“Why? Are you going to sit on my sofa and suggest a threesome?”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I just mean . . . you still don’t know me very well. It’s an empty house. I know you don’t want to be on your own, but I don’t want to make you feel . . . worse.”
Maybe she would. But if there was one thing Rosaline had learned over the past few weeks, it was that second-guessing her own instincts and emotions got her nowhere. “How about we try it and see how it goes?”
“All right. Just making sure it’s what you wanted.”
“Yes,” she said as she put her key in the lock. “It is. I’m going to try this new thing where, if I want something, I’m honest with myself about it.”
She flicked on the hall light and led the way into the living room, turning the light on in there as well, and the light in the kitchen. It wasn’t like anyone was lurking in her fridge ready to jump out and make her bang an interior designer, but she wasn’t in the mood for things to be dark right now.
“Cup of . . . something?” she asked as Harry lowered himself slightly gingerly onto the sofa. “It’s probably a bit late for tea.”
“Glass of water’d be fine.”
“I think I’ve got some Horlicks?”
That made him grin. “Go on then. I haven’t had it since I was ten.”
“Yeah, Amelie’s best friend has it before she goes to sleep so Amelie wanted to have it as well. But she tried it once and decided it was horrible and now it’s hanging out sadly in my cupboard.”
“It is a bit weird, init? Like drinking the inside of a Malteser. Which, now I think about it, makes sense on account of how it’s a malt drink.”
“What even is malt?” asked Rosaline.
“It’s a type of marm, init?”
Laughing, she ducked into the kitchen and put the kettle on. And a couple of minutes later she emerged bearing two mugs of creamy beige liquid that immediately filled the room with the smell of bedtime.
“Thanks, mate.” Harry took his drink and blew some of the steam off the top. He waited a moment as Rosaline tucked herself next to him, and then continued, “How you holding up, then?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m honestly fine. Maybe even a little relieved because all the time we were together it was like I was trying to prove something to him, or to myself, or to my parents. And now I don’t have to and actually I never had to and that . . . that’s pretty great?”
“I’ll drink to that.”
They clunked their mugs together clumsily because Horlicks was not a beverage designed for toasting. It also wasn’t as calming as the adverts made it sound. In fact, Rosaline was starting to think Amelie might have been onto something when she’d said it tasted like sand and old people.
Silence settled between them. And it should have been a cosy silence, because what was cosier than Horlicks, but Rosaline was . . . well. She hadn’t lied when she’d told Harry she was fine. She was fine. She was just . . . jumbly, as if her whole life was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put away in the wrong box, so she’d been trying to make a picture of a sunset with pieces that were meant to be a cow. And while the prospect of no longer trying to build a skyline out of hooves was enough to make her genuinely giddy—like when she’d been running through some poor farmer’s field with Anvita and Harry—she was also on the verge of resentful.
Deeply, deeply resentful.
Not because of Alain. Because of everything. Everything she’d overlooked and ignored and missed out on. Even when it was staring her right in the face.
And what . . . what if it was already too late?
“Whoa, mate”—Harry was hastily putting his Horlicks on the floor—“what you doing?”
And it was at that point Rosaline realised she’d tried to kiss him.
“Sorry. Sorry.” Oh God, was she Liv? “I . . . I know this a fucked-up situation, but I think you maybe . . . and I maybe . . . and so I . . .”
For a long, long, really long time, Harry said nothing at all.
And then he stood up. “I think I should probably go.”
“Shit. Sorry. You don’t have—Shit. I’ve been an utter ballsack, haven’t I?”
“You ain’t, mate. It’s just.” He drew in the kind of breath he drew in when Colin Thrimp insisted he have a feeling about his baking. “Look, you know I like . . . like you and that. But I don’t reckon you’d like me very much if I . . . went along with what you was trying just now. What with everything that happened.”
He was right. He was probably right. But she didn’t like he was right. “So, what. One bloke tries to get me to have a threesome I don’t want and I lose my ability to know my own mind?”
“What? No?” He rubbed the back of his neck in a slightly tormented way. “You’ve had a drink and a scare and it wouldn’t be right.”
“You don’t get to make that call for me.”
“No, but I get to make it for me.”
The double whammy of sexual assault and rejection was not doing wonders for Rosaline’s self-esteem.
“Look,” Harry went on, in that slow, steady way he had when things were important to him. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do or that you can’t make your own choices. Thing is, though, I don’t want to be the rebound guy. Or the bloke you hook up with to make yourself better because another bloke was shitty to you.”
“You’re not,” she protested. “I know circumstantially it looks like that. But . . . but I really have always liked you. Well, I’ve always fancied you. And then I liked you. And then I liked and fancied you. And now I think I’ve lost you.”
“You ain’t lost nothing, mate. It’s just right here and right now it don’t work for me.” He took another deep breath. “’Cos if something did happen with you and me, I’d want it to be something what could work out. You know, long-term-like. And when you’re trying to win a show, and you just got out of another thing, and you’re making all these changes in your life, that ain’t how long-term starts.”
Okay. So it turned out you couldn’t make yourself an entirely new person over the course of a two-hour van ride. Because while she had the right to be free and confident and happy, someone who made impulsive sexual decisions while slightly drunk wasn’t the Rosaline she wanted to be. It was the Rosaline Alain had tried to make her into.
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. I’m sorry I . . .”
He made a reassuring It’s nothing gesture. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve had a day.”
“And I haven’t . . . We’re still friends, right?”
“Course, mate. I probably should be pushing off, though.”
She still didn’t want to be alone. But it was time to be. “Thanks again. I’ll see you . . . God. It’s Friday. Later today I suppose?”
“I can still run you home on the Sunday if you want?”
“Are you sure that wouldn’t be weird?”
“Not if you don’t want it to be.”
It was a little bit amazing, how straightforward Harry could make things sound and how willing she was to believe he was right. There was power in it, she was starting to realise. Living in a world where you got to choose what mattered. And with time, and work, and perhaps a tiny bit of therapy, maybe she could have that too.