Page 60 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
‘Well, it’s a road-trip kind of surprise,’ Noah revealed with a hopeful smile. ‘How does that sound?’
Nina clasped her hands to her chest. ‘Oh my God, that sounds thrilling!’
‘We’ll be gone overnight,’ Noah explained. ‘I did ask Verity to pack a bag for you to add to the surprise element but she said that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that.’
‘The make-up alone,’ Verity called out from the kitchen. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Nina was very grateful that Verity had recognised her limitations and hadn’t attempted to send her off without any liquid eyeliner or night cream. ‘I’ll go and pack, shall I?’ she asked, a little dazed that Noah was here and whisking her off to some place that wasn’t here.
‘You’ll need sensible walking shoes and a thick coat,’ Noah said, which, truthfully, sounded a lot less thrilling.
It took Nina twenty minutes (a personal best) to pack two bags (one just for her make-up, skincare and hair products) and then Noah was escorting her to the hire car parked in the mews, with a food parcel from Mattie and coffee from Paloma.
‘Don’t worry about the time off!’ Posy called out kindly as she waved them off. ‘You can make it up when we start our extended summer opening hours.’
Nina was quite beside herself. This was all so unexpected. She’d convinced herself that for his own emotional well-being she needed to end things with Noah as soon as he got back from Glasgow and yet he’d suddenly reappeared to rescue her from two days of retail drudgery and whisk her away on an adventure.
A proper adventure.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Regent’s Park came into view. ‘Is it in London?’
‘It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you,’ Noah said firmly, like he was one of those annoying people who wouldn’t crack under interrogation.
Soon they joined the M1, past a sign that said ‘To The North’, which made Nina think of polar bears and ice caps and igloos. Then Noah started telling her about the packaging-plant emergency in Glasgow and how he’d had to spend most of his time in a factory in the middle of a huge industrial estate. ‘I had lots to say about staff morale,’ he said. ‘They didn’t even have a staff canteen. Just a whole wall of vending machines, half of which were broken, and the other half sold over-priced protein bars.’
‘It sounds like you’ve been to a very dark place,’ Nina noted, catching Noah’s eye. There was a lot of eye-catching going on.
‘The very darkest,’ he said mournfully.
There was a quick stop at Watford Gap services for coffee and then back in the car and heading to the Midlands as Nina bragged about her success on social media.
‘Nearly two thousand followers on Instagram,’ she was proud to report. ‘Just over a thousand on Twitter and I got Sam to give me a tutorial on how to update the website, though I didn’t understand a word of it.’
‘I’ll help you with that,’ Noah offered immediately. Then he tried to explain how to game the Google rankings but Nina only understood every other word. Still, it was so good to see Noah again, to have his hand brush against her leg when he changed gears, to think greedily of all the time they were going to spend with each other.
Past Derby and Nottingham, past signs to the Peak National Park and Nina couldn’t imagine where Noah might be taking her. ‘We’re not going to Glasgow, are we?’ she asked with a hint of genuine suspicion. ‘Do you have unfinished business at that packaging plant?’
‘You’ve found me out.’ Noah smiled and shook his head. ‘Guess again.’
They came off the motorway to stop for an early lunch of toasted-cheese sandwiches in a pretty village pub on the outskirts of Chesterfield and talked about how Noah had missed pretty village pubs when he’d been in the States. AlsoCoronation Street(which he had a secret fondness for, even though his parents were very against commercial television) and ‘a decent cup of tea’.
‘Isn’t it a bit of a cliché to complain that you can’t get a decent cup of tea once you leave British shipping waters?’ Nina asked teasingly.
‘It’s a cliché only because it’s true,’ Noah replied. ‘You have to pay a fortune for a proper brand of tea bags from an import shop and their water tastes funny and they don’t even do proper milk. They have this stuff called half and half. It’s half milk and half I don’t even know what.’
‘This is why I only drink coffee,’ Nina said and Noah’s eyes widened even further.
‘That’s it. I’m dropping you at the nearest station to make your own way home,’ he said, putting his hand over the bill as Nina reached for the saucer. ‘No, it’s my treat.’
‘There’s no point in treating me if you plan to drop me off like an unwanted parcel,’ Nina told him and Noah smiled.
‘I suppose if we’ve come this far we might as well continue.’
They were deep in the darkest North now. Past Barnsley, past Wakefield, past little towns and villages whose names sounded clunky when Nina tried to say them out loud. Cleckheaton. Scholes. Hipperholme. Northowram. Dark-green fields were a blur out of the car window until they gave way to a grey stone sprawl as they drove through Bradford.
Queensbury.
Denholme.
