The Road Trip(29)

I frown and reach to tilt her chin downwards again. ‘No. That’s – I was – we’re not like that. We’re different, me and you. I’ll never break your heart, Addie.’

She smiles wryly. ‘And so said every gentleman to the girl who lived in the servant’s quarters, eh?’





Addie All right, I’m freaking out.

We’re moving way too fast. Anyone can see that. It’s only been eight days. Of course he still looks at me like I’m a queen – we’re sleeping together every night and he doesn’t actually know me well enough to have anything to dislike.

I wish I hadn’t said all that stuff about being middleish last night. I should be playing it cool, keeping him chasing. That’s what Deb would do, and men never fall out of love with her. She actually finds it quite annoying.

The problem is, Dylan’s just so sweet. His sleepy green-yellow eyes. The way he seems to see me. It’s all making me fall in love with him, and that is absolutely the stupidest thing any woman can do after one week of sleeping with a bloke on holiday.

I spend the morning away from the villa. We needed some food in, and I take way longer than I have to in the Intermarché. Afterwards I drive into the village and chat to the café owner in broken French while I munch my way through a huge pain au chocolat. I make him laugh and stand up a little straighter. I don’t need Dylan. This was my summer before he came, and look, it’s beautiful.

I mean to head straight to the flat when I get back, but Dylan’s sat reading poetry aloud on the stone balustrade around the terrace. He’s thirty feet up from me down here in the courtyard. His legs are dangling over and he says something to himself about silver slips of starlight. I can’t resist stopping to look up at him, holding my forearm up to block the sun. The feeling hits me in the chest, a huge gust of it.

‘Oh, good,’ he calls down. ‘Someone to serenade. Ever so embarrassing to be serenading without an object.’

‘An object!’

‘Purely a figure of grammar,’ he says hastily, and I laugh. ‘Subject-verb-object and all that.’

‘Is it one of your poems?’ I ask. He never shows me his own work, though he’s always happy reading me bits of sixteenth-century stuff. It doesn’t make sense to me. Where Dylan hears something incredibly profound, I just hear something you could say in way fewer words.

‘It was, but only because I’d got distracted. I’m reading Philip Sidney,’ Dylan says, waving a battered paperback down at me. ‘Sir Philip Sidney, actually. Courtier, diplomat, poet.’

‘Old guy?’ I guess.

He smiles. ‘Yeah. Died 1586.’

‘Very old guy.’

Dylan’s battered brown Havaianas dangle from his feet over the edge of the balustrade.

‘Read me something,’ I call. I want to get it, the poetry thing. It’s just so foreign to me.

‘My true love hath my heart,’ he begins, ‘and I have his.’

‘His?’

‘It’s a woman speaking, not Philip himself,’ Dylan says. ‘He’s not saying he’s in love with a man. He was almost certainly a homophobic bigot, what with being a rich chap in the sixteenth century. Come up here, would you? I want to hold you.’

I grin despite myself. ‘Philip!’ I say, making my way towards the steps up to the terrace. ‘First-name terms, are you?’

‘Phil. Phil-man. Philster,’ Dylan says, poker-faced.

I’m giggling now. ‘Go on. Your true love’s got your heart, you’ve got his?’ I climb up beside him on the balustrade and he wraps an arm around my waist, tucking me in close. I snag his beer and take a swig.

‘My true love hath my heart and I have his. By just exchange one to the other given. I hold his dear and mine he cannot miss. There never was a better bargain driven.’

I kind of get that, actually. I think. Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.

The rest of the poem is a muddle of words in the wrong order – For as from me on him his hurt did light and that sort of stuff. When he finishes reading I swap him his beer for the book.

‘Yeah?’ Dylan says. He looks so excited as I take the book. It’s adorable, but it kind of scares me too, because of all the times he’s read me something and I’ve not got it.

‘If I like this one,’ I say, ‘will you show me one of yours?’

He pulls a face. ‘Oh, God, it’d be like showing you my teenage journal. Or . . .’

‘Your internet search history?’

Dylan grins. ‘Why, what’s in yours?’

‘Is that what you need?’ I ask, arching one eyebrow. ‘Tit for tat?’

‘You’re calling my poetry tat, are you?’ Dylan says, then feigns thoughtfulness. ‘Though, tit would be a . . .’

‘Shut up. You know what I meant. You need me to tell you something embarrassing too?’

‘It’d help, certainly.’ Dylan sips his beer, and I can tell he’s trying not to grin.

I hesitate for a moment and then swing my legs around, leaving the book on the ledge. The morning away from the villa has made me feel in control again. There’s no harm in giving him a little more of myself, is there?