‘Does it matter?’ Sam asked.
‘It matters to me,’ she replied, retaining the lightness in her voice. ‘But no bother.’ She turned to me with a massive grin. ‘Jess is a good excuse to eat out anyway. I want to hear everything.’ Would she, Sam? Would she want to hear everything? Sam looked more uncomfortable by the second. I wasn’t going to rescue him.
‘Did you want to eat out, Jess? We know some really nice places, our treat.’ Jamie smiled in my direction. Did she really need to look like that? I looked down at my borrowed silk pyjamas, pushing my towel-dry hair from my make-up-less face. As much as I would love to be taken out to dinner with my ex-boyfriend and his nice-as-pie girlfriend, I really couldn’t stomach it – the company, not the food; I could stomach the food, I was starving. I looked down at my phone. It was half past seven. Somewhere between Woolies and our walk, a part of me had begun to hope I’d be too distracted by Sam by now to be hungry for anything but him. And yet here I was being invited to dine across from Jamie, so he could really see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of girlfriends past and present. Swallowing my stupidity, I looked towards their eager expressions, the fridge now closed and non-organic produce and their domestic bickering safely locked away. Was it too early to call it a night?
‘I think, actually,’ I said, ‘as long as it’s okay with you, I might just go to bed. It’s been… quite the day.’
Quite the day? What twenty-seven-year-old in their right mind says, ‘Quite the day?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Sam, a little too quickly.
‘No worries. Now, you take this,’ she said, extending a small silver key in my direction. ‘Come and go as you please. The Wi-Fi code is stuck on the fridge and the Mac doesn’t have a password. Help yourself to anything in the cupboards. We’ll probably be up for a little longer.’ She looked at her chunky designer watch. ‘Yeah – we’ll defo be up for a bit.’ She smiled, her big display of hospitality somehow making me feel even smaller. ‘But here’s my number, just drop us a message if we’re being too loud.’ My mind instantly wandered to the many ways they could keep me up at night, none of them good – for me at least. ‘Or if you change your mind, feel free to join us.’ Cue even more outrageous images.
‘That’s okay,’ I replied quickly. ‘I’ll be out like a light the second my head hits the pillow.’ I yawned at the thought. ‘Thanks again for having me.’ I looked from Jamie to Sam and back again, trying not to vomit or cry. ‘I really appreciate it.’
‘Oh, stop.’ Jamie raised a manicured hand in my direction. ‘Like I said. Any friend of Sam’s is a friend of mine.’ Sam tried to catch my eye, but I looked away.
If only she knew, I thought, heading into the spare bedroom. If only she knew.
The room was every bit as gorgeous as the rest of the apartment. White, light and bright – just like the living room, with a large surf-blue bedspread and shabby-chic wooden tables on either side of the bed, piled high with Sam’s magazines. A used surfboard hung on the wall, a single crack running from end to end. I reached up to run my fingers from one side to the other, letting my nails move into the etched ‘S’ on the board’s tail. Sam looked great on a surfboard. A bolt of longing shot across my chest. This was ridiculous. I rallied all the perspective I could muster. Sam wasn’t mine. He hadn’t been mine for years. And I’d had relationships since ours, some more serious than others (tequila-housemate nights falling very much under ‘others’) but I had always kind of thought – always kind of hoped – that our paths would somehow forge back together. It had never felt like the end. And here I was. In their home. Sam was not mine. He would never be again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at the surfboard, I bit back the tears. I wouldn’t cry again, not here, not with the two of them on the other side of the door doing God knows what – shut up, brain, shut up.
Flinging my body back to lie on the bed, I let Jamie’s Egyptian cotton sheets please and patronise me in equal measure. My stomach groaned, and I longed for more than Sam. My head now sinking into a foot of goose feathers, I rolled onto one side to be confronted with a picture of the two of them that Jamie hadn’t thought to take down – why would she? She thought we were just friends. We were just friends – the kind who had seen each other naked and yet hadn’t seen each other for years. The kind who had planned a future that only one of us had managed to make. Together they stared out of the frame, Sam’s hand extended to the back of the camera while his other clutched Jamie around her tiny waist. If only this one had been in the living room, I might have known not to stay, but then Sam had insisted; why on earth would he want me here? Unless he really did just think of me as a friend now. I looked at the photo again. Just like in the one of Sam and Joshua, they were both wearing wetsuits, pulled down to their middles, the sand and sea caught in the background. That was Sydney. It just wasn’t my Sydney, I thought, switching the light to black, my mind sifting through all the next moves I could make to rectify my second start all over again. As I turned onto the cold side of the bed I berated the tiny bit of my heart hoping that second start could still be ours.
18 September 2012 – Nottingham, England ]
‘Can you paint me like one of DiCaprio’s French girls?’ Sam lay on his side across the length of my bed, his slim-cut jeans straining to bend, his strong legs visible within them.
‘I guess, but my French girls stay still.’ My eyes, like my tone, told him to stop moving for the umpteenth time. I looked down at the sketchpad in my hands, not sure how me teaching him to draw had turned into me studying his profile, but not entirely unhappy about it. I used the length of my pencil to measure the gap between his eyes, the length of his light laughter lines down to his lips, the symmetry of his mouth – a mouth that for all of our drunken moments was yet to be on mine. I pushed my pencil into the page lightly, then harder, darker, building depth with every sketch, trying to capture something of him.
‘So, I’m not allowed to talk at all?’ Sam mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Not even to ask you what the hell happened with Zoe and Austin the other night?’
I narrowed my eyes, trying to be quiet, zen, but powerless not to take the bait.
‘I think everyone in the bar knew what happened that night.’ I laughed, recalling images of the two of them, bound together, as I’d looked at Sam and hoped for the same. Maybe we are in the friend zone? I wondered for a moment, but the look caught by my pencil told me that wasn’t the case.
‘So, what now?’ Sam mumbled again, a cute ventriloquist – for my entertainment only.
‘Nothing,’ I said, lifting my head intermittently to capture the contours of his face, forcing my eyes to remain above his neck. ‘Zoe doesn’t do relationships.’ I looked at him, as Sam rolled his eyes: why does that not surprise me? ‘Not like that, she just doesn’t want to settle down, she has her… reasons.’ My look dared him to challenge me. We’d only known each other for a few days, but Zoe’s secrets were safe with me. People had told me so much about university, exactly what to expect. But they’d never told me of bonds born so quickly and yet built to last, of the intensity of spending every waking moment together: sharing your breakfast with the people who shared your night.