Kitabı oku: «Always the Bridesmaid», sayfa 2
All About You
Being a bridesmaid isn’t just a day to wear a pretty dress and have your photo taken!
As well as getting to know your bride even better than you do today, it’s a time to learn a lot about yourself. Fill in the answers below and you might be surprised to learn what an accomplished and powerful and wonderful young woman you already are.
Remember, there’s a reason your bride chose you!
My hair is: light brown
My eyes are: green
My favourite physical attribute is: boobs
I don’t love my: thighs arse bank balance but they’re mine!
My three best qualities are: loyalty, sense of humour, perseverance (as evidenced by this journal)
I make a great friend because: I’m a good listener, I remember everything and I always have gin
Three things I will practise from this day on for a happier, healthier life:
– Delete all the shopping apps off my phone before I bankrupt myself
– Stop looking at my ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page
– Only look at my ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page once a week
– Read all the big literary books Sarah has given me instead of looking at the Wikipedia entries for the ones that win prizes and telling everyone I’ve read them
– Get fantastic boyfriend and post so many pictures of the two of us that people I don’t know that well unfriend/unfollow me
– Spend time meditating and getting to know myself so I can truly be happy
– Throw out dry shampoo and bloody well wash hair more often
2
Friday May 15th
Today I feel: Like eating All Of The Things.
Today I am thankful for: The fact I’m too lazy to go out and buy all of the things.
Knowing I had to work all day Saturday for the McCallan wedding, I had planned to spend the entirety of Friday night on my arse watching some terrible television and working my way through the millions of emails Lauren had already sent about her wedding and hastily arranged engagement party, set for Sunday afternoon. I know, two days’ notice. FUN.
So far she’d sent me fifteen different wedding dresses, six venues and enquired whether or not we could get Beyoncé to play the reception – and, officially speaking, we hadn’t even started planning properly yet.
Why did I get the feeling this wasn’t going to be an easy one?
I was tapping out the politest version of ‘No, we cannot get one of the most successful musicians in the world to play the reception, you lovely moron’ when the texts from Sarah started. It was her first Friday night as a single woman in ten years, and she wasn’t doing well, despite the seventeen ‘I’m fine’ text messages she’d sent me earlier in the day.
An hour later, she was at my door, Oddbins bag in hand.
‘Sorry it’s such a shit-hole,’ I said, shoving half a pile of magazines off the coffee table onto the floor as she gingerly placed her handbag in their place.
‘It’s always a shit-hole,’ she pointed out, her voice tired and defeated as she handed me a bottle of gin and looked round at the clutter spread all across my flat. Open plan had seemed like such a good idea when I found the place but all I’d really done was double the amount of space I had available to fill with shit. At least she’d had the presence of mind to bring tonic. I never had anything helpful in my cupboards unless you considered an unopened packet of Ryvita and a not quite empty box of Frosties useful. ‘I’m used to it − your shit-hole is reassuring. Drinks. Now.’
It’s easy to let your flat become a takeaway-box-littered shantytown when no one else is there, but it’s hard to defend your appalling housekeeping skills face to face. Ever since Seb had moved out, I’d lacked the motivation to keep the place in order. It was amazing how quickly you could get over dust allergies if you tried.
‘I was going to clean this evening,’ I lied, ‘but I thought essential bonding time with my best friend in the entire world was more important. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’
‘You might actually be.’ Sarah slapped both of her hands down on the kitchen counter and gave me a grim smile. ‘This place is a human rights violation.’
‘Shut up and drink your gin,’ I said, poking my way to the back of a cupboard to find clean glasses. ‘Shona was a real bitch today.’
I’m not proud of myself, but I was putting off talking about the divorce until I had at least one drink in me. I had no idea how to talk about the divorce. If I’d had advance warning, I might have bought in a lot of ice cream and dug up my Pretty Woman DVD, because that’s what we did when Dave Stevenson stood her up for the lower sixth Halloween disco. I didn’t know the protocol for this one.
‘I know we give you shit about it, but you need to find a new job,’ Sarah said, moving a pile of creased sweatshirts from the settee to the armchair and sitting herself down. ‘I can’t believe you got a mammogram for her. Your boss shouldn’t really get a say in your tits unless you’re sleeping with them for a promotion.’
‘How do you know I’m not?’
