a middle
Lily gets home from the bookshop in time for Kingsley to take her to Turtle Bay for Caribbean food and rum cocktails, finishes her book—albeit, with a slight buzz on—before midnight, and goes to bed at peace with the world and everyone in it.
It is possible that she overreacted in her handling of a newfound desire to slam an innocent bookstore employee up against a shelf of biographies—there's a kink she didn't know she had—and shag him senseless, which is ridiculous, really. At least, that's what Kingsley says. He doesn't 'do' drama, he does hypnosis tapes, and breathing exercises, and a weekly bamboo massage with Vivien at the spa. He prides himself on remaining zen, though he will occasionally venture towards a dry, bitter, eye-rolling nihilism that needs to be kept in check. If he says she's being dramatic, he's probably right.
Trust her to get all in a tizzy over a stupid crush, when it probably happens to most people at least once, but she can and must do better. She's not a feeble side-character in an American teen drama, falling to pieces all over the place. She can handle being attracted to a good-looking man.
She'll just stay away from the shop. It's a simple solution.
It's extreme, perhaps, but popping into a bookshop that's thirty minutes out of her way just to eye up some bloke is like keeping chocolate in the fridge when one is dieting; temptation she doesn't want or need. She's not keen on the idea of feeling a guilt she doesn't deserve every time she claps eyes on him, two flirty conversations don't provide sufficient grounds to end a year-long relationship, and she'd never cheat, so there's no other option. The story of them is done and dusted. Lily can't miss what she never had.
Even if he did make it clear that he fancies her, too.
But it's fine. Her only real reason to go there in the first place was her gift card, and she's used that up. If she needs any more books—aside from the twelve she's bought in the past fortnight—she can use the bloody library. There are loads of them in Peterborough. It'll save her the money.
Though of course, she hasn't been able to go back to the library in The Cresset since she returned Animal Farm a week late and almost died of shame. Kingsley said she was a nutter for being so embarrassed, but Kingsley has never appreciated the sanctity of literature.
If she was single, she'd have asked James out herself and gone to town on him, but alas, it's not to be.
Or not alas, because she's with Ian and he's a good egg, and he's going to try harder to make their time together a priority.
This is fine.
She's in a good mood when she gets to work on Monday, parking up at her desk with her thermos flask of tea and a newly-minted copy of Starter for 10 in her handbag for her lunch hour. That's the upside to all of this; she's got a brand-new stack of books to peruse, and can finally get cracking on her resolution to get more reading done. Ian will be back from Dublin tonight and has promised to come over, so she's planning a lovely meal for two, and in the words of Starship, nothing's gonna stop her now.
But she makes the mistake of telling Mary where she's been the past two Saturdays.
They're in the staff kitchen preparing their respective lunches—a takeaway kebab box for Mary, and last night's chicken curry for Lily, which is whirring away in the microwave—chatting about how much they like the decor of the shop, and she hasn't mentioned James at all, when seven lethal words conspire to seal her fate, and his—and Ian's, for that matter—though Lily hardly knows that yet.
"You should come to the book club."
"What book club?"
"It meets in the shop every second Wednesday," Mary rattles off, with the chipper tone of a radio advertisement. "There's free food and drink, and somebody always bakes something."
"Since when did you go to a book club?"
"Since ages ago."
"At Shelf Awareness?"
"Yeah, I'm sure I've told you about it. Remus—that's the bloke who runs it—is literally the sweetest person I've ever met, and there are a few wanky book snobs, but everyone else is lovely." Mary points her teaspoon at Lily's face. "We can carpool there from work to save money on fuel."
"I can't go to a book club on Wednesday nights," says Lily flatly.
"Why not?"
"Because..." There's no clever way to say that she's so hot for one of the shop's employees that she's already thought about him in the shower several times, one of which resulted in Kingsley banging on the door to remind her that she'd been in there a full forty-five minutes. Her housemate has spent the weekend ribbing her, and has decided to drive to the bookstore after the gym tomorrow morning just to take a look at James. "Ian always comes over after work on Wednesdays."
"So? He comes over every weeknight."
"Yeah, but Wednesdays are like..." She trails off for a moment, "busy."
Perhaps she sounds enigmatic, but the truth is, she's unable to think of a lie to cover the reality, which is that Ian usually fires up Netflix and falls asleep on her sofa while she's washing the dinner dishes.
"Please tell me it's not a sex night," says Mary, scrunching up her nose. "You two aren't like that Flight of the Conchords song, are you?"
"No!"
"Then what's the big deal? You've been saying for ages that you wanted something to do on the weeknights that isn't sitting around with Ian watching telly, plus, it's incentive to read more. This is killing two birds with one stone."
"You mean, killing two birds with one club?"
"Don't make puns," says Mary coldly. "Ian won't mind losing you for one night. Even better, this might make him spend a bloody weekend with you, for once."
The janky, ancient, microwave—which might, Lily suspects, eventually explode in a burst of flame and flying meatballs—dings, and she yanks the door open to remove her meal. "Actually, we will be spending more time together at weekends, once the football season's over."
"You mean, when the football season's over and World Cup season starts, and he has to watch every single match because god forbid he misses one and his Neanderthal mates take his man card away?"
"That's unnecessarily mean."
"You knew I was mean when I made you my friend."
