The Road Trip(24)

I smile into the gloom, pressing my hands to my face. This feels like . . . more than a summer romance. It feels epic.



The sun’s up when I wake again, and Terry is banging on the door to the flat.

I fell asleep with my head on Dylan’s arm. It spasms abruptly as he wakes and I dodge, just about avoiding a sharp smack in the face.

‘Oi!’ I yelp.

‘Hmm?’ he says, turning absent eyes my way. He does a comedy double take, hair falling into his eyes. ‘Oh, hullo.’

I can’t help smiling. ‘Hi. You nearly decked me.’

‘Did I?’ Dylan shuffles up to sit against the pillow, brushing his hair back. He rubs his cheeks like he’s trying to bring his face back to life. ‘Oh, Christ, sorry. I’m a flailer. So sorry. At least you’re a snorer, so we’re even.’

‘Hello?’ Terry calls from outside the flat. ‘Dylan!’

I groan, turning my face into the pillow. We can’t have got more than three hours’ sleep. I’d like to stay in bed for another nine or so.

‘Bloody Uncle Terry,’ Dylan announces to the ceiling.

I laugh into the pillow. ‘Are all your family this weird?’

‘Oh, definitely. But different-weird. Varied.’ He rolls over and plants a kiss on my shoulder. ‘Morning,’ he says, resting his forehead against me. ‘Please stay exactly like this, in this attire, in this bed, until I return from booze-cruising with my uncle?’

‘I’m not wearing any “attire”,’ I say, twisting to look at him.

‘Precisely.’

‘Dylan! We should be setting off!’ Terry calls.

Dylan leans forward and kisses me gently on the lips. ‘All right. You can dress, and move around, if absolutely necessary. But don’t disappear. Please?’

‘I’m here all summer,’ I say. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He smiles then. Laid back, a little dishevelled, hair already falling back into his eyes. ‘Perfect,’ he says. He kisses me softly. ‘Last night was . . . unforgettable. You’re extraordinary.’

I blush so fiercely he chuckles – I’m sure he can feel the heat radiating from my skin. I want to tell him he always says the perfect thing, but it feels too much. I don’t want to give him that. I don’t want him to know how completely he has me already. If he knows that, he has all the power. Then the joy of yesterday – his hangdog eyes following me around the pool – will be gone.





NOW





Dylan

The accidental breakdown cover men are here, fixing Deb’s car. I really do try to listen to the explanation about what happened with the brakes and the steering but there’s something about car talk that just makes me switch off entirely. A similar thing occurs whenever my father talks to me about rugby. I could learn the whole of Twelfth Night off by heart aged sixteen, but I am still unclear on what exactly they’re all doing when they get in a scrum.

While Kevin launches into an in-depth chat with Deb about brake fluid, with Rodney at his shoulder, nodding eagerly, I watch Addie. And Marcus watches me.

‘You keep staring at her like that, you’re going to give her the creeps,’ Marcus says, sidling over with his hands in his pockets.

We’re still on the verge; I’ve already got so accustomed to the roar of traffic I don’t hear it now, and the realisation makes me think of the crickets in France, how I’d tune out their endless chirrups and only know they’d been singing when they suddenly hushed.

The car guy laughs at something Addie says, and I feel a shock of almost-pain as I watch her smile back at him. He’s handsome – Spanish, perhaps, with a short beard and striking eyes.

‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ Marcus says quietly as he follows me down the bank towards the others. ‘I’m not trying to be a dick. I lost my head in the car, fine, but the point still stands, Dyl – I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t say it. You can’t go back there. You need to move on. Christ, I would have thought you had already. It’s been almost two years, hasn’t it?’

I want to hit him. Maybe I could hit him, just once? I’ve wanted to so many times and I never have. Perhaps one punch would get it out of my system, and then I could go back to being a mature, supportive friend.

‘Addie,’ Deb calls, waving her phone. ‘Addie . . . Cherry’s ringing.’

Deb returned from her trip to Tesco looking very happy and dishevelled. When I asked the obvious questions – Sorry, but how? As in, where? – she announced with great glee that Kevin had a shipment of chairs in the back of his lorry, and that she’d been able to fulfil two of her favourite activities simultaneously: having sex and having a nice sit-down.

‘Don’t answer,’ I call, just as Addie says,

‘Don’t pick up!’

Everyone watches the phone ringing out in Deb’s hand.

‘We’re going to have to tell her eventually,’ Deb says as the call goes to voicemail. ‘We’ll never make it there to set up for the barbecue now.’

She opens Maps on her phone.

‘We’ve travelled one hundred and twenty miles in five and a half hours. There’s still . . . three hundred miles to go.’