from the get-go he always felt more like a brother to me.
Plus, Alex dated the most beautiful women in the world; there was no way I could ever compete. I didn’t bother trying. He had the most terrible reputation as a heartbreaker, and it was true, he moved through women in the way I move through a box of chocolates—with tremendous speed and purpose, barely stopping to appreciate what I’ve got.
Until he met Sara. Sara was not his type. She was kind of ordinary. Quiet, even. A bit mousy, as tiny as a doll, with a slightly odd, asymmetrical face, and crazy smart. She is a lecturer in political science, and had she been in a roomful of women that I had to pick out for Alex, she might possibly have been the absolute last person I would have chosen. Too short, too ordinary, too … pedestrian. Alex had always been with women who stopped traffic. This woman was almost invisible.
None of it made sense, and I waited for the text to say it was all over and did I know any women to set him up with. It didn’t come.
Alex dropped off the face of the planet with Sara. He wasn’t at parties, or ringing to ask me to TV awards. There was radio silence for a few months, and the next thing I knew, I had received an invitation to his engagement party. His engagement to Sara. The librarian (which is how I have always thought of her in my mind).
Alex the commitment phobe was making a commitment. All those women, those dozens and dozens of women who had sat on my sofa crying, were wrong about him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to make a commitment; it was that he didn’t want to make a commitment to them.
There was nothing wrong with Alex other than that he picked badly, and as soon as he met the right woman, he settled down. Six months ago they had a baby. In his late forties, Alex is happier than he ever thought possible, and no one, none of us, ever thought this would happen to Alex.
It taught me not to make assumptions about people. It taught me not to look at this perfect specimen of manhood sitting in front of me and assume there must be something wrong with him.
I suppress a yawn—oh God! Please stop me yawning!—and look over at Eddie, wondering if it is the same story. Wondering if he has just been waiting for the right woman to settle down. Knowing that it’s highly unlikely that I’m the right woman, but perhaps I could be the woman for right now.
Or perhaps the stirring in my loins, a stirring I haven’t felt for a very long time, can be satisfied by Eddie. Not forever. Just for a holiday fling. I blink and swim back into the conversation, realizing I have no idea what he’s been talking about for the last ten minutes, my mind far away, on Alex, and commitment, and finally, naughtily, deliciously, on sex.
“… so my dad died a few months ago, and it kind of feels like I’ve been set free,” Eddie is saying. “My grief felt much more like relief. It’s why I stayed away from the island for so long. I came back a free man.”
“I felt exactly the same way when my dad died,” I say. “Relief. He wasn’t actually my biological dad, although I didn’t know that until after he died. But that sense of relief, and guilt. I was never what he wanted, he clearly didn’t like or approve of me, yet I’m the one who felt guilty!” I let out a wry smile.
“How could he not approve of you?” Eddie says.
“I was very different from him, not unsurprisingly.”
“But look at you! You’re gorgeous, and successful, and sweet. He must have had a big problem.”
“He did,” I say, but my ears are buzzing. All I can hear is what he just said. I’m gorgeous! Sweet! He, this man to whom I am growing more and more attracted as the minutes tick by, thinks I’m gorgeous! And sweet!
I realize I am high. High on the excitement, the possibility, the flirtation, for that is surely what this is. High on the fact that after all this time, someone as great as this is actually interested in me. Finally!
Abigail comes to the back door and calls me inside.
“Would you mind helping me with this salad?” she asks, sliding a wooden chopping board