And he wasn’t going to be able to change his flight at all given that he didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spare for a first-class Christmas Eve flight. Well, now he thought about it, that was probably for the best. In fact, it definitely was. What had he been thinking? Evie would probably have felt mortified if he’d just scarpered. Far better to stay here and laugh the whole thing off with her as soon as possible. And he was going home on Boxing Day anyway. Only forty-eight hours to go.
Five
Now – Christmas Eve 2021
Evie
The water was so cold.So bloody cold. Evie was going to freeze to death.Whyhad she on autopilot shampooed her hair?Why? And why had the water gone so quickly from manageable to tepid to painfully freezing just after she’d rubbed all the shampoo in?
Her headache was getting better, though. Maybe she should tell Dan about this. No need for paracetamol, just take a freezing shower.
Dan. Gaaah. It was going to be so embarrassing seeing him later. Sleeping with someone you’d known and liked for so many years was completely different from sleeping with someone you’d met recently.
Soembarrassing, especially given how extremely vocal she remembered having been last night about how much she was enjoying things. She was pretty sure she was blushing just thinking about it. To be fair, he’d been pretty vocal too, even if he hadn’t seemed that happy this morning.
She took the hand-held shower attachment off the wall and turned her head upside down to wash the shampoo out of the underneath of her hair.
Ow, ow, ow, freezing. It was like the water was stabbing her. Why had she even had a shower here, actually? It was because Dan had mentioned it, so she’d just hopped in. She was too suggestible. She should have just dragged her clothes on and gone back to her actual hotel where all her stuff was.
She screeched as the water got even colder, if that were possible. So unpleasant. Not as unpleasant as her thoughts, though.
She was basically Rachel fromFriends. She was thirty today and she had a broken engagement and a failed one-night marriage under her belt. How. Bloody. Ridiculous.
And, again, embarrassing. How was she going to face Dan later? She kind of wanted to just jump on a plane and escape home today. No, she was being ridiculous. She and the others had all saved up for this trip for over a year, and she couldn’t leave. And this had just been a one-night stand – only with a marriage thrown in. And the fact that it had been with her best friend’s brother, who was her long-term crush. But no-one knew that. It would be fine. They’d be a bit red-faced around each other briefly and then that would be that; they’d move on and Evie would accept thatclearlythey’d never really been going to come good on their fallback pact.
Right. It was too cold to carry on washing shampoo out of her hair. She was going to leave it, towel it dry as it was, walk-of-shame herself back to her hotel and have a nice hot shower there.
Last night’s clothes back on, she folded the velour bedspread that Dan had wrapped himself in this morning into four and placed it at the bottom of the bed. The staff were obviously going to strip the bed, but she could never actually bring herself to leave a hotel room anything other than tidy.
There was something on the floor half under the bed. She bent down to pick it up. Dan’s boxers. Black, stretchy trunks, which she remembered had fitted himverywell. They were nice ones, Calvin Kleins, but no way was she going to give them back to him. That would be one step too far on the rising-above-their-one-night-stand thing. She took them into the bathroom and binned them.
Right. Time to go.
Except – disaster – she had no idea how to get back to her own hotel. No. It was fine. She could Google-Map it.
She opened the clutch that she’d brought with her and took her phone out.
It was stone-cold dead.
Okay, not a problem. They’d be able to give her directions at the hotel reception downstairs.
‘Yeah, we can’t help with directions. Where’s your newhusband?’ Susan looked around the hotel foyer like Dan might be hiding behind one of the large pot plants, or the cardboard Elvis.
‘Not really my husband. Just a drunken joke.’ Evie winced as she said it, even to a woman who she’d only met briefly last night and who she would never see again. And who wasmean.
Susan shook her head sorrowfully. ‘You seemed great together,’ she said. ‘I thought you were one of the for-real couples. Anyway, yeah, I can’t help you. I’m very busy.’ She picked up an emery board and started filing her nails. ‘I can offer you a charger so you can use your phone. Five dollars for fifteen minutes.’ She pointed her nail file in the direction of a charger hanging out of the wall beyond the desk.
‘Right. Thank you,’ Evie said, actually mildly impressed at Susan’s hard-nosed business instincts. To be fair, right now she’d have paid a lot more than five dollars to get her phone working.
Evie plugged the phone in and sat down on the floor next to it, put her arms round her knees and closed her eyes. The positive physical effects of her cold shower had worn off. Now she felt sick, headachy and tired, and really miserable, and she just wantedsomuchto be back in her own hotel room.
Gaaah. Her alarm was going off. No, it wasn’t her alarm, but it was definitely her phone making that noise. Oh, okay, she’d nodded off and, now that the phone was slightly charged, about a billion messages and calls had pinged through. Probably birthday messages. She wasn’t going to read them right now. She was too hungover and shellshocked about last night to have the capacity to send lots ofThank youreplies at the moment.
‘Your phone charged enough yet? You gonna call your husband? Try to patch things up?’ Susan’s cackle wasloud.
Evie rolled her eyes, which hurt her head, and typed her hotel’s name into Google Maps, which told her that it was only a fifteen-minute walk from here. Yesssss.
It was the most immense relief to get back to her actual room in her actual hotel. Evie put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the handle outsideanddouble-locked the door, put her phone – still without having read any of her messages – on her charger and then sank down into the room’s armchair.
