Mr Almost Right - By Eleanor Moran Page 0,101

go,’ interrupts Alice. ‘I’m starving.’

How can she possibly be hungry? I suppose she has literally emptied her stomach of its entire contents. I potter around on my own trying not to think about anything too hard. Eventually I swallow down the nausea and get back to the drawing board. My dinner with Tarquin is a mere three days away and I need to focus. I can’t allow myself to be distracted by worrying about Charles. Cautiously pleased with my efforts, I try to call Zelda to solicit her opinion, but there’s no answer from her mobile or landline. The anxiety starts to kick in, but I bat it away. She said she was on the road to recovery, and if there’s one thing I know about Zelda it’s that she’s a straight talker.

Alice comes back about three, immediately rushing up to the bathroom for a merry round of dry heaves.

‘Why’d you put yourself through that?’ I ask her incredulously.

‘Um, I like Emily. She’s a good laugh.’

There’s something insincere about her, but I don’t know quite what. ‘You weren’t just finding an excuse to get out of the house and see Richard?’

‘No!’

‘I can’t stand it if we start lying to each other,’ I plead.

‘Me neither,’ she says, a hint of steeliness to her tone. I know I’m a pot and she’s a kettle, but I’m still frustrated by how defensive she’s being. I try to probe more, but all she’ll fess up to is seeing him for a single drink.

‘I know what you think, Lulu, and I don’t wanna talk about it.’

‘But –’

She silences me with a death stare, then softens the blow by bringing me a cup of tea and a HobNob. I know better than to pry any further: I’ll have to wait until she feels ready to confide. I haven’t even had a chance yet to tell her about Jenna and Ali, but when I do she’s appalled.

‘She’s got no right!’

‘I did tell her I wasn’t interested,’ I say, even though I’m secretly glad she feels that way.

‘No matter, you saw him first!’

‘Yeah, I did, didn’t I?’

‘And you snogged him first,’ she grins broadly, ‘which is so brilliant!’

‘He snogged me. It was virtually a snog rape, except for the fact that I totally enjoyed it.’

‘I knew you would!’ says Alice, pleased with herself. ‘That’s why I invited him. You can’t let him slip through your fingers just because Jenna got her filthy mitts on him for five minutes. I love Jenna, but if we ruled out men on that basis, we might as well head straight for the nearest nunnery.’

‘No, if it was meant to be that wouldn’t have happened. He’s clearly the world’s biggest man slapper. I’m not going to think about it any more.’

‘Because you’re thinking about –’

‘No!’

Amazingly, Alice backs away from the inevitable lecture, but instead we’re left with a sticky undercurrent, as we both obsess about what the other is holding back. Maybe we should’ve just stayed hanging out in the womb, sucking our thumbs in companionable silence with no men coming between us. If they really are from Mars, perhaps they should all just take an express rocket right back there.

Charles certainly hasn’t been banished to an alternative planet. He’s back in Oxfordshire, in the location where we first started, which is where I head to first thing Monday. I’m heartened to see crocuses starting to poke through the grass, heralding the arrival of spring. So much has happened since we kicked off in the freezing cold.

With only two weeks to go, I’m either going to lose him forever or something quite the opposite. My first sight of him is every bit as hard as I expected, but I do feel a certain inner poise that I’ve always had to fake up until now. He seems way more rattled than me, fiddling with his phone and stumbling over a simple hello. I know my position is the right one and it allows me to be professionally friendly, rather than a needy mess. I refuse to start reading too much into his behaviour; our future is out of my hands and there’s a certain liberation in that.

Besides, there’s way too much to deal with for me to be locking myself in the caravan, mentally rocking. But not being made of Teflon means that Tarquin’s relayed request that I meet him on-set exactly when Emily and Charles are giving it their romantic all is far from welcome. Make-up and hair are fiddling around with Emily,

readonlinefreenovel.com Copyright 2016 - 2024