer, and I can tell he’s trying not to grin.
I hesitate for a moment and then swing my legs around, leaving the book on the ledge. The morning away from the villa has made me feel in control again. There’s no harm in giving him a little more of myself, is there?
‘Come on.’
I lead him back to the flat, through to the cupboard where me and Deb are storing our suitcases. Dylan leans on the door frame and watches as I pull out my suitcase and unzip it.
He laughs when he sees what’s inside and my cheeks instantly flush. I’m already clumsily re-zipping the case by the time his arms close around me from behind.
‘No, no, don’t. I love this. Please tell me you build model trains for fun.’
I squirm in his arms. Why did I do this?
‘I love it, Addie,’ he says, more gently. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. It was – it was a delighted laugh. A surprised one.’
He presses a kiss to my cheek. After a long, painful moment I lift out the Flying Scotsman. It’s tucked at the base of the suitcase where it won’t get squashed. There’s a wheel missing but otherwise it survived the journey to France pretty well.
‘It’s my dad’s thing,’ I say. Dylan tries to turn me in his arms but I stay put. It’s easier this way, not looking at him. ‘He’s always loved it. We used to do it together, with Deb, when I was a kid. She went through this phase where she was train mad, and that’s how it started, and then Dad just never stopped. I usually do a project with him whenever I go home. This is the one we did before I came to France.’
‘It must take ages,’ Dylan says. ‘May I?’
I let him take it and step away. I glance up from under my eyelashes. He’s not laughing now. He’s examining the model train like it’s totally fascinating.
It’s like he’s just dropped the last coin into the slots machine. It all comes rushing down and I’m falling in love with him, I am, I can’t stop myself.