"Besides, the World Cup doesn't even last that long."
"And we're biting our tongue," says Mary lightly, and sweeps from the room with her box swinging haphazardly from one hand, making a pincer-like motion towards her open mouth with the fingers of the other. "Biting, biting, biting."
Lily rolls her eyes and grabs a fork from the sideboard, then follows Mary into the break room.
"You can say whatever you like," she tells her, "but the bottom line is, I can't go to the book club."
"You can," says Mary, "plus, you have to. I already emailed Remus before lunch and gave him your name."
"Who's Remus?" They sit down at an empty table, next to the wall, which is plastered in blurry, printed photos of 'The Boyz' from the office on various work nights out that both women make a strident point to avoid. "James doesn't go, does he?"
"Remus works at the shop. You'll know him if you've seen him—he dresses like a professor."
"Elbow patch guy?"
"That's the one." She takes a bite of her kebab. "Which one is James?"
"Tall guy? Black hair? Glasses? Sort of..." Yummy. "Overconfident?"
Mary frowns while chews her food and considers this description. "I don't think he goes, no. Or maybe, like, once or twice. I can't really remember."
"Doesn't matter," says Lily firmly. "I still can't make the time."
"You can though."
"I can't," she insists, and shakes her head to emphasise her point. "I mean it."
She doesn't even believe herself.
Wednesday is a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the truly inconvenient, starting with Ian, who mustn't have been paying attention to what she was saying the night before, because he swings by her flat that evening with his gym bag and his usual story about how he's half-starved because he had to work through lunch, which is his usual way of asking her to cook without looking like an arsehole.
He thinks she doesn't know this, but she does. He thinks she doesn't know that he did have lunch, but she does, because he leaves a crumpled McDonald's receipt on her coffee table when he dumps out the contents of his back pockets.
Lily wouldn't mind being asked directly on an average day. She's a bloody good cook, and she can always refuse. The problem is that he turns up right as she's about to leave, which leads to a prolonged scene in which she tries to explain that she told him where she was going yesterday and Ian insists—long after it becomes clear to them both that Lily is right to claim that he simply wasn't listening—that he's sure she never mentioned a book club. It's an awkward, vaguely passive-aggressive stand-off without the stand-off, but eventually she leaves him in her living room with Kingsley for company, and sets off for Stamford with her promise to Mary hanging over her head.
To make things worse, or better (or truly inconvenient), James is there, chatting to a small group of people around Lily's age with a slight frown on his face, but he's all smiles as soon as he sees her walk in, and glides over to greet her like a figure skater in a black sweater and well-worn jeans.
"It's you again!" he announces, and skids to an abrupt halt in front of her. "Hey!"
"Hey!" she echoes brightly. She is weak. She is so weak. "It's me again!"
"It's Lily, right? I never remember names, but I saw yours on the attendee list and thought, 'Surely it's not the same Lily? Surely she's not so obsessed with me that she'd stalk me at book club?' But it seems I was wrong, and here you are."
Luckily for her blushing face, she's distracted from his surpassing gorgeousness—and his worryingly effective flirting game—by what's going on south of his ankles. "Are you wearing wheelie trainers?"
"Yup," he says proudly.
"Why?"
"For fun and dexterity."
"I didn't know they made them for adults."
"Oh, they don't, but I'm pretty good at getting what I want."
"That's an ominous statement to make, if I'm honest."
"Isn't it, though?" She's not looking at his face, but can see that he's shoved his hands in his pockets. "Thing is, it's totally true. I was a spoiled brat growing up. My nickname was Veruca Salt."
"Didn't Veruca Salt wind up in a trash chute?"
"That, also, happened frequently," he explains, and she looks up at him, meets his gaze, and they both laugh; him in soft, half-bashful kind of way, while his eyes rake over her face as if to savour her reaction, her in a way that emits far too many pheromones for her liking.
Why, she wonders, does any eye contact between them feel like a precursor to sex?
"I think my friend Mary's supposed to be here?" she asks, attempting to steer the conversation away from anything that has potential to become cute or flirtatious. "Dunno if you know her, she's a bit taller than me, dark-haired, lovely Scottish accent?"
"Yeah, I know her," says James. "Mardy Mary? Always likes to be angry about something? She'll probably be along soon."
"She's the one who told me about the club in the first place."
"So, I was right. You are here for the book club."
"Excellent deduction, Holmes. I'm haven't just come to get lost in your eyes," she retorts, instantly failing in her own mission. Weak. Far too weak, "though it's one of my top two priorities."
"You think you'll get another discount if I ask you out again, don't you?"
"Actually, I was hoping to push you far enough to start getting stuff for free."
"You think you can trick me with your face and your hair and your blatant honesty," he says, and makes as if he's turning his back on her to storm away, "but James Potter's mother didn't raise a fool."
"James Potter never asked me out in the first place," she reminds him, "fool."
"You're right, I didn't!" he agrees, and spins around on his wheels with perfect balance. "Go out with me?"
"Can't."
"Boyfriend's still knocking about, is he?"
She shrugs. "No major relationship status changes in the last five days."
"Thought so, but at least I've earned you that discount," he quips, and tosses a glance over his shoulder, where the group of people he was talking to when she walked in are watching them curiously. "I should probably go and explain to that lot why I ran off suddenly, and you should probably talk to Remus." He points at the scholarly man from her first visit, who is manning a table leaden with biscuits, milk, hot water canisters and Styrofoam cups. "He'll take you through how everything works."
