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I’m not a bitch though; or maybe I’m just a quiet one inside my own head. Isn’t everyone?
I am
We stare straight at each other and I can’t look away. I feel my lips move as if I’m going to say something, God knows what, and all of a sudden and out of nowhere I need to get off this bus. I’m gripped by the overwhelming urge to go outside, to get to him. But I don’t. I don’t move a muscle, because I know there isn’t a chance in hell that I can get past anorak man beside me and push through the packed bus before it pulls away. So I make the split-second decision to stay rooted to the spot and try to convey to him to get on board using just the hot, desperate longing in my eyes.
For onlookers, it must have been an Oscar-worthy sixty-second silent movie. From now on, if anyone asks me if I’ve ever fallen in love at first sight, I shall say yes, for one glorious minute on December 21, 2008.
I cast around for an answer and, to be honest, it’s slim pickings.
I know this was before but im singing sabrina now
You know that shabby-chic little flat Bridget Jones lives in? It reminded me of that, only more shabby and less chic, and I was going to have to share it with a total stranger to meet the rent.
I open my mouth to say hello and then I see his face. My heart jumps into my throat and I feel as if someone just laid electric shock pads on my chest and turned them up to full fry. I can’t get any words to leave my lips. I know him. It feels like just last week I saw him first—and last. That heart-stopping glimpse from the top deck of a crowded bus twelve months ago.
Of course
Sarah is my best friend in the entire world, and however much and for however long it kills me, I’ll never silently, secretly hold up signs to tell Jack O’Mara, without hope or agenda, that to me he is perfect, and that my wasted heart will always love him.
I’ve seen her before—before last night, I mean. It was just once, fleetingly, in the flesh, but there have been other times in my head since: random, disturbing early-morning lucid dreams where I jolt awake, hard and frustrated. I don’t know if she remembers me. Christ, I hope not. Especially now I’m standing in front of her in a ridiculous pineapple-strewn ball-grazing dressing gown.
I expected an open-air cinema with a burger truck or two, and there is a huge screen set up for later, but jeez, this place is something else. I feel as if I’m actually in the movie rather than at it, and I reckon we’ve bagged ourselves the two best-looking Pink Ladies at the whole gig.
“Do I look like someone who scares easily?” Danny Zuko eat your heart out; but the way he drums his fingers on the top of the car close to my shoulder tells me he’s not as relaxed as his outward appearance might suggest. I don’t know what it is that’s making him uptight: being on the wheel without Sarah, or being on the wheel at all, or being on the wheel with me. I sigh, about to ask him, and then the familiar, swoony opening bars of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” strike up and the wheel begins to rotate.
“On the bus?” she breathes. Her cheeks are pink from the wine, and her eyes more animated than they have been since the summer. “Do you remember?” I frown and arrange my features into what I hope suggests puzzlement. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that to acknowledge my memory of those few moments at the bus stop would be a monu-fucking-mental mistake. Our entire friendship is built on the dynamics of my position as her best friend’s boyfriend. I wait in silence and she withers in front of me. The jittery shimmer in her eyes dims and I know she wishes she could suck those words out of
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“Maybe I should,” I acknowledge. “But I don’t want to. I like being with you too much.” Christ. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s on the edges of inappropriate, and it’s selfish. “I like being with you too much too,” she whispers, and a single, desolate tear slides down her cheek.
But this isn’t make-believe, it’s real life, and in real life people make mistakes. I raise my head, and if he kisses me I won’t have the power to stop myself from kissing him back, because to me he looks exactly as he did that day at the bus stop, and for a second I’m that girl on the bus in 2008 again. My dad isn’t sick, and Jack isn’t Sarah’s boyfriend, and there’s tinsel in my hair. I can almost hear the whirl of time turning back, whooshing past my ears like the sound of an old-fashioned tape recorder being rewound or a vinyl record being played backward. God, I don’t think I can stop
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“I wanted to kiss you back there in the pub, Laurie, and I want to kiss you even more right now. You’re one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my whole life.” He looks away, down the length of the deserted street and then back at me again. “You’re beautiful and kind, and you make me laugh, and when you look at me like that with your summer hedgerow eyes…only a fucking saint wouldn’t kiss you.”
