I glanced up.
‘He asked her round for brunch on Sunday, and she was a total nightmare. She wore this super-tight top and she kept putting her arm around me like she knew me, and laughing too loudly, and then when my dad was in the garden she would look at me with these big round eyes and go, “And how are you?” with this really annoying head tilt.’
‘Oh, the head tilt,’ said William, and there was a low murmur of agreement. Everyone knew the head tilt.
‘And when Dad was there she just giggled and flicked her hair all the time, like she was trying to be a teenager even though she was plainly at least thirty.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
‘Thirty!’ said Daphne, her gaze sliding sideways. ‘Imagine!’
‘I actually preferred the one who used to quiz me about what he was up to. At least she didn’t pretend to be my best friend.’
I could barely hear the rest of what he said. A distant ringing had begun in my ears, drowning out all sound. How could I have been so stupid? I suddenly recalled Jake’s eye roll the first time he had watched Sam chatting me up. There was my warning, right there, and I had been stupid enough to ignore it.
I felt hot and shaky. I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t listen to any more. ‘Um … I just remembered. I have an appointment,’ I mumbled, gathering up my bag and bolting from my seat. ‘Sorry.’
‘Everything all right, Louisa?’ said Marc.
‘Totally fine. Got to dash.’ I ran for the door, my fake smile plastered on my face so tightly that it was painful.
He was there. Of course he was. He had just pulled up on the bike in the car park and was removing his helmet. I emerged from the church hall and stopped at the top of the steps, wondering if there was any way I could get to my car without passing him, but it was hopeless. The physical part of my brain registered the shape of him before the remaining synapses caught up: a flush of pleasure, the flash of memory of how his hands had felt on me. And then that blazing anger, the blood pulse of humiliation.
‘Hey,’ he said, as he caught sight of me, his smile easy, his eyes crinkling with pleasure. The fecking charmer.
I slowed my step just long enough for him to register the hurt on my face. I didn’t care. I felt like Lily suddenly. I was not going to internalize this. This had not been me climbing out of one person’s bed and straight into another.
‘Nice job, you utter, utter wanker,’ I spat, then ran past him to my car before the choke in my voice could turn into an actual sob.
The week, as if in response to some unheard malign dog whistle, actually managed to go downhill from there. Richard grew ever pickier, complained that we didn’t smile enough and that our lack of ‘cheery bantz’ with the customers was sending travellers along the way to the Wings in the Air Bar and Grill. The weather turned, sending the skies a gunmetal grey and delaying flights with tropical rainstorms, so the airport was filled with bad-tempered passengers, and then, with immaculate timing, the baggage handlers went on strike. ‘What can you expect? Mercury is in retrograde,’ said Vera, savagely, and growled at a customer who asked for less froth on his cappuccino.
At home, Lily arrived under her own dark cloud. She sat in my living room, glued to her mobile phone, but whatever was on it seemed to give her no pleasure. She would stare out of the window, stony-faced, as her father had, as if she were just as trapped as he had been. I had tried to explain that Will had given me the yellow and black tights, that their significance was not in the colour or the quality, but that they –
‘Yeah, yeah, tights. Whatever,’ she said.
For three nights I barely slept. I stared at my ceiling, fired by a stone-cold fury that lodged in my chest and refused to go away. I was so angry with Sam. But I was angrier with myself. He texted twice, a maddeningly faux-innocent ‘??’, to which I didn’t trust myself to respond. I had done the classic thing women do of ignoring everything a man says or does, preferring to listen to their own insistent drumbeat: It will be different with me. I had kissed him. I had made the whole thing happen. So I had only myself to blame.