And what he thought I should do about Lila.
I’d thought I wanted everything to go back to normal, but how could it now I’d met my father and learnt the things I had? I was tired of pretending I had it all figured out and under control. If I couldn’t talk to Nick, who could I talk to?
He grew pensive as we walked and I explained everything, his hands in his pockets and eyes on the pavement, and I started to feel guilty and selfish. Maybe I should’ve kept it to myself—
‘Mum could have a temper on her, couldn’t she?’ he interrupted my thoughts unexpectedly.
‘Could she?’
‘Yeah. It was slow to burn and she had a lot of patience with us, but if it came to a matter of protecting us…do you remember when that teacher – Mr Gregory? – made you do laps of the playground in a hailstorm because he’d caught you kissing a girl in the caretaker’s cupboard?’
I wrinkled my brow. ‘I think so…which girl?’
‘How should I know? It was a different one every week with you back then, wasn’t it.’ He nudged my shoulder with his, but I didn’t laugh because it was too true to form. He carried on, although I caught the concerned glance he threw me. ‘Whoever the girl was, Mum wasn’t bothered about that, it was the fact you were practically blue with the cold when you got home. She took you into school the next day, along with a jumbo Slush Puppie from the petrol station and poured it all over his head.’
‘Oh God. I do remember now.’ I laughed this time, recalling the blue syrupy ice running down the teacher’s face and soaking into his white collar. ‘He picked on me for the rest of the year, but never made me run laps again.’
‘Exactly. She didn’t really think it through, did she? She was too mad that you’d been put at harm and she wanted to protect you.’
‘I suppose you’re right. I always thought when she did things like that it was because she was trying to compensate us for not having two parents. But perhaps she always had that temper; its focus just got distilled as she got older.’
‘It’s what happens to all of us, I guess. We change, but only to become more ourselves,’ Nick mused.
‘That’s very deep, although it sounds like an oxymoron. Have you taken up reading philosophy in your downtime?’
‘Got to do something during the stopovers to distract myself from missing Beth.’
‘You really are a love-sick fool.’ I smiled, slinging my arm around his shoulder to cover up the way my chest tightened at the thought of missing someone. I was missing Noelle too – and had spent the day trying to distract myself with work. ‘You still want to go ring shopping?’
‘Definitely.’
He was so sure of himself. I wanted to be sure of myself again. I thought that I’d made the right decision and that I’d be back on an even keel by now. After all, we’d only been seeing each other for a fortnight; breaking it off had been inevitable. But doing it early was supposed to make it easier for both of us – I felt more lost now than before.
I was back to staring up at my ceiling, arms and legs making the most of the space on the bed. But this time I wasn’t panicking about my book, I was immobilised with rage. At Stephen for being such a jerk and at myself for being such an idiot and letting him hurt me even though I knew what was coming. Was I never going to learn? It was like I’d stood still watching a car driving at me at eighty miles an hour and been surprised I’d ended up in hospital. What did I think would happen?
I’d been through worse breakups though. We’d only been dating a couple of weeks and it wasn’t like it wasn’t expected. My ego was obviously bruised. Being dumped is always unpleasant but it would mend. It was only a bruise.
It was a bruise that kept getting prodded though. On Friday morning the ‘boring’ gift Stephen had mentioned he’d ordered for me turned up. I unpacked the brown box and found a roll of window film. It was decorated with a design of pretty embossed suns and wavy lines, which meant when you stuck it to your window it distorted the view through it and gave you privacy.
Itwasboring and practical but so like the Stephen I’d been falling for, the one who showed all signs that he’d wanted to help me and to protect me. I thought I’d been figuring him out, but now I was more confused than ever. I needed to talk to somebody about this, but I knew how my family would react – it would either be a joke to them, another entry in Noelle’s comical dating diary, or they would get mad.
Then an air-conditioning engineer turned up at the weekend who I hadn’t booked. I didn’t have the money for it at the moment. I knew who’d arranged it without ringing around though: Stephen. But was this something he’d booked before? Or was this a new thing? A way of getting square and saying thank you for the help I’d given him to find his dad, or was he provoking me? Trying to get me to call him?
The engineer stayed to fix my unit and I arranged to pay it by credit card. That just pissed me off even further because my hand had been forced and I had to manage the bigger repayments on my card until my royalties were paid in September. I ended up pacing back and forth in my newly cooled apartment, the blind up on my window, free from pervy eyes watching me because I’d stuck up the privacy film and I was just so damnmadabout it all.
I wanted to charge over to Stephen’s place and shake him. How dare he keep doing things that meant I couldn’t fit him firmly in the category of selfish asshole? It was driving me insane wondering whether I’d been right all along, and he’d treated me badly, or whether I’d misjudged him and everything that had happened between us had truly meant something. Neither was going to make me feel any good, but it was like I’d said to him about dealing with his dad: at least if you knew, you could start moving past it.
There was one person who might be able to help me make sense of it all though. Beth. She knew him too. I’d been avoiding calling her back, sticking to texts because I’d been worried about giving the game away about Nick proposing. Now I desperately wanted to see her lovely face and hear what she thought, so I sent her a message asking her if she was free to Skype.
She came back to me almost immediately and I grabbed a bag of Hershey peanut butter cups, throwing myself in my desk chair, ready to take her call.
‘Hey there.’ Beth came into view in a room with dim orange lighting in the background. She was wearing a beautiful purple silk headscarf and pyjamas.
‘Shoot. I woke you up. I didn’t check the time. Sorry, honey.’
‘No. You’re okay. I wasn’t sleeping anyway. It’s too warm and I find it harder when Nick’s away.’
‘Where is he this time?’
