Page 10 of Enemies to Lovers

‘I can only imagine …’ I say, crossing my legs and arching an eyebrow. Jamie opens a packet of dried figs, offering one to all of us. I take one, but don’t eat it. I hold it, waiting for Kate’s declaration.

‘A gap year,’ she declares. ‘A year of doing nothing.’

‘I had a gap year,’ I remind her. ‘Before my degree.’

‘Which one?’ quips Laurie, winking at Jamie to get him in on the joke, unable to resist a jab at my choice of a life in academia.

‘I’m ignoring that,’ I tell him.

‘Didn’t you spend it working in the local pub, and then working on a tortoise rescue programme for twelve hours a day?’ Kate asks.

Jamie is looking away from us and out to sea, but I can feel him rolling his eyes at me.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘In Costa Rica. I did six months there.’

‘And did you actually see any of Costa Rica?’ Kate presses.

More eye-rolling – I just know it.

I shrug, not liking being the topic of conversation. ‘I saw plenty of it. From the beach. Where I worked.’ When she puts it like this, Kate makes me sound so square. ‘But I liked the turtle rescue programme. I didn’t need to be off every night with the others, getting drunk and coming home at 4 a.m. I can’t live on two hours’ sleep, even when I was eighteen I couldn’t!’

‘Exactly.’ She nods, satisfied that she’s proved her point, flicking her choppy blonde hair over her shoulder dramatically. She’s in a red one-piece swimsuit with frills on the shoulders and at the thighs, and looks like a model for Reese Witherspoon’s clothing line. She’s warmed up to her theme now and starts wafting a hand as she says, ‘You need a month in Seville learning Spanish and sleeping with sexy waiters. And then a season in a ski resort, getting drunk and sleeping with tourists. Oooooh, you could do Australia and New Zealand. Bali! If you got into yoga in Bali, I’d bet you’d meet all kinds of people. Have you ever heard of ecstatic dance? It’s like sex, but with your clothes on. They’re mad for it up in Ubud, I’ve heard.’

‘Kate, I don’t think you want me to travel so much asget laid?’ I suggest, noting that she’s the second person today to tell me such a thing.

Laurie puts his fingers in his ears and starts to sing loudly. I roll my eyes. It’s such a cliché – older brothers who can’t imagine their younger sisters are desirable to other men. I realise Jamie is looking right at me, with that stupid look on his stupid face. It’s like he agrees with Laurie: I should be an asexual being. Like he hasn’t already made that crystal-clear.

‘Laurie,’ Kate coos, once he’s stopped blocking out the noise of his little sister’s imaginary sex life, ‘Flo is very hot and deserves to enjoy being hot, both by being outwardly appreciated and inwardly pleasured. We’re all adults here.’

‘Hmmm, are we, though?’ Laurie bats back, because to him I will always be a gangly twelve-year-old.

Jamie coughs and says, ‘I’d rather not hear about Flo’s sex life, either, thanks.’

Kate ignores them both and continues to focus on me. I wish she wouldn’t. I wish she wouldn’t in general, but especially now that Jamie is here. I don’t want him to know anything about my life. Right now I can convince myself he hates an imagined version of me, but if we keep talking about how sad and pathetic I am, I might have to admit he dislikes theactualme, and with everything that happened during my PhD it has taken alotof work even to have this much low self-confidence. I’m a work-in-progress, and the hardest part about thatis being okay with being ‘unfinished’ – especially surrounded by the high achievers of my family: Laurie and Kate are lawyers; Alex is a doctor; Mum is, as discussed, Veronica Greenberg; and Dad … well, he’s the glue that keeps us all together, god bless his heart.

Oh. Shit. Kate is looking at me like she’s expecting me to speak. I think I zoned out as she continued to dissect My Life And Everything That Is Wrong With It.

‘Hmmm?’ I say. ‘Sorry. I was just having a hallucination about what it would be like to have a sister-in-law who knew how to shut up and read a book.’

‘Ha ha,’ Kate says. ‘I’m only trying to help. I mean, Jamie, after your parents died, you realised that life is short and so followed your bliss or whatever, didn’t you?’

I can’t believe she’s directly referenced the death of Jamie’s parents. But that’s Kate. She names the elephant in the room.

Jamie takes a deep breath and shrugs in a nonchalant way that seems very practised, if you ask me. He blows out air from between his lips, making him pout like he’s saying ‘prune’, like I’ve read the Olsen twins do when they’re being photographed.

‘Come on,’ Kate presses, and I’m secretly thrilled the spotlight has turned onto somebody else. I know the bits about Jamie that he shares directly with my family when I am there, and I get occasional titbits through the way he’s spoken about when he’snotthere, but seldom do I hear about Jamie in this context, from the manhimself. That’s what felt so special about Christmas – that suddenly we hadso muchto learn about each other. We only scratched the surface, though. Kate smirks at him, amused by his reluctance to go on record with his life’s mission statement. ‘Seriously,’ she says. ‘Almost six figures a year, from sailing boats around the world, isn’t a bad way to spend your days …’

Almost six figures?

Jamie leans back on his forearms, sinking his over-developed frame into the sand because he’s the only one of us not sitting on his towel.

‘Not all who wander are lost,’ he says, and Kate hoots out a laugh. Laurie shakes his head, smirking.

‘Mate, you’re the jammiest bastard I know. Honest to god.’

I can’t tell if they’re poking fun at me. Jamie earns all that money, swanning about sailing for half the year? Surely not.

But once again he gives very little away, and as I take the chance to study his feet, of all things – the annoyingly clean, squared-off toenails, the light dusting of hair on his toes, which weirdly isn’t repulsive so much as a stamp of his masculinity, if you’re into hairy men – I feel him looking at me.Again. I don’t know what comes over me, but I dare to match his gaze, and even though we’ve both got sunglasses on and so I can’t properly see his eyes, I am 100 per cent sure we’ve just made eye-contact. He sighs, then turns his head away.

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