‘Because of that time Lauren kissed you at the uni ball to impress Stephan Jones and you threw up immediately afterwards.’
‘That was as much to do with Aftershock shots as my aversion to lipstick lesbianism,’ I replied. ‘I could be a lesbian.’
‘You couldn’t even get through an entire series of Orange Is the New Black.’
‘Yes, but that was because I live in mortal fear of going to prison and ending up as someone’s bitch,’ I pointed out. ‘Not because I’m scared of a loving, respectful, consensual partnership with a lady.’
‘You’re not gay, Maddie,’ she said. ‘You’re just a wimp.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, chopping up a sad-looking lemon for our gin. ‘That’s one of the upsides of having a gay sister. You don’t run around going “I wish I was a lesbian, it’s so much easier”, because it isn’t.’
Sarah nodded and held her hand out for a red wine glass full to the brim with gin and tonic. ‘Remember that girl she was going out with in her first year at Durham? What a cock.’
‘It’s not just the chaps,’ I agreed. ‘Women can be just as bad.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m pretty anti-man right now,’ she said, nursing the glass but not drinking.
Here it was. The Talk. We were going to have the talk and I was going to be supportive and caring and she would leave here knowing that she was an incredible person who, in spite of all the pain she was going through, was utterly and completely loved. I was going to say just the right thing.
‘Yuh-huh.’
I suck so hard.
Thankfully, Sarah didn’t seem to mind my friend fail and took it upon herself to start talking anyway. I dropped a lemon in her drink, sat myself down and held my glass tightly. All I needed to do was listen.
‘Things had been shit for a while,’ Sarah said. ‘I suppose I got used to it. He was out a lot and I’ve been working so much … you don’t realize how quickly things can go wrong. It’s got to be three months since we even had sex. I just didn’t realize.’
I nodded in silence. Three months. Was that a long time? I’d forgotten.
‘Then he comes home one day and out of nowhere he’s like, it isn’t working, I want a divorce. Just like that, he wants a divorce.’
‘So, what actually happened?’ I asked, treading as carefully as I knew how. ‘What exactly did he say?’
These were the same two questions I’d been asking her about boys since we were eleven. The fact that we were thirty-one and still having the same conversations was impossibly depressing.
Sarah took a deep breath and blew it out in one big huff.
‘It’s so ridiculous, saying it out loud,’ she said, her big blue eyes tearing up already. And as we’ve established, Sarah is not a crier. ‘It was Saturday, he’d been at the football with Michael and some of the others all day. I was a bit pissed off because, like I said, we hardly ever see each other and he was out so late, and he didn’t tell me what time he’d be home.’
‘So you were perfectly entitled to be annoyed,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ she nodded, swiping at a stray tear before it messed up her eyeliner. ‘So I was making dinner when he got in, and he got a beer out of the fridge and I said dinner was almost ready and could he open the wine, and he said he didn’t want wine and I said I wanted wine, and he said he wanted to go out and I said I’d made dinner, and he slammed down his beer on the kitchen top and it spilled everywhere, and then he said “This isn’t working”. And yeah, it went from there.’
Sarah was still staring at her gin instead of drinking it, but I was halfway down mine.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ she said, tapping her bitten-down nail on the rim of her glass. ‘You think these things are going to be dead dramatic, and then they’re not. You’re doing something painfully normal and having a totally average chat, and then, there it is. He just says it, just like that. It’s not working. He wants a divorce. Dunzo.’
‘Did he actually say he wants to get divorced, though?’ I asked, looking for a silver lining in this epic pile of shit. ‘Maybe he means he wants a break. Or he wants to fix things? This might be his way of getting your attention.’
‘He’s got that,’ she replied in a voice so light it felt like her words might float away before I heard them. ‘He’s already moved out. He slept on the settee on Saturday and went to stay at his mum’s on Sunday. He’s not coming back, Maddie. He emailed me today to say he’s got a lawyer and I should do the same.’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’ I squeezed her ankle, the most easily accessibly appendage, while she chewed on her bottom lip in an attempt to stop the tears from coming. She’d been gnawing on that thing for so many years I was amazed she hadn’t chewed it right off. ‘Why didn’t you call me before? I could have done—’
‘Absolutely nothing?’
I had never felt so useless in my entire life. I wanted to help but didn’t know how, and when your entire existence is based around being The One Who Helps, that is majorly distressing.
