Page 17 of Just for December

‘I’ll come in with you,’ Evie says, as they slow down outside. ‘I’m going to hold on to your arm at the counter for like, five seconds, okay? Do we even know if this is being photographed?’

Duke looks at her, pastes on a pretend smile and says through gritted teeth, ‘I. Have. No. Idea. Evie. I. Assume. So. Smile. Back. Please.’

Evie bursts out into fake laughter, throwing her head back and then reaching out to touch Duke’s arm.

‘You’re so funny, Dukey!’ she squeals, hamming it up, and a woman with a dog sat on her lap at the table closest to them frowns discontentedly.

Inside, they wait their turn as a waiter takes orders, makes coffees, serves pastries. Duke orders a black coffee, and Evie a latte. The waiter tells them how much it is in German first, then in English when she realises they don’t understand.

Duke leans forward with contactless pulled up on his phone at the exact same moment as Evie reaches out with a ten-euro note.

‘It’s fine,’ says Duke. ‘It’s on me.’

‘As a point of pride,’ Evie counters. ‘I insist.’

She repositions her arm to block his access to the card reader. He bats away her hand but she goes back in again, wherein he tries again to use his card with more force, flinging her arm back and up into the air, making her step back with it – right into a waiter with a tray full of coffee.

It happens in slow motion. The tray somehow moves upwards. It flips. Coffee hurls out in a thousand different directions, including directly onto Evie’s chest where it promptly spills down the entirety of her coat and drips to her boots. The waiter screams. Somebody sat at an indoor table nearby moves back in their chair, so it makes a nails-down-a-chalkboard screech. The tray lands on the floor. The six cups that were on the tray also land on the floor, clattering and crashing, splintering into chunks at Evie’s sodden feet.

‘Oh my God,’ says Evie, looking around, totally panicked. ‘Oh my God! I am so, so sorry. I am so sorry!’

She spins around to Duke to see if he’s okay, if he’s been caught in the crossfire too, and though she discovers he is, her concern quickly morphs into anger. She should be relieved he hasn’t, she supposes, but it’s not that he isn’t covered in coffee that bothers her. It’s that he’slaughingat her.

‘Seriously?’ she says, grabbing paper napkins from the counter and furiously wiping at herself. ‘Unbelievable,’ she tuts, not so much cleaning the coffee up as simply pushing it around her coat so it smears more, making everything worse.

But Duke keeps doing it – he keeps laughing. In fact, he seems to find the whole thing so funny that the morefrustrated Evie gets, the more hysterically she starts trying to clean herself up, the more people loudly talk in German around them, fetching mops for the spills and newspaper for the breakages, the harder he laughs. Right up until Evie says his name.

‘Duke,’ she snaps, looking at him. ‘Duke!’

As she shouts, she hears somebody nearby say, ‘Duke? Duke Carlisle!’ and then there’s even more of a frenzy as word spreads that the movie star is here, in the café, and nobody noticed.

He looks at her, then, and opens his mouth, about to speak. But before he can say anything Evie grabs her latte and hurls it at his body.

‘Okay,’ he says slowly, holding his arms away from the spreading wet patch, flecks of coffee dripping from that irritatingly picture-perfect face. ‘I can see how I deserved that.’

They go back to the hotel in enraged silence.

Dinner is a cast and crew affair in the hotel, wherein Evie stays at the opposite end of the long dining room to Duke for the duration. Their coffee date finished her. She could see what everyone meant about turning the narrative about the movie around, about using it to her advantage. Her photo is out there now – it may as well be out there for the next few weeks if it’s going to help sell more books and even more movie rights, her father seeing it (or not) be damned. Fine. She’s not going to cut her nose off to spite her face. But Christ, she’s up online with these new shots already, live-action pics of the coffee spillage posted for the masses. Fortunately, it looks like her own coffee slipped from herhand when she threw it over Duke. At least, that’s what the caption says:Another disaster quickly followed, when the coffee spilled on the floor made author Evie Bird slip, covering her date from head to toe too.The truth is, she lost control when Duke laughed at her that way. It’s shocking to her how much quicker she’s been to anger since she arrived, like the Hyde to her Jekyll has been released. Duke just pushes her buttons. All of them.

When she’s eaten, all Evie wants to do is go upstairs to try to write, and yet when she finishes the last of her roasted beef Katerina heads on over to see if she’s coming to the ‘pub quiz’ being hosted in the snug next door.

‘Erm, no?’ Evie says, confused. Organised fun is her least favourite kind of fun, so much so that organised fun is actually her idea of hell. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

‘Noooo!’ Katerina intones. ‘Impossible! Come on – it’ll only be an hour. You can’t hide away all on your own.’

‘Of course I can.’ Evie blinks, and even she can admit how boring she sounds. Katerina pulls a face. Evie’s façade melts. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she says, perilously close to smiling.

‘Is that a yes?’ Katerina asks, like butter wouldn’t melt. ‘There will be wine …’

‘Fine. Butonehour, okay? I really do have to get some words down before bed.’

‘Sold,’ says Katerina, and they head on over to the snug. As they walk Katerina adds: ‘This is good bonding. And also, as a hardened on-set DP, I really have to insist that you don’t get sucked into survival mode. This job only works if you give in to the cabin fever of it all and become best mates with everyone, if only for the time we’re all together.’

Evie lets herself be taken by the arm to the far corner of the hotel lobby. The snug – basically a room cosier than the lobby and smaller than the restaurant – is festiveness personified with a roaring log fire, low-beamed ceilings, and chairs upholstered in worn corduroy and velvet, strewn with throws and pillows. There’s about twenty people huddled off into groups of two or three, pieces of paper between them and Jerry, a fifty-something lighting guy with a ponytail and a microphone, evidently leading the proceedings.

‘Oh, great!’ he exclaims as he clocks their arrival. ‘We’re literally about to start. Evie, can you team up with Billy No Mates there? Katerina, you’re with Daphne she says.’

‘Daphne has good taste in pub quiz partners,’ Katerina quips, breaking away from Evie and crossing the room to a small three-legged table with two wooden chairs, one of which is occupied by a smiling Daphne holding a pen. Evie looks around to see who Billy No Mates is and comes face to face with Duke and the empty chair beside him. She looks to Jerry, who is occupied by flicking through what seems to be a rather extensive collection of questions and answers, and when he finally does look up, he simply gestures again in Duke’s direction – who, for his part, has figured out what’s going on and seems, to Evie’s eye, to be rather panicked about it too.

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