‘Of course.’ I take another surreptitious glance at the clock. Yep. Going to miss the train.
‘Why now? Why did you wait until now? Why did we have this week together?’ A single tear trickles down her cheek and I hate myself so much.
‘Because I’m a stupid, stupid idiot,’ I tell her. ‘Initially I didn’t realise what was happening. And then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I think I thought that once we’d started it wouldn’t make it any worse to carry on for a bit longer because the hurt would already be there.’
She stares at me. ‘You know what I want to say now? But I shouldn’t?’
I shake my head. I think Idoknow but again I’m not doing well with articulating things.
‘Why leavenowis what I mean. Why not finish this next week or next year or next decade? Why not, for the moment, give it a go and just see what happens?’
‘Oh, okay.’ I think I know the answer to this. ‘Because I know that at some point I’ll fuck up and hurt you and it will all end and I’ll be hurt too, which I won’t enjoy. But the worst thing will be that I’ve let you down and you’re hurt, and I don’t want to be in a relationship with you knowing that you’re investing in something that at some point I’m going to destroy. So I think we should stop now. Basically, I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You mean like you’re doing now?’ she questions.
‘Exactly. Like now.’
‘And did you just hear what we both just said?’ She has this heartbreaking little frown on her face, like she’s puzzled.
‘Yes.’ I nod to confirm.
She looks at me for a long time and then says… ‘So that’s… that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Well. You should go and get your train then.’ She has tears rolling down both cheeks now. I would like so much to wipe them away for her. I would like even more not to be the person who caused them. And for her never to have needed to cry over me.
It would have been so much better if we’d never met.
Although then we’d never have had the magical times we’ve had together.
Although the magic is pretty tarnished by splitting.
I don’t know. I do not know anything.
I stand up and take the handle of my case and say, ‘Goodbye. I’m so, so sorry.’
And I leave without looking back.
I do miss my train because it’s busy on the Eurostar today, and the staff are impervious to my pleas. There are no seats free anywhere, so I sit on my case and think about what a fucking idiot I am and about the trainwreck of my life. And that is why I’ve done the right thing, because this is apparently what I do when I’m around Emma, I wreck stuff.
I look at the duty-free shop next to me. I’m tempted to buy myself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and down the whole lot.
I make the best decision I’ve made all week and buy myself a bottle of lemonade instead.
And then I carry on sitting on my case and try not to think about Emma.
16
EMMA
Mid-afternoon, I decide that I should eat something, so I tear off a piece of my croissant and put it in my mouth.
I’m sure I would have thought it was delicious twenty-four hours ago. Now it just tastes of grease. It’s like the food equivalent of my ‘relationship’ with Callum over the past week: depending on how you look at it, it could be a wonderful experience, flooding my senses with its amazing smell and taste, warming me, filling me, or it could just be really bad for me and best left well alone, with no nutritional value whatsoever.
I put the rest of the croissant back in its paper bag and scrunch the opening.
I’m sitting on Paris Plage, the urban beach on the banks of the River Seine. It’s a thirty-two-degree, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky day and I’m surrounded by chattering families, happy-looking couples, groups of friends. There’s the occasional person sitting on their own, like me, reading or scrolling through their phone. I wonder if any of them just got their heart broken.