"Sick of me already, are you?"
"Of you?" He places a hand on his heart as if she's wounded him. "Never, but you know how other people are. They can get very jealous, and I wouldn't want you making enemies on your first day here."
"If this is your level of confidence when you've just been rejected, I can't imagine what you're like when you do get a yes."
"Irrepressible optimism is my greatest strength," he tells her, and rolls backward on his wheeled feet, "that and my hair, really."
She's left with no other option but to shake her head at him in an exaggerated, faux-exasperated manner, as if he's a terribly bothersome boy and not a magnet—with admittedly brilliant hair—from whom she can't seem to detach herself.
Mary will figure it out immediately. She's made no secret of her distaste for Ian since last year's Christmas party, when Lily turned up in a terrible mood after an argument, got drunk and told her all about it, breaking her own rule about discussing her relationship issues with her partner and her partner only. She's going to realise that Lily has feelings for James, and she's going to tease her about it, and pester her, and it's going to make her life at work a daily migraine.
For now, though, there's someone she needs to speak to, and as Kingsley has reminded her recently, there's no need to make a whole song and dance out of this thing with James. Mary might not even notice, if Lily is cool about it.
She approaches the refreshment table, and Remus, who greets her with a welcoming smile.
"Hi," she says, with a short wave. "I'm the new girl."
"Nice to see you again," he replies. "You're Mary's friend, aren't you?"
"The one and only."
"She's usually here on time, I expect she won't be too much longer," he says. "Coffee or tea?"
"Tea, please. Coffee and I have never gotten along."
While Remus is making her a drink, Lily looks over her shoulder at James, who is zooming backwards past a table stacked with books that bears the sign Books to make you look intelligent on public transport, and watches him until he turns his head in her direction, at which point she hurriedly looks away and realises that Remus has seen the whole thing.
"What does the owner think of him whizzing around on those shoes?" she asks, trying to sound as if her interest in James is born purely out of concern for his safety.
"Oh, the owner's never around," Remus tells her, passing her a cup of tea. "I think I've seen him a grand total of three or four times since I started working here. He leaves James in charge, for the most part, hence the shoes."
"So he's the manager here?"
Remus nods. "If you've seen anything around the shop you thought was fun, it was probably his idea."
"So, the silly reviews?"
"That was him."
"And the cauldrons?"
"Bought them himself."
"But he hasn't filled the place with cats yet?"
"Not yet, but put the idea in his head and he'll probably do it."
She pauses to consider this prospect for a moment. "I mean, personally, I think the only thing better than a bookshop would be a bookshop overrun with cats, so you wouldn't see me complaining."
"You're one of those, are you?" he says, with a laugh. "James is going to love you."
That's a nice idea, she thinks, and that's the bloody problem.
Ian is lying on her sofa when she gets home, half-watching some action movie with two empty Chinese food containers on the floor next to him.
A tub of half-eaten sweet and sour sauce is leaving a ring on her coffee table.
Normally, she would say something—she's the first to admit that she can be anal retentive about cleanliness—but she's had a really fun night and wants to keep her good mood going. Even though she didn't have a chance to read the book they were discussing and mostly observed in silence, she had a great time at the club. Mary was right, aside from one bloke named Edwin who sat twitching on the edge of his chair, permanently poised to launch into an agitated, quasi-condescending debate with anyone who doesn't agree with his assessment of the story's central theme, and another girl named Helena who seemed to be there purely to flirt, everyone else present was nice and welcoming, and mostly on her level. Even if she did incur a lot of jealous looks from Francesca, who is quite obviously smitten with James.
Sirius—the tattooed Prince Caspian lookalike—particularly enjoys provoking Edwin to argue in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to wind him up that flies over his head. Mary gets her kicks out of putting the snobs in their place. Remus moderates the discussion and veers the conversation away from anything that might cause a genuine argument. It's a friendly, well-oiled machine they've got running.
James makes everybody laugh.
He spent a lot of time looking at her, and smiled at her a lot, and looked especially pleased when—as Remus was running through a surprising list of 'about you' questions to integrate her into to the group, something else that Mary neglected to mention when she hyped it up—Lily named cats as one of the three things she loved most in the world. He had caught her eye and she'd blushed, and Mary had noticed, just as Lily knew she would.
She'll suffer for that at work, but as James caught up with her before she left and personally enquired as to whether she'd be coming to the next meeting, Lily can't bring herself to care much at the minute.
"You took longer than I thought," Ian tells her, as she places her handbag down on her desk. It's not an accusation, merely a bald fact. He was probably startled awake when she came in.
"It's a two-hour meeting," she replies, eyeing the containers. There were plenty of snacks and treats at the club, but as Ian had texted to tell her he was getting Chinese, she'd neglected to partake to save her appetite. "Where's my food?"
"Oh, shit, sorry, I didn't get you any," he says, and twists around so he's lying on his front, looking up at her with contrition in his light blue eyes. "I assumed you'd get something on the road."
"Oh."
"I'm sorry, love, I can run out and buy you something now, if you want."
"That's okay, I'm not that hungry," she says, with a smile, and turns to go into the kitchen. "I'll make myself something small."
