‘I’m not a nervous passenger,’ Matt told her. ‘Just a rational one.’ You definitely wouldn’t choose Carole to drive you along a winding mountain road, for example.
As they bounced back down towards the beach where all the others were, Matt caught a flash of purple as some women rounded a corner in the road. Had that been Lily? Actually wearing the strange purple thing that she’d had over her head? Could well have been. There was every chance they’d bump into each other several times on this tiny island. They hadn’t seen each other a single time in London since they split up but the population of London had to be several thousand times that of Antiparos.
‘Matt? Matty?’
Matt looked back round at Carole.
‘You didn’t hear a word that I said, did you?’ She smiled at him good-naturedly. ‘Million miles away?’
‘Oops, yes, sorry,’ he said. Carole had always known when they were lying when they were kids, and he was pretty sure things wouldn’t be any different now.
‘I was asking if you’d seen Tess yet.’
‘No, not yet. Bumped into two of her bridesmaids in a shop this morning but that’s the closest I’ve come to her.’ Odd to talk about Lily as Tess’s bridesmaid rather than as herself, the funny, gorgeous, vibrant, heartbreaking individual – who he clearly hadn’t known as well as he’d thought he had – that she was.
Turned out he still really wanted to know what had actually gone wrong between them. Maybe he should just ask her if he got the opportunity. This unfinished business thing was not healthy.
‘Matty. You’re paying no attention whatsoever to me.’
‘Sorry?’ he said. He pushed thoughts of Lily away and grinned at Carole.
‘I could never resist that smile.’ She took her right hand off the steering wheel to reach up to ruffle his hair and they lurched to the left and Matt let out a yelp. ‘Stop it. You’re far too nervous a passenger. Come on, let’s get you back. I hope you’re going to be concentrating harder on your architect plans than on my conversation.’
Matt re-joined the rest of the stags on the beach late afternoon for a raucous volleyball tournament.
Midway through a game, he caught a swing of a blonde ponytail as a couple of women strolled past them along the water’s edge. Was that Lily? He turned to look, irritated beyond belief as he did so by the fact that he knew that he shouldn’t but he couldn’t help it. And that his heart rate had quickened a little.
No, not her.
Oof. The ball had just hit him hard on the back of his shoulder.
‘Mate,’ Carlton, one of Tom’s friends, yelled, ‘what were youdoing? The game’s this way, not in the bloody sea.’ Yup.
Lily and the others weren’t in the same bar or restaurant that Matt’s group went to that evening and, by the next morning, Matt was only keeping an eye out for her maybe fifty per cent of the time – a big improvement.
Piling ham and cheese onto his plate at breakfast time, he remembered hotel breakfasts with her. She’d had a very strong belief that eating meat for breakfast was just plainwrong, like an aberration – her stomach just couldn’t deal with that kind of food first thing – much how he felt about the way she sometimes used to like an evening in pyjamas with a bowl of cereal and chocolate for her dinner. She was the only person he’d ever met who’d never had a full English breakfast even once. He wondered if she’d be having what had been her usual – croissant followed by Greek yoghurt and fruit – or if she’d moved on in her breakfast tastes.
They were all going to be playing golf mid-morning. Matt decided to go and find a quiet corner in a café and spend an hour working on plans for Carole’s cottages before he met the others.
Drinking a delicious – and incredibly strong – coffee while he worked, he thought for a moment that he heard Lily’s laugh from somewhere and looked up. Nope, no sign of her in the street outside. There were women’s voices coming from somewhere nearby, and while he couldn’t make out individual words, he was pretty sure that they were speaking English. So what, though? There were bound to be other English tourists here in July. And even if itwasLily, it didn’t matter, did it?
This was actually becoming ridiculous. He’d thought about her all the time after they split up, and that had not been a good time in his life. He really didn’t want to revisit even a fraction of that pain.
He needed either to put her completely out of his mind and just acknowledge her as someone from his past who he’d loved a lot but from whom he’d moved on, or just actually ask her what had happened between them at the end so that he no longer had that question mark in his mind.
Right now, though, he was going to stop thinking about her and enjoy his day with a great group of men on a holiday paradise island.
Time to get another coffee and then wander back in time for the golf.
Half an hour later, he thanked the café owner again, walked out onto the street and turned left.
‘Matt,’ called a voice from behind him. It sounded exactly like Lily.
He turned round, slowly.
It was her. Looking very odd.
Oh God. He was going to laugh. He really, really shouldn’t.
