“Fuck yeah, I do,” I reply.
DEAR JENNA, DUBAI IS A WEIRD FUCKEN PLACE. MAEVE’S WORKING HERE. GOOD TO GET SUNSHINE THOUGH, AND THE SUNSETS ARE DECENT ENOUGH. I WISH I’D KNOCKED ON YOUR DOOR IN LONDON. LOVE YOU, MARTY. P.S. MAEVE SAYS HI!
“I do not!” Maeve exclaims, looking over my shoulder.
“Well, it’s rude if you don’t.”
“Fine, I say hi, but more than that I want to ask what the fuck are you two doing? Are you really going to see this through?”
“Abso-fucken-lutely,” I say as I fix the stamp on the card. “I'm almost halfway there. I actually think I can fecking do it.”
“I can't tell if this is the stupidest idea or the most romantic sappiest shit I've ever heard of.”
“Probably a bit of both,” I say and not in the least bit embarrassed by it.
“But what if she meets someone else? What if you do?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen, at least for me.”
A week later I meet Matthew in the restaurant. After over a decade of working for my uncle, I've managed to not get tangled up with colleagues for anything more than a few drunken snogs when I first started, but the moment Matthew walks in, I know I’m fucked. With dark hair, light blue eyes, and sculpted arms that belong on an athlete, he is the new restaurant’s front of house manager and the way he takes his instant nickname of Door Bitch with a suggestive pout and eyebrow raise directed at me tells me I wouldn't be barking up the wrong tree if I decide to bark up his. The surprising thing is, after a few weeks dancing around him in the kitchen - smelling his cedar, evergreen scent - and watching his tight buttocks march around the restaurant - I realise I do want to.
So I do. I do what I haven't done since Jenna. I flirt aggressively with him. I practically chase him down with my banter. And I then apply for a new job elsewhere so we can do more without it posing problems for either of us. In some ways it’s the push I need. I’ve been professionally ready for a change of scenery and a new challenge for a while, but mentally and emotionally, it is now time to cut the cord on my attachment to my uncle's restaurant, a place that saved me when I needed it.
Matthew meets me after my first shift as Deputy Chef at Kaiteki, an Asian-fusion soul food restaurant near St Stephen's Green, and we get the bus back to my place. That night we talk our voices hoarse and drink green tea until our bladders can't take anymore. With AJ snoring at our feet, we fall asleep on the couch, both semi-clothed and semi-erect, promising ourselves we’ll make up for it the next day. And we do.
We make up for it most evenings for the next seven months and every night I feel myself inch closer to falling for him, so close that I don't see the signs he’s not as keen as I am. He doesn't want to meet my parents. He isn't interested in going away with me, or spending Christmas together, and when I mention throwing him a birthday party, he makes excuses. A couple of weeks later, I realise I haven’t heard from him for a few days so when I meet my uncle for coffee at his restaurant, I ask how Matthew is, and Dermot tells me he has moved back to Cork. It stings. It hurts me, that people could treat someone that way. Then I get angry. Angry that he doesn’t realise how much pain already exists in the world even whenyou do love someone, let alone when you are trying to love or be loved. But after a few weeks I stop torturing myself about it and realise I got lucky to know the truth before I did actually fall.
Maybe because I’m still a little heartbroken, I agree to go on holiday with my parents again, just the three of us as Maeve is working in the USA. So it's from a seaside hotel near Biarritz that I send my tenth postcard to Jenna, written the day after an embarrassingly pitiful accident.
DEAR JENNA, I BROKE MY FUCKEN ARM SURFING SO THAT’S WHY IT LOOKS LIKE A 5-YEAR-OLD WROTE THIS. WORK ARE GOING TO KILL ME, BUT IT’S NOT SO BAD RIGHT NOW AS I SPEND MY DAYS IN THE HOTEL SPA. BY THE WAY, YOU HAVE RUINED SHOWERS WITH SEATS FOR ME. I LOVE YOU, MARTY.
