Page 49 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
If she did, it would ruin everything. Instead of seeing Nina, Noah would look at her and only see her brother. Not Paul as he was now; kind, caring, the loveliest father, but as he’d been back then. A thug in a Kappa tracksuit, as Paul himself had said.
‘I realise that there are some things I can’t lock away,’ Noah said. ‘Not now I’m back.’
‘But it does no good living in the past,’ Nina argued in the same desperate voice. Noah had shared something with her and though she couldn’t tell him the truth, she wanted to share something personal and painful too. ‘Last night, at All Bar One, I bumped into my ex.Theex.’
‘Oh.’ Noah caught her eye again as he changed lanes. ‘Your childhood sweetheart?’
‘One and the same, Dan Moffat,’ Nina said without thinking.
‘Dan Moffat? I think the name dimly rings a bell,’ Noah said but he didn’t say any more than that and there was no telltale flush to his face any more, so at least Dan hadn’t made Noah’s life a misery too.
‘We started going out when I was fifteen. He was my first boyfriend,’ Nina said. ‘I was obsessed with getting a boyfriend.’ Oh God, she had hardly changed at all. ‘I was so basic back then. I wanted to look like everyone else, wear the same clothes, hang out at the same places.’
‘But most people want to fit in when they’re teenagers,’ Noah pointed out. ‘It’s safer that way.’
‘Sometimes safe is just another word for boring. Everything about me was boring. Like, all the women in my family were married by the time they were twenty and that was the sum total of my ambition too. So, I went out with Dan and he was perfectly nice and we got engaged on my eighteenth birthday and the wedding date was set, caterers booked, and that was when I readWuthering Heightsand realised that I was just sleepwalking. Treading water and it was time that I learned to swim, jump off the really high diving board. You know what I mean?’
‘Mostly.’ Noah dared to nudge Nina and now he was smiling again. ‘Although you’re starting to lose me a little with all the swimming metaphors.’
Nina smiled. ‘OK, I’ll skip the bit about learning how to do butterfly after years of a sedate breaststroke.’ Her expression grew more serious, not least because she couldn’t tell him that the reason for her epiphany was Paul’s accident. ‘Anyway, I decided I was done with living the life that my mother had planned out for me. So, I quit my job at my aunt’s hair salon so I could work in a place in town that would be more cutting edge and well, I broke up with Dan. Though it was only two weeks before our wedding, so technically it counts as jilting him. That was ten years ago and my mother still hasn’t forgiven me.’
‘Wow,’ Noah said. ‘You’d think she’d have let it drop by now.’
‘It wasn’t just the jilting,’ Nina said. ‘Everything I did to reclaim myself was a personal affront to her, from dyeing my hair to eating carbs – she’d had me on the Atkins diet since I was twelve.’
‘When my parents found out that I wasn’t vegan any more – my dad discovered a Ginster’s pasty wrapper in my laundry bag when I was home from university – we had a week of family mediation sessions so I could think about what I’d done,’ Noah offered.
‘I’d rather have a week of mediation than ten years of my mother’s passive-aggressive sniping,’ Nina said. Then she thought about it. ‘Actually it’s not even passive-aggressive. It’s aggressive-aggressive.’ But they were getting sidetracked. ‘What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter who we used to be, what’s important is the people that we choose to be now,’ she said with great force and feeling.
Noah caught her eye again in the windscreen mirror, his expression serious but not sad any longer. ‘Amen to that.’
‘If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.’
Despite all her protests that he could drop her off at the first tube station they came to, Noah didn’t just drive her back into London, but all the way to Marianne and Claude’s place in Kentish Town.
En route he introduced her to theThis American Lifepodcast and when Nina asked him what he’d meant about falling asleep on the job the night before, he handed her his phone when they were stopped at traffic lights.
‘My sister took that when she came home,’ he explained. ‘Before she woke me up and told me off for being so slack in my babysitting duties.’
In the picture Noah was slumped on a sofa with a baby curled against the crook of his neck and a toddler draped across his chest. All of them fast asleep, with their mouths wide open, same peaceful expression on their three faces.
‘Definitely one for the family Christmas card this year,’ Nina snorted, as she tried to hold back the urge to tilt her head and make ‘aw’ noises because the whole scene was unbearably cute. Nina didn’t do unbearably cute or ever wonder whether the particular man she was seeing at any one time would make good dad material.
Except she couldn’t help but think that Noah would be an excellent dad and then stopped herself right there and purposely asked Noah a question about the podcast (‘this Ira Glass – I’m pretty sure he’s a character in a J. D. Salinger novel, right?’) so she wouldn’t start asking him if he’d thought about having kids and did he have a preference for boys or girls and had he picked out any names?
All too soon, even though it had taken them well over an hour, Noah was pulling into the little street off Kentish Town Road where Marianne had her vintage dress shop and Claude had his tattoo parlour upstairs and they lived in the flat on the top floor.
Nina had stayed in text contact with Claude throughout their journey and he was just walking up the road with a carrier bag bulging promisingly with sugary snacks to keep her going through her inking.
She tapped on the window as she took off her seatbelt. ‘That’s Claude,’ she said to Noah. ‘He’s going to be hurting me with needles for the next few hours.’
‘I suppose there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon,’ Noah said wryly.
‘Come and say hello,’ Nina said because she wanted Noah to meet someone that she loved and for it not to be a totally traumatising experience for him.
Claude might look terrifying with his jet-black quiff and sideburns and the tattoos that completely covered every inch of skin visible from the cuffs of his leather jacket right up to his neck, but he was a sweetheart, an absolute teddy bear, and of course he insisted on inviting Noah in when he heard that they’d driven all the way from Surrey without stopping for a coffee.
‘Marianne’s been baking, which to be fair isn’t always the incentive it sounds …’