Once away from him, Lily reminds herself that the annoyance she feels creeping into her gut is unwarranted, and he doesn't deserve a snarky comment. She shouldn't have inferred from his text that he was getting food for both of them, and she knows he would have bought her whatever she wanted if she'd only given the word.
He could have asked, though, instead of just assuming. She would have done that for him.
"Did you meet anyone you liked at your library thing?" he calls out, while she's getting a tin of beans from the cupboard and vaguely contemplating a fish-finger sandwich.
She thinks of James—and his exquisite hair, and the way he smiled at her all night—and lies to her boyfriend. "Nah."
"So, what do you think of coffee?" says James, and leans backwards against a bookshelf with his hands shoved into his pockets, having apparently materialised out of thin air while she was scanning the shelves for something that might catch her eye, aside from him, which is a given.
It's yet another Saturday spent alone at the bookshop, a full five weeks from the day they first met, and he, and his forearms, are looking damn fine today in a red plaid shirt with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows—which has to be a deliberate attempt to stir up inhuman thirsts within her person, for he must know that his arms are those of a bronze statue made flesh, and he's clearly seen her ogling him when he carries heavy boxes, his muscles stretched and taut from all the strain.
That's far too much thought for any one person to put into any two forearms, but Lily can't exactly control what parts of him she longs to bite.
She's given up pretending to avoid the place, and goes at least once a week outside of book club. They talk at length every time she's there, and she's learned a lot about him, not least that they like a lot of the same authors, that they were born two months apart, and that even though his wheelie shoes are much too big for her, he'll let her try them on and lead her around the shop with her hands in his.
She's made friends with the others, too, even helped Remus—who also lives in Peterborough—pick out a new sofa in DFS, but James is... different. There's a mutual understanding, something fast and easy and instinctual, between them. She doesn't know where it came from, but she can't really pretend that it doesn't exist.
"Shouldn't you be working?" she says, with a raised eyebrow. She asks this question every time.
"This is work," he says, "in a sense."
"In that case, I don't think of coffee if I can help it. I'm a tea girl," she replies, brandishing a recently published Tana French. "This is the sixth in the series, but I haven't read the fifth one and I can't find it here."
"No problem, I'll order it in for you later."
"Thank you," She replaces the book on the shelf and regards him curiously, "and why are you asking about coffee?"
"Owner's thinking of opening a café."
"Where?"
"Here," he says, and points toward the ceiling. "The attic's been gathering dust for years—it's well spooky—but there's loads of space up there, so we've been told to gather opinions from our best-looking customers."
She snorts. "That was the brief, was it? Your best-looking customers?"
"It might have been 'most valued,' now that I think of it, but the way I see it, they're one and the same," he explains, and gestures towards her with one hand. "Beautiful people draw other people in."
"In that case, surely, you're more than enough to fill this place with hundreds of customers, all by yourself?"
"While that's true, my influence is limited by my gender, so I'd rather just keep you around."
She knows that he can tell how much she likes it when he flirts, but she makes a show of sighing and putting her hands on her hips anyway. "James."
He mimics her stance. "Lily."
"You don't—stop that," she orders, and swats at him, and he drops his arms, laughing. "You know that you don't need a café to keep me coming back. I love this place."
"Oh, right, yeah, because of 'the floor,'" he says dryly, and makes quote marks with his fingers, "not because of me at all, but wouldn't you love it more if there was a café?"
"You've reached your flirting quota for the day," she warns him.
"Okay, I'll be a good boy," he promises. "Seriously, though, this whole project lives and dies by our customers, so what do you think?"
"I think it's a good idea."
"That's it?"
"Well, obviously a bookstore crossed with a café is a wonderful idea in theory, but I don't have any other information. Like, are you going to partner with Costa or something, or—"
"Nah," James interrupts, scratching the back of his head, "he wants to do something unique. No corporations."
"Well, see, the lack of The Man's involvement means I'm liking this idea more and more."
"Don't you work in corporate law?"
"Shut up," she tells him, and he laughs. "You're going to have a theme, right?"
"What?"
"I mean, you have to. Look at this place. Opening a bog-standard coffee shop upstairs isn't going to fit with what you're going for down here."
"And what do you think we're going for down here?"
"I dunno," she says, "fun? An escape? An adventure? Magic?"
"Magic?"
"That should be your theme, you know. You've already got the cauldrons."
"So says the corporate solicitor."
"Maybe that means that I know what I'm talking about," she grandly replies. "You said it was spooky up there, right?"
"There's a definite haunted house vibe, yeah."
"You should tell the owner to play on that," Lily instructs him, "assuming he ever comes in, which he mustn't, otherwise you'd be in trouble for standing here talking to me, instead of getting on with work."
"Oh, I'm not working now."
"You're not?"
"Clocked off ten minutes ago," he says, and shoots a cheeky smile at her, "but I couldn't leave without giving you my weekly recommendation."
She tries—and quite predictably, fails—to look pained by this strange, yet hopelessly endearing, new game of his. "If this is another pun—"
"No, you'll like this one!" he insists. "It's not a pun, I promise."
"I don't believe you."
"That lack of trust is exactly why you and I never made it, you know."
"Made it where?"
"No time for that. Have you read that book about Stockholm Syndrome?"
