‘You look fantastic,’ I say quietly, my words drowned out by the crowd.
Aury moves towards me, and I reach over the waist-height metal fencing holding us plebs back from the megastars. She reaches over and holds me tightly – I can feel her heart hammering in her chest. She must be more nervous than she’s letting on. And then I feel her heartbeat slow against me and she pulls back and looks at me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she says and directs the comment to both me and Romy, who I forgot was standing right there for those few precious seconds Aury was in my arms. ‘It means a lot,’ Aury goes on. ‘Really.’
I don’t like to tell her I was forced to come, that I didn’t even know she’d be here. But the fact that she is has made my week.
Someone in a suit, clutching a clipboard, is trying to get her attention to move Aury along into the cinema and she tells me she’ll call me soon, that we need to meet up and ‘Why do we always leave it so long?’ I know it’s rhetorical, because she’s gone before I can answer. Not that I’d know what to say anyway.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Aurora
After the premiere Sam and I return to my flat.Liv’s rules.I’ve been thinking about this over and over again while Sam’s been with me this past week. I haven’t had any modelling jobs on this week, so I’ve had a lot of time to compute Liv’s rules. What they mean for her, what they might mean for me if I was to apply them to my life. She wants more, deserves more. She doesn’t want to ‘bubble along’: is that what she said? And I’m not sure I want to, either. I haven’t dated someone seriously since Ben. Ben was difficult, so difficult. Sam is easy, too easy. And that’s what makes it easy to stay together. But we’re not together, are we? Not really. We’re bubbling along. But isn’t that because he lives in LA and I live in London? And isn’t it because we’re forced to go slow, forced to date, rather than be in a real relationship? I’ve talked myself in and out of this decision this past week, flip-flopping between choices.
I watch Sam as he packs his belongings again, ready to return to the other side of the world. I smile when he looks up at me, but I realise it’s not a genuine response; it’s a panickysort of smile because I’ve been caught watching him, analysing him. Analysingus. Oh, shit! I think I’m about to do something that a lot of single women would think is crazy. Beyond crazy. If I leave it any later, he’ll be gone and then I’d be a coward for not doing this face-to-face, because I’ll have to do it over the phone. What if this is the wrong decision? I won’t know until I do it.
‘Sam,’ I say and he gives me the same sort of panicked smile I just gave him, his smile not reaching his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry to do this. But we need to talk.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Ollie
Two mornings later I’ve just finished a night-shift in A&E. It’s not my first one there, but I always dread it. Fellow doctors qualifying with me reported back that the A&E shift was the worst one they’d ever done, but an overnight one is the baptism of fire. If we can hack this, we can probably hack anything, we were told. At about 2 a.m. I started to wonder if this was what a warzone might look like. It was like something out ofLord of the Flies. The waiting room was stocked with teenagers with knife wounds; worried mothers of small, sickly children trying to keep out of the way; and fully grown men who’d punched each other after a football match that didn’t go to plan, with two of them ending up under a car. Broken arms and broken legs, broken hearts and drug addicts. It’s dire. I don’t want to be an A&E doctor. I really don’t.
Ben wanted to know how it was going, so as I come off-shift and board the bus outside the hospital I message him:Awful. Don’t get sick on a weekend. Fight Central. No room in A&E for anyone with a proper illness.
I watch Ben typing and he’s clearly ignored everything I said as he sends,Mate, this picture!
I sigh. Ben isn’t usually cryptic, but this one has stalled me.What?
And then another message lands. A photo blurs and I wait for the sketchy data-package to find my phone sufficiently to unblur it.
And then I see it: the photo is from the film premiere. There’s a whole series of images of various guests in the article, but the one Ben has selected to show me is a photo of Aury and me holding each other across the metal divide. Her eyes are closed as she embraces me. My eyes are closed too, and Ithinkthis is just a lucky shot taken when both of us are blinking at the same time, but it looks way more romantic than it should, given that my girlfriend is standing right there in the photo too.
‘Oh, you’re fucking joking,’ I say aloud, prompting the woman seated across from me on the bus to give me a concerned look before she glances away, pretending my outburst didn’t happen.
I put my phone face-down in my lap, place my head against the cold, grimy glass on the bus and close my eyes. I don’t need this. My phone beeps again and I open my eyes, lift my head away from the glass and read the message. It’s from Ben again.
What’s going on in this picture?
What does it look like?I want to ask, but I don’t, because what it looks like is that Aury and I are in some kind of romantic tryst. Over a barricade.
Romy is in the picture too,I text.
Not with her eyes closed,Ben fires back.
Are you pissed off?I ask.About a nothing picture. We’re blinking. At the same time. They’ve chosen that picture especially. They probably took about fifty, all in the space of a few seconds, and they chose that one because of how it looks. You know how it works.
Although Ben doesn’t. He laps this shit up, believes everything he reads online. I want to tell him that I know I can’t have Aury, that he’s made that abundantly clear and so I’m not doing anything; that I have a girlfriend and he doesn’t need to worry. But why do I have to keep defending myself? I don’t. It would be different if something was happening, but it’s not.
My phone beeps again and I’m frustrated enough to make some sort of involuntary growling noise from the back of my throat. The woman gets up and moves away. I pick up my phone, expecting it to be Ben again, doubling down on his request that I stay away from Aury, which I’ve been doing since bloody for ever. But it’s not Ben. It’s Romy.
Are you free today?she asks. I smile. Oh, thank God. A normal conversation is about to take place with a normal person.
I am. Yes,I reply and I watch her texting.
I’ll come over? In an hour?she types.
