‘How do you know?’ I asked, trying to remind myself she was in fact eighteen and not the little girl it felt like I’d just been playing Barbies with in the back garden. ‘I might be out in London every weekend racking up my body count.’
She pulled a face and went back to her phone. ‘Don’t say things like body count, you can’t pull it off.’
I turned back to face the windscreen and silently added it to all the other slang she had forbidden me to use.
‘It is weird though,’ William mused, gliding over into the next lane to get around a very old lady in a very large Land Rover. ‘Why would he keep it a secret? He’s been here for what, three, four months?’
‘If I were a semi-reformed shagger, planning to put it about a bit until my wife left her entire life in a different country to be with me, I’d probably keep quiet about it,’ Charlotte suggested from the backseat. Neither William nor I responded. It was as good a theory as any and I didn’t care for it one bit.
‘He did say he had some things to work out but he didn’t clarify what those things were,’ I said as my phone briefly went dark. Eleven missed calls. Eleven voicemails. Fifty-five messages. ‘Was I supposed to ask if one of them was a wife?’
‘I believe the correct etiquette is still for the married party to at least mention their status before putting their penis in the unmarried party,’ William confirmed before moving back into the fast lane. ‘The onus is definitely on Joe.’
‘The onus might be on him but the joke’s on me,’ I moaned. ‘I should’ve known better. This is why I’m better off single.’
In the back, Charlotte’s expression shifted into something more thoughtful, a shadow I did not care for dulling the light in her eyes. ‘Is that why you wrote Eric?’ she asked. ‘Because in real life all men are this terrible?’
An emphatic yes fought its way to the tip of my tongue, but I kept my lips pressed tightly together and shook my head instead. She was only eighteen, it wasn’t fair, I wouldn’t do it to her.
But William would.
‘Yes,’ he answered before I could sugarcoat a response. ‘Straight men are human scum. And the shit-housery comes in all different shapes and sizes. They will go to any length to get what they want out of you and not a single one can be trusted, they are all, without exception … what was the word you used the other day? Chunts. They are all raging chunts, Charlotte Virginia Taylor.’
‘No, they’re not,’ I said as forcefully as I could manage, twisting around to look right at her. ‘Don’t listen to your brother, this is his idea of being protective. I wrote Eric because I believed there had to be a man like that out there somewhere.’
She looked back at me with big eyes, traces of last night’s glitter eyeshadow making them sparkle.
‘Do you still believe it?’
I thought for a second.
‘I want to,’ I said, ‘even though it isn’t exactly an easy task at this precise minute.’
‘Not all love stories are straightforward,’ she replied with unearned wisdom as she leaned forward to pat me on the top of the head like a good dog. ‘Maybe this is one of them.’
‘Feels more like a thriller right now,’ I muttered. ‘I’m not sure this one has a happily ever after.’
‘Maybe it’s an epic. A grand tale for the ages where you find each other again in fifty years and realise he was your true love all along.’
‘Fuck me, that’s depressing.’
William’s dry delivery managed to squeeze an unexpected laugh out of me and he grinned before his eyes moved up to the rear-view mirror. ‘I can’t remember the last time the three of us were on our own together. This is nice.’
‘It’d be nicer if we stopped at McDonald’s,’ Charlotte grumbled. ‘Sophie can pay. She’s minted.’
Out the window, I saw a sign for the Watford Gap services and my stomach growled again.
‘I could go for a six-piece of nuggets,’ William admitted. ‘And she’s right, you are loaded.’
In the backseat, Charlotte let out an agonised gasp, suddenly pale and panicked.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I strained against my seatbelt to reach her, grabbing hold of her hand as William hit the hazard lights and swerved across two lanes of traffic to the hard shoulder.
‘My Chanel bag,’ she replied, clutching the leather and chain strap draped across her body. ‘It’s real, isn’t it?’
Silently seething, William turned off the hazards and pulled back into traffic.
‘Lottie, that bag is the least of my worries,’ I told her, squeezing a tweaked muscle in my neck as I breathed out.
