It always smarts, catching sight of her bare ring finger. It still feels, on many levels, unbelievable. I’ve carried on wearing mine. I don’t know if that’s weird. It probably is.
I shake my head. ‘Perhaps I should go away for a while. Maybe Wilf had the right idea, escaping abroad.’
Rachel nods, a faraway look in her eye. ‘God, yeah. You know, I still think about Aruba sometimes, when I’m—’ She breaks off, and laughs. ‘Well, delirious from lack of sleep, essentially.’
It takes everything I have not to tell her to pack a bag. That I’ll put a holiday for two – three – to Aruba on my credit card right now.
‘Your writer’s block probably just needs a muse,’ Rachel says.
I half-laugh, because I appreciate irony, and look down at my knees. Since we broke up, I’ve begun to wonder if Rachelwasmy muse. I haven’t told her this, mostly because I don’t think she’d enjoy the guilt trip, plus the concept has always seemed faintly patriarchal to me. But still. I can’t shake the feeling that, sinceshe left, my brain doesn’t work in quite the same way as it did. Is it that I’m unhappy? Or that I can’t fully relax?
I got talking to Darren about this not long ago. But all he did was try to persuade me to start smoking a very potent grade of weed.
‘Do you have one, at the moment?’ she asks. ‘A muse.’
‘Do you mean, am I seeing anyone?’
She smiles. ‘I was trying to be subtle.’
I laugh. ‘Okay. But just so you know? Ingrid on an acid trip is more subtle than you.’
The funny thing is, I want to tell her. I like that she wants to know. But what I can’t confess is that, a full four years on, I still can’t kiss anyone else without thinking of her.
Instead, I just tell her that yes, occasionally, I hook up with girls. Without adding, of course, that I have never been able to replicate what we had. That I end every one of these encounters feeling empty and disconnected. I usually tell whoever it is close to nothing about myself, whereupon we have a brief and mutually unsatisfying shag before going our separate ways.
‘And? How is it?’ Rachel asks.
I hesitate. Make a sound that is not quite a laugh, look away.
‘Sorry. I’m being insensitive.’
Maybe. But, with her, it never truly feels like that. I will always want to talk to her about this stuff. No matter how weird it might seem to other people.
‘I was trying to think of a more creative word than crap,’ I say.
She sips her wine, steadying her brown eyes against me. ‘In what way?’
Heart hopping, I meet her gaze. The seconds stretch.
‘I guess it’s better when you really know the person,’ I say eventually. My mouth, abruptly, has gone dry with want. ‘Or, you know... love them.’
‘How much better?’
I see her breath catch, a tiny jump to her chest.
I picture setting down my glass, leaning forward to kiss her. Teasing my tongue into her mouth. Feeling her touch me. Clothes coming off as time turns to liquid. Taking her to the brink with my fingers, hearing her gasp my name.
‘So good, you have the kind of sex you can’t stop thinking about. Even years later. You know?’
She nods, fiercely. ‘Yeah,’ she whispers.
And now I do put down my glass, and am about to lean in when a tiny whimper fills the air.
The spell is broken. Rachel turns her head. Emma’s cry ramps up.
‘Sorry,’ Rachel murmurs, setting down her own glass and getting to her feet.
46.
