Butnow. Nowshe’s with a bloodycelebritywho prances around on the TV for work. This is bonkers. Beyond bonkers. There are more pictures of them appearing online, in a bar. Aury’s in the same dress, but I’ve got no idea if the photo was taken before or after the one of them kissing in a lift. I don’t want to know. And it doesn’t matter, because there is absolutely no way I’m doing anything about this – about how I feel.
No way.
Not that I could before. Bloody Ben!
And now … bloody Sam Charlton too.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
This year
Aurora
‘Does Ollie talk to you much these days?’ I ask Liv in a bar over drinks, six months later. We’re cramming in Christmas drinks before she goes back home to Northumberland for a week.
Ollie and I haven’t spoken in so long. Neither of us has been grown-up enough to send a follow-up message after the phone call when he hung up on me. Ben has no idea why Ollie’s wound up, and Liv’s response when I rehash all this over drinks with her, near her office in Spitalfields, is simply, ‘It’s Ollie. He doesn’t talk to anyone. Why do you think we broke up?’
‘I thought it was because he was boring,’ I state, not feeling remotely like defending Ollie right now.
‘Yes, many reasons. That was one. It just wasn’t right. But we’re still friends. Sort of. We talk from time to time,’ Liv says. ‘But I don’t tell him my deepest, darkest secrets and he doesn’t tell me his, so it’s not a close friendship.It’s a blasé, at-least-we-can-be-in-the-same-room kind of friendship.’
‘Civil,’ I state.
‘Civil,’ Liv echoes. ‘Like you and Ben.’
‘Yeah, I suppose. But I thought Ollie and I were more than that.’
‘I thought that about you too,’ Liv replies, giving me a direct look.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The two of you were always off in a corner somewhere, having a talk. You always looked so serious together, as if you were dealing with the worries of the world. Usually at parties, when the rest of us were trying to have fun.’
I remember many of those occasions in the early years of our friendship. Usually because Ben was being too … Ben.
‘I was quite jealous actually,’ Liv says, not making eye contact.
‘Were you?’ I ask quietly. ‘You didn’t need to be. There was nothing going on between me and Ollie.’
‘I know. But I didn’t like how he looked at you.’
My breathing slows. ‘How did he look at me?’
‘Please. You must have seen it. You must have.’
Ben told me something similar, back in the day. I was incensed that he’d say such a thing while we were breaking up.Wasit true back then? Is it now?
Ollie always looked at me in the same way – there was never anything that made me suspicious.
I shake my head.
‘Really?’ Liv asks and seems genuinely puzzled by this.‘It’s water under the bridge. I can forgive him for fancying you because neither of you did anything about it. You broke up with Ben, and Ollie didn’t try to do anything about the fact you were single, so …’
‘So …?’
‘So Ollie either doesn’t fancy you and it was all in my head. And Ben’s head. Which it wasn’t. Or Ollie’s too afraid.’
I double-take. ‘You knew Ben felt that way too?’
