We Were On a Break Read online

  ‘What do you think Daniel Craig the actor is doing right now?’

  ‘Eating, sleeping or having a shit? That’s more or less all he does these days.’

  ‘Weirdo,’ I laughed, flapping my elbows slightly as I tried to find a phone signal and hoped there wasn’t a massive sweat stain on the back of my shirt. Should have worn an undershirt. Should have put deodorant on my back. Should have done a lot of things.

  Liv pressed her lips together into a thin smile. ‘You’re a weirdo.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s why you love me.’ I choked on the words as the map came up. We were nowhere near the restaurant – it was a ten-minute drive away, not a ten-minute walk.

  ‘I knew there had to be a reason,’ she said, trying to subtly pull a strand of hair out of her lip gloss. ‘Are you excited about the christening?’

  ‘I can’t believe my brother is a dad,’ I replied, still staring at my phone. ‘He wasn’t even allowed to bring the school guinea pig home during the holidays and now he’s got a baby.’

  Recalculating the route, I looked down at Liv, wincing with every step she took.

  ‘Anyway, it really has been the best holiday ever,’ she said slowly. ‘I can’t imagine anything nicer.’

  ‘Yeah, incredible,’ I agreed, a cold sweat running down my back. How could I have messed this up? ‘Total once-in-a-lifetime thing.’

  ‘And I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather be with, yeti.’ She looked up and gave me the smallest, sweetest smile and I thought I was going to be sick. In a good way. Sort of. ‘Ever.’

  Oh god, I was actually going to be sick. Everything had been planned so carefully, right down to the smallest detail, and I had cocked up the directions. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to propose after all.

  ‘You obviously haven’t given it enough thought,’ I said, forcing out a laugh to distract from the fact I was dying inside. ‘You’re saying you’d rather be on holiday with me than Channing Tatum?’

  ‘Why Channing Tatum?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’s good looking, isn’t he? All buff and that. And he can dance. Women love men who can dance.’

  ‘You can’t dance – and I love you,’ she said, curling her fingers tightly around mine. ‘And I’d definitely pick you over Channing Tatum.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You’ve got better hair,’ she nodded thoughtfully. ‘And I couldn’t do that to his wife. She seems lovely.’

  I’d been so worried about what to wear, about getting the music right, the menu right, about fixing my massive Teen Wolf eyebrows, I’d completely messed up our timing. We were supposed to get to the restaurant in time to watch the sun go down. At this rate, it would be the middle of the night before we got there.

  ‘Really, though,’ Liv started with a crack in her voice and my stomach turned over again. ‘I don’t want to be with anyone other than you, Adam. There’s no one else for me, ever.’

  I let go of her hand and wiped my sweaty palms on the back of my jeans.

  ‘Yeah, better the devil you know,’ I said, my tongue tripping over my words. ‘It’s like Star Wars. You’ve got the original trilogy and they’re great, but then George Lucas says he’s going to make new films and you get all excited but you end up with The Phantom Menace.’

  Liv knitted her perfectly groomed eyebrows together. I always hoped our children would have her eyebrows.

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘I’m saying, our relationship is like the original Star Wars,’ I explained. ‘So I can’t dump you in case I end up with The Phantom Menace.’

  The sun had already started to slip away over the horizon but it was not difficult to make out my girlfriend’s expression. She didn’t look nearly as pleased with the analogy as I was.

  ‘What I’m saying is …’ I rubbed my palms together then took her hand back in mine. ‘You’re A New Hope. That’s good! And it’s better to stick with you because who knows if the next girl is going to be a Force Awakens or a Phantom Menace.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d probably just stop talking.’ She looked around the deserted beach, clearly confused. ‘Yeti, where is the restaurant?’

  ‘So, there’s a small chance I was looking at the driving directions when I said it was ten minutes away,’ I replied, reviewing the map. ‘It’s further than I thought?’

  ‘How much further?’ she asked, a noticeable hobble in her walk.

