Page 77 of Enemies to Lovers

‘Get him,’ I say, gesturing to his room. Mum tries his door, but it’s locked.

‘Alex, get up,’ Mum shouts through the door. ‘There’s a fire! Alex!’

I’m halfway down the stairs when Alex’s door opens slightly and a man who is not Alex says to my mother, ‘We’re coming. I just need to untie him.’

Mum turns puce and then deathly pale, and she says nothing as the door is closed in her face, then follows me. I hear her mutter, ‘Jesus. My bloody kids.’

Collectively we race up the hill, where a small fire truck has already arrived, thank the Lord. It’s only when I see the thing that it occurs to me I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. It’s not like I can fight a fire on my own. I don’t even know the number for the emergency services here. But I couldn’t do nothing, could I? I was in there only an hour ago.

Laurie, Jamie, Dad and Mum and I stand, watchingthe fire roar and two fire officers survey what’s happening whilst two more fix a massive hosepipe to something near a drain. Alex jogs up behind us and says, ‘What happened?’

‘Fire,’ Dad says.

‘Obviously,’ adds Laurie drily.

Panic rises in my chest: is this our fault? Did we leave a candle burning? More than that, since I was the last one out of there: is itmyfault?

‘What can we do?’ I shout, desperate, in the direction of the firefighters and a concerned local couple in their nightwear. The couple blink at me and give a small shrug. Their faces are bathed in the eerie glow from the fire. Is it their outhouse or are they neighbours? I hope they’re insured. This is awful.

‘Is anybody hurt?’ Kate asks, appearing at the side of us all, with a scarf over her nose and mouth. Laurie looks at her with a frown. ‘I know,’ she says, reading his mind. ‘But I couldn’t just stay at the house, Laurie. And the wind is blowing that way.’ She gestures away from us. We’re lucky that Mother Nature is doing us a solid: the smoke is being carried off up the hill and far away, instead of towards the villa.

Laurie puts his arm around her protectively. ‘Okay,’ he says quietly.

I look at Jamie, wanting reassurance from him that this is all going to be okay: the fire, and him and me. He’s watching the flames, but I know he feels my eyes on him. His face flickers enough for me to know thathe’s trying his best not to give me his attention. My heart sinks. The feeling I was wallowing in on the beach rises to the surface – thoughts of how I was foolish to think I deserve anything good leaking back into my consciousness. I look back at the fire. It’s pretty bad. Not only have I ruined things for me and Jamie, but I’ve ruined somebody’s actual property, too.

I look at Jamie again and the words leave my mouth before I can register what I’m saying out loud. ‘I thought I blew out all of the candles. I’m sure I did …’

Jamie looks at me this time and I stare at him, hard, willing him to tell me this isn’t my fault. His eyes dart away from me, to my left. To where Laurie is. He quickly looks back, but I can’t help it: I look at Laurie, too. It’s a rookie mistake, because Laurie whips his head back and forth, following the imaginary tennis ball between me and Jamie, busily connecting the dots. His sixth sense has been piqued.

‘Candles?’ Mum asks, trying to catch up. I look at her, then at the ground. Dear Lord, what I wouldn’t do to rewind the last sixty seconds. There’s self-sabotage, and then there’s this: leaking our secret to the very people we agreed would never find out. Fuck!

‘Oh,’ I hear Mum say then. In my peripheral vision I see Kate give a small nod of the head.

Alex – whose friend, I suddenly realise, is nowhere to be seen – hits Jamie’s arm and says, ‘Seriously?’ Jamie rubs at the site of impact. ‘Is that who you were with at the beach the other night?’

The floor continues to be the most interesting thing I’ve ever come across. The fire is relenting now, the firefighters having done their job. But the heat is still in the air. I feel its pressure against my face, making my skin slick and clammy.

‘Veronica,’ Jamie says, ‘Michael, I’m sorry …’

‘Nonsense,’ says my mum, right as Dad asks innocently, ‘What for, Jamie?’

Before he can respond, it feels like Laurie grows six inches in height as he pulls back his shoulders, lifts his chin and steps towards his best friend. ‘He’s apologising,’ Laurie says, and his tone is so strained in its civility that we all instinctively understand he’s about to blow, ‘for FUCKING Florence.’

It all happens fast after that. Laurie launches himself at Jamie like a bullet from a gun, tackling him to the ground, where Jamie pushes him off and tries to get back up. But Laurie is angrier than I’ve ever seen him, and all the stronger for it, so he reaches up and grabs Jamie’s leg, pulling backwards until Jamie is on the floor with him once again.

They tussle, not really landing punches so much as wrestling in the dirt, and it feels like the rest of us are all screaming and shouting for them to stop – except Kate, who has taken a step back and is rubbing her stomach, eyes wide, like she cannot believe what she is seeing. Laurie gets a punch in – not a big one. He hits Jamie’s jaw, but it sounds soft almost, not like the massive thwack that punches make on TV. It’s violent enough tomake Dad launch himself on top of them, as if he’s a father separating six-year-olds, not thirty-somethings. He issues a booming command of:Enough!

There’s a bit more scuffling, but with Dad between them now. I can practically see the red mist in Laurie’s eyes, and the shame in Jamie’s. This is the exact thing he feared, and seeing him so sad breaks my heart. Laurie has no right to get involved in any of this, but I can tell Jamie feels terrible that he broke whatever promise he made. And it was me –Imade him do that. Kate was right: what did I think was going to happen? It hits me: I’ve messed up, and messed up badly. I’ve put Jamie in a horrible position.

Laurie looks up from the ground and says to us, ‘Jamie’s been messing around with Flo, and it’s like you lot don’t even care! Let me fuckinghave him.’

Dad stands, brushing the dust from his knees and as he straightens up he says, ‘No, Laurence, I don’t care. Grow up!’

‘I don’t, either,’ declares Mum, taking Dad’s arm and giving him a squeeze. They look at each other, and it’s a look that says a million things:I love you for breaking that up. Are you okay? What the hell is going on? I’m glad you’re my partner in all this.

‘I’d encourage it actually, Laurie,’ says Kate, and I can tell by her face that she’s livid at him for fighting. She shoots him a look that I take to mean,We’ll talk about this later. And if Laurie is going to argue against everyone’s calm reactions, that single glance stops him. It’slike the wind has been stolen from his sails. He looks quickly from one face to the next, disbelief etched across his features – and, I’d dare say, a level of betrayal, too. He thoughteveryonewould be mad, that he’d done the right thing in ‘protecting’ my ‘honour’, and he’s shocked nobody is backing him up here.

‘I’d say it was pretty inevitable, to be honest, bro,’ Alex says to Laurie.

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