"I don't ev—you're exhausting," she tells him, and sighs. "What book about Stockholm Syndrome?"
"I hated it at first," he says, grinning widely from ear-to-ear, "but I loved it by the end."
She hits him with a copy of Murder on the Orient Express.
"I'll just ask the ball-and-chain," says Ian, on a night in mid-June, and laughs, and lowers the phone from his ear. "Lily, the lads are having a darts tourney at the pub. You don't mind if I shoot over, do you?"
Thus begins their biggest argument yet.
Lily isn't even supposed to be there. She's supposed to be at book club, but Ian pleaded with her—pleaded, as if he hadn't seen the sun in weeks—to spend the night at home with him. Work has been busy, and the promise he made to give up weekends for her has long petered out after one or two feeble attempts, and he misses her, and wouldn't a nice night in together be so much better than driving to Stamford after a long day at work?
It's not as if she could have disagreed out loud, and her attachment to James, in particular, leaves her just guilty enough to submit to his request, but now he's thrown her kindness in her face.
She tosses her tea towel down on the counter—she's been drying the dishes after finishing dinner—and turns to face him with the utmost incredulity in her eyes.
"Are you serious?"
"What?"
"You asked me to stay home from book club today so we could spend time together, and now you're going to the pub?"
Ian lifts his phone to his ear and says, "I'll call you back, mate," then seems nonplussed when he puts the phone down, entirely taken aback by her expression. Lily normally doesn't arrive at anger so quickly. Losing her temper is a journey on a normal day, a slow escalation from one level to the next. "We've already had dinner—"
"Oh, so, what, you're done for the day?"
"It's just an hour playing darts, Lil."
"As opposed to a book club I get to go to only twice a month, which is apparently fine for me to miss, but darts are a really pressing issue?"
"I've spent the last three hours with you," he points out. "I just wanted to hop out to the pub for an hour, you can come with me if you want."
"I don't want to come with you. I didn't want to miss book club, I did it because you bloody begged—"
"Because I've barely seen you recently!"
"Whose fault is that?!" she cries, and now she's raising her voice, which she hates, because their walls are thin and Carly next door is an overworked paediatric nurse who spends most of her time at home trying to catch up on sleep. "I asked you to make more time at weekends and you said you would, but no, you've got a rugby league, and football, and that's all well and good for you but woe betide I find one bloody hobby outside of cooking dinner for you and cleaning up after the mess you leave in my flat!"
"Oh, so now this is about me making a mess in your flat?"
"It's about you expecting me to make time for you whenever it suits you, when you never—"
"Do you have any idea how tiring my job is?" he fires back, because he can't respond to her allegations of neglect—she knows he can't, because he knows they're true—so he's trying to veer the fight towards an arena where he feels he'll have more power. "I'm working balls-to-the-wall every fucking day, driving from here to Grantham and back twice a day in rush hour traffic, so pardon me if I don't have the energy to cook and clean!"
"I'm a bloody solicitor!" she squeaks. "What do you think I'm doing all day at work, painting my nails?"
And it all devolves from there, until there's nothing left for Lily to do but kick him out or cry, which she almost does, inciting the deep-set need most men possess to not see their girlfriends cry. Ian instantly makes a big show of announcing that he won't go to the pub after all, if it upsets her that much, but Lily has reached the point where she can't stand the sight of him—the audacity of him, to plead with her to give up her night for him, but toss her on the scrapheap as soon as he gets a better offer—and tells him to get out of her flat.
When he goes, muttering curses under his breath and slamming her door behind him, tears do spill out, and her chest is wracked with the typical, adrenaline-fuelled heave of an argument that cuts to the bone, but her predominant feeling is relief, because she didn't want him here tonight. She wanted to go to Stamford. She wanted to discuss A Thousand Splendid Suns because she has a lot of thoughts about it. She wanted to see James, and make him laugh, and linger after the meeting the way she's taken to doing, just her and him and whichever of his mates is cleaning up the shop with him. That's the part she likes best, anyway.
If she left now, she could make it for the end, just in time to apologise.
She's acting crazy, she thinks. Nobody else would do that. A normal person would arrive at the next meeting with some kind of excuse, and everyone would think no more of it. All she'd accomplish by turning up now is a demonstration of her stubbornly persistent feelings.
He probably doesn't even care that she hasn't come.
But she really wants to see him.
She invites Beatrice over instead.
"Do you ever think about other men?"
"Depends," Kingsley replies, with his eyes fixed on the television. The glass of malbec he's holding looks comically small in his mammoth hand. "Which one of us are you talking to?"
"Both of you," says Lily, "either of you. I'm not fussed."
They're watching one of the Twilight films—not that they're fans—because Beatrice has agreed to sleep over in the spare room, and they have a long-standing tradition of getting smashed on wine that's far too fancy for the occasion, and mocking terrible movies, that dates back to their teens, of which Kingsley is a passionate fan. Lily is usually an active, enthusiastic participant in such shenanigans, but her argument with Ian is fresh in her mind, and she's feeling less than her witty best tonight.
"How many fucking family meetings do these people need to have because of this girl?" says Beatrice, curled up in a ball in the corner of the sofa on the other side of Kingsley, her lip curling in disgust. "Surely at some point, they've got to realise that they're better off letting someone kill the miserable cow and be done with it?"