  I bloody well knew those shoes of hers would be trouble.

  ‘The good news is, we’ve already been walking for twenty minutes,’ I replied with a tentative smile. ‘And it’s only fifty minutes away altogether.’

  ‘Fifty minutes!’

  Liv stopped dead in her tracks, looking at me as though I’d just told her she had to walk the rest of the way barefoot, over hot coals.

  ‘I can’t walk another half an hour in these shoes.’ As she leaned forward, her blonde hair fell in front of her face, showing off her long neck as she messed around with the miniscule gold buckles. I hated those shoes but I loved that neck. I wanted to kiss it. But this really was not the time. ‘My foot is killing me.’

  I bloody knew it.

  ‘Well, take your shoes off and we’ll walk on the sand,’ I suggested, looking at the uneven path that ran down the side of the beach. Even my leathery Hobbit feet wouldn’t fancy that much.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, wincing as she removed her left shoe. ‘My foot is a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Oh my god, there’s a hole in your foot!’ I made an involuntary gipping sound as she pulled the shoe away to reveal what must have been a particularly nasty blister about fifteen minutes ago. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘You were in such a rush.’ She leaned against the low tidal wall and poked gently at the weeping mess formerly known as her foot. ‘I didn’t want to be late.’

  ‘I told you not to wear those shoes,’ I said, mad at her foot, mad at Google and possibly, very slightly mad at myself.

  ‘You also told me the restaurant was ten minutes away,’ she snapped back. ‘I can’t help it.’

  I checked my phone one more time before taking another look at Liv’s gammy foot. It was utterly disgusting but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  ‘If we walk around the beach, we’ll be there in ten minutes,’ I said, enlarging the map to make sure of my short cut. ‘Then we can clean that mess up there.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m walking down the beach,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘It’s filthy. Do you want me to get an infection in my foot? Do you want me to get septicaemia?’

  No, I almost shouted, I want to bloody propose to you! Instead, I took a calming breath, put my phone away and smiled.

  ‘Have you got a plaster?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t got a bloody plaster!’ she exploded. ‘Why would I have a plaster?’

  ‘Because you’re a vet?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t you carry that sort of thing?’

  ‘What, in case we pass an Alsatian with a splinter?’

  I turned my back on her and looked out at the setting sun, the last sliver hovering over the sea, and fingered the ring in my pocket. We were supposed to be there by now. We were supposed to be drinking champagne, surrounded by white roses and enjoying all the other amazing things I’d paid an arm and a leg for Pablo the events manager to organize in The Arse End of Nowhere, Mexico. I should have been the one down on one knee with a ring in my hand, instead Liv was crouching on the floor and tending to an open wound.

  ‘Maybe we should go back to the hotel,’ I suggested weakly as the sun drowned itself in the ocean. ‘It’s dark; it’s late. We’re not going to get there on time.’

  ‘You want to go back?’ she asked, hesitating over every word. ‘You don’t want to go to dinner?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to sit here,’ I replied. ‘What would you suggest?’

  Do it now, hissed the little voice in my head. Do it now, do it while she’s not expecting
it.

  ‘Fine,’ Liv pursed her lips and stood up, limping along to the edge of the path. ‘We’ll just go back.’

  That’s right. For some reason, the voice sounded an awful lot like my big brother. Go back to the hotel, don’t propose, wait for Liv to leave you then you can die alone with a massive beard, tissue boxes on your feet instead of shoes and hundreds of bottles full of your own wee to keep you and your eighteen cats company.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I murmured, fishing around in my pocket for the ring and bending down. Slowly. I really needed to see someone about my back.

  ‘There’s a taxi!’

  Before I could stop her, Liv hopped off the path and into the street, flagging down a white car with a red stripe down the side. It screeched to a halt at her side. I watched her, the headlights of the car lighting up her flowing white dress as it swirled around her slender legs, her hair flying out behind her. She was beautiful. She was clever and caring, she made me laugh, she took care of me even when I didn’t know I needed taking care of and she always watched Star Trek Next Gen with me, even if we’d seen it a dozen times before. Olivia Addison was perfect.

