“I’m not sure if I feel better or worse for this conversation,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. Because I wasn’t sure either. A part of me was glad to have had it, and another part of me just felt heartbroken when I looked back on the series of stupid decisions that I’d made that had led me to being so far away from the very thing that being close to now felt so right.
“Me neither,” I said. I stuck the last of the plasters over the small piece of antiseptic-soaked cotton wool and put her foot back onto the floor gently. “There we go, finished.”
I was finished with her foot, but after that conversation, it felt like I was nowhere near finished with her. Not in the slightest.
CHAPTER 19
Ash
I stood on the little dusty airstrip feeling two very different yet equally overwhelming emotions. One, I did not want to get on that plane again. It had made me feel so sick the last time, not to mention utterly terrified, that walking through thorns in this relentless heat and dodging hungry lions sounded more appealing than climbing back into that thing. I’d taken two anti-nausea tablets, which I knew would make me feel woozy. I knew this probably meant I wouldn’t get nearly enough work done today. And two, I couldn’t look at Max, not even vaguely.I guess I now knew how he must have felt all those years ago.
I fixed my eyes on the ground, where I watched a line of small ants carrying a dead fly on their backs. Max was on the opposite side of the airstrip and, truthfully, I had not been able to look at him since yesterday morning’s discussion. What had made the whole thing worse was that while pouring his heart out, telling me how emasculated and terrible he’d felt about himself, he was carefully, painstakingly, cleaning and bandaging a bleeding wound on my foot.
After reading those messages I’d sent, which I now regretted more than I think I had ever regretted anything, he should not be down on the floor carefully removing a thorn from my foot. We’d ripped the bandage off that part of our history, while he was putting an actual bandage on my foot. I’m sure there was some deep kind of meaning in that, but I wasn’t about to go looking for it now. I just knew that I felt horrible.
I’d managed to limp around a little more that day and had gotten all my work done. Then I’d quickly made the excuse of having to send all my pictures and film to Sebastian, and call him about it, to escape up to my bedroom and not have to see him again. I took dinner in my room too, even though the chef had invited me downstairs for acasualdinner on the balcony. He’d been very clear to use the word “casual” and I suspect Max would have asked him to, so I didn’t think I was walking into something as ridiculously romantic as the night before. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit there and eat food with him. I think I was feeling exactly what he’d felt all those years ago. It felt impossible to face him again in the wake of all those revelations.
He’d read those messages. . . Shame and guilt and a devastation so large it filled me up inside until I felt like I might actually burst, gripped me. It had happened thirteen years ago, for heaven’s sake. So why did I feel so bad about it? The sex had been terrible, and even if it hadn’t been, even if it had been mind-blowing and had exceeded all the unrealistic expectations we’d set for ourselves, we probably still wouldn’t be together today anyway.
We were teenagers. What did we know about love and commitment? We’d talked about forever, but at that age, what the hell do you know about tomorrow or next year, let alone forever? But still, something was niggling at me. Maybe even more than niggling. What would have happened if he hadn’t read those messages? What if he hadn’t drunk so much to block out what I’d said? What if we hadn’t put so much goddamn pressure on ourselves? What would have happened if we’d tried again and it had been different? What if Max hadn’t gone away?What bloody if?
I finally looked up from the ants maneuvering the fly into their hole when I heard the noise of an approaching plane. But the noise was totally different this time. It wasn’t that loud, awful shaking sound that the flying tin can death trap had made two days earlier. In fact, this sound was smooth, like butter. It was silky and comforting and as it came closer I could see why. It didn’t have a propeller. It didn’t have skinny caterpillar legs with tiny wheels that looked as if they should be on a child’s bike, not something that launches itself into the sky. It was sleek and gorgeous and glinted in the sun like a diamond tennis bracelet.
“A private jet?” I called over to Max, and he gave me the smallest lopsided smile. Granted, it was small, but it was a private jet.
“I wasn’t fond of that other plane either, to be honest.”
“So you booked this?”
He shrugged casually as if this was nothing, as if he did this all the time. He probably did.
“I’m going to have to explain this to the producer somehow, though,” I said, looking at the thing that clearly cost more than the previous plane and that the producer had not okayed for this part of the job’s budget.
“Your producer doesn’t need to know,” he shouted over to me. “I managed to squeeze it into my budget.” He said it, but I didn’t believe him. I could see he was lying; he’d never been a good liar.
“You hired it personally,” I shouted back at him, making a statement of fact.
“Like I said, I also didn’t like that small plane.”
Another lie. He’d been perfectly fine in the small plane. In fact, when I’d looked up at him, he’d seemed totally relaxed. But I hadn’t been okay in the small plane. And now he’d hired a different plane. The implications of this did not escape me. For a second, I thought of making a joke about him needing it more because he didn’t want me to almost vomit on him again, but it did not seem appropriate. He’d hired it because I’d hated flying in the previous plane. This was possibly one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for me. But then it got even nicer.
“I have gum too, if you need,” he said, holding a pack up in the air.
CHAPTER 20
Max
It had been expensive, but seeing the look of relief on her face had been priceless. And seeing her with her head back, looking relaxed and at peace while sitting inside, even better. I watched her drift off to sleep. She still made the same little noises from time to time that she used to make. She was always so embarrassed when I told her about them, but honestly, I’d missed them. I watched her sleep for a while, hoping like hell she wasn’t going to open her eyes and find me staring at her.
I finally pried my eyes from her sleeping face and turned my attention to the landscape. We were flying from Zimbabwe to Botswana, to the middle of nowhere once again. I was very much looking forward to seeing this place, a tented safari camp in the middle of the Makgadikgadi salt pans. A beautiful, almost desolate expanse of land. The Makgadikgadi pans looked almost otherworldly, flat and white, broken up with majestic baobab trees that looked as if they didn’t belong in this time or place at all. But the area was also teaming with wildlife, and it was so remote and private that I could definitely see a celebrity couple coming here for the ultimate African safari experience. In fact, I’d asked the camp manager to take me out on one, so I could see what their offering was like. And, of course, if someone needed to shoot an advert to showcase some of the best of southern Africa, like this ad, the tented camp was the perfect backdrop.
When the pilot asked us to put on our seatbelts, I looked over at Ash and thought about waking her. She looked so peaceful, though, and probably needed all the rest she could get. One side of her seatbelt was lying across her lap; the other had fallen and was hanging from the chair. I reached across the aisle carefully and took the hanging part in my hand. Then my arm accidentally grazed her knees as I reached for the one in her lap and I froze, hoping she wouldn’t wake up. When she didn’t, I continued, but it was the noise of the buckle that finally made her stir.
“What the fuck?” She jumped in her seat and batted my hands away. “Why are you touching me? Get your hands out of my lap.”
“My hands are not in your lap. I’m doing up your seatbelt.”
“But why?” She smacked my hands away and I pulled them back and held them in the air in a “hands up” gesture.
