I shivered involuntarily, not sure if I was more afraid of going over to apologize or the thought that she might not want to see me in the first place. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
There was, after all, a first time for everything.
I’ve never been a smoker but there were times when the idea of popping out for a cigarette sounded so great. Hiding at the back of the surgery and checking Instagram was not relaxing. All those photos of other people’s holidays, overdrawn-lip selfies and artfully shot pasta might have been easier to stomach with a lungful of nicotine. Every time I scrolled through, I thought of an old framed photo of my granddad hanging in my parents’ living room. He was standing in the surgery in his operating gown, enjoying a pipe with his colleagues immediately after performing his first successful spinal surgery on an Alsatian. I’m not saying it was the healthiest thing for my granddad or the dog, but everyone in the picture looked incredibly relaxed and every single one of them was puffing away. Here I was, squinting at a smudged phone screen, looking at what one-quarter of Little Mix had for breakfast and my anxiety levels were off the charts.
For sixteen minutes I’d been pretending I was about to call Adam and in those sixteen minutes, I’d done a full lap of my social media channels and checked three different websites to make sure it wasn’t Mercury retrograde. I wasn’t usually someone who was lost for words but it was one thing knowing how to say ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stevens, your hamster didn’t make it’ without hesitating but quite another to call your boyfriend when all you had to work with was ‘So, I was just wondering, did you by any chance dump me at three o’clock this morning?’
‘Liv?’
I looked up to see Adam right there in front of me, same red hooded sweatshirt as the night before, a different, more sheepish expression on his face.
‘Hello,’ he said.
Well, at least he’d saved me a phone call.
‘You look knackered.’ There was a sad-looking bunch of pink roses in his right hand and he was hanging onto them for dear life. ‘Busy morning?’
‘Very,’ I replied. ‘And, you know, I didn’t get a lot of sleep.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he looked down at the flowers in his hand and blew out a big, heavy breath. ‘These are for you.’
He stretched as far as his long arms would reach, only taking two extra steps towards me when he was absolutely certain they were necessary.
‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to notice the remains of the price sticker he hadn’t quite managed to remove. There were a bunch of Sainsbury’s bags in the back of his car and my stomach rumbled loudly. Would it be impolite to trade the flowers for a loaf of bread? ‘They’re pretty.’
They weren’t.
‘Least I could do,’ Adam’s words were stilted and uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry about last night, I don’t know what was going on in my head, I must have gone mental from the flight.’
‘You mean about the break thing?’ I asked, concentrating on the bouquet of flowers. Even though he was here to apologize and take it back, having David’s theory proven right hurt. Really hurt. Hurt like I’d been kicked in the stomach by a donkey. That really had happened once and donkeys do not mess about.
‘Um, yes?’ He dug his hands in his pockets, looked at his feet for a moment then peeped back up to see whether or not he was forgiven. ‘Sorry.’
He was not.
‘You’re sorry?’ I asked. He had dumped me. There had been a dumping and I didn’t even know. Standing there, in the car park, phone in one hand, crappy supermarket flowers in the other, I was so close to meltdown. Anything I said or did would be wrong. If I cried I would feel foolish, if I shouted, he would shout back, and if I punched him in the throat, well, in theory I could go to prison but really shouldn’t I get some kind of prize? I didn’t know which was worse, to be angry, crazy or heartbroken, because, in that moment, I was all of the above.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry.’ He gave me a small, handsome smile and lifted his head a little bit more. ‘Uh, so, I know we were supposed to go round to Chris and Cassie’s tonight but Mum’s away and Dad asked if me and Chris would go round there, so I think we’re going to do that instead. Me and Chris, I mean.’
My grip tightened around the stems of the roses and I thanked the supermarket overlords for removing the thorns.
‘What?’
For some bizarre reason, I couldn’t quite seem to get over the part where my boyfriend had dumped me and then magically changed his mind overnight. Turned out it was incredibly hard to forgive something in the past when you had only just found out it happened in the first place. I wasn’t a saint, I wasn’t Beyoncé, more’s the bloody pity.
‘Me and Chris are going to my dad’s for tea,’ he repeated, a smile fully realized on his face, his body easy and relaxed all while a tiny version of me ran around circles in circles inside my brain, screaming at the top of her lungs and drowning out my thought process. ‘So dinner at their house is off. Didn’t Cassie call you?’
That was all he had to say? Sorry I broke up with you, I’m going to my dad’s for tea, here are some shit supermarket flowers now let’s pretend it never happened, cool, OK, bye?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, resting the flowers on the wall and rubbing my shiny, sunburned face with both hands. ‘I think I’ve missed something. What exactly happened last night? What exactly happened in Mexico?’
A wave of tension swept over my boyfriend and he rocked backwards on his heels, tugging on the strings of his hoodie and pushing out his bottom lip.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, kicking the gravel with the toe of his Converse and squeezing his shoulders up around his ears. He did the same thing when I found out he’d eaten all my Jaffa Cakes so at least I was certain he knew how serious this was. ‘It was stupid, I wasn’t thinking. I was just tired, Liv.’
‘Well, it came from somewhere,’ I pointed out, still processing. ‘You must have meant it at the time.’
I could feel my face getting hot, not just hurt, not just angry but consumed by feelings I’d paid no mind to in years. Adam had never made me feel anything other than safe, loved and, very occasionally, mildly irritated but that was only when he shoved Penguin wrappers down the side of the settee. All I wanted to do was go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and pretend this wasn’t happening. Instead I had to resolve it like a grown-up then explain to a sixty-two-year-old man that his cat’s neon pink furballs and the fact he kept forcing it to wear neon pink hand-knitted jumpers were related.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Even though he didn’t look nearly as shit as I did, I could tell by the bags under his eyes he hadn’t got a lot of sleep. As was right and proper. ‘I was pissed off. All that shit on the plane and then you wouldn’t stop talking and I needed some space to calm down.’
All that shit on the plane? Like that was my fault?
‘I was only upset because you were being weird all Monday night,’ I reminded him, sending the heat in my face to fuel the fire in my belly. Rage was better than tears: angry, I could work with. Tired and emotional, I could not. ‘And I’m not the one who caused a scene on the plane.’
‘I’m