  And I couldn’t even get her to a bloody restaurant on time.

  ‘I can’t,’ I realized, staring at my grandmother’s engagement ring. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Adam?’

  It was too late, Liv was already inside the taxi, staring back at me. ‘What are you doing?’

  It felt as though everything inside me had stopped working, like even my organs were waiting to see what came next before they bothered to carry on keeping me alive. Her eyes widened and she blinked at the sight of me kneeling on the dusty street.

  ‘Fastening my shoelace,’ I replied, dropping the ring on the floor and covering it with my shoe. ‘Sorry.’

  Better start saving up my tissue boxes and adopting those cats, I thought, as I stood up, stashed the ring back in my pocket and forced one foot in front of the other to join her in the back seat of the taxi. You couldn’t just walk into an RSPCA and take eighteen. Could you? Surely there was a limit.

  The taxi driver pulled out into the speeding traffic, turning the radio up full blast and soundtracking my misery with a song I had loved until that moment. Now I was going to have to hunt down Mumford and all of his sons and murder them all to death.

  Liv stared out the window with her shoes in her lap as I closed my eyes, trying to work out just how I’d managed to get everything so wrong. Slipping my finger into the tiny pocket of my jeans, I traced the setting of the sapphire in my grandmother’s engagement ring and squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying not to cry.

  Well. That went well.

  2

  ‘Have you got everything?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Adam replied, looking back over his shoulder. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Did you check all the drawers?’ I asked. ‘The little ones in the nightstand?’

  ‘I’ll double check,’ he said, disappearing back into the bedroom.

  The second we got back to the cottage, Adam had retired to the bathroom, claiming an upset stomach and didn’t reappear until I’d given up any hope of a romantic proposal and swapped my beautiful white dress for my Garfield pyjamas. The whole evening had been a complete waste of make-up. Neither of us had slept a wink but neither of us was prepared to admit anything was wrong. Adam kept saying he still felt unwell, even though he’d managed to put away all the beer left in the fridge after I’d gone to bed, and I was only just keeping my shit together.

  ‘Are you not taking all this sun cream?’ he shouted, waving half-empty bottles of Ambre Solaire in the air. ‘There’s loads left.’

  ‘I couldn’t fit it in my case,’ I said as I heaved said case out of the front door and onto the deck, waving at our very early taxi driver. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘But there’s more than half left in one of them.’ He appeared in the living room with the three bottles in his hands. ‘Why didn’t you use one up instead of starting all three?’

  ‘Why didn’t you use any sunscreen the entire fortnight?’ I replied. ‘They’re all different. SPF 50 for the first week, 30 for the second and 15 for my legs.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ he muttered, opening his suitcase and jamming the bottles inside. ‘Such a waste of money.’

  ‘It’s sunscreen, it doesn’t matter, we can buy more. And it’s going to explode all over your sodding case if you keep shoving it in like that.’

  He looked up, defiance all over his broad features.

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  I raised an eyebrow and shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re not right about everything you know.’ He yanked the zip closed and pushed past me, chucking the case through the door. ‘It’s such a waste of money.’

  ‘Arsehole,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘I’m totally right.’

  He stood on the deck, staring at his phone as I locked the cottage door behind us. I’d already checked out when Adam went for his morning swim. Because like I said, he wasn’t feeling well.

  ‘All right?’ I asked as he began to type madly, all fingers and thumbs with his phone. His hands were so big, they even dwarfed his iPhone 6. ‘Is something wrong?’

  He shook his head without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘I need to call someone, I won’t be a minute. It’s not a problem.’

  I stared at him as he strode across the beach but kept my mouth closed for fear of accidentally screaming ‘Where is my riiiiiing?’ right in his face. Instead, I nodded and wheeled my suitcase over to the waiting taxi while he paced up and down the sand, shouting at someone in Spanish. For someone whose only opinion on weddings before finding out about Adam’s supposed proposal was that if it wasn’t an open-bar reception, I wasn’t going, I was beginning to worry I’d lost my mind.

