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“Look, just so you’re not surprised, okay? It’s not a big deal.” Eric kept his attention on the road. “Adrian and I—Adrian owns the hotel, just took over from his parents. So, Adrian and I, we’re…” Bed mates? Lovers? Hooking up? “We’ve got a thing. It’s casual, okay? But just so you’re not surprised.”
“Casual,” Olivia repeated, voice doused in doubt. “You.”
“I’m perfectly capable of keeping things casual,” Eric told her.
“Since when? Last I checked”—a pointed look—“you fall into infatuation like that.” She snapped her fingers.
Eric shot her a glance. “Infatuation?”
“Well, I hardly think it counts as love if you don’t know them and they don’t know you.” Olivia’s tone suggested it was a well-established fact when it pulled Eric up short, instantly defensive. He’d been in love. He’d written a dozen songs to prove it.
“Why both?” Dad asked before Eric could make his case, sounding genuinely curious. It was the sort of emotional discussion Dad enjoyed—abstract and philosophical, personal layers removed.
Olivia paused while they squeezed around a slow-moving farm vehicle that had stopped to let them pass. “Because people react to each other, don’t they?” she said then. “We all show different things to different people. And how well we know someone influences who we are when we’re with them, so if two people don’t know each other well…”
“They may be someone to each other that isn’t truly them,” Dad finished.
“Pretty much.” Olivia nodded, and Eric guessed that this was why she taught philosophy and ethics to A-level students. She’d inherited Dad’s interest in the subject, but unlike him, she didn’t mind taking it to personal levels. “Say I’m in a long-distance relationship with a guy,” she continued. “And we only see each other every other weekend, when we’re both off work and visiting each other. We’re kind of living a fairytale then, and we don’t know what the other’s day-to-day looks like. We see one version of each other, and that’s the version we react to, and that in turn influences what version of ourselves we’re showing.”
“That’s a lot of versions,” Eric commented idly, and Olivia poked his shoulder.
“That’s thepoint. The more versions you see of someone, the more you know them—and the more they know you too, because you react to them. Tired and happy and sad and stressed, all of it. The moreyou know, the more they know you. And the more you know whether you’re right for each other.”
It made some form of sense, probably. But not in a way that Eric could fully appreciate while navigating a narrow, winding road.
“Is that what happened with Cedric?” he asked instead, because his sister hadn’t been very forthcoming about why she’d broken up with her boyfriend of two years.
“Sort of.” She chuckled without any humour. “Turns out I didn’t mesh with the version of him that was dating someone else and got her pregnant.”
Oh, shit.
“Are you okay?” Eric asked, while Mum and Dad made twin noises of shock.
Olivia considered it. “Getting there. Mostly angry, with a side of ‘how the fuck did I not see it coming?’”
That … sounded familiar.
“Do you want me to write a song that’ll make him cringe each time he hears it in the supermarket?” he offered. In fact, if he changed the pronouns, it could work for the boy band.
“Tempting.” While Olivia’s smile was small, it wasn’t fake. “Can I get back to you on that?”
He reached back blindly to touch her hand. “Of course. Anytime.”
“Thank you.”
“We’re so sorry to hear that, darling.” Mum sounded deeply uncomfortable even though it was clear that she meant it, and Dad grunted his assent. “He obviously didn’t deserve you.”
Affection washed over Eric because yeah, maybe they weren’t perfect—they’d both grown up in traditional households steeped in British reserve, and as a result, emotional displays were a struggle for them. They replaced them with quiet acts of kindness though, from Mum cooking Eric’s favourite food whenever he came home now, all the way back to Dad making every single one of Eric’s football games when he’d been younger.
“You’re right,” Olivia told Mum. “He didn’t deserve me. Unfortunately, I still wasted two years of my life on that tosser.”
“Let’s egg his car,” Eric said, and like he’d hoped, Olivia cracked a smile because Cedric had been awfully smug about his Porsche Cayenne. Eric suspected it was spurred by a sense of competition, with Cedric rather bad at handling that Eric, five years younger, made far more money.
Good riddance.
“I’ll think of something,” Olivia said. “And when I do, I’ll let you know. But for now, can we agree we won’t even mention his name while we’re here? It’s my first time in the Alps, and I don’t want that arse to ruin it.”
“Of course we can.” Dad sounded relieved. “Eric, why don’t you tell us more about the history of this place? I read that a lot of artists came here in the nineteenth century, including a number of British ones.”
