Page 8 of You Belong With Me

‘I don’t think I deserve it. Or I don’t trust it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You want good things for other people you love, so why not yourself?’

‘Maybe I don’tlove myself,’ Edie said, with necessary British-sarky intonation. ‘It’s … it’s that causing the bad thing to happen makes you feel in charge of what you believed was destined to happen anyway. Hope is opening yourself up to too much uncontrolled hurt. Self sabotage is control.’

‘Hmm. I suppose I don’t understand how someone so warm and generally … joyful can also be a complete catastrophist,’ Elliot said, making Edie smile.

‘It could be because the first person who was meant to love me the most left me? Only a guess.’ That was a blurt. She hadn’t expected to directly refer to her mother’s suicide in this conversation. ‘I’m not saying that for some cheap point score sympathy vote,’ she said, as much a check on herself as him.

‘If I thought you’d do that, I wouldn’t know you at all. Or deserve to.’

Elliot held her closer. Edie had forgotten his unique ability to pry things from her that she didn’t intend to share.

If she was honest, Edie didn’t always find his incisiveness, his eagerness to dissect the frog, comfortable. It spoketo a side of him that felt foreign: the L.A. world where you had expensive therapy, and a cavalier attitude to prescription medication. There was being seen, and there was being seen through.

4

After Elliot’s robust indifference, Edie had started to hope her Instagram judgement fail had slipped past the censors and was a momentary lapse she could choose to learn from. Emphasis on the choose.

Yet her mobile shrilled with an incoming call from RICHARD within minutes of Elliot’s taxi pulling away to his parents’ house, so it was clearly nonsensical self-soothing.

Richard was her employer, proprietor of the ad agency Ad Hoc, and more intimidating than that, one of the human beings Edie most respected in all the world. He had a mind like a steel trap, the sanguine manner and good looks of Barack Obama at a podium, and suits so sharp it was like he fashion-directedGQ.

You did not fuck with Richard, and if you did, you’d most certainly find out.

She answered the call in a hot flush of trepidation.

‘Ms Thompson!’ Richard said, vivacious and upbeat. ‘It’s Boxing Day, and instead of enjoying a smorgasbord of cold cuts and my Uncle Stuart’s tangy homemade pickle with aglass of mid-priced champagne, I’m calling you. Can you imagine why that might be?’

‘I have … one idea.’

‘Do you. I’m told there is a depiction of what the downmarket titles refer to as a “steamy clinch” – you, with a highly significant other. It appeared on one of the devil’s doodle-pads. Instagram, I believe?’

‘Richard, I’m so, SO sorry – it won’t happen again, I—’

‘Let me stop you there. I’ll tell you what I told my helpful source. Your private life is no business of mine, unless it impacts your work. Which to my knowledge, this time, it hasn’t.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

Edie hadn’t been quite sure what she was guilty of, she supposed, beyondongoing silliness in a public forum. During she and Elliot’s pre-courtship phase, they’d been papped arguing in the street. Richard had reasonably pointed out that this wasn’t exactly the behaviour he wanted the autobiography’s publisher to see from the firm’s supplied copywriter.

Yet, project over, project wreathed in bestselling glory, whatwerethe rules on portraits with Elliot Owen?

‘This isn’t a telling off – it’s to let you know that as well as a colleague feeling it was their heavy burden to notify me, I’ve also had a call from a silver-tongued gentleman at theMail, wondering if I had any insights to offer.’

Edie gulped. As she’d thought, it had escaped into the jungle. ‘Oh God. Why call you and not me?’

‘Because the agency landline on the website defaults to my mobile, out of hours. If you’ve not been bothered, they haven’t got your number, I assume.’

Yet.

It was even more dispiriting to hear that Edie still had active adversaries within the Ad Hoc agency. It wasn’t unexpected – her situationship disaster and ex-colleague Jack Marshall had been sacked, ditto his former bride, her ex-colleague Charlotte, and her frenemy and their foot soldier Louis. Yet the poison likely lingered in the system.

Being caught kissing a groom on his wedding dayby the bridewas the kind of infraction people tended to remember.

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