Page 3 of You Belong With Me

Edie held the flowers over his shoulder, muttering: ‘Fuck, you’re freezing’ in self-consciousness as they disentangled, because the repressed passion in physical contact somehow managed to say more than anything in the last two minutes. If they’d started there, they could’ve saved time.

Elliot put a cold hand to her face and said quietly: ‘We’re not making a mistake, you know. If you’re right and what comes next is a massive mess that breaks both our hearts, then I’m afraid that’s still what we’ve got to do. The only way out is through.’

He glanced up and added at normal volume: ‘Oh, hi! Mr Thompson!’

Edie turned to see her dad over her shoulder.

‘Hello!Hugeapologies for the interruption, but Megan’s at the side dishes like a groundhog and wants to know ifanyone has rights to second helps,’ her father said. ‘I quote her verbatim: “Edith will go full Miss Trunchbull if we finish the roasties, Dad – you know what she’s like.”’

‘Edie, you should’ve said you were having dinner – I’m so sorry!’ Elliot said.

‘I feel sure you’re more of an attraction than the sprout and lemon stuffing, delightful as it is. Are you joining us, Elliot?’ her dad asked.

Elliot looked to Edie. ‘Ehm …?’

‘Yes,’ Edie said, without hesitation. ‘Yes, he is.’

She hung up his ridiculous coat in her hallway, alongside normal items of outerwear, like a nineteenth-century nobleman was time-travel visiting.

She found Elliot a chair, reintroduced him to Nick and Hannah, and made introductions with their plus ones, now that she had one of her own.

‘Parsnips with maple syrup glaze, not honey, so no bees were exploited,’ her sister Meg said, as she heaped his plate. ‘Beekeeping is like sending bees to war.’

‘Inglorious bee-sterds,’ Elliot said, and vegan ultra Meg actuallygiggled.

Edie watched, amazed.

Elliot was, in so many ways, a miracle.

1

Actually, Elliot Owen’s presence was the headline miracle, what the newspaper trade called aone-fact story.(And thank God they weren’t sniffing round this tiny Nottingham suburb with its solid Victorian housing stock and a large Lidl today.)

There was more than one unexpected marvel here, as far as Edie was concerned. Not least her formerly cantankerous if not quasi-estranged sister acting as her effusive co-host.

Meg, with her round face, blue eyes, and blonde hair in a dreadlocked ponytail, looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid after a week at Reading Festival. You would never know that she and dark-eyed, Clara Bow-esque Edie were related, and for a long time that had felt like a reflection of their relationship.

In this crowded room with steamed windows, the aroma of porcini mushroom gravy and a Bluetooth speaker pealing ‘Somethin’ Stupid’,Edie’s world had taken a definitive, beautiful leap into a better future.

She’d never been the greatest fan of Christmas Day’s suspended reality. Reality might’ve been a disappointing grind,but she could handle it. Suspending it left her adrift and exposed.

When she was living in London, Edie had dreaded navigating the politics of returning for the holiday, with her widowed, apologetic father and ornery little sister.

Her dad felt awful that it wasn’t the celebration it would’ve been before their mum died, and Meg was constantly boiling, substantially correctly, with a sense that Edie didn’t want to be there.

Edie felt painfully conscious their December twenty-fifth didn’t look or feel like the spray-snow-encrusted vision of matching-pyjamas and hot chocolate togetherness that it was supposed to.

There was a psychic deadlock of guilt, more guilt, and resentment that she couldn’t spring them from. Not until Edie was forced back home in a social media shaming following The Jack Marshall Incident, their flamboyant elderly neighbour Margot died, and they collectively confronted the unresolved grief and regret about the loss of her mother.

The familial reconciliation and Edie reordering her life accordingly had ended up being more surprising than her falling in love with a famous actor who’d starred in a swords-wolves-and-tits fantasy saga.

So, despite there being a newly minted superhero here – Elliot’s latest onscreen incarnation wasThe Void– it was already magical.

Edie was glad that she and what the tabloids termed her ‘superstar beau’ had been sufficiently serious and/or relaxed enough about each other’s status last time that he’d alreadymet her dad, Meg, and her two best friends from sixth form, Hannah and Nick.

Hannah, a willowy and acerbic kidney doctor (‘nephrologist!’) and Nick, a mod-dressing misanthrope and local DJ, had been lost to Edinburgh and an unhappy, controlling marriage respectively, and both were now back.

They beamed in warm recognition at the newcomer. Her old friends were plenty intuitive enough to interpret Edie’s stunned, bashful glow and Elliot’s handshaking with everyone in turn. It wasn’t a meal you just dropped in on as an ex.

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