I tried to catch Fatima’s eye, but she’d given up on the conversation. I only half-paid attention; I had one eye on my phone, staring at the message I’d sent Morgan, desperate for the little ticks to turn blue so I knew she’d read it. But with the entire morning gone, I was losing hope.
Just before the show finished, Fatima got up to go to the toilets and said she’d meet us at the joust, so I didn’t get to finish our conversation, which I’d of course made all about me. By the time we walked into the arena early to get seats, Morgan was still nowhere to be seen, and I came to terms with the fact that she’d never planned to meet us.
“I feel like I should ring Morgan,” Chloe said, echoing my thoughts, pulling her phone out as we settled into the stands, even closer to the middle than we’d been yesterday. But I held out a hand to stop her.
“She’s not coming,” I said. “Don’t bother.”
Chloe looked at me and narrowed her eyes. “What makes you think that?”
I shrugged. “A hunch?”
“Bullshit,” she said, scowling. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” I said, in a way that I knew she’d understand to mean “everything”.
“Fuck’s sake, Jack,” Chloe said, smacking me on the arm hard enough that I felt the sting through my jerkin. “Why did you screw this up?”
I levelled my gaze at her, and I must have looked pitiful enough, because her ire quickly melted into pity.
“You really did screw this up, didn’t you?” she asked, reaching her arms out to hug me from the side.
“I mean, it was pretty mutually destructive,” I said. “But yeah, I wasn’t exactly the paragon of good boyfriends.”
“It’s okay,” she said, suddenly very tender, refusing to move her face from my shoulder or her arms from my torso. “You’ll be fine. Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on, anyway.”
“Why are we getting all huggy?” Phil asked, climbing over Chloe and me and sitting down right between us, forcing us to scoot apart. He handed me a tub of kettle corn as Fatima and Grey settled in behind us.
“Because Jack’s a bad boyfriend,” Chloe said, and Phil nodded.
“Yeah, could have told you that,” he said.
“From all the time we spent dating?” I asked.
“You couldn’t pull me.”
“How about we save this little friends-to-enemies-to-lovers arc for after the joust?” Chloe asked, just as Maximus and his opponent came riding out.
As they performed their feats of strength and agility, we all seemed to remember where the huzzahs and boos were meant to go, and it was fun to feel like we were now in on the joke. But I found myself looking over my shoulder subconsciously for Morgan, as if she would appear behind me where she’d been yesterday.
She should be here for this, I thought.This is all meant to be for her.
“Did you text Morgan?” I asked Chloe as the trumpeters finished their awful noise and the Queen appeared on the platform.
“Yeah, like, seven times,” Chloe said dismissively, looking up at the Queen.
“Welcome to today’s joust,” she was saying. “Normally we would have a happy pair of newlyweds to preside…”
“Maybe you should text her again,” I said quietly.
“Shhhh,” Chloe said, swatting at me, looking past me.
“I just don’t want her to feel alone,” I said.
“Jack—”
“I don’t want her to think we’re just having fun without her. That we don’t miss her.”
“Jack?”