"That's not the answer Lil was looking for, love."
Beatrice tears her gaze away from the telly and looks at them both. "What?"
"She wants to know if we think about other men," says Kingsley simply, "sexually."
"Oh."
"Not sexually, necessarily," says Lily quickly, "just in general, like, say you met someone at work, or—"
"I think about Michael B. Jordan twelve times a day," Kingsley interrupts.
"Wakanda forever," said Beatrice dully, swirling her wine around in her glass.
"No, I'm not talking about famous men, I'm talking about men you meet in real life."
"Well, yeah, I suppose," says Beatrice. "If I see a fit bloke in Starbucks, I'm probably going to notice."
"No but, I'm talking about more than just noticing someone, that's totally normal. I know that being in a relationship doesn't mean you can't appreciate people for purely aesthetic reasons—"
"In English, please," says Kingsley.
"Shut up," she scolds him, and leans forward to pick up her glass from the coffee table, where she and King are both playing a precarious game of near misses with their feet. "What I meant to say is; are there ever times when you're with another bloke, like a friend, or something, and you think, 'oh God, I'd rather be with him than with the person I'm actually dating because the person I'm actually dating is a selfish fuckhead who doesn't get me at all, and what if this other person is The One because he's smart and gorgeous and makes me laugh,' like, just in that moment?"
Beatrice looks at Kingsley with a wide-eyed, pointed expression, as if to communicate something that Lily's not allowed to know, then shrugs. "No."
"Really?"
"Like I said, I notice fit guys, and I look at fit guys, but I'm happy with Karl, so it doesn't go beyond that."
"And you?" says Lily to Kingsley. "Do you ever feel an urge to be with someone else?"
"Isaac is all I need," he proudly replies, holding up his glass as if in salute, "unless Michael B. Jordan makes his intentions known, in which case—actually, no. Isaac is all I need."
"Cool. Thanks. I feel super reassured," she mutters, and turns her attention back to the television, trying to look like it was a question of no real importance to her to begin with. "Cool."
"Why'd you ask?"
"It's fine. It's nothing," she lies. "I've just never thought that this—" She points to the lovers onscreen "—was particularly realistic."
Kingsley makes a noise in his throat which seems to indicate that he doesn't believe her, but Lily doesn't rise to the bait.
It feels as if she's pressed the mute button on the room—she can tell by the way her friends are looking at each other that they think something is up—but she stares resolutely at the telly, tracing the rim of her glass with her finger, until both become preoccupied by the movie once again.
Alas, peace and quiet are naught but fleeting fancies.
"Is this about that bookstore guy?" says Kingsley suddenly, after fifteen relatively quiet minutes. His voice is louder than he probably intended, cutting through the silence with unnecessary force and quite unsuited to the wistful, breathy staring that the two actors on screen are currently engaged in.
Beatrice's head whips around like a cat sensing its prey nearby. "Bookstore guy?"
"Lily's obsessed with a bookstore guy, didn't she tell you?"
She's horrified to find herself blushing. "No, I'm not!"
"Yes, you are."
"When did I ever say that I was obsess—"
"You didn't, but you fancy him, and you talk about him all the time."
"She's never mentioned him to me once!" Beatrice cries, looking more scandalised than the situation calls for. "Who is he? When did this all start?"
"Nothing started—"
"Couple of months ago now."
"A couple of months?!"
"He's always flirting with her and telling her she's pretty," Kingsley promptly supplies, "and he's a huge dork about books."
"Brilliant," says Beatrice firmly, as if she's heard all she needs to assess the situation. "Marry him."
"What?!"
Kingsley shrugs, a surprisingly dainty movement for such a huge man. "I second that opinion."
"First of all, you've never even met the guy, just watched him creepily from behind a bookshelf," Lily reminds him, twisting to fix them both with a look that King likes to refer to as, 'the wrath of mother,' and holds out her finger to indicate her point. "Secondly—" Another finger joins the first. "I don't even fancy him that much. Thirdly, I already have a boyfriend and I'm trying to work on improving our relationship, or didn't you remember?"
"You don't have a boyfriend," Beatrice scoffs, and drains the rest of her wine, "you have a human football."
Lily knows that she should rise up in outrage and argue that point.
She doesn't.
Later that night, she's already asleep when Ian—drunk and unsteady—lets himself into the flat with her spare key and wakes her up by stumbling into her room with all the silent delicacy of a rampaging sledgehammer. She watches him struggle to undress from bed with her covers pulled up to her chin, spies his favourite rugby shirt sail carelessly through the air and land a foot clear of her laundry basket, and turns her back on him when he slips in beside her.
He must have forgotten their disagreement after his fifth Corona of the night, because he rolls over and plants a wet kiss on her neck. His hand creeps over her thigh beneath the covers; clumsy fingers prodding, groping blindly for the obvious. His half-cocked erection is pressed against her backside.
"Hello, you," he purrs in her ear. "Missed you tonight."
He smells of whatever pub he and his mates were drinking in all evening, a rancid reminder of that which he finds more important than her. When they're alone together, she's his girlfriend, but with his friends, he likens her to a set of shackles.
Lily wants no part of him tonight.
