‘Yes, you’re acting like a kid, Ava. It’s happened, you can’t go back and change anything, pulling out of the book isn’t going to mean that you didn’t lie to me, that you didn’t write those things…’
‘No, but…’
‘And this is what you’ve worked on, yeah? What you’ve been doing to deal with Ettie?’
‘Yes, and I never wrote it to hurt anyone. To be honest, for the longest time I didn’t think anyone would even care, it wasn’t like you were there much. And I know now that I was wrong. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt, Florian.’
He hardens at the mention of being hurt. He shakes his head and the angry stranger who thundered through the chateau to try to get away from me last night reappears. ‘Too late for that, Ava, far too fucking late.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I try but I know I’ve already lost him, lost the conversation, lost the argument, lost whatever it was that we had.
‘Publish the fucking book. Publish everything. Tell the world about how much you detest me, how I’m just Ettie’s “druggy brother”. I honestly don’t care any more.’ He stamps on the cigarette, grinding it into the stone and storms back to his room, slamming the door behind him making all the glass in the windowpanes shake.
I am trembling too; everything feels as if it’s so precariously balanced that one step in the wrong direction will topple me entirely. I stub the cigarette out on the railing. I can’t leave it like this, with him thinking I detest him, that he has just been some distraction for me, an obstacle to write about.
I run into my own room, reach into my bag and grab the tattered diary, the nondescript little object that has caused my world to collapse in on itself. I take a deep, deep breath and then launch myself out onto the balcony again and into Florian’s room.
He is sitting in an armchair by the window, his hands gripping onto the arms so tightly I notice how white his skin is, how prominent and green his veins are. He jumps as he registers what’s happening, that I am here in his space, not willing to give up just yet. He bolts upright as if I have caught him doing something he shouldn’t. We stay like that for a moment, staring at each other, wondering whether to fight our corners or give in entirely. His eyes trace down my body to the little green object in my hand and he rolls his eyes.
‘You going to write about this too, are you?’ he sneers. ‘Might as well get the full narrative arc.’
‘You need to know one thing, Florian. This is my diary. I didn’t lie. This is the place where I scrawl down everything and anything I am feeling without it being filtered down or thought out. It’s me, just me and my confused little thoughts sitting there on a page. It isn’t the blog. It isn’t the book, it’s just ramblings.’
‘But it’s you, Ava, why can’t you see that’s the issue? You are the one that thought of me like that. You are always going to think of me like that.’
‘That’s a lie.’ I shake my head fervently. ‘Your mother… she picked the worst bits.’
‘Don’t bring her into this.’ He looks pained. I wonder if he has spoken to her some more, maybe even been counselled by her, if she’s added some more poison into the pot.
‘If you could just read the rest of it…’
He scoffs. ‘I’m not going to give you another chance to point out my flaws, Ava.’
‘Florian, please…’
‘Just go, take that fucking thing with you.’
I look at the door, the way he looks so despondent, so completely and utterly done with me. My finger brushes the fabric of my diary, I open the cover, look at Ettie’s little signature in the corner. I take a breath and run the pages through my fingers until I find it.
‘I wanted to kiss him.’My voice is shaky, trembling.‘And it terrifies me. I haven’t been that impulsive before, not for a long time. He said it was because of Ettie but it wasn’t, in that moment, in that brief second, I wanted nothing in the world except him.’
I look up to see whether he still looks like he might break something. He is staring at the ground, fists still curled up, his expression unreadable.
‘I can’t stop thinking about him. I keep replaying what happened in the café on this unavoidable, pornographic little loop. He knows me. I don’t think I’ve been so easily read before. Archie tried but I think he only saw the person I was pretending to be. It’s like Florian, he sees through it all, he can see the sordid, dark little feelings I have tried to smooth over. I think I see past him now too. I think he likes that, that he knows I don’t just see him now, I see who he was, who he has fought to become. How I am still utterly fascinated with him. And like all nice things I win for myself, I have fucked it up entirely by telling him to go.’
‘Ava, stop it, please…’ My head is dragged from the pages and towards Florian who has now moved his gaze from the floor and onto me. He looks desperate, shadows eating up the shallow planes of his face.
I flick through the pages again, over more ramblings, through all of the hours and days I have spent thinking about Florian Grenaud, trying to tell myself that this was a normal response to his reappearance in my life. The pages slip through my fingers until I find the one at the end, the one that has been dog-eared and reread multiple times over the last few days. It has been tragically cathartic to know the exact moment that everything in the entire world stopped being so fucking complicated.
‘I didn’t think I was ever going to love someone again. Not the way that I loved Ettie. But I do.’I feel theemotions catching at the back of my throat, I try to steer myself through the next bit, try to gain the smallest semblance of control.‘It’s terrifying, complicated and entirely ill-advised but it is unavoidable. I sit here, on a shitty bench overlooking my husband’s grave, desperate for Florian to finish pretending to pray and come back, to sit next to me, to talk to me and I know – I am desperately and against all of my better judgement, in love with Florian Grenaud.’
The words sit in the air longer than the others, so heavy and thick that I can almost see them, swimming around the space between us.
He runs an exhausted hand through his hair and when our eyes meet again, I realise that there are tears that he is struggling to keep contained. I, on the other hand, am having no such luck in trying to keep my feelings under control. When I let out a sigh, it escapes in pieces, shattered from trying to hold on to it all.
‘I understand if you hate me.’ I fold the book back up, grip it tightly against my chest, grateful for something to do with my hands. ‘I just couldn’t let you hate me without knowing it all.’
He nods, swallows something hard in his throat.