‘I started about a million texts, but I couldn’t work out how to say it,’ Sarah said. ‘Plus I had a yoga workshop.’
I paused, mid-sip. ‘You went to a yoga workshop? The day after your husband told you he wanted a divorce?’
‘I’d already paid for it,’ she said, daring me to argue. ‘And what was I supposed to do − sit around and cry all weekend?’
‘I don’t know whether to be massively impressed or have you sectioned,’ I said. ‘So that’s it? It’s happening?’
Sarah tilted back her glass and chugged it down in three big gulps.
‘When I try to think about it,’ she said, ‘it’s like my brain shuts down. I can’t even process it. Then I’ll be sat having a wee and I’ll look at my hand and think, do I have to take my wedding ring off? Has he already taken his off? I actually googled how long it would take for the groove to go away.’
She held up her hand and stretched out her bare fingers. I felt my own face crumple a little bit as her tears started to come in earnest.
‘Turns out it takes longer than a week,’ she gasped, clenching her hand into a tight fist. ‘I can’t believe that he’s doing this and he’s happy about it. How can someone who said they loved you every day for a decade suddenly decide they don’t any more? I’m sitting at home every night, sleeping in the spare room because I can’t stand to be in our bed, and he’s happy.’
‘Do you think he’s cheating?’ I asked.
She fidgeted with her top button for a moment and then shook her head.
‘No,’ she said with certainty. ‘He said he isn’t.’
‘Right,’ I replied.
‘Why?’ Suddenly she wasn’t looking nearly as certain. ‘He wouldn’t. Would he? Do you think he is? Have you heard something?’
‘Of course not,’ I replied instantly, squeezing her foot to calm her down.
Another white lie in the name of friendship.
Of course I thought he was cheating. Why else would he suddenly decide he wanted to abandon his wife and marriage without giving it a second thought? They’d been together since uni, inseparable for a decade, and now he had randomly decided it wasn’t working out? I remembered when Seb left me, wonderful Shona reminding me that most men don’t leave until they’ve got the next thing lined up. I scoffed at the time but of course, it turned out she was right in my case. Not an insight I would share with Sarah at this stage, perhaps.
‘I don’t want to get divorced,’ Sarah said, her watery blue eyes meeting my red-rimmed green ones. ‘I don’t want to have to tell people I’m divorced and sit there while they wonder what’s wrong with me or do exactly what you just did and assume he was cheating on me. What’s going to happen to me now?’
I stared blankly at the TV that I’d muted when I heard the doorbell but not turned off. A cartoon played silently in the background, a happy dysfunctional family, husband, wife, three kids.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, not wanting to lie any more than I had to. ‘But I do know we’ll get through it. I don’t know what else to say that won’t sound like a load of annoying clichés.’
‘I’m only thirty-one,’ Sarah said, gripping the stem of her glass until her knuckles turned white. ‘I’m not the first person in the world to get divorced, am I? Better now than ten years down the line when we’d have two kids in the mix, isn’t it?’
‘Course.’ I wondered how many times she’d told herself that already this week. ‘You’re totally right.’
‘All I want is to not feel like this any more,’ she said wearily, putting down her glass and pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘It’s like the worst hangover ever. I feel sick and empty, and every time I forget about it for a moment, it comes back and punches me in the face. And the only person who could make me feel better about it is the person who’s causing it. I hate him so much I can see it, but all I want is for him to come home and tell me he’s changed his mind.’
That part I recognized. ‘Really? You’d take him back?’
‘I don’t even know,’ she laughed, sounding sour. ‘I don’t know what I’d do. How would I ever trust him? I’d always be waiting for him to do it again, wouldn’t I?’
For want of a better response, I shrugged.
‘So what the fuck do I do now?’ Sarah asked, dropping her head against the back of my saggy settee. ‘Am I just supposed to sit here until it stops feeling like someone ripped my insides out with a fish hook?’
‘Would it help if I made you a kale smoothie?’ I offered.
‘It might,’ she said, pulling my hair. ‘But I think I’d rather have another gin.’
‘Good because I don’t have any kale.’ I grabbed the bottle off the coffee table and topped her up. ‘Let me get the tonic out of the fridge.’
