I grab at my napkin as the breeze coming in from the sea picks it up and hurls it towards me. The candles on the table flicker.
“Are you cold?” Alex asks, seeing me rub my arms. “Do you want to go inside?”
“No, I’m fine,” I insist, picking my fork back up. “I only have two nights left here. I’m determined to enjoy them. And it’s not every night a girl gets treated to a romant… to a dinner on the beach.”
I might be determined to enjoy myself, but the wind, it seems, has other ideas. It dies down slightly as we eat our main course, but by the time Emilio appears to ask what we’d like for dessert, we’re having to use our phones, plus a couple of small rocks from the beach, to anchor the cloth to the table, and I have a horrible feeling that when I look in the mirror back at my room, my hair’s going to look a lot like that Barbie my brother once gave a mohawk.
“What d’you say we skip dessert?” Alex suggests as the menu goes fluttering out of the waiter’s hands and skips gaily down towards the sea, with Emilio in hot pursuit. “There’s an ice cream shop not far from here. It’ll be less windy the further we are from the sea.”
We walk the short distance to the shop in question, and, after a few minutes, Alex emerges from its doors carrying two of those gigantic cones that are so big they start melting before you can finish them.
“Are you really going to tell Jamie’s wife about how he was with you?” he asks, as we wander along the promenade next to the sea, meholding my ice cream at arm’s length to stop it dribbling down my arm.
I shake my head firmly, thinking of Jamie’s little girl, and the adoring way she’d looked up at him.
“No. I’m not going to be responsible for breaking up a family. It’s up to him to decide whether he feels guilty enough to tell his wife or not. I just wanted to make him stew for a bit.”
“Do you think he’ll tell her?”
“Nah. I doubt it. Nothing really happened between us, after all. The ‘kiss’ was just a brush on the lips — he could explain it away as just a friendly goodbye between friends. Or say I imagined it. Sometimes I’m not sure if I did.”
“Don’t do that,” says Alex after a second. “Don’t try to downplay it. He was leading you on, and he was married. That’s not okay.”
“No,” I agree, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. “No, it’s not.”
I turn my cone around, trying to catch the trickle of ice cream that’s started to melt on the other side of it.
“So, what about you?” I say, hoping I haven’t got any of it on my nose. “What will you do when you get home? Will you have to move house? I’m guessing you and Rebecca live together?”
“We did,” he says. “But the house is mine, thankfully. I told her to move her stuff out while I was away. That’s one of the reasons I came on this trip, actually: so I didn’t have to be around while she was doing it. At least this way by the time I get back, every trace of her should be gone.”
He says this with a bitterness that makes me wonder whether the empty house he’s going home to is going to be a good thing or a bad one. Because I know hesaysthe relationship should have ended longago, but I also know you don’t get engaged to someone without having any feelings about them at all.
He must havesomefeelings for her, surely?
There’s no way for me to ask this without it being intrusive, though, so I swallow the question on my lips with another mouthful of ice cream.
“You mean youdidn’tcome here to have Rita read your tea leaves and talk to Gerald about ‘the darts’, then?” I ask playfully instead.
“Nope. Although I must say, I am looking forward to hearing the best singer in the Canary Islands tomorrow night,” he replies. “So I suppose some good’s come of my weird solo honeymoon.”
“I’m amazed you went through with it. I’m not sure I could’ve,” I say cautiously. “Not that I’ve got the slightest clue what you’ve been going through, obviously.”
“I almost didn’t go through with it,” he admits. He’s somehow managing to eat his ice cream without getting it all over his face, like I am, but there’s a tiny dot of strawberry on his upper lip, which is proving very distracting. “It was tempting just to pretend this wasn’t supposed to be happening, either. But then, I knew I wasn’t going to get my money back if I canceled — funnily enough, holiday insurance doesn’t cover finding out your fiancée is cheating — and I just thought, fuck it, why not?”
“Why not?” I echo, thinking about how I’d said almost the same thing to myself when I spontaneously decided to come on this holiday. I think about Alex, making the same decision at the same time: two seemingly random choices from two people whose paths might not otherwise have crossed, but which ended with us sitting right next to each other on the plane. And in the same hotel. And even in rooms right next to each other.
And now here we are.
In some other world — someSliding Doorsmoment, as Alex once put it — we would never have met. If I’d stayed in that night and not a takeaway, like I’d planned, rather than going toDiamondswith Chloe. If his wedding had been due to take place on literally any other day of the year. If Mum hadn’t dropped that box of old diaries off at my flat earlier in the week. If he’d had better holiday insurance. All the little choices and micro-moments that somehow shuffled into line and created a chain of chance decisions that led us to this windswept beach on an island off the coast of Africa, thousands of miles from home.
It’s actually quite amazing when you really think about it.
But in two days’ time, it’s going to be over, and I’ll probably never see him again.
That’s how holidays work. You meet people, then you never see them again.
Isn’t that what Alex said, that first night on the balcony?