She's cradling a hard, unyielding kind of anger, one that spares no room for her own guilt, because she's trying so bloody hard to make things work, to not be that girl who heartlessly gives up on her relationship just because she met somebody better at the wrong time—she won't be one of those people who trade up, like their current partner is an ageing car—but Ian doesn't seem to give a shit about her efforts. He doesn't try at all. He has no idea how it feels to be in her position, constantly worried that she is a terrible, selfish, broken person because she can't help how she feels about another man, even if she has no intention of acting on her wishes when she's in his presence.
She wants him to go home, but it's not worth getting into an argument at this hour. He's too trashed to be reasonable, and Kingsley will spring into defensive mode if he feels that Lily is in any way endangered, even if the worst thing Ian can do is scream drunkenly in her face.
She shuffles away from him, closer to the edge of her bed. "I'm too tired."
"We never have sex anymore," he spits into the darkness, words ejected from his lips like a poison dart as he flips onto his back, and there's a deafening silence, short and cold, but he's asleep within a minute.
What makes her the angriest—and she has any number of reasons to be furious at this moment—is that he dared to wake her up, though it's with a heady rush of shame that she recalls precisely why.
She'd been dreaming about James.
"'Cause I am your laaaaddyyyyyyyyyy—"
"Oh my god."
"And you are my maaaaannnnnn—"
"I don't understand what's happening."
"I'm singing—ever you reach for me, I'll do all that I caaaannnnn!"
"James—"
"We're heading for somethinnnnngggggg!" he bellows, and Lily starts to laugh, prompting him to stop warbling along with the song and glare at her in a terrible imitation of offence. "Why are you laughing at Céline?"
"I'm not laughing at Céline!" she cries, and protectively pats the car stereo. "I love Céline, I'm laughing at you."
"You're the one listening to—" He presses the home button on her phone, which is sitting in its car cradle, and reads what's on the screen. "—romance playlist five?" He pulls a face at her. "What, because four's not enough? You have to have a fifth in case you happen across a long-haired bloke in the street with his shirt billowing in the wind?"
If she had known he'd be in her car that night, she wouldn't have had that stupid playlist set to play as soon as she started the engine.
But he was hungry, and his car's in the garage because of a faulty gearbox that needs fixing, and she'd heard herself offering to take him for a fast food drive-thru—the least romantic meal she could think of in a pinch—before she even knew what she was saying.
Now, here he is, sitting on the passenger side of her little Corsa as if he's belonged there since the day the car was rolled out of whatever factory it started its life in, thoroughly enjoying that stupid playlist while they zip towards the nearest McDonald's.
"First of all, I like an equal number of songs on each playlist," she delicately begins. "Second of all, romance encompasses a lot of different moods. It can be sad, it can be happy, it can—"
"Is there a romance playlist six?"
"I'm not going to dignify that with a response."
"I bet there's a romance playlist six," he says, reaching for her phone. She takes one hand off the wheel to slap at his fingers, and he laughs at her. "I can't believe you've been a sap this whole time, but you never bloody told me."
"You're the one who knows all the words to The Power of Love!" she protests, though she knows them too, and would have been singing her heart out, were he not in the car with her.
"'Course I do, I'm a huge sap, but I'm not afraid to admit it."
"Oh, please, I bet you say that to all the girls."
"What girls?" he says, with another laugh. "The only woman I hang out with on the regular is my mum, and her favourite thing to do is complain about the lack of girls in my life."
"Is she one of those 'impatiently waiting for grandchildren' mums?"
"I've reckon I've got about two good years left in me before she takes matters into her own hands," says James. "Never meet her, she'd love you, which means she'd have us married off to one another before either of us knew what was happening."
"What happens to Ian in this scenario?"
"Ian's your boyfriend?"
For a moment—and quite a fortuitous one, as she's had to stop the car for a moment as she waits for a vehicle somewhere up ahead to make a turn—she's completely taken aback by this question. "Have I never mentioned his name before?"
He looks at her sideways, and shrugs. "No."
"Oh," she says, blinking. "Well, yeah, he is. What'd she do about him?"
"She'd have him taken care of."
"What? Like, find him another girlfriend?"
"No, I mean he'd disappear and turn up six months from now floating in the French Riviera. My mum knows people."
"Sirius is not people."
"Don't go assuming my mum is like me. She has a vast network of spies in her employ, watching in the shadows."
"Your mother sounds like an interesting woman," she remarks, as they pull into the McDonald's car park and line up behind the other cars in the queue for the drive-thru, "or Lord Varys. Either way, interesting."
"She's pretty unique, all right," says James. He's combing his fingers through his own hair, gazing out the window at one of the brightly-lit advertisements with a somewhat absent expression. "D'you think you'll marry him?"
"What, Ian?"
"Yeah."
"No."
He looks at her immediately. "Really?"
She'd be lying if she said she gave her answer without thinking, but doesn't want to elaborate on it now—it's just one word, but there's far too much disappointment and resentment and confusion to unpack behind it, and it's something, she supposes, she should really talk about with Ian first—so she shrugs one shoulder. "Do you want to get married one day?"
"Absolutely, yeah, I want to get married," he says immediately, and warmly, and in a way that makes something small inside her ache, "and so do you, even if you're going to be coy and pretend you've never really thought about it."
"How'd you make that?"
"Six playlists full of love songs," he reminds her, and taps her phone. "The true hallmark of a hopeless romantic. Don't even pretend I'm not right."
