Page 52 of Love and Loathing

“No, I haven’t forgotten.”

“So you’ll bring her?”

“I… It’s… I’ll have to ask her.”

No, was what he should have said.She isn’t my girlfriend.When he got back from work, Evie was all packed and waiting for him to take her to her ridiculously named friends. He looked at her bags in the corner of his living room as he pulled off his tie.

It was a good thing. Some time apart was a good thing. Especially as he currently had the same feeling he once had when, aged nineteen, he and Liv had travelled to South America to fit into one month the entire gap-year student backpacking experience the intensity of their education had denied them. Half-dead with humidity and jetlag, they had boarded a very small plane. The propeller had been visible from his window. The rattle of the engine had thudded through his bones. Jaw tight, he had watched that propeller, his fate—life or death—entirely out of his hands. The plane might take him to paradise. Or the plane might crash and burn.

“I’ll take you back to your place now,” he said. “Then I’m off to Switzerland for a few days, then New York. Work is…busy.”

Evie nodded. “Yeah. I get it.”

“But…” The propeller was spinning, stomach turning as the plane bounced, “...the weekend after next…it’s my sister’s birthday. She’s fourteen.”

“Oh?” enquired Evie politely.

“They’re having a birthday dinner. My stepmum wants you to come.”

Evie looked at him, that same polite expression on her face. God dammit. He scrubbed a hand through his hair.

“Iwant you to come,” he said.

She started to grin. “Yes?”

“Yes. Apparently I have a girlfriend, you see. Everyone knows about our ‘relationship.’” He found himself doing air quotesaround the word and scowled. He’d never once in his life done air quotes about anything.

“The fake relationship,” said Evie nodding. “That we’re definitely not having.”

“Yes,” he muttered. “That.”

TWENTY-TWO

Things at Zig andFi’s place were understandably a bit frosty, now that she was a traitor and all, literally sleeping with the enemy. She spent as much time as she could out of the flat, drifting around London between the various volunteer projects she was involved in, crashing a few nights at other people’s places, and generally trying to convince herself that the aching feeling in her chest had little to do with missing a certain tall, dark, and aggravating man.

On the day of the birthday dinner, she went to his flat as arranged. They hadn’t exchanged numbers. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him in ten days since he’d dropped her off at Zig’s. It felt alien and unreal to be walking up to his building, pressing the buzzer. He might not even be in. Might have forgotten all about it, be wondering why the hell she was there. She was wondering the same thing herself, had half a mind to flee, because the rapid beating of her pulse was painful. She must be mad, voluntarily subjecting herself to this,choosingto be here… Mad. Mad. Why did she like him so much?

A curt, “Come up,” and her heart walloped her in the throat.

Walking into the building, entering the lift, pressing the button… She was really doing it. Evie Blackton going to Aubrey Ford. And not even for anything fun, but to spend an evening with his entire family at a teenager’s birthday party. She must be mad, mad, mad.

He opened the door, crisp and delicious and very dark-eyed in a white shirt and dark trousers. He smiled. “Hello.”

“Hi.”

The flat was as she remembered, and also completely surreal after her time away from it—time spent at Zig and Fi’s, and a night on someone’s houseboat, and a sofa in someone’s attic, and days spent scrubbing pots in a community kitchen, and days spent wading in a river clearing invasive weeds, and days spent drinking cheap coffee from a shared thermos, and cleaning dirt from her nails, and sticking a plaster on the back of her grazed hand, and the smell of rain macs and exertion and stale cigarette smoke and incense on people’s clothes… And here was Aubrey, impeccable and neat, in his minimal designer flat. It couldn’t work. She was mad.

“I like this dress,” he said.

“It’s one of Maisie’s.”

“Maisie?”

“My friend. She makes clothes from old fabrics—from old clothes.”

“I thought it was designer. Your mother’s money.”

“No. Just Maisie.” She smiled limply.

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