Then he leans me against the wall with the weight of his body, and because he isn’t a fucking saint, he kisses me. Jack O’Mara dips his head and kisses me in the snow, his lips trembling and then hot and sure, and I’m crying and kissing him back,
Screaming rn
I don’t. Of course I don’t. Despite the fairy-tale snowstorm out there, this isn’t Narnia. This is London, real life, where hearts get kicked and bruised and broken, but somehow they still keep beating. I watch him recede as the taxi lurches cautiously away, and he watches me too, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his shoulders bunched against the wind. I lay my head against the cold glass as we turn the corner, my heart and my conscience lead heavy in my chest.
I kissed her because she looked fucking ethereal under the streetlamp with snowflakes clinging to her hair. I kissed her because I’d lied about not seeing her on that bus and I felt like a dick, and I kissed her because the need to know how her soft, vulnerable mouth would feel against mine floored me like a goddamn express train. And now I do know, and I wish I didn’t, because you can’t un-remember something as spectacular as that.
There’s something about living in a different place that allows you to be whoever you want to be.
I never thought I could feel like this for someone other than Jack, but something about being here with Oscar has freed me.
Jack’s sandy hair always looks as if he’s been scrubbing his hands through it, whereas Oscar’s freshly cut blue-black waves flop perfectly over his eyebrows. He debated for longer than I did over what to wear tonight, wondering whether his striped shirt was too banker, his tweed jacket too headmaster. In the end he settled for a chambray blue linen shirt; it reminds me of our days in Thailand.
Jack has gone for the “just tumbled out of bed after shagging a hot model” look that comes off as slightly arrogant. If I didn’t want to think better of him, I’d wonder if it was a deliberate move to undermine Oscar. But because I do want to think better of him, I let it slide and just absorb the sight of them standing together. So different. Both so important to me. I gulp down a mouthful of cold champagne and refocus on Sarah.
Sarah accused me of acting like an overprotective big brother, but she’s wrong. I can’t claim to feel brotherly toward Laurie, I forfeited that when I— No, I’m not going to think about that now.
I check the coq au vin, and I’m pleased to report it looks quite a lot like the picture in the recipe book. Hey there, Jamie Oliver, my coq’s better than your coq. I’m laughing to myself as my phone vibrates, and I grab it quickly as I hear Oscar calling my name.
“I’m calling because this phone has fallen out of the pocket of a guy who’s just been involved in a serious road accident on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Your number comes up as the one he dials most often—we’re just waiting with him for the ambulance crew now. I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible. My name’s Luke, by the way. Let me know what to do with his phone when you can.”
Oh shit
He’s in surgery, she said, in a quiet, reassuring voice that actually frightened the hell out of me. Head injury. Broken ribs. Fractured left shoulder. I can handle broken bones, because I know bones can mend. It’s the head injury that terrifies me;
I told him that there comes a point where you have to make the choice to be happy, because being sad for too long is exhausting. And that one day, you’ll look back, and you’ll not be able to remember exactly what it was you loved about that person.”
“But I also said that sometimes, rarely, people can come back into your life. And if that happens, you should keep those people close to you forever.”
I huff, because it wasn’t just my pain they were numbing. It was my brain too. I’ve been walking like a man in lead boots, too tired to raise my bones from my bed, too fuddled to think any further ahead than my next meal and how long it is until I can go back to bed again. A small part of me acknowledges that the booze is doing pretty much the same thing.
“When you look at me, I know that you really see me. I don’t think anyone ever has, Lu. Not the way you do.”
It’s not true. Not a word of it. I don’t recognize the vicious loser I’ve become. I take a step toward her, to do I don’t know what, and she backs away from me, horrified. I see the person I’ve become in her eyes and it makes me sick. But then, as she moves, that bloody starfish pendant catches my eye and I reach out to grab it. I don’t know why, it’s irrational, I just want to do something to make her stop, but she jerks away from me and it snaps from around her neck. I stare at it for a moment, then throw it to the floor, and we stand stock-still and glare at each other. Her chest is heaving
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“I know I’ve asked you this a hundred times before, Laurie, but this time I’m not joking or laughing or messing around.” His dark eyes are damp as he holds my hands. “I want to take you back there. But this time I want it to be with you as my wife. I don’t want to wait any longer. I love you and I want you with me forever. Will you marry me?”
