CHAPTER 71
“You’re squirming a lot.” Mike turned his head towards me.
“There’s no space.” I wiggled in my seat and tried to stretch my legs out.
“Used to traveling business class?” he joked.
“Actually, yes!” I said, with a playful smile.
“Well, you’re just going to have to slum it, like the rest of us.”
“Did you know,” I leaned in and whispered, “that men still pee on the toilet seats in business class?”
Mike laughed loudly and someone turned and looked at us.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Do you know how hard it is to pee standing up in a moving vehicle?”
“Do you know how hard it is to pull some toilet paper off, make it into something like a little square and give the seat a wipe, or—hey, here’s a novel idea—why not lift the seat?”
“I lift the seat,” Mike said to me, in a strange voice that seemed loaded with something.
“Good to know,” I teased.
“In case we ever decide to co-habit.” He mumbled that last part and then quickly smiled, turning it into a joke, even though it hadn’t sounded like one at first. Was I imagining things? I smiled back at him and he gave me that warm, crazy, sexy smile that lit up the dull interior of the plane around us. This was better than any business class I’d ever flown.
“So, what’s the plan?” Mike asked.
“The plan,” I said thoughtfully. We hadn’t really had a chance to formulate that much of a plan between yesterday and today. We’d only discovered the man’s name yesterday, and everything had happened so quickly after that. Mike had used his fake police powers and had gotten a cop friend from Morgan Bay to track down an address for Abe, in the UK. Emelia had booked us flights there, with three clicks of a button, then we’d packed as fast as possible, then we’d all piled into my car and driven back to Jo’burg, crashing at my place for the night—everyone had fakeooohed at my coffee table. Then we’d all woken up the next morning and gone to the airport, said goodbye to Ash and Emelia, and before I really knew what was happening, we were cruising 30,000 feet in the air,in economy class.
“The plan,” I repeated, thoughtfully. “Well, the plan is that we go and take these letters to him.”
“And what about your book?” Mike asked.
“What about it?” I repeated.What about my book?I hadn’t thought about my book in days.
“How are you going to tell him you’re writing it? You’ll need to get his permission, now, from a copyright perspective, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, suddenly sounding like a lawyer for the first time since I’d met him.
My stomach twisted a little; I hadn’t thought of that. “I guess he could be married and maybe he wouldn’t want this out?”
“But—as her heir and the person who inherited her estate—technically, all her letters and the diary are now mine. So I can give you permission to do whatever you want with them. You can turn those into the book; you don’t need his letters anymore.”
I listened to him. It was all starting to sound complicated now, and the whole idea was making me feel nervous and nauseous. Somewhere along the way, I’d almost forgotten that I was writing a book. I’d become so swept up in Edith and Abe’s story, I’d forgotten I had one to write.
“It’s okay.” Mike slipped an arm through mine. “We’ll ask his permission, but, if he says no, you can put her letters into the book. We’ll photocopy them all and give him the originals. It’ll be fine.” He sounded so sure of himself.
I leaned my head back on the uncomfortable seat and let my mind wander. I let it wander to all the places I’d been, this last week. All the things I’d seen and done, and the people I’d met. I closed my eyes and let it wander some more; this time, it wondered what it would be like to be with Mike, permanently. What it would be like to wake up with him in the morning, in Willow Bay. I might stay at home and write at that little desk by the window, looking out over the river. He’d go out during the day and fake-police around town. I smiled to myself at the thought. Maybe, in the evenings, we could walk on the beach together, we could sit on the veranda and drink wine—and I wouldn’t care how red I went. At night, we would climb into bed and sleep together, and he would hold me in the same way that he’d held me the other night. Maybe I would go out and have a cup of coffee and some cake at Emelia’s coffee shop during the day. Maybe I would go and work in the library, too, in between all the hot dinosaurs and mermen threesomes. Maybe I would become friends with Techno Tannie and download her music and listen to it, and maybe I would become a regular at Reddy’s, buying condoms. Maybe I would paint with Ash in the afternoons, help out around the B and B. I could rewrite their terrible web copy, I could . . .
I opened my eyes when I realized what I was doing.
“What?” Mike asked, looking over at me. “Are you okay?”
I looked at him and shook my head. Because I wasn’t okay. I was in serious danger, here, of being verynot okay, because I was totally and utterly falling—for him, for a place, for the life I wanted to have,was meant to have.
“I’m fine.” I forced a smile, and he smiled back.
“You sure?” he asked again, as if he didn’t believe me.
I nodded. “Never been better,” I said, and, strangely, in some ways, that was the truth.
