“Yes.” Lucas grins. “Basically vinegar. Sublime shit, that stuff.”
“We get it at the hotel.”
Lucas’s head swings round, his eyes just visible over the tops of his sunglasses. “Seriously? I thought it was a five-star place.”
“Four,” I say. “But the ketchup is still as cheap as they can get it. Two years and it just gets more neon as the weeks go by.”
Lucas laughs, hand outstretching to land on the small of my back so to weave me around a group of teenagers, windsurfing boards under their arms, walking toward us on the pavement. It’s moments like this that I understand why people in the past have mistaken us for a couple. Lucas always plays up to it when it happens.
“Two years have flown,” says Lucas. “Is it totally shit?” He drops his hand again as they pass. “I mean, are you bored?”
“Of the job?” I ask. “No, it’s good. I mean, I definitely didn’t expect to be there two years later, but the people are really nice. I did sign up to an agency last month, though.”
“That’s great,” says Lucas.
“It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. But it’s just—”
“It’s waitressing at a hotel?”
And I don’t know why, but the way he says it feels like a punch to the chest. It makes me feel shrunken down, like a speck, here in this beautiful place, next to Lucas in his designer shirt, he newly engaged, weeks past signing one of the biggest projects his firm has ever signed.
“No,” I say shortly. “I was actually going to say, I’d like a little more money. I’d like to be able to afford my own flat again.”
“Ah. ’Course,” he says, nodding, eyes to the floor. “But you’ll get something better, Em. You’ve got loads of experience in admin after all your years at the photo studio. And I can always talk to Dad.”
“About what?”
Lucas shrugs, hands back in his pockets. “Well, he has tons of friends in London who have their own firms. I’m sure if I sent your CV to Dad, he could make some calls.”
“I don’t really want to go into London, Luke.”
Lucas’s brow crumples. “Why?”
“I don’t think I’d be able to hack commuting every day,” I say. “I’m not sure that’s me.”
“So waitressing at a hotel is you, then, or—”
“Oh my god.” I stop on the pavement outside an open-fronted busy café, and freeze. “Listen.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
I gesture with a hand. “This song. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this in public anywhere. Don’t you remember?”
I do. I remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time. The CD arrived one morning before I left for college (in exchange for the six bags of Milky Way Magic Stars I’d posted to Lucas a fortnight before), and I listened to it on the bus there, on my Discman, the sun beating through the murky window, heating my skin. I had two classes that day with Georgia and her friends—the girl and the constantly smirking two boys—but I listened to it on repeat all day. That CD carried me through. Like arms around me, like a hand squeezing mine, reminding me I wasn’t alone in the world.
Lucas smiles at me, puzzled, and slowly shakes his head. “You’ve lost me, Em.”
“Seriously? You put it on one of the CDs. The Dear Balloon Girl CDs.”
“Oh. God, ’course. Yeah,” he laughs, then he taps his finger to my forehead. “You and your elephant memory. No doubt you know the—”
“Volume two, track five,” I say, and Lucas smiles. “Knew it,” he says.
* * *
Mix CD. Vol 2.
Dear Balloon Girl,
Track 1. Because your dad was probably in Whitesnake
Track 2. Because you snort when you laugh
Track 3. Because you said you’d never heard of this one
Track 4. Because none of what happened to you is your fault
Track 5. Because I should have asked you to dance in Berck
Balloon Boy
X
It was here, in Amanda and Jean Moreau’s kitchen, that I realized I was in love with Lucas. It was six years ago, two weeks before Christmas, and we had been out for dinner and drinks with Lucas’s friend from work. The friend was leaving to start his own business and had found out after years of IVF that he and his wife were expecting a baby. He gave a speech in a private room he’d hired out in a local bar and Lucas had translated parts of it for me afterward, saying, “Listen up, Paul McCartney, you might learn something here.”
We’d taken a taxi home, giggly but not drunk, and there was a thunderstorm so bad, we let ourselves into his parents’ house, not wanting to stay out in it a minute longer to walk the tiny but torrential distance to the bottom of the garden to the guest cottage. We whispered, tiptoed our way around the huge, dimly lit kitchen like teenagers home too late, laughing, shushing each other, making coffee, and trying not to rustle the packets of cookies Lucas pulled from the cupboard in case we woke his parents.
At the black marble of the breakfast bar, we’d hunched, opposite each other, hair wet, cheeks flushed with cold, and I watched him sip, and eat, and look over at me, gray eyes and golden lashes, the spattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and I felt it. This tug. This sickening pull in my stomach, like nausea, like excitement and fear all balled into one fizzing, burning orb in my gut. And it threw me. I was standing right there, opposite him, in the calm of the kitchen, rain battering the windows, but the realization felt like I’d been flung across the room. I knew. I knew right then.
He smiled at me, powder-blue shirt speckled with raindrops. “Where you at, Emmie Blue?”
“Nowhere.” I swallowed, the dead silence of the house intimidating, goading me to tell him. “Nothing.”
“You sure?”
I nodded once, hesitated. “That… speech,” I’d said instead, hands cradling my mug. “Patrice’s wife, when she cried. I keep thinking about it.”
Lucas put his coffee mug down, forearms leaning on the counter, hands balled together, the silver watch at his wrist tapping on the marble. “The poetic, soppy bit. About how they met?”
“Yeah,” I said. “About how they knew each other as kids yet it took them twenty years to find each other again.”
“Yep.” Lucas smiled warmly, light catching in his eyes. “And two marriages. Imagine that. You’ve already met the person you’re meant to be with by the time you’re twelve, but it takes you twenty years to realize it. Depressing in a way.”
“But worth the wait.”
He’d nodded, eyes fixed on me. And in that moment, for the first time in our whole friendship—of sleeping beside each other, of passing towels through ajar bathroom doors, of meeting my boyfriends and his girlfriends—opposite him on that counter, I felt too close to him to bear. Because I knew I loved him; had always loved him. And there was no way I could tell him.
Seven weeks later I met Adam, who quickly became my boyfriend, and three weeks after that, Lucas had started dating a woman at work. And I was relieved, really. It was an excuse to say nothing. To push it down, as if it were something shoved to the back of a wardrobe, closing the door quickly, before it had a chance to jump back out at me again. And it worked, at least for a little while. Adam numbed the longing; distracted me from having to look properly at the feelings that tumbled free from somewhere inside me, that rainy night at the kitchen counter.