It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,59

spambot.

My father will die alone, and my mother will marry a man who uses cheap printer ink as a seduction tool.

And now I also have to consider the fact that Eric texted my mother three times within an hour of dinner finishing. Either he is a stalker or I should definitely be freaking out that I haven’t heard from Alex in thirty-four hours.

Or both things could be true. Eric is a stage-five clinger, and Alex is ghosting me.

After her shower, Mum comes into my room in her bathrobe, combing her damp hair. I’m not fast enough putting my phone down, so she knows I’m not asleep.

‘Let’s talk,’ she says, lying down on the bed beside me. She is a big believer in never going to bed angry, which really gets in the way of my desire to hold petty grudges and stew on things at 3am instead of sleeping.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ I say.

‘How was your time at Zach’s?’

‘Fine.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Not much.’

‘Natalie.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Give me nothing answers.’

There was a period of time, when I was in my early teens, when Mum and Dad banned me from saying ‘nothing much’ and ‘fine’ in response to questions about my day. I had to think of something interesting to say. Sometimes I just made things up to appease them. Sometimes I would research random facts, because I knew if I said, ‘In Switzerland, it’s illegal to own just one guinea pig,’ then Dad would be completely distracted by that information and they would both forget to ask any more questions about my day.

But I don’t have any random facts on hand tonight, and Mum was never as easy to distract as Dad anyway.

‘Fine. Let me see. I went to the beach, I got sunburnt, we watched some movies, and I kissed Alex.’

A part of me has been bursting to tell Mum this, because I want to shock her and show her how she doesn’t know as much about me as she thinks she does. I guess you’ve been so busy dating other men, you can’t keep up with my life anymore.

I also want to tell her because we haven’t been talking as much lately and I am scared we are going to drift apart, that maybe she’ll fall out of love with me in the same way she did with Dad, which is ridiculous because parents don’t fall out of love with their kids, but maybe they do and no one talks about it.

‘You…what?’ Mum says. She sounds as shocked as I was hoping she would.

‘I kissed Alex, Zach’s brother.’

Mum sits up a little and turns to me. ‘When?’

‘We were hanging out and it just happened.’ I shrug, trying to look nonchalant.

‘Do you like him?’ Mum’s eyes are lit up with excitement and also slight panic. This must be what I looked like when Lucy told me she’d had sex.

‘Well, I kissed him.’

‘I thought you liked his friend, Owen.’

‘No.’ I scrunch up my nose.

‘But you said in the car—’

‘That was ages ago.’

‘It was a week ago!’

‘Well it feels like ages ago.’

‘I guess I can’t keep up with your love-life anymore,’ Mum says.

‘Well, I just told you the biggest thing that has ever happened to my love-life, so consider yourself all caught up.’

‘Honey, this is…this is great. I’m excited for you. We’re excited, right?’ She’s looking at my face, trying to gauge my feelings. I’m not giving her much.

‘It’s semi-exciting,’ I say. I mean, it’s nice to have one person in my life excited by Alex and me, but she’s excited for the wrong reasons, and her excitement is like an alarm bell. Ding, ding, ding, sad desperate Natalie should be over the moon that anyone is paying attention to her.

‘I should meet him.’

‘Mum. Calm down. You definitely don’t need to meet him.’

‘You could invite him over for dinner.’

‘I’m absolutely not doing that.’

‘Not now, obviously. Next week or the week after.’

Oh god, she’s going to suggest a golfing double-date with Eric next. ‘We might not even be a thing next week,’ I say.

‘What kind of thing are you now?’

‘The smallest thing possible, too small to even classify. We’re seeing where things go. Which is nowhere, since I haven’t heard from him since yesterday.’

‘Why don’t you text him?’

Very easy for her to say, a woman who’s just had three texts from the man she left a couple of hours ago. Her eyes are bright, and I can see her next thought will be to help me decide what to write