Chapter Fifty
Jenna
Iwait three more months before I break-up with Chris, wanting to give it a chance once we're back in the real world, wondering if it was just being at the resort that tainted it for me. But it doesn't work. He doesn't want to be friends and that is upsetting, but not as much as being loved by someone who isn't Marty.
Still waiting on my editor’s feedback, I find myself volunteering at Battersea Dog Park two afternoons a week, and training for an amateur weightlifting competition that I get a PB from but no awards. Then, as summer fades into autumn, my manuscript is sent back to me and long hours of research and edits help me count down the weeks until my brother's season ends, and he moves in again.
It's on his second visit to the dog shelter with me that Jake points out a Jack Russell mix with what he calls Bi Dick Energy and he practically insists on me adopting him and calling him Marty. I succumb to one of those requests and take home the little troublemaker a few weeks later, but I keep his name as Rocky because I can’t bare the idea of hearing Marty’s name even more times than it already echoes through my mind. That little hyperactive dog and I break up my relentless days of edits by going on long daily walks. I find myself welcoming the change of season, and almost feeling excited about heading up to the Edinburgh for Christmas and watching Rocky terrorise my dad's dogs, which he does at every opportunity.
I think about Marty often - every time I catch the sunset, whenever I hear an Irish accent, and solidly for weeks and weeks when I'm editing the chapter on grief for my book - but slowly and surely I start to notice that he's no longer my firstactive thought in the morning, nor is he always who I think about when I glide my hands over my own body.
It's back in London on New Year's Eve, tipsy on expensive champagne bought by my brother and his wonderfully eccentric friends, when I realise that I am halfway through the five years. We are halfway there. I search for the pride I should feel, but it’s out of reach, and so is Marty, by at least two and a half years.
The next day I stay in bed until midday, trying to cry away my hangover, and when that doesn't work, Rocky and I walk eight miles to Hackney Marshes and back before picking up supplies for the most epic dinner for my brother and his friends. As their laughter fills my house for the second evening in a row, I feel full and happy and like maybe I am doing okay.
That is how I spend most of the rest of winter - walking and cuddling Rocky, cooking for Jake, and keeping my house and mind as full as possible - and finalising my book edits.
I hand over the updated draft the day before my fortieth birthday in March and to celebrate these two milestones, a week later my brother and I head off to the Maldives for two weeks to a resort he gets generously discounted.
I start as I mean to go on by doing next to nothing apart from an hour in the gym each day. That is until the fourth day when the gym manager asks me if I'd like to go snorkelling with him, just the two of us. Intrigued by his jet-black eyes and a little dizzy from his thick, defined quads, I push aside the sting that comes from remembering my snorkelling date with Marty, and I go with him. We see turtles, manta rays and baby barracuda sharks. Then he takes me off the resort to a private beach on the other side of the island that the staff use on their days off. Drinking cocktails out of plastic bottles with straws, we sit on the smooth white sand and watch the sunset while the sea water dries crisp and tight on my sun-tinged skin. A couple of hours later, he licks the salt of it off my body before we take a shower together, an experience that brings Marty’s image so vividly to my mind when I close my eyes, until the gym instructor's hairier chest jolts me back to where I am. I pull the man in front of me closer and I take and give pleasure as much as I possibly can. And it is good - he ravishes me and caresses me in equal measure. He takes instruction well and surrenders his body to my touch in a waythat reminds me of Marty but not in a distracting way, more as encouragement. It's bittersweet having that reassurance; that sex can still be good after Marty. If it has to be...
I only get two postcards from Marty this year, but that makes them even more precious. I read them just as often as the others and they are dog-eared and creased in no time.
Because of that Maldives trip, and my brother's resort being booked out a year in advance, I wasn't going to go to back to Crete this year, but then he has a cancellation and I get a phone call from Jake telling me that he may or may not have slept with someone he shouldn't have and he needs me there. The next thing I know, I'm on a plane to Crete again.
Four days later, I send Marty a postcard.
