The Wake-Up Call

by Beth O'Leary

Arjun, the head chef, says ‘when Izzy and Lucas are on shift at the same time the hotel is about as welcoming as my grandmother’s house’, and I’ve met Arjun’s grandmother, so I can say with confidence that this was a very rude remark.

As the door closes behind her, I stare at it for a while. Nothing about that conversation should have made me feel especially uncomfortable, but I’m all discombobulated. Maybe it’s because she didn’t really like my nativity scene. Is that why? Something has got under my skin, and now I feel as though I’ve made a mistake, but I can’t figure out where.

I DO THIS ALL THE TIME

‘There’s no room for part-timers in this world, Lucas,’ Antônio begins.

This place has become home to me. I’d defend it in the same way I’d defend Niterói, the city where I grew up. It has its faults, but it’s mine.

It is usually worth taking the time to learn something difficult, I find.

It is easy to find calm in a place that outdates you by about a millennium.

I open Netflix, looking for something new, even though I already know I’ll be rewatching Charmed

People come to a hotel at this time of year for all sorts of reasons, and I realised Mr Townsend’s reason was exactly the same as mine: because he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone.

I don’t want Izzy to spend her evening in a bikini with Louis Keele. I don’t trust that man with the future of this hotel, and I definitely don’t trust him with Izzy.

We are all misled and misdirected from time to time. Perhaps there really is no shame in that, as long as we wake up to it before it’s too late to change.

I am a careful man by nature. But Izzy makes me feel reckless.

I want to give in to the thump-thump of desire that courses through me when I see her. I want to ignore real life for once and just pretend that I’m a guy, at a party, dancing with a beautiful girl.

‘Some things are important enough to cause a little drama.’

There’s a reason it’s harder for women to approach men than the other way around – when the world tells you your worth is about men desiring you, it’s hard to take it when they don’t, and we’re scared to be rejected.

‘You’ll know what to do. If you really like her, it’ll come to you, because if you’re made for each other, you’re made to heal her when she’s hurting.

‘You would strip naked for me, but you don’t want to kiss me?’ ‘I never said I didn’t want to kiss you.’ Her eyes move over me. ‘Kiss me, then.’

I catalogue what she’d think of my flat, wonder which side of my bed she’d claim as hers, imagine how it would feel to lift her against my bedroom wall and wrap her legs around my waist.

I haven’t been on a date for a while. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop dating, I just got sick of trawling through Bumble and shaving my legs for men who wouldn’t prove worthy of seeing them.

(Why is it that when men sweat, it’s sexy, but when I sweat, I look like I’ve been crossbred with a tomato?)

‘Maisie used to say we’re better with a little fatigue in our systems. It keeps us fighting.’

I want to look after you. So that you don’t have to do it all, for once.

How did you get from strangers to this, where you’re like one person split in two?

I’m noticing the muscles rolling in his shoulders, the bare, pale-brown stretch of his neck.

She is obsessed with musced ok we get it

he will always be the man who kissed my flatmate on the day I handed him my heart.

Stop repeating it is so annoying

She’d known how I felt about Lucas, and still kissed him.

Ugh miscommunication

I’d follow her anywhere these days – maybe I always would have.

‘She is a very talented colleague,’ I say. I hate that I’m still like this, even with Antônio so many thousands of miles away. Even with my own car, my own flat, my own job, my own degree – almost. But these traits are so deeply engrained, I don’t know how to unlearn them.

I would like to believe that I can let a person see me, and that once they have, they might think more of me, not less.

Every moment we spent together in that car, I could feel myself drowning in the euphoria of it, even as I begged myself to wait and remember everything, because this was precious.

I don’t want to get Izzy out of my system. That is clearer than ever after last night. I want all of her. Her kindness, her commitment, her technicolour hair and the way she always puts me in my place. I want to take her home and call her mine.

That’s what jealousy is, isn’t it? Fear of losing someone?

By the week before Christmas, I am gone. I am out of my own control. Every time we touch, I feel myself tumble a little further, and every time she gives me a bright, professional smile at work it hurts a bit more.

I had imagined the danger in this arrangement would be Izzy losing interest in me after we had sex. But it seems the real danger is me falling in love.

Sometimes it’s good to curl up under a blanket and wallow.

Imagining those moments with Lucas, and then trying very hard not to notice that if Lucas had been there, they wouldn’t have been blah, those moments. No single moment with Lucas ever has been.

Her body trusts me now, even if the rest of her doesn’t.

The moon is half full, bright white above the trees, and the stars are extraordinary. It’s as if someone has sown them like seeds across the sky.

I can barely see her nod in the darkness. I sit back in the chair, trying to find calmness in the star-soaked sky.

‘Time sometimes feels like it’s . . . I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s just streaming by

‘Lucas,’ she says, softly now. ‘You can relax. It’s just me.’ It’s just me. Like she isn’t fucking everything.

actually . . . I deserve better than this.

Miscommunication Ughhhh

I’ve put my heart on the line for Lucas da Silva before and it was such a disaster. I am not a person who lets someone burn her twice. Life is too short for wasting time with people who don’t deserve you.

We get itttt

‘She’d say you’re being stubborn as a mule and blind as a bat. How can you not see how much you love this boy?’

‘What would happen if you talked to him about last Christmas, little pigeon?’

Yes!! You need to communicate!!!

I’ve been clear with Louis that there is nothing romantic between us and there never will be.

The fucking lettttterrrr!!!!

He never knew.

Why didn’t I just have an adult conversation with him about that Christmas card?

yes why didn't you???

In all my wild imaginings of how this airport chase is going to go, I’ve been envisaging it like Love Actually or Friends. Sprinting through crowds, shouting Lucas’s name, desperate to find him.

‘So meet me under the Airport Security sign right now, Lucas da Silva. It’s not quite mistletoe. But it will have to do. Yours, Izzy.’

We’ve kissed so many times, but not once have we kissed like this, with neither of us holding any part of ourselves back.