Page 101 of You Belong With Me

Edie swallowed hard. Had she? ‘I don’t know how to defend myself against this charge. I’ve seen nothing and done nothing, and that means I have, what, feelings I’ve hidden from myself? What do I do with that?’

Edie grasped this low-key wrangle might be quite serious and felt sick.

‘I don’t know what to do with it, either. I spent a whole evening with ringside seat for your spark with the man you’d have gone out with if I’d not come back. A role he’s still auditioning for. My understudy, hoping I break my leg.I’msure he’s a nice enough person, but no one’s really nice in this scenario. His attitude to me can be summed up as: “tick tock motherfucker”.’

‘How do you know I’d have gone out with Declan?!’

As Edie said this, a series of moments flashed through her mind. Jolts at physical closeness, eyes meeting in laughter, the ways he’d looked out for her. The way he’d held her. Here was a tall, winning Irishman with a physique that could grace a Calvin Klein ad, who was Tim to her Dawn inThe Office.This representation of Declan was a shock to her; it wasn’t, in fact, a reach.

‘You’re telling me Declan wouldn’t have been the next person? The “Last Time” person, if I’d left it another six months?’ Elliot said. ‘You don’t know yourself very well if you’re denying that.’

His words hung in the air as evident, unassailable truth. Elliot’s incisiveness was considerable. Edie had never asked herself this, and now she did, and he was right.

‘I’ve never thought about it for a moment,’ Edie said, glad that much was true. ‘I’m with you. I’m very much with you, whichever country you happen to be in. What do the What Ifs matter? Or the Who Elses? Those people don’t stop existing – they stop mattering.’

Edie was quite relieved she had produced this, under duress.

‘If you’re adamant I have nothing to worry about with Declan, then I accept that. I trust you. Also, I desperately want it to be true.’ Elliot smiled an unhappy smile.

‘You have nothing to worry about. Whatever you need me to do for you to believe that, I’ll do it.’

As she said it, Edie realised that she’d resist any demand to stop working with Declan. That’d be a great email.Hi Richard, I need to request a transfer for Declan: he allegedly looked too covetously at my clavicle area.

‘OK, then I do have a request,’ Elliot said. ‘The day soon when he comes to you and tells you he knows he’s completely out of order as you have a boyfriend and blah blah, but that he has to tell you that he wakes up thinking about you, goes to sleep thinking about you, and he only exists now to make you laugh, that if there was the smallest chance you felt any of this, too, blah blah – I want you to tell me he’s done it. He doesn’t get to keep secrets with you. Promise?’

‘Promise, but what the hell …?!’ Edie trying to joke Elliot out of it was obviously futile. ‘All we did is go for birthday tacos, and now I’m in some … scripted fiction love triangle?’

Elliot spoke of trusting her; it certainly didn’t feel like the whole story.

‘How do you know he’ll do this?’ Edie said, concealing that she was thoroughly rattled by the diatribe.

Elliot leaned back against the headboard. ‘It’s what I’d do if I was him.’

‘I don’t think you would. You’d not go after someone in a relationship?’

‘As I said, nobody’s nice in this scenario.’

‘What scenario?’

‘The one where you can’t bear to let someone go.’

53

‘Look at the two of us, being corporate swish,’ Declan said, in a long coat over a suit, as Edie met him on the train station concourse, her lace-up heeled boots clip-clopping on the concrete. ‘Like Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith inWorking Girl.’

‘Pepsi is our Trask merger?’

‘Well remembered! I’ve had to see it loads thanks to Cara and Sinead. I must warn you, I have a “bod for sin”, and the sin is a Sausage & Egg McMuffin.’ He brandished a paper bag. ‘Got a spare in case you want to partake.’

Edie laughed heartily, while wishing he wouldn’t refer to his body. Every time he did, she had to work out what facial expression best conveyed:I have definitely forgotten what you look like naked.

Before Elliot’s outburst, Edie would’ve overlooked the fact Declan had referenced a film where two people fall in love at the office. She’d been pushed into greater awareness, no doubt as Elliot wanted.This super-injunction, it worries me.

Edie squelched such concerns; today was business.They were about to do their best two-hander act for the Pepsimeeting in London. They spent the journey down with their notes in front of them, mock-interrogating the other to find the weaknesses.

‘What if I said you’re devaluing a beverage with over one-hundred-and-thirty years of history for cheap laughs from the extremely online peanut gallery?’ Edie said, as they passed Kettering. ‘… Diarmuid.’

‘Why am I Diarmuid?’

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