I’m from London. We just moved here.
Hope me finding this means you win some sort of prize!!!
Well done to you and ur balloon.
Lucas x
PS: I hope you’re okay.
* * *
“Just that he’d found my balloon in Boulogne-sur-Mer,” I tell Marie, “and that he’d just moved there. I was so excited when I got that email. Honestly. Having French roots and everything. I couldn’t believe it.” I don’t say anything else, or how I clicked on it on a computer in Mrs. Beech’s geography class while hiding from the other kids at lunchtime, tears streaking my cheeks. And I don’t tell her that Lucas’s P.S. was like a gentle, wordless hug that morning when I opened my inbox. In that moment, this stranger across the ocean—Balloon Boy as he jokingly called himself after that—was the only person who cared in the whole world.
“It’s amazing,” Marie sighs dreamily. “He told me you sent him DVDs and jars of food.”
I laugh. “Yes. Marmite. Tesco’s own brand of fizzy sweets. Anything he missed from home.”
“And did he send you French food back?”
“No,” I say. “No, he actually sent CDs back.”
“CDs?”
“Mix CDs that he’d make. Music.”
“Oh God.” Marie laughs, hand touching my forearm on the table. “You poor thing. My fiancé’s taste in music leaves a lot to be desired, do you not think?”
“Really? Well, maybe he’s lost his talent,” I say. “Okay, occasionally the odd Jason Donovan slipped through the net, but his choices were not bad at all back then. He introduced me to loads of songs and bands I’d never heard of.”
Marie laughs again. “I dread our wedding playlist.”
“Oh, well, I’ll keep him reeled in,” I tell her, and she leans across the little round table, her eyes on mine. “I know you will,” she says sweetly, then she pauses, her eyes still on mine, her smile fading slightly. “He seems happy. Do you think?”
It makes me swallow, the way she asks me. I recognize something in her eyes. Worry. Unease. “Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
“You know him more than anyone; he tells me that. And…” Marie reaches for her coffee but doesn’t drink. A prop, I think, for her nervous hands. I feel my heart start to thump in my chest. Is she going to ask me? Is she going to ask me if I have feelings for him, if I think he has feelings for me? “I have had no luck, Emmie,” she says eventually. “I am thirty-four and I have had my heart broken enough for you, me, and everyone in this café.” She smiles at me sadly, eyes shining. “And Lucas. Well, with Lucas, I know we have stopped and started a lot, our silly arguments, distrust, but I feel like it is different this time. And I know that’s cliché, that everyone probably says that…” She pauses, looks up at me, and for a moment I think she’s going to tell me she can hear the loud drumming of my heart; ask me why it’s beating so hard. But instead she says, “I am so happy. I’m engaged. Lucas wants to marry me. Me. He has chosen no other person ever in his life to propose to. To marry. And… it feels…”
“Too good to be true,” I say. I hardly realize there are tears in my eyes until I speak, and my words are thick, wobbly. Holly, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, flashes into my mind too, momentarily. Lucas was engaged to her when he was twenty. But they were kids then. It lasted mere moments, really. But I do wonder if Marie knows.
“Yes,” says Marie. “That is it, Emmie. You understand. I am so happy that I am terrified.”
It isn’t a question, but I nod. “I do get it,” I say quietly. “I really do.”
Marie looks at me, laughs, brings a knuckle to her eye. “Gosh, I am sorry. I cry at everything, my father says. Do not let that rub off on you.”
I smile, tell her not to apologize, and although my appetite is now nonexistent, chased away by the heart that plummeted moments ago and now sits heavy and sad in my gut, we begin eating again.
“I cannot wait for you to see the hotel tonight, Emmie,” says Marie after a while. “And their bar; the best cocktails. The best dancing. It won awards, you know, for the music, the ambience…”
“The best dancing,” I repeat. “You do realize Tom is going? I’m afraid after tonight, it may be stripped of its awards.”
Marie bursts out laughing, neat, manicured hand at her mouth, and says, “Have you seen him do the hips?”
“Yes,” I say. “Many times. And he hasn’t even improved. I first saw Tom dance when Lucas and I turned eighteen, and I swear, it’s gotten worse since then, if that’s possible. I hope he leaves his hips safely in his hotel room tonight.”
Marie leans in and whispers, “And the rest of him.”
* * *
I feel out of place. I am in a dress I’ve had for five years that’s been sewn twice at the armpit, and I have thirty euros in my purse; the price of one of the most expensive cocktails on the menu. I couldn’t help but notice the wedge of notes in Lucas’s wallet when he got the first round in, and I had tried not to be a part of it. To accept a drink is to owe a drink, and I doubt a soul in our group is on tap water.
We have commandeered a booth with velvet seats and a hanging orb of a lamp in the center of the table. Eliot and Ana (who has yet to say a word to me since we arrived at the hotel’s bar) sit snuggled in the corner, his arm around her, and I sit in the opposite corner beside Lucas, with Marie on his other side, who is in a fast and smiling conversation with Tom, who is sweaty from the dance floor.
Lucas throws his arm around me and squeezes me against him. He can always tell when I feel uneasy, or nervous, because every time, along comes that strong arm and that squeeze. The arm, protection, the squeeze, a wordless Everything’s okay. I’m here, right next to you. It was mostly after our nineteenth birthday when I needed it the most. A night Lucas, Eliot, and I had looked forward to for weeks—a house party. A huge inflatable swimming pool. A barbecue. Cocktails made at Jean’s bar. A night we counted down to. A night that ended up driving a wedge between me, Lucas, and Eliot. The two people that knew everything about me, because I trusted them with it. And I shouldn’t have. Eliot betrayed it. In one stupid moment that ended up throwing me miles backward, sent me toppling. I dropped out of college, moved to Shire Sands, into a new flat in a new town that felt alien, but at least it was far from everything and everyone I knew. And I’d get through it, I was sure, because of Lucas. His arm around me. My head against his chest, his lips against my hair, listening to the strong, dependable beats of his heart.
“Hey,” he speaks into my ear now, whiskey on his breath. “Where you at, Emmie Blue?”
I look up at him. “In a bar,” I say over the music. “With Tom’s offensive hips.”
Lucas laughs, crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
The bar is heaving. When Lucas mentioned the bar of the five-star Le Touquet hotel he is to be married in, I expected a tinkling piano and 1920s light shades. I didn’t expect this. It reminds me of a London bar on a Saturday night. Ears ringing from the layers and layers of music and chatter of hundreds of voices dying to be heard above it, the clinking glasses and bottles. The lights are low, and behind the bar are glowing blue panels, casting the white-shirt-wearing bar staff deep lilac, as if they’re standing under UV lights. It’s dark and the air smells like perfume and wine. People are dancing, too, on the minuscule dance floor, and Tom is getting up from beside Marie now and heading back there, to where he’s been most of the night, dancing as if he has a family of live eels trapped in his underpants.