Eyes closed, I curl into a ball on my side; everything aches, like I fell down a flight of stairs. Maybe I did. I reach for the memory of arriving home but there’s nothing except a black hole.
Seefer bumps my hand so I stroke her, running my palm over the little rust-coloured heart shape on her flank which I love, and her purring quiets my mind. She meows, wanting food. I sit up. And frown. The dress I wore last night is neatly folded on my stool, and my heels are carefully lined up by the door. Drunk me would never have achieved that. Drunk me staggers into her room, kicks off her heels and passes out face down on the bed. It’s only when I see the water and pills on the side with little Post-it notes reading ‘Drink Me’ and ‘Swallow Me’ that I realise who’s behind this. Just on cue, I hear a key in my front door.
A few seconds later, Jack strides into the bedroom carrying a brown paper bag and says, ‘Welcome back to the living.’
‘If this is what living feels like, I’d rather be dead.’ I flop back down onto my pillow. ‘Why do the most terrible hangovers happen on the sunniest days?’
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Peachy.’
Jack raises one disbelieving brow. ‘Really?’
‘Well … I feel like a peach. You know, one that’s been flung off the top of a fifty-storey building and splattered on the hot tarmac in a mess of insides and fluids.’
He nods solemnly and the bed dips as he sits down on the end of it. ‘And that peach – are most of its fluids gin?’
‘Nope. Tequila and champagne.’
He winces. ‘That’ll do it.’ He reaches into the paper bag. ‘Here,’ he says, handing me a croissant wrapped in a napkin.
Even though I’m starving, the thought of eating sends another violent surf of nausea through me. I put it down beside me on the bed. ‘Later. Thanks though – you didn’t have to get breakfast.’
‘What happened last night? You weren’t making a lick of sense.’ There’s the slightest American twang when he speaks, left over from the years he spent in New York as a child. I love the American accent, it makes me feel as though everything is going to turn out happy, like in the movies; the guy gets the girl, the villain is defeated, and she was always a hooker with a heart of gold. ‘When I picked you up from the station, you were rambling about Margot’s book?’
Oh god.
Last night ricochets back and I taste the lie on my tongue. Why did I have to let Margot think I have an offer too? The throbbing in my skull intensifies. ‘Yeah,’ I say without looking at him. ‘Yeah, Margot has a book deal.’
‘I thought she was a wedding planner …’
‘She is … but you know, her mum’s a famous model – retired now – and, well, Harriers has commissioned Reyna to write about her life. Margot’s contributing, writing her own chapters.’ I’m surprised by how level-headed and calm I sound, like I’m simply recounting how many drinks we ordered at the bar.
‘How did your meeting go?’ he asks. ‘Did Harriers make an offer?’
The grief is instant.
‘No,’ I say – I can’t lie to Jack too. ‘No. They didn’t.’
He is silent. I wait, but he doesn’t speak, so I glance up and see the anger in the tenseness of his jaw, the flash of his eyes. ‘They’re idiots.’
‘Except they’re not. They’re professionals. They know the difference between good books and bad ones.’
‘It is good. Why don’t they want it?’
‘Romances aren’t selling right now. Stories based on real life events are. They want something grittier.’
‘Okay,’ he says slowly. ‘Write that.’
‘Sure, I can write about how I dropped a career in marketing to pursue something I’m clearly not cut out for.’ My laughter is mirthless. ‘Everyone likes a tragedy, right?’
He gives me a look. ‘This one-woman woe-is-me gig is going to get old. Fast. You’re better than this, Fray. You’re talented and ambitious and—’
‘Full of woe.’ I hold his stare. ‘I’m twenty-eight, I turn twenty-nine in less than two months, I don’t have a house or a husband or a career—’
‘That’s your mother talking.’
‘Well, maybe she’s right. Maybe I have made a huge mistake.’ Jack wants me to be happy, but I’m hungover, and I don’t have the energy to fake it. ‘The longer I go without a book deal, the harder it is to justify putting my career on hold. What will Mum say when she finds out the dream I’ve been chasing has been handed to Margot like it’s a bag of pick ’n’ mix?’ My parents want me to strive for more. Like Ada and all she has. Like Ruby. Like all their friends’ children. I’m in a race I didn’t want to enter. Along the track, others are snatching things up from the side: careers, marriage, children, houses, book deals. But anything I manage to grasp slips from my fingers a few strides later. Now, I’m so far behind everyone else, I’m terrified I’ll never catch up. ‘Maybe I should just go back to marketing.’
‘Will that make you happy?’ he asks. ‘Or would you be giving up writing and going back to marketing to make other people happy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you do both – can you write and work in marketing?’
‘Not really. My career was all-consuming. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Besides, that job was slowly killing me.’ I glance at the green vase on my chest of drawers. ‘I don’t want to die having never done something I love. And being an author is one of the very few careers where you’re essentially leaving a part of yourself behind even after you’ve gone.’
‘Then you need to pick. Life is too—’
‘Short,’ I finish for him. ‘Yeah, I know, life is too short to be unhappy.’
He smiles. ‘Actually, I was going to say life is too long to be unhappy.’
‘Too long?’
‘Yeah, if someone told me I had to be unhappy for a year and then it would all be over, I could handle that. But if someone told me I had to be unhappy for the next fifty years, I’d have to make a change.’
‘Only you would see it that way.’ Sometimes I think his mind operates on a different plane to the rest of us mere mortals.
‘Am I wrong?’
I smile. ‘No.’
‘Okay, so choose to do what makes you happy. Not anyone else.’
‘I love writing but the rejections are so soul-crushing. You don’t get it. You’ve never wanted something so much it’s a physical need.’
For a beat, he doesn’t answer. But he leans into me, lowering his head so I’m caught in the blue of his eyes. ‘Haven’t I?’
And with those words, and the intensity in which his gaze is fixed unwaveringly on me, the air crackles. I feel myself tilting my head up, my mouth only a breath from his. Then Seefer meows loudly and jumps from the bed. I turn away from Jack to watch her pad towards the door. She isn’t keen on Jack and doesn’t stick around long when he’s here.
When I lift my gaze to his, that unnameable electricity is dispelled. The moment, whatever it was, is gone.
‘Anyway,’ I say, trying to keep my voice light. ‘You have everything you want. You wanted to own your own house before you were thirty, and you did. You wanted to be an architect, and now you are. You want sex, you stroll into a bar.’