‘Don’t bother,’ she said, taking a glug then holding up her glass. ‘To fresh starts, Maddie. Cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ I echoed, wondering whether or not there ever was such a thing as a fresh start, or whether you just picked up a new set of problems.
I can’t believe Sarah is getting divorced. It’s bizarre: I’ve known her for two-thirds of my life, and for the first time ever, I have no idea what to say to her.
Divorce. She’s getting a divorce. I don’t know anyone who got married and isn’t married any more other than Lauren’s parents, and I don’t really know them. It’s so weird. When you’re single you don’t think about that bit, even though in this day and age you’re fully aware of that bit. Getting the ring on your finger is the goal: the white dress, the John Lewis wedding-present list, worry about the rest of it afterwards. Getting married means you’ve won, and I hate thinking like that, I do, but let’s be honest, that’s just how it is. In our super progressive, equal rights, modern society, it’s the one thing no one wants to say but everyone is thinking, however messed-up it is.
Until you’re married, you’re a loser, no matter how great you are at everything else. But what does that make someone who gets divorced?
Divorce is something that happens to my parents’ generation, not my friends. Like in year nine, when everyone’s mum and dad suddenly split up and no one talked about it until Jane couldn’t come to your ice-skating birthday party because she ‘had to see her dad on Saturdays’.
Shit, who will get their cat? They both love that cat. Won’t somebody think of the children?
3
Saturday May 16th
Today I feel: Sore.
Today I am thankful for: Shaving my legs this morning when I couldn’t really be bothered.
I am so confused as to what happened today. All I do know is that it has ended with a strange man in my bed who I cannot ask to leave because it’s impolite, but who I really wish would leave because I’m starving and want to eat some biscuits, and if I don’t, I’m worried I might very well eat his arm in the night.
It started out as a normal day. Well, normal apart from the wedding/divorce debacle of Thursday night and then the depressing divorce-and-gin fest of Friday night, obviously. I got up, I texted my friends, they didn’t reply, and I went to work. The only difference was that my text to Lauren was all about her wedding, rather than last night’s telly, and my text to Sarah just said ‘Are you OK?’ She’d left at ten o’clock last night, teary with mother’s ruin but refusing the offer to stay over with a curled lip at my shabby sofa and the mountains of washing covering the spare bed. Fair play, really.
Ahhh, work. The McCallan wedding.
One of the fun things about working for an events planner is you never know exactly what you’re going to be doing from one day to the next, other than working yourself into a blind, desperate pit of no return seven days a week, obviously. Thanks to ten years in the trade, I am now a passable florist, competent seamstress and an excellent mixologist. Nevertheless, I wasn’t too happy when I got to the reception venue to find out two of the waitresses couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed and come to work, meaning I had to save the day by putting on a pinny and serving a room full of drunk people an absurdly expensive chicken dinner.
It’s amazing how terribly people treat wait staff sometimes. I ask you, how hard is it to say please and thank you? I’d say their mothers would be appalled but most of their mothers were there and quite frankly, in a lot of instances, the mothers were the worst. After spending a year planning every last moment of the McCallan’s big day, running around on the actual day of the wedding, fetching and carrying dirty dishes, while every single assembled guest refused to look me in the eye didn’t half test my moral fibre.
And then I saw him.
He was easy on the eyes, there was no getting around it. His eyes were brown, but a light brown − sort of gold, when you looked at them − and his black hair was shaved close to his head, giving him an air of an Action Man; but somehow, it worked. He had gorgeous full lips, and when he smiled at me I wanted to burn every pair of knickers I owned because I would never, ever be needing them again. He looked solid but smiley, like he’d always have a joke to tell you, and even while he was charming the pants off your parents he’d have his hand on your arse, and at the end of the night, when you’d had one too many, he’d feel you up a bit in the taxi.
‘Hello, everyone.’
Action Man was actually the best man. When it was his turn to give a toast, he didn’t even need to clink his glass. As soon as he stood up, everyone turned around and sat up straight. Without even asking myself why, I tightened my ponytail and bit some colour into my lips. Be still my beating heart.
‘As most of you already know, I’m Will, the best man,’ he said. ‘Or at least I’m the best one that was free today and had his own suit.’
I leaned against the wall, cupping my elbow in one hand, and pressed a fist against my mouth. He wasn’t so tall but he was tall enough, and his jacket hung perfectly from his shoulders, the result either of excellent tailoring or of excellent shoulders, it was hard to tell, but his easy stance and the way he looked around the room, totally comfortable in a situation that others found unbearable, gave me the biggest ladyboner.