  ‘No!’ Adam barked in his laboured accent. ‘Eso no es lo que acordamos.’

  It was strange to see him so close to losing his temper. Generally speaking, my boyfriend was so laidback and offensively agreeable that I once went round to his house to find Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to come up with an excuse to leave.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked, intensely casual as he clambered into the back of the taxi beside me.

  ‘No one,’ he replied, clicking in his seatbelt and turning towards the window. ‘Nothing.’

  Oh good, I thought, smiling beatifically. I was going to have to kill him.

  ‘No one,’ I repeated. ‘Right.’

  He looked back at me for a moment, seemingly on the verge of telling me something.

  ‘Really,’ he said with fifty per cent less huff. ‘No one. The manager of that restaurant wanting to know why we missed our reservation.’

  He was such a terrible liar.

  ‘OK.’ I kept my eyes on the horizon as we sped away from our beautiful cottage, in the beautiful resort by the beautiful beach, and realized I had wasted two weeks waiting for a proposal that wasn’t going to happen. ‘OK, then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Adam replied, shifting back towards the window. ‘Everything’s fine, don’t worry about it.’

  Because that was definitely a sensible thing to say to a woman, wasn’t it?

  ‘Here, give me that.’

  Adam held out his hands for my suitcase as I jostled it up onto the headrest of the seat in front of me, hair stuck to my sweaty forehead.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said with a tired but determined smile. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘I know you can,’ he replied, lifting the case out of my hands easily and sliding it neatly into the overhead locker before kissing me on the top of the head. ‘Just let me help.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, hurling my handbag onto my seat. He shrugged agreeably, staring at his ticket as I curled up in my uncomfortable seat.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh?’ I looked up to see Adam staring at his ticket. ‘What’s wrong? Are we not sat together?’

  ‘We are,’ he said, jamming his ticket into the back pocket of his jeans. �
��But you’re in the window seat.’

  I looked out of the tiny porthole at the steaming tarmac below and saw three men in orange hi-vis vests chucking suitcases onto a conveyor belt. I watched as one fell off, bouncing along the floor before one of the men came over to kick it all the way back to the conveyor belt to try again.

  ‘Did you want the window?’ I looked out at my little square of sky reluctantly. ‘We can swap?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind,’ he wrestled his man bag from across his chest and dropped it in the aisle seat. ‘It’s just, you had the window on the way out.’

  ‘You can have the window,’ I told him, nursing my handbag. ‘You sit here and I’ll sit in the middle.’

  ‘I said I don’t mind.’

  It was funny, because he certainly looked like he minded. He looked like he minded a lot of things but since he’d been almost silent ever since we got in the taxi it was impossible to know what was going on in his head. I had read every single gossip magazine the airport had to offer while he paced up and down the terminal, shouting at the supposed restaurant owner in broken Spanish. It had been a long three hours. I wasn’t a woman renowned for her patience when it came to human beings and the thought of a twelve-hour flight back to the UK was not helping me be my most sensitive self. If he wasn’t going to explain what was going on and the rubbish app I’d quickly downloaded to translate him couldn’t explain either, I was just going to have to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  ‘Uh, I think I’m sitting next to you guys.’ A young woman with an American accent waved her hand awkwardly behind Adam’s immense shoulders. ‘22C?’

  ‘Oh, hi.’ I gave her a manic smile and nudged my boyfriend in the thigh. ‘Adam, can you move your bag.’

  ‘I’m Maura,’ she said, slipping travel-sickness bands onto her wrists and sliding assorted medications and sick bags into her seatback pocket. ‘I’ll probably sleep the whole flight, so if you need to get by to use the bathroom, just like, climb over me.’

  ‘No problem, I’m Olivia, Liv,’ I replied, pointing at myself before gesturing at the six-foot-four human partition standing between us. ‘This is Adam.’