Page 39 of A Winter Wedding Adventure
Shuffling inside and closing the door, Mattia noticed that there was only one person sitting on the wooden slats – someone he rather wanted to talk to, which meant not Joe.
‘Rav, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I won’t offer my hand, because… well, you know.’ He grimaced inwardly, the fug of warmth in the room spreading out his presence of mind like gas particles. Great, now Rav would either think he had sweaty hands after two seconds in a sauna or that he was scared of dropping his towel. Both were unfortunately true.
He chose a spot that he hoped was a polite distance away and racked his brain for something to say that wasn’t Why was Kira upset with you last night?
To his surprise, Rav brought it up. ‘Are you a friend of Kira’s? I didn’t know she liked opera.’ He gave a halting chuckle at his own joke.
‘She doesn’t,’ he replied curtly, propping himself up with his elbows on his knees and hanging his head as sweat gathered on the back of his neck. ‘We bonded over Bon Jovi and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. She’s an old rock soul.’
To his surprise, Rav laughed – properly this time. ‘She’s still the same as she was at school, then.’
Mattia peered at him out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t sure he liked the fondness in the other man’s tone. He certainly didn’t like that he didn’t understand it. ‘You knew her when she was a teenager?’
Rav nodded. ‘We were a close bunch of friends all through secondary school.’
That certainly sounded like ‘just friends’ rather than anything else, but he remembered the catch in her voice when she’d told him she didn’t like to let other people change her.
‘But I haven’t seen her in… oh, it must be more than ten years. We went off to university and she…’ His expression tightened, reminding Mattia of the emotion strung taut on her face whenever he’d seen her speaking to Rav.
‘You left her behind?’
Rav’s eyebrows shot up. Perhaps that question had been too belligerent, but Mattia was desperate to understand the subtext.
‘No— well kind of, yes,’ Rav answered with a frown. ‘To be honest, I was pissed off at Christian for ending it so badly. She’s good value, Kira. It would have been nice to stay friends even though they broke up.’
Mattia sat up straight, rubbing a dollop of sweat out of the corner of his eye. His chest was tight – both from the bubble of pressurised heat and from that hint of what had happened. Christian. Having a name was enough to set him off. His stomach twisted, remembering everything Kira had said about relationships.
Rav kept speaking, as though the intimacy of the sauna had given him permission to get this off his chest. ‘Maybe he shouldn’t have gone out with her at all. Friendships between men and women can be complicated, you know? Then you add in a history like that – and the way he broke up with her was rotten—’ Ravi looked away with a grimace.
Mattia filled in the rest of the picture: a young, less jaded Kira (just as sporty and hot) wouldn’t have been prepared for the sudden end of the relationship, because she was loyal in every cell of her body. It would have crushed her.
‘Well, you know Kira,’ Rav was saying, making Mattia belatedly tune in again.
‘Hmm?’
‘She gave him one. Not that what he did wasn’t shitty, but she got mad and then he got mad and I think they both said things they might not have with a clear head.’
‘I’ve seen her grumpy, but to make her truly mad – he must have really deserved it.’ Mattia had to snap his mouth shut before he said anything further. Rav’s uneasy look suggested he’d growled rather than speaking those words in a normal voice.
‘Maybe, but I thought we were all friends and after that, she just… I didn’t hear a thing from her. She cut herself off.’
That did sound like Kira ‘I don’t like people to change me’ Watling.
‘I’m a bit worried about the wedding, to be honest,’ Rav continued. ‘I don’t think Joe knows. It happened before we met him.’
What happened? What did it have to do with the wedding?
The door swung open. ‘Hey, mate! You got started without us. Hi, Matty. I didn’t bring you a beer.’ Joe swung a beer into Rav’s hand, tapping his own against the bottle and taking a swig as he sat down between Mattia and Rav, hitching his towel up. The other groomsman, Hugh, followed him in.
‘Hi, eh, don’t worry about it,’ Mattia responded, eying the beer. Given his pores were weeping in the heat, he couldn’t imagine alcohol was a good idea. He’d heard Britons did enjoy warm beer, although perhaps that was only in Asterix.
Mattia leaned forward, trying to catch Rav’s eye to continue their previous discussion. What was worrying Rav about the wedding?
He was uneasy, his heart beating strangely, although he’d lost track of how long he’d been sweltering in the sauna, so that could have been the reason.
