Lily pours more for each of them. ‘So I’m guessing he freaked out at the idea of taking on responsibility – not just for you, but for your grandparents, for Ivy, for people in your life. It’s a big step, and maybe he doesn’t feel ready for it. I mean, that’s my guess. I obviously don’t know for sure.’
‘So he hasn’t been over here for counselling?’
‘This is not just counselling. This is Lily counselling. But no.’
Jess forces her laugh a little at this lame joke. The wine is going down easily. She pours another glass without asking; what’s the point in having M&S wine if you’re not going to drink it? And wine never tastes as good with curry as she hopes it will. They might as well enjoy it while they wait.
‘So what do I do now?’
‘Well.’ Lily takes a long slurp of wine. ‘First, I guess you have to decide if this relationship is worth fighting for. How much do you like him, exactly? Or do you just like the idea of him?’
In that bookshop all that time ago, Jess would have had to admit that she liked the idea of him more than anything else. His fingers brushing hers, his Darcy-like hand clench, the gentle flirting and meet-cute of it all. If she’d known he was a writer, she would probably have liked the idea of him even more. But then when she met him again half an hour later and he was rude and dismissive and condescending, she didn’t like theidea of him at all. If you’d told her she’d be in love with him in a matter of weeks, she would have dismissed it as ridiculous.What, she would have said,do you think I’m completely lacking in self-respect?And yet, here she was, in love. And now – well, now it’s become very inconvenient that she likes him so much, when he messes with her head on a regular basis. The idea of him is less than appealing, and then she sees him, and she’s all weak knees, butterflied stomach, and wobbly legs. So this is a confusing question.
‘The idea of him is inconvenient in a lot of ways,’ she says eventually. ‘So I think I’d have to say that it’s him I like, and not the idea.’
‘Right. So this is worth fighting for?’
‘I think so,’ Jess says. ‘If this ends happily.’
‘Well, you can’t know that. That’s the rub. You can’t ever know if something ends happily. You have to hold your nose and jump off the diving board and hope the water is there to catch you and you’re not just going to land in an empty concrete pool and snap your neck.’
‘That’s not exactly reassuring.’
‘I know.’
‘But, wait …’ It’s possible that the wine is blurring Jess’s thinking. ‘In this analogy, wouldn’t you look first to check there is water in the pool?’
‘Right. You would. You do your due diligence. You list pros and cons. You think about whether this particular pool is one that looks worth the risk. And then you jump.’
‘But I guess you still have to trust that you haven’t hallucinated the water.’
‘Exactly.’ Lily nods. ‘You can only be so sure. Especially with relationships. People are complicated.’
Jess takes another sip, pondering this. ‘So if I decide he is worth it, and I’m going to jump – what then? What does jumping mean?’
‘It means not being afraid to address the difficult stuff. To have the tough conversations.’
Jess shudders. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘I know you don’t. But life isn’t all puppies and rainbows. To make a relationship last, you have to be willing to address the difficult stuff, not stick your head in the sand and cover it up with fun stuff.’
‘Sticking my head in the sand has always served me well, though.’ Jess means it light-heartedly, as a kind of joke. But Lily doesn’t take it that way.
‘Has it, though?’
Jess is saved from having to consider this question by the proverbial doorbell: the Indian takeaway has arrived in a turquoise cool bag on the back of somebody’s bike. And Indian takeaways are another thing that have always served her well. There is certainly no doubting that.
Plates, serving spoons, cutlery: it now seems foolish that Jess and Lily didn’t have all this ready long before the arrival of the food. It’s not as if they didn’t have long enough: they’ve had plenty of time to down a couple of glasses of red wine each. Jess isn’t sure how long that is, exactly. Her head is spinning a little.
They dollop food onto plates – a little of each dish, as is their tradition – and Jess tears the sweet-smelling peshwari naan into two roughly equal halves. She hopes Lily doesn’t notice when she takes the slightly-more-than-equal half for herself. Maybe her Alex trials are enough of an excuse to do so.
They have done all of this wordlessly; maybe Lily is still waiting for an answer, and she is letting the silence linger so that Jess will eventually squirm enough to admit that, actually, avoiding all unpleasantness and leaning into fun hasn’t always worked great. In her first year of uni, it led to a few questionable one-night stands and a lot of hangovers – never made easier by impending essay crises. These days, it means she’s wasted her time on more than one questionable Netflix series and more than a thousand two-and-a-half-star reads. Anything to escape, even if the escape itself isn’t that great.
‘But you and Gareth are happy,’ Jess says.
‘You’re not going to answer my question, are you?’
‘What question?’
