“I’m sorry I hurt you when I said I needed to slow things down. I was panicking.” Her words spilled out in a rush.
“I was worried you wanted to end it. I thought that Cassie had scared you off.”
“She almost did. I miss you. A lot. When we get back home, we’ll talk. I need to know where you want this to go. If it’s the same as me.”
“When we get home?” Why not now? I wanted to ask. Why wait?
“You have a lot going on. I don’t want to crash Ava’s big day.”
“Okay. When we get home. I’ll try to wait till then.”
“Thank you.” There was a shout behind her. “I’d best go. I think Rose is about to push Liv in the pool, and Liv’s about to go out on a date with the bartender. I’ll text you later.” There was another shout, then a hurried goodbye from Georgia.
I stared at my phone for a minute after the call ended, then fiddled around with the settings on the camera.
Standing back, I worked out where I needed to be to get all of me the frame and took three photos. I checked over them once, tried not to over think things, and then sent them to her.
I’d finally said my piece.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Georgia
Ididn’t show Olivia the pictures at first. They were mine and I wanted to keep them that way, at least until I was absolutely certain about what I was going to do.
Seph was unique; I’d figured that the first time I met him, and the more time I spent with him, the more I realised he wasn't like anybody else I'd been out with before. The last few weeks had felt strange as if somebody had told me I couldn't use my right arm, when it was actually perfectly fine to use. I wondered if this was how Franciscan monks felt when they took a silence, frustrated and caged in.
It had been like I'd been on a diet. Where you were depriving yourself of all the things she liked best, only to later come to the conclusion that it was making absolutely no difference whatsoever.
I could carry on with the analogies; there were tonnes I'd thought of in the last few days, all questioning why I'd made this decision to slow things down with Seph. Instead of watching my sister cavorting on the beach with her bartender, I could have had Seph with us, rubbing suntan lotion into my back, laughing with Rose in the sea. Rose had asked after him at least three times a day. She’d brought her atlas with her, and she'd worked out the rough distance between where we were and where Seph was. There was no point in saying to her that he was at a family wedding, because she'd spent enough time with Payton and Claire in the last few weeks to know that they liked her.
“What is it that you keep staring at?” Olivia tried to peer over my shoulder to see what it was that was looking at.
I moved my phone away, wanting this to just be for me, not wanting to share it at the moment, because when I did my sister was going to throw a party.
“Nothing.”
“No such thing as nothing.”
It looked like we were in for one of our petty squabbles that took us back to when I was four and she was six. We'd never quite grown out of them.
“That's what Mum always said. Why are you copying Mum?”
“I'm not copying Mum. Let me see your phone!”
I moved it further away from her. “Don't you have some bloke to fawn over?”
Olivia scowled, and I could see exactly where Rose got that expression from.
“He's busy.”
I looked over to where he was sitting, and noticed that he wasn't busy at all. In fact, all he was doing was staring at his phone.
“Don't tell me you're bored of him already?”
Olivia tossed her head slightly, reminding me of a pony in one of Rose’s cartoons. “I think we’ve run our course.”
“Okay then.” I rolled my eyes, Olivia-style. “So, who’s next?”
