Thirty-Seven
Now – November 2022
Evie
Evie woke up latish the following Sunday morning and lay under her lovely warm duvet for a few minutes, regrouping.
Sunday.Dan. They were meeting at two thirty at Portobello Market. And then they might go for a walk and grab an early dinner,or, say, go back to one of their flats and have afternoon sex.So exciting. It was a week and a half since she’d seen him, and she couldn’t wait.
She’d thought they were going to meet quickly during the week but he hadn’t been able to get away from work in the end, and he’d been fairly monosyllabic with his texts over the past few days, but that was understandable given the full-on nature of his job.
Right. She was going to get out of bed now and this morning she was going to paint her toenails, pop to the shops for some nicer coffee, just in case they came back to her flat and got as far as actually having a cup of anything, and maybe buy some fresh flowers for the sitting room, change her bedsheets, and finish some marking.
Honestly, she actually felt likesquealingin excitement about the day ahead.
What was she going to wear this afternoon? Maybe her new jeans with a loose top over a camisole.
Evie had just got home with the coffee, some flowers and a nice new scarf for herself, plus a book that Dan had been saying that he wanted to read that had just come out in paperback, when her phone pinged.
It was a text from Dan. She balanced all her shopping in one hand and swiped her phone. Probably aLooking forward to seeing youmessage. Only a couple of hours now until they were meeting.
Evie, I’m so sorry but I think we should maybe cancel this afternoon. I’m worried things are going too fast for both of us. I’m so sorry. Dan x
Evie dropped her phone on the sofa, dumped the flowers in the sink, plonked the coffee, book and scarf on the work surface, and sat down hard on the sofa next to the phone.
She read the message again and sniffed and scrubbed her eyes.
Bastard. Or not a bastard. Yes, a bastard. If he wanted to dump her, fair enough, his prerogative, but bytextfor fuck’s sake. He could have had the courtesy to bloody call her at the very least.
She went into her bedroom, closed the door behind her and sank onto her bed. Then she lay down and rolled onto her tummy and cried, a lot, for several minutes. And then she just lay there, feeling truly bereft.
Her phone rang a few minutes later, while she was still lying there doing nothing. She ignored it. There was no-one she could bear to talk to right now.
It kept on ringing, stopped and restarted. And again.
Oh, God, what if this was the actual worst day of her life and something terrible had happened to her mum or Autumn. Or Sasha. She picked it up and looked at the screen.
It was Dan. God, it wastragicthe way her heart leapt when she saw his name on her screen, because maybe he was calling to say his text had been a mistake, and then plummeted again, because of course he wasn’t.
Whatever, she might as well speak to him. Just in case.
‘Hi, Dan.’
‘Evie, hi. I’m sorry. I just… I’m sorry. I’m scared and I don’t think I can do this and I wanted to tell you in person. I’m sorry.’
Right. No. She couldn’t talk to him right now. It hurt too much.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Evie’s mum phoned straight after Dan had ended the call.
‘I’m so stupid,’ she wailed as soon as Evie swiped green. ‘Alex has apparently been sleeping with three different women at the same time.’ Alex was her latest OMG-he-might-be-the-One. After her longest ever period – a good six months – on the no-men wagon, she’d fallen off about a month ago. ‘He wasn’t serious about any of us. What’s wrong with me? I always read too much into things. Like I believe what I want to believe. And you’re my daughter and I’m your mother and you don’t need to hear this about my life. And I’m going to be okay. I’m going to go to the cinema with Grant this evening and cry on his shoulder. Tell me about you. How’s your day going?’
Evie’s day was going pretty similarly, actually. She’d been believing what she wanted to believe about Dan. She was just like her mum. Not surprising, really.
In the same way that it was really bloody obvious to everyone except Evie’s mum that Grant was the man for her, it was probably obvious to everyone but Evie that Dan wasnotthe man for her.
The one difference between her and her mum in this instance was that she hadn’t really told anyone about her and Dan. Not even Sasha. Maybe she’d subconsciously worried that something like this would happen.
