‘Lily?’ hollered Felix really close to her ear.
‘Oh my God, what?’ Lily looked round to see what shocking event had occurred.
‘Just asked you about five times if you wanted to start the game but you were in a world of your own. Thought I should shout. Also, whose notebook are we using?’
They sat down on the tarmac in a little circle and got going with their game.
And now they were playing, Lilyknewthat she was going to beat Matt, because she just knew him too well.
In fact, as the game progressed, it wasreallyhard not to crow.
‘Lily, you’ve got your lips pressed together like you really want to say something to me, like the words are pushing up inside your mouth just bursting to get out.’ Matt had his eyebrows raised and his eyes narrowed. ‘And I don’t think it’s complimentary.’
Lily put her hands over her face and tried really hard to look like her mind was blank.
Matt put the queen of hearts down.
‘Yesss.’ She couldn’t help it. ‘Iknewyou were going to play either the jack or the queen.’
‘Howdid you know that?’
‘Psychic.’
‘It’s because she knows you so well,’ Felix told Matt.
‘I didn’t know you two knew each other before this?’ Alfredo looked from Matt to Lily and back again.
‘Really?’ Felix said. ‘You can’t feel thehistorybetween them?’
Alfredo looked between the two of them some more while Lily made a face at Felix and then checked the cards in her hand very carefully. No way was she looking at Matt right now.
‘Oh-kay.’ Matt tapped the pile of cards in the centre of their little circle. ‘You to play, Lily.’ She played the ace of clubs, trying not to smirk. ‘Oh my God. Again.’
Eventually they got to the front of the queue and, with a lot of negotiating, managed to book spaces for the four of them and Meg and Pythagoras on a flight on an eight-person plane leaving mid-morning tomorrow. Carole had said that Meg and Pythagoras would be more than welcome to stay over tonight, so they’d be on their way with Pythagoras’s cousin any minute.
‘I love small planes,’ Alfredo said once they were settled in a taxi to go back to Carole’s, Matt in the front and the other three in the back. ‘Such a different feeling from a large one.’
I know. Like you might fall out of the sky, Lily thought. Best not to mention her flying phobia out loud. No point tipping other people from being okay about flying into joining her in her paranoia.
‘You okay about it, Lily?’ Matt asked over his shoulder.
‘Yep, totally,’ she said.
‘Really?’ Yeah, he was clearly thinking about the first flight they’d taken together. They’d been on their way to a wedding in Scotland soon after they’d got together, and there’d been turbulence on their plane and it had dropped several feet inside some kind of air pocket and Lily’s stomach had dropped a lot further and Lily had grabbed Matt’s arm and screamedMake it stop. And then she’d been really embarrassed about looking so pathetic but he’d beenlovelyto her. That flight had cemented her feeling that she was falling in love with him.
And right now he was looking at her with a similarly gorgeously concerned expression in his dark eyes and she couldn’t have pulled her eyes away from his if you’d paid her.
‘It’ll be okay,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she breathed. Right now it felt like anything would be okay if Matt was there.
Eighteen
Matt
Matt really wished he could time travel. Like, go back ten years to the moment he realised that he’d fallen head over heels in love with Lily – of all places on a plane to Scotland when she’d alternated between obvious terror and being lovely to an elderly lady across the aisle – and from there just not mess up. How, though? Take things more slowly? Travel for work less? Hard to know.
Felix coughed and said, ‘So you don’t like flying, Lily?’
