We Were On a Break Read online

  ‘We’re not supposed to change seats before take off.’ He grabbed his bag from Maura’s seat without acknowledging her and hugged it like a sulky toddler. She sat down, cheek to cheek against his backside. ‘But whatever. You sit in the window, I’ll sit in the middle. Again.’

  I looked up at him, all tanned and sullen, and hoped against hope that my ring was wedged right up his arse.

  ‘Why can’t we change seats before take off?’ I asked, watching as Maura in 22C swallowed a handful of little white pills without so much as a sip of water. Total pro.

  He sat down in the middle seat with a heavy thump. ‘Because if we blow up during take off, they might not be able to identify the bodies so they need to know where everyone was to distribute the remains.’

  Maura in 22C froze.

  ‘I think it’s actually something to do with weight distribution,’ I replied loudly. ‘And I don’t think it really matters that much, let’s just swap.’

  ‘No, that’s helicopters,’ Adam corrected, still cuddling his backpack. ‘With planes it’s in case all the bodies get burned up beyond recognition, then they can bury the right remains in the right—’

  ‘Just swap with me.’ I stood up and hoisted him to his feet while Maura in 22C began to cry. ‘And for god’s sake, shut up.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, wide-eyed and completely oblivious to my neighbour shaking silently as she stared at the safety card through red eyes. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I muttered, hiding behind my hair. ‘Sit down.’

  Adam kicked his bag under the seat in front and pulled his hood over his head, smiling for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long.

  ‘Liv.’

  From deep inside a dream about going out for ice cream with Brad, Ange and all the kids, I felt a stiff poke in my shoulder.

  ‘Liv? Liv.’

  Why? Why would he wake me up when it took me so long to fall asleep?

  ‘Liv.’ Adam tapped my shoulder over and over again. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘No,’ I replied without opening my eyes. ‘I’m really not.’

  ‘I’m bored.’

  I cracked open one eye to find his face so close to mine that everything but his freckles was a blur.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he pulled the strings on his red jumper so that the hood cinched in tightly around his face until just his eyes and nose were showing, the strain showing on his stupid, handsome face. ‘We’ve still got ages.’

  ‘I know, that’s why I was asleep,’ I said, swiping at his hood. ‘Can you take that down? You look like Little Red Riding twat.’

  ‘You love it.’ Adam tied the strings in an elaborate bow underneath his chin. ‘I look amazing. I’m the amazing red-hooded yeti.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I replied with a yawn. ‘And I’m not just saying that because you’ve got food in your hand.’

  Abi had been the one to christen him ‘yeti’ when we first met. She always labelled our dates, refusing to acknowledge their real names until the relationships had been established. Adam came to be known as the yeti because none of us really believed it was possible for an eligible, handsome man over the age of thirty to move to our village with his family and therefore she considered his kind to be as rare as the abominable snowman. With his sandy blond hair, longer and shaggier than it was now, yeti worked, and yeti had stuck.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ he ordered, opening a packet of M&Ms. ‘I bet I can do it in one.’

  Somewhere far, far away, I felt my grandmother spinning in her grave. Somewhere closer, I heard Maura in 22C let out a stuck-pig snore.

  ‘You’re not throwing sweets at my face on a plane,’ I said quietly, holding up a hand in front of my face. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You know I can do it,’ Adam repeated, readying a blue M&M. ‘Open your mouth.’

  With lips pursed tighter than the average cat’s arse, I shook my head, still mad about being woken up and slowly remembering all the other reasons I was upset with him. Last night’s weirdness, the airport phone calls and, oh yeah, the complete and utter lack of a bloody proposal.

  ‘Fine, whatever,’ he muttered, emptying half the bag directly into his mouth, slumping back down in his seat and producing a tiny can of Coke from his backpack. ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I turned so sharply a curtain of my own sun-bleached blonde hair slapped me in the face. ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied with a smirk. ‘Mum.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet,’ I replied, mostly peeved because he was right. It was happening more and more often, I would open my mouth and my mother’s voice would come out instead. I had Motherettes. ‘That’s so not funny.’