Here’s the thing. I’ve always loved weddings. When I was little, I would run around the house wrapped up in a bed sheet screaming ‘I do!’ at the next-door neighbour, and when I was seven and my aunt got married, I didn’t take my bridesmaid’s dress off for two weeks. And that was only because I had the measles and threw up on it. Since then, I’ve been a bridesmaid five times and I would do it five more times if someone asked. How is it not fun? The dress shopping, the hen night, the penis headbands, I love all of it. And then there’s the actual wedding: you get a new frock, you get a free feed, you get to drink from the crack of dawn right through to the next day and not even your parents can complain about it. Weddings are the best.
But after hearing Sarah and Lauren’s news on Thursday, for the first time ever I was beginning to feel the onset of matrimonial fatigue. All of a sudden, everything that had once made me clap with delight had me rolling my eyes instead. Oh, you’re pretending to run away from a dinosaur in your pictures? How original. Choreographed first dance to the song from Dirty Dancing? You guys! It was horrible. Even the thought of stealing macarons from the dessert table didn’t help. I was over macarons. And when a woman declares herself over macarons, you know something is wrong. By the time the speeches had begun, it would be all I could do not to launch myself at the bride and groom and start screaming, ‘This is a sham! True love is an illusion! We’re all going to die alone!’
And for an assistant wedding planner, that was less than ideal.
And so the undeniable hotness of the best man made for a very welcome distraction on an incredibly shitty day.
‘I’ve known Em and Ian for donkeys,’ Will went on. Addressing the room, making eye contact, not using notes. All very impressive. ‘And between you and me, I couldn’t have been happier when he told me they were getting married. In fact, when he told me he was going to ask her, I cried. And then, when he sent me a text to say she said yes, I cried again.’
All the mums began to sniff and coo in unison, while all the single women pulled out lipsticks and powder compacts as they readied themselves to go to war.
Will was doing a good job.
‘You see, it’s hard to meet someone these days.’ He gave a little shrug and looked over at the happy couple. ‘These two met at a wedding, if you can believe it − my little sister’s wedding, actually − and I know it’s a cliché, but I knew they were going the distance as soon as they started going out. Actually, let me clarify that first bit again. It’s not hard to meet someone. It’s hard to meet someone special.’ He cleared his throat and let his voice crack a little, and I may or may not have let out a little squeak.
‘When Ian started seeing Emma, he changed, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Whenever we saw each other, he couldn’t stop saying her name. He brought her to the football and let her wear the scarf that his dad bought him when he was six, and then, when he changed his Facebook status and his profile photo, I knew it was only a matter of time.
‘I think, when you meet someone who you love so much that you’re happy to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the world that they’re yours, you ought to lock it down. There was never any doubt for him. As soon as they met, no one else even existed to Ian. That’s why I’m not going to stand here and make jokes about his suit and his haircut. Although I clearly could.’
Cue genuine laughter. Cue me flushing from head to toe as Best Man Will picked up the Libbey Embassy champagne coupe that I’d had to order in especially because the bride wanted coupes and not flutes and raised it high in the air.
He was staring right at me.
Not at the little redheaded bridesmaid who was trying to squeeze her arms together to make her demure lilac gown show a bit more cleavage, or at the hot blonde guest who had been crossing and uncrossing her legs throughout the entire speech.
He kept looking at me.
Flushed in the face from running in and out of the kitchen, hair yanked back in a utilitarian ponytail, mascara all over my face after a champagne-opening incident that left me and three other people smelling like a piss-up in a very fancy brewery.
And I had checked − my shirt wasn’t unbuttoned or anything.
‘So if you would all join me and raise your glasses. To the bride and groom.’
As everyone shuffled out of their seats, the women struggling to stand in their too-high heels that would soon be kicked off and replaced with flip-flops, I blinked, breaking the connection. When I looked back, he was smiling at the bride and groom, the moment gone.
Breathing more heavily than is healthy, I slipped back into the kitchen looking for a drink of my own.
‘Sorry to bother you, but have you got a light?’