"I do not have six playlists full of love songs," she doggedly insists, then turns her head to look out of the driver-side window, tipping her nose daintily into the air. "I have nine."
He's still laughing at her when they collect their food at the window.
Ten weeks have passed since the day she first walked into the bookshop.
Ian's promise to book a couple's weekend away has never borne fruit, and she knows by now that it probably never will.
She and James have become friends, somehow, but it's an incomplete, secretive thing, as if they're standing on opposite sides of a room, staring resolutely at a line drawn down the middle and unable to cross from either side.
They're Facebook friends, but they've never exchanged numbers. He doesn't 'like' her photos or comment on her posts, and she treats his profile with the same lack of attention, but he'll bring them up in the shop, and she'll tell him how much his status from three days ago made her laugh while she was at work. They chat on Messenger, but only ever about the books they're reading, and in a tone that's markedly different to the easy, flirty repartee of their flesh-and-blood selves. Even Ian, who Lily caught looking through her messages while he thought she was cooking in the kitchen, saw no cause for concern with James. He was more worried about Remus, for whom she made the mistake of including a hug emoji at the end of a text.
That invasion of her privacy caused another banger of a row and a frosty silence of three solid days, though it was hard for her to feel as righteous as she would have, perhaps, had she not been harbouring feelings for another friend that were growing harder to repress by the day. Were her own relationship not starting to make less and less sense. If the thought of James seeing somebody else didn't feel like being socked in the gut.
And the line in the room grows bolder, until one day, she finds herself prodding it with her toe.
It's early July, and an otherwise typical Monday evening. For once, she's round at Ian's place, though it's the first day of Wimbledon and he had neglected to tell her that Paul and Josh were coming over to watch the match he recorded on his couch. She finds herself wedged between her boyfriend and a bloke who once got drunk and tried to grope her breast at a house party, scrolling through Wuthering Heights on her phone because she needs to have it finished before the club meets next week, except she really isn't feeling it, and she's too crotchety to focus, and wonders what James is up to at that moment. If he's working today. If he's happy. If he ever thinks of her when she's not around, the way she's thinking about him.
She likes to say his name out loud sometimes, when she's alone and feels particularly stressed, like a coping mechanism. James. It reminds her that he exists, and the reality of him is such a lovely thing to remember. James, James, James. One soft, imperceptible sigh that dissolves in the air and hurts nobody, but it makes her feel much better to do it.
When his message pops up on her phone, it feels as if he's come to rescue her.
i know this book is meant to be powerful or whatever but i really bloody hate it. do your super brainy thing and tell me what i'm missing please
Her relief is so great that it manifests itself in a smile that can't be mistaken for anything other than hopeless infatuation, and she has to fight to keep it off her face. It doesn't matter, though. Ian's too involved in the tennis match to notice, and she hastens to reply, lest James slip away from her too fast.
Omg no hard same, I hate it. I always find it hard to connect with a book if the protagonists are literal garbage, and Heathcliff is the worst.
before i read it I thought it was a romance novel but now i see that i was horribly deceived
heathcliff needs to meet my mum. my mum would kick his arse
And how many narrators does one book need?
and why is the narrator narrating the narrator?
I DON'T KNOW but it's the most irritating narrative structure I've ever come across.
and wtf is up with catherine always locking herself in her room and making herself ill when she doesn't get her way? kids are more mature than that. i am more mature than that
It really pisses me off that Heathcliff abuses Isabella, but even in this day and age we're supposed to believe he's a Byronic hero, like, okay, sure, let's side-sweep the abuse because he's tragic or whatever.
i wasn't aware that it was okay to abuse women if you could pull off handsome broodiness by standing around on the moors but i guess heathcliff has paved the way
LMFAO
the woman i love is dead. should i kidnap her daughter? i guess it's fine because i look really spiffing in breeches and a cravat
The thought of you in breeches and a cravat is hilarious.
you mean HANDSOME and also OVERWHELMINGLY HANDSOME
And the caps finally make an appearance.
weirdly i used to date an isabella
You did?
yeah for like two years
Wow. I've never dated anyone for that long.
how long have you been with your boyfriend?
Oh. Just over a year I suppose.
you suppose?
Things with him have been sort of shit for a while so I don't really like thinking about it.
oh
i'm sorry, i didn't realise
I'm at his flat now. His mates are here. He didn't tell me they'd be watching tennis so I'm sitting here with nothing to do.
TBH I don't even know why I'm here because one of the guys who came over once tried to grope me and I've felt really uncomfortable around him ever since.
wtf that's awful
did you tell your boyfriend about it
Yeah, but they've been friends for a really long time so.
You know.
I think I might just go home.
or
alternatively
we shut up the shop an hour ago but i'm still here sorting some stuff out
do you want to come over and hang out?
He's still just a friend, technically, and there's nothing wrong with what they're doing, but she knows that she shouldn't. This isn't like grabbing a lift with a colleague, or bumping into Remus in Cowgate and deciding to get pancakes at Tamu. She feels too much for this one.
She might be falling for this one.
Then Ian roars at the telly, cracking open his third can of the day, and there's no point to her prolonged presence in this place, or to him, or to them, or anything, and that makes her mind up for her.
Give me half an hour.