  ‘Oh, it’s so not funny?’ He let down my tray table without asking and placed his can in the little indentation without a napkin underneath. ‘I hate when you talk to me like a child, you’re not my mother, you know.’

  ‘Thank god,’ I quipped without thinking.

  The smirk wiped itself off his face.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  I should have known better, I really should. I knew I wasn’t allowed to make comments about his mum, ever, no matter what he felt like saying about mine. It was the number one unwritten, unspoken rule of dating a mummy’s boy. Never make a joke about his mother, ever.

  ‘Nothing.’ I picked up his drink and snapped my table back in place to cross my legs without hitting my knees. ‘Is your tray broken or something?’

  ‘At least my mum’s fun,’ he muttered, nipping the can out of my hand and glugging. ‘At least my parents aren’t boring.’

  ‘Don’t start.’ I closed my eyes and tried to think of happy things like my friends and my cat and advent calendars and Tom Hardy and the Topshop summer sale. Nothing was really that wrong, it was just the enclosed space and the lack of sleep and the night before and … oh god, I really was going to kill someone. At least Maura was completely unconscious so there wouldn’t be any witnesses.

  ‘I can’t be arsed with you right now.’

  ‘Me?’ Adam replied, incredulous. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Other than all those weird phone calls? And the moody silences?’ Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop myself and an unpleasant feeling began to fizz up in my chest. ‘Or, I don’t know, completely ruining the last night of our holiday?’

  ‘I didn’t feel well,’ he protested. The strings of his hoodie were still tied in a neat bow under his chin and it was all I could do not to choke him with them. ‘You couldn’t walk in those stupid shoes anyway; you would have ended up moaning all night. You should be grateful.’

  ‘I would not have moaned.’ My foot was still throbbing underneath the four layers of plasters. Ten minutes away, my arse. ‘You were the one who said it was ten minutes. And can you please take that hood off when I’m trying to talk to you?’

  Adam yanked the hood down, his hair springing up around his face, all fluffy and dry from the recycled plane air. He looked like a furious Pomeranian and it was very hard to take him seriously.

  ‘So, I made a mistake.’ He chugged his drink and crumpled the can like a slightly less impressive Incredible Hulk. He was, in fairness, almost as green. Adam was not a good flier. ‘I’m sorry I’m not perfect all the time like you. And it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t been wearing those stupid shoes in the first place.’

  ‘I’m not perfect,’ I said, brushing my hair behind my ears as my eyes began to burn. It was just the dry air. My eyes were watering because I’d gone to sleep in my contact lenses. I definitely wasn’t crying. ‘I’m just not stupid.’

  I felt Maura seize up at the side of me, not nearly as unconscious as I had originally thought.

  A condescending sigh escaped his mouth and he flipped his hood back up over his head, pulling it down over his eyes.

  ‘That’s me, so stupid. Not like Professor Liv. I’ll shut up before I say anything else that offends you.’

  I didn’t know what to do. We
never argued, ever. Well, there was that one time he’d deleted the Downton Abbey finale off my Sky+ but he’d replaced it with the DVD and all was forgiven. What was I supposed to do? Let him calm down, I told myself. Take Elsa’s advice and let it go. That would be the clever thing to do.

  ‘Arsehole.’

  I closed my eyes the second it was out, ashamed. Elsa would never call her boyfriend an arsehole – Olaf, maybe, but never Elsa.

  ‘I’m an arsehole?’

  Adam yanked the hood down and turned in his seat to give me his full attention.

  ‘I’m an arsehole?’ he repeated.

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Oh brilliant, now I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘You’ve been acting like a mentalist for two weeks,’ he said in an angry whisper that woke anyone still sleeping in a three-row radius. ‘Whining, sulking, constantly complaining and I’m the arsehole.’

  ‘When was I whining? What have I complained about?’ I replied, trying to keep my rage to an appropriate volume level. My grandmother would have come back to life just to die again if she’d seen us arguing in public. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘“What are we doing today, Adam? Where are we going tonight, Adam? Adam, I need a drink. Adam, it’s so hot. Why don’t you carry me, Adam? Why didn’t we hire a donkey, Adam?”’