Omg
“You know what? Fine. You want me to be honest, I’ll be honest. I’ve thought about it, about Luke, in that way. He makes me laugh and he listens to me. He notices me, Jack. You don’t, and you haven’t for a long time now. All you notice is yourself.”
Slay
“Close is enough for some people,” she says, “for a lot of people. The world is full of close-to-perfect couples.” She’s wavering, searching my face. I get that. I’m wavering too. I can’t imagine what my life will be like without her in it. Who I will be.
I don’t even know how life works without Jack in it, but there’s this bit of me”—she breaks off and looks at her hands—“this bit of me that feels relieved. Relieved, because being in love with Jack has always been, to one degree or another, bloody hard work.”
our entire relationship has been a million tiny compromises, his or mine, so our differences weren’t big enough to pull us apart. It’s been a constant effort, and I don’t know if love should feel like that, you know? I don’t mean making an effort for each other…I mean making an effort to be someone ever so slightly different from who we really are.
That when someone says “the man you’ve always dreamed of,” I think of Jack O’Mara.
I shake my head. “No. If all brides looked like you, there’d be no single men left in the world.” I know that wasn’t what she was asking.
“It’s a promotion. Too good a chance to pass up,” he says. “My own evening talk show.” He sounds excited. I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard him sound positive in a long time, so I’m furious when my eyes well with tears.
“I always knew there was something. I—I think I’m going to be sick.” She lurches for the bathroom.
I knew it'd be bad
“I very much doubt that,” she spits. “At least you’d found him.” “No. You’d found him. I wish I’d never laid eyes on him.” We fall into silence, and then she makes a sound that’s horribly like a hiss.
“Good luck for Saturday, because I won’t be there. You know who I feel sorry for? Oscar. Poor fuck doesn’t even know he’s second best.” She’s saying things I know we’ll never come back from. “Keep your precious bracelet. I don’t want it. Keep your bracelet and your secrets and your fake friendship. I’m done here.”
Shiiiiit
I’m not sure what I think of Jack in a suit. But then I can’t think about that anymore because his familiar eyes find mine, and I wish I could grip his hand for even a fleeting second before I become Oscar’s wife. With no Sarah here he feels like the only person who knows the real me.
My precision-planned wedding has a Sarah-shaped hole in it, and I’m scared to death that the rest of my life will too.
You tread lightly through life, but you leave deep footprints that are hard for other people to fill.”
Yet somehow I’m dancing with him, his hand rubbing up and down my spine, and time seems to have done something strange, because I’m not the Laurie I was a couple of hours ago. I’m the Laurie I was seven years ago. Oh, Oscar, why didn’t you come?
And then he looks down at me, and his eyes say all the things he cannot. His gaze holds mine as we dance slowly, and I silently tell him that I’ll always carry him in my heart, and he silently tells me that in another place, another time, we’d have been pretty damn close to perfect.
The truth is that I’ve walked around the edge of being in love with Jack for too many years. It’s made me realize something inevitable, something that’s been a long time coming: he and I would be better off without each other. I need to unwind the roots of Jack O’Mara from my life. He’s too much a part of who I am, and me a part of him. The problem with uprooting things is that sometimes it kills them altogether, but that’s a risk I have to take. For the sake of my marriage; for the sake of all of us.
“What?” He looks at her wet shirt and then at the vase in my hands, perplexed. “Why would you do that, Laurie?” The fact that he didn’t stop to wonder whether she was lying is a red flag; I file it away to think about later.
What does that mean?” I’m nearly yelling again. He doesn’t answer me, which is telling in itself. After a minute or two’s silence, I speak again. I don’t want to go to sleep on an argument, but I need to say this. “Maybe it’s time to ask about transferring back to London full-time. Brussels was only meant to be temporary.”
“I’m not leaving Brussels, Laurie,” he says, holding on to my hand. “In fact, the job will be based there full-time.” I stare at him, aware that I’m blinking too fast. “I don’t…”