Hours later, when the buffet had been reduced to nothing more than a few stray cherry tomatoes and the odd splodge of tartar sauce, I was hiding at the back of the venue, holding a Marlboro Light, tearing up at the picture of Lauren’s engagement ring on Facebook and trying to work out how to ask Sarah if she was OK again without saying ‘Are you OK?’, because clearly she wasn’t. When I looked up, a man in a suit (strangely enough) was holding out a cigarette of his own. I blinked a couple of times, my eyes adjusting from the bright white light of the iPhone screen to the semi-darkness of my hidey-hole.
‘Oh, um, I haven’t actually got one,’ I said, squinting. It was one of the ushers. The one whose trousers were an inch too short. You tend to notice strange things when you work two weddings a week for three-quarters of the year. ‘Sorry.’
‘No worries,’ he said, putting the cigarette back in the pack of ten in his inside pocket. He was awfully tall; I supposed that explained the trousers. ‘I’m supposed to have quit anyway.’
‘Probably best then.’ I shuffled from foot to sensibly shod foot, flicking my unlit cigarette between my fingers and tucking my phone back into the waistband of my skirt.
He nodded, pressed his lips together and stuck his hands in his pockets.
‘Did you lose your lighter?’ he asked.
Oh good, awkward conversation. I loved those. Why couldn’t he leave me alone so I could bunk off and text my friend in peace?
‘Oh no,’ I replied, preparing myself. ‘I don’t smoke.’
The very tall usher looked at me strangely.
‘You don’t smoke?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘But you’re standing outside holding a cigarette?’
‘Yes.’
He took in a short breath that sounded like he was going to say something, then shook his head and stopped himself. Then did it again and didn’t stop himself. More’s the pity.
‘I’m sure I’m going to regret it, but can I ask why you’re standing outside holding a cigarette without a lighter if you don’t smoke?’
It was a fair question; I just didn’t want to answer it. I wanted to read some showbiz gossip on my phone, text Sarah, call Lauren and pretend I hadn’t just pissed away an entire Saturday at someone else’s special day. It didn’t matter if you were wearing Jimmy Choos or a pair of Clarks − if you were on your feet for nigh on twelve hours, you were in pain.
‘My boss smokes,’ I said, shaking a full box of Marlboros at him. ‘And she takes cigarette breaks all the time, so she can’t stop me from taking them. So, you know, as far as she’s concerned, I’ve got a very healthy two packs a day habit. Or unhealthy, as the case may be.’
He looked at me. ‘You’re not serious?’
I looked back at him.
‘Oh my God, you are.’
‘She thinks smoking is better than eating,’ I replied. ‘Fewer carbs.’
‘But smoking will kill you,’ he said, looking at his own pack with a regularly repeated lecture playing over in his head. ‘She does know that, doesn’t she?’
‘We get private health insurance,’ I said. ‘So it all works out.’
‘Fair enough.’ The usher put his cigarettes away and scrunched up his face for a moment, staring at me. ‘I hate weddings,’ he said.
‘Really?’ Who went around saying they hated weddings while they were at a wedding. ‘Why?’
‘There’s so much standing around,’ he said wearily, pushing wavy brown hair off his forehead. Earlier it had been all slicked back and crunchy-looking, but by this point in the proceedings his locks had let loose. He needed a good shot of Elnett; he had to be single. ‘And there’s never anywhere to go. I just want to sod off somewhere and have a sit-down.’
‘Once I did a wedding that had a mini cinema,’ I said, nodding in agreement, ‘but the bride got angry because everyone sat in there all night instead of dancing to the band she’d paid a bloody fortune for. In the end she made us turn the film off and shouted at everybody.’
‘What film was it?’ he asked.
‘Ghostbusters. The groom picked all the films from when they’d been dating but he did too good a job.’
‘I’d give my right arm to sit in the dark and watch Ghostbusters right now,’ he said, sighing. His skin was quite pale and his eyes were quite dark and he really was awfully tall. At least a foot and a half taller than me. Teetering around too tall territory. Just the right height if you wanted something down from the loft, but a nightmare to sit next to if you were flying economy.
‘They had ice cream and beer as well,’ I added, trying not to look at his visible ankles.
‘I might never have left.’ He paused for a moment and then smiled.
He was nice looking when he smiled, a bit less gawky and angular, a realization that only made me feel all the more uncomfortable. I felt myself breathe in slightly and brushed a few stray strands of hair behind my ear.
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