  ‘I was only joking about you carrying me,’ I replied, flushed. ‘And obviously I didn’t really want to hire a donkey. You’re totally exaggerating.’

  Admittedly, I had googled the donkey thing when a girl rode one past us halfway up a mountain but apparently you had to buy it outright and I knew my credit card limit wouldn’t stretch to it. Not after that bloody stupid frock. For the most part, any questioning on my part was because I was anxious about the supposed proposal, but I could hardly tell him that.

  ‘I’m very sorry the Mayans didn’t build their ancient civilization closer to the hotel,’ Adam seethed. ‘What a bunch of selfish fuckers.’

  ‘It was hot and I was thirsty,’ I glanced around the plane and everyone quickly looked away. ‘But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t having a good time. Don’t make out like all I did was complain.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you enjoyed yourself,’ he said, either oblivious to or unconcerned by the scene he was creating. ‘You love complaining, you complain constantly.’

  ‘I do not.’ At least, no more than any other self-respecting Englishwoman. ‘I tell you when I’m upset about something, that’s not the same thing.’

  ‘Then you must be constantly upset. Liv, how do you cope?’ Adam said, sharpening his spine and wrapping his arms around himself, pulling himself further and further away from me, severing every point of physical contact. ‘Nothing’s ever good enough for you, is it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I was so incredibly angry I could barely see, and worst of all, I was almost certainly about to cry. ‘You’ve totally lost me.’

  ‘Mexico’s not good enough, my family’s not good enough, I’m not good enough,’ he carried on ranting in a mad whisper, banging his elbows on the armrests and his head hitting the ceiling as he threw himself around in his seat like an overgrown toddler. ‘Nothing’s ever good enough.’

  I stared at my boyfriend and he fannied around with his seatbelt, yanking on the strap trying to extend it, only succeeding in restraining himself even more tightly. Not a terrible idea, as things were. It was so out of character. Adam never lost his temper. Something was definitely wrong.

  ‘Adam,’ I laid my hand on his arm to calm him, trying to ignore the prying eyes up and down the plane and be the bigger person. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He shook his head and pulled away. My hand hovered in midair for a moment and I literally didn’t know what to do. What had happened? How had we gone from kissing in the cottage to shouting at each other on a plane?

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he asked with a laugh. ‘Amazing. There’s nothing wrong with me, what’s wrong with you?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he pulled his phone out of the seatback pocket and opened up one of his games, completely ignoring the stunned expressions on me, Maura in 22C and everyone in row 23. Nothing I wanted to say could be helpful, nothing I was feeling made sense. All I could do now was sit quietly for the next five and a half hours and hope we were flying through the Mexican equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

  Dabbing the corners of my eyes with my sleeve, I stared straight ahead, burning with embarrassment, confusion and most of all, the unshakeable feeling that I had done something wrong only I didn’t know what. And if he hadn’t apologized by the time we landed, I could always push him down the escalators at Heathrow and say it was an accident.

  We spent the rest of the flight in silence, listening to Maura’s choked sobs every time the plane shook, followed by another wordless hour in customs and nearly two more driving home. I was half awake, half asleep, delirious from jet lag and unwelcome tears. I didn’t care about the ring at all any more, all I wanted to know was why Adam was so incredibly angry.

  A sharp left turn jolted me wide awake as we pulled off the main road and into the village. Enough was enough, I thought, rubbing my eyes and blinking at the clock on his dash. Perhaps the holiday wasn’t going to end in a proposal but there was no way it was going to end like this.

  ‘Here already?’

  Adam nodded as we pelted down the country roads.

  ‘I wonder what’s gone on while we’ve been away,’ I said, my voice so croaky I could barely hear it myself. ‘Dad was supposed to be getting the surgery painted. I hope he got the colours I suggested.’

  Adam stared straight ahead.

  ‘I bet Gus has grown,’ I went on. ‘He gets bigger every time I see him. I think he’s going to be tall like you and your dad. I bet he’ll be bigger than Chris by the time he’s seven. Definitely going to be a heartbreaker, like your mum said.’

