These, of course, are the things they told themselves back when it was all going to be fine. Back when itwasfine, really.
‘But you each stay in your lanes,’ Polina presses.
‘Yes,’ Sam says.
Lexi catches the romance novel display. ‘That’s the theory, anyway.’
The vibe has shifted so many times tonight, from friendly to awkward to fun, and now they’re back in awkward territory, something like tension filling the air.
Polina clears her throat. ‘Well, this has been fun,’ she says. She has got all she needs from this conversation. ‘But I should get going. Love what you’ve done with the place.’
‘Thank you,’ Sam says.
Circulating with wine, hovering just within earshot, Amanda’s caught the compliment too and chimes in with athank youof her own. Now the vibe feels more chilly than anything, ice in Lexi’s veins as Polina looks from her to Amanda and back again. Wondering, no doubt, about some of the things Lexi has wondered about too. Is Amanda sticking around? Are she and Sam going into business together? What happened to her career ambitions? And, most importantly to Lexi: if Sam is able to forgive Amanda for using him, then why can’t he forgive Lexi the (surely) smaller sin of role-playing from Jane Austen to get him to fall in love with her? She might have been careless with his heart; she was maybe a little misguided, maybe a bit ridiculous, but it was because she liked him.
And now he and Lexi and Amanda stand there, and Lexi doesn’t have the upper hand or the quick banter. Instead, she feels like she’s shrinking, like she’s surplus to requirements. It’s not a nice feeling.
‘Well,’ she says, clearing her throat and, unable to think of a betterI’m leaving in a not-at-all-awkward-wayphrase than Polina’s: ‘This has been fun.’
‘So soon?’ Amanda is baring those white teeth again– that polite smile that belies the catty words.
‘You know how it is. Places to be.’ Those places are mostly in the kitchen making tea and in bed with a book to block out how awkward she feels. So that’s two places. Plural. No word of a lie.
Amanda seems doubtful. ‘Places more fun than this?’
Lexi looks around at the admittedly now thinning crowd, still chattering and laughing and downing wine. Fun, yes, at least in theory. But the amount of fun that can be had when standing around with a guy she both loves and hates and his ex and perhaps current girlfriend is... limited.
‘Depends how you look at it, I guess.’
Sam raises an eyebrow. Lexi shrugs... enigmatically? Or perhaps just sadly, pathetically.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Well, thanks for coming.’
‘Thank you for inviting me.’
Invitingis a stretch. Grabbing her as she walked past, was more like it. But if Amanda has control of the guest list, perhaps that’s the best he could do. Maybe he was even incurring her wrath by doing that.
Suddenly grateful, Lexi surprises herself by kissing him on the cheek. And then, just as suddenly self-conscious, she turns to kiss Amanda, too, to demonstrate that she’s the kind of person who kisses everyone, no big deal, nothing to read into it. Then Lexi hoists her bag back onto her shoulder and turns to leave.
But then her bag catches on something and she stops, frozen.
A gasp.
A crashing of glass.
A few drunken cheers and claps from across the room.
Oh, no.
In a film, Lexi turning round to face the damage she’s wrought would be in slow-mo. In reality, it happens super-fast: the grimace on Amanda’s face, the passing of the napkins, the frantic dabbing at the deep red wine splashes on her pink blouse, the rushing in of Tessa with a dustpan and brush retrieving the glass from the floor.
All Lexi wants to do is what she’s beentryingto do– to get the heck out of there– but now she has to stay, apologise, offer to clean up.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeats over and over.
‘It’s fine,’ Amanda says, with that same polite American smile she’s had on all night, the one that says,I want to kill you. Only now it says,I want to kill you with a set of blunt knives so that it’s as slow and torturous as possible.
Lexi searches out Sam’s eyes for some reassurance that he doesn’t hate her, that he knows it was an accident.