  I stole a sideways glance at my boyfriend. Nothing.

  ‘It’s a long way from Tulum, isn’t it?’ I clucked as we flew past the supermarket my dad swore he would never shop at until he found out he could get a free coffee every time he went in. The little village Co-op had closed within six months, it never stood a chance. ‘Makes you think.’

  About what, I wasn’t sure.

  Another left turn took us off the high street and down the little lane that led to the surgery.

  ‘We’re going to mine?’ I asked, sounding like I’d sandpapered my throat on the way home.

  We never stayed at mine because Adam hated staying at mine. Mine being a tiny one-bedroom flat above the veterinary surgery as opposed to Adam’s three-bedroom house with a great big garden and no attached neighbours. Adam claimed the flat was haunted by the Ghosts of Pets Past and their late-night howling kept him awake but I had an inkling it was more to do with the fact he didn’t like being away from his fancy coffee maker and king-size bed. Out of the three years we’d been together, I could count the number of nights we’d spent together in my flat on one hand. Most of my things were over at Adam’s but since my parents were oddly old-fashioned about these things, I had never officially moved in. I slept at mine once, maybe twice, a week, if my evening surgery ran late or Abi demanded a sleepover but really, it was little more than an unnecessarily well-furnished storage locker.

  Adam’s Land Rover crunched along the gravel outside the surgery and the motion-activated security lights shone accusingly into my eyes. Exhausted and frustrated, all I wanted was to go to bed. Maybe a couple of hours of decent kip would help, things always got blown out of proportion outside of daylight hours and everyone knew things seemed worse when you were tired. I opened the passenger side door and stumbled out onto the drive – Adam’s car really wasn’t made for a short arse like me. Retrieving my suitcase from the boot, I was staggering down the path with my suitcase, halfway to the front door, keys in hand before I realized Adam was still in the car. Still wearing his seatbelt. Still gripping the steering wheel as
though the car might tear away all on its own.

  ‘Are you planning on sleeping out here?’ I asked, the sharp edges of my house keys cutting into my fingers. ‘It’s a bit cold for a camp-out.’

  ‘No,’ he replied, eyes straight ahead. ‘I’m going home.’

  I took a deep, calming breath.

  ‘Adam,’ I said as softly as I could. ‘Come inside—’

  ‘I need to sort some stuff out,’ he cut me off, nodding once at his windshield. Even though he was looking in my general direction, his eyes didn’t quite meet mine. ‘I need a break, Liv.’

  ‘Well, you’ve just had a holiday,’ I pointed out, trying not to yawn. ‘That was a two-week break.’

  ‘I don’t mean that kind of break,’ he tailed off with a huffing noise and then turned the key in the ignition. ‘I need a break from this, a break from us.’

  The security light blinked out above me, leaving me in disorienting darkness for too long a moment. The only thing I could make out was Adam’s profile, etched in orange light from his glowing dashboard.

  ‘What?’

  My handbag slid off my shoulder, landed on my foot and then hit the ground, its contents spilling all over the floor. Inside the surgery I heard a few drowsy barks and whimpers as the security light flashed back into life, dazzling me with its angry white light.

  ‘I’m tired, Liv,’ he muttered, gunning the engine. ‘I’m going home and I’ll talk to you later.’

  Without any further explanation, he reversed quickly and peeled out of the driveway, showering me with gravel as he went. Stunned, I reached down to grab my handbag and felt an unexpected tear roll out of my dry eye and off the end of my nose. Inside the bag, my phone was flashing with a text message. It was Cassie, up for a three a.m. feed.

  ARE YOU ENGAGED???? DID HE DO IT??????

  ‘No,’ I whispered to my phone, tears falling freely down my face as I knelt on the floor. ‘I’m just knackered, miserable and desperate for a wee.’

  The sharp stones of the driveway dug into my knees, and underneath all the plasters my foot was screaming but I couldn’t feel any of it. I couldn’t feel anything at all. Swiping the back of my hand across my face, I scooped all my things back into my handbag then dragged my suitcase through the gravel, up to the door of my little flat, alone.