My Best Friend's Girl (33 page)

chapter 42

L
uke got used to seeing Nate a few times a week.

“Used to” might be overstretching the case, he simply limited his (cue Tegan’s deep voice) “Nate, you’re here again, how nice,” to once a week because Nate started spending a lot of time at our place. At least four times a week he would show up, almost always at Tegan’s request. She hadn’t elevated him to Luke status, but he had become like the ducks in the park she was always wanting to feed—she decided without her intervention he would starve. Almost every other night we had to call Mr. Nate to ask if he would come round for his dinner. If he couldn’t make it she’d want to know what he was going to eat. Sometimes she’d ring him to find out what he’d done at work that day and if he had any new friends. When he came over she would ask me if it was OK if he took her to the shop to buy sweets. Luke wasn’t forgotten in this. Whenever she returned from a trip with Nate she would always go straight to Luke, climb onto his lap and tell him the details of their mini-trip and then ask him if he’d take her to the shop next time. She didn’t ever forget to let Luke know that while Nate was fun, Luke was number one.

As a result of the time he spent with us—the realization that he wasn’t hated by me or Tegan—Nate slowly got back to normal. As normal as he could. He moved into the phase where it hurts but you can function. He started to sleep, eat properly, look better, and we even had conversations about Adele. “Remember that night Adele came to my house and threatened me?” Nate asked once when the four of us were in the park.

I smiled as the memory returned to me.

“She told me she’d kill me if I ever hurt you. ‘Proper kill you,’ she said.”

“She was funny.”

“No, she was serious. I remember when I first met you I quickly realized that Adele was a part of our lives. And then when she had Tegan the three of you came as a package.” I turned to look at him. “Not complaining. It was nice, actually, to have a ready-made family. I was just waiting for that day when you would say, ‘Why don’t we buy a house so they can live with us?’” I grinned because the thought had crossed my mind. “Yeah,” Nate said, “I knew it!”

“I know you fell out, but she did love you,” I admitted.

“Only as a friend, though. You realize that now, don’t you? I was just like your brothers were to her.”

“She slept with my brothers as well?” I asked.

His eyes widened in horror. “What? No! I never said that—Ah, you’re joking. Very funny. Very funny.”

“Del would have thought so.”

“Yeah, she would have.”

The fact that I could talk about Adele without breaking down also meant that I was getting better. I was dealing with what had happened. In tiny increments, but I was doing it. I’d had to force myself to. Since the day of Nate’s breakdown I’d been jolted to my core. The realization that I was falling for Nate again had scared me. It meant I wasn’t paying enough attention to Luke. If I wasn’t careful, I was in danger of driving Luke away just as I had done briefly with Nate all those years ago. I’d started saying “I love you” every day to Luke, because I did. He was the one I was with, the one I’d chosen to be with and I was going to prove that to both of us. I’d decided upon the perfect way to do that.

“This is like being proper boyfriend and girlfriend,” Luke said. We’d snuck out of work separately to meet up for lunch down by the river. We’d gone away from the main drag so we wouldn’t be seen by anyone from Angeles. Although most people suspected we were together—Betsy was waiting for the day when she’d be allowed to gossip about it with the girls on the shop floor—we liked to keep it quiet. Separate our work persona from the dating one. Neither of us could have worked effectively if we were constantly worrying that everyone was watching to see how we reacted to each other vetoing an idea or pointing out a mistake. “It’s like we’re on a proper date.”

“I know.” I smiled. I’d asked him to come out to lunch because I wanted to talk to him, wanted to do the thing that would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was him I wanted to be with.

My boss checked around for any Angeles staff before kissing me, his lips salty from his beef and horseradish sandwich.

“We should do this more often,” he said, stopping in front of me. “We don’t spend enough time together, you know. Just you and me. Do you reckon your parents would come up and stay with Tegan one weekend while we went out for the night?”

“Probably. Or Nate could do it.”

“Yeah,” Luke mumbled and looked away. “He might even sign those papers.”

When it came to this subject my boyfriend was like a person hanging onto a cliff edge—no matter how weary he got, he wouldn’t let it go, because he thought it’d kill him. “Do you really mind him being around?” I asked. “Really and truly?”

“Don’t Teganize me, Ryn. It’s not easy having your ex practically living with us. T is the image of him. I look at her, I see his face. And if that’s not bad enough, I know that he spent years fucking you.” Luke said “fucking” deliberately. He was trying to diminish what Nate and I had by making it sound sordid and emotionless—the only way he could cope with regularly seeing the man I almost married.

“I can’t get away from him. Show me any other bloke who has to spend time with his girlfriend’s ex. If you were me, would you be able to do it?”

“I understand it’s not easy, but he’s so much better now and you must have noticed he’s started coming over less as a result?”

“Here’s to a speedy recovery, so he can disappear completely.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Luke, you know you’re a good person. And if you don’t remember how good you are, I won’t tell you why I asked you to lunch.”

He glowered like the dying embers of a coal fire for a few seconds, then curiosity doused his fume. “Yeah, I have noticed that he’s been coming round less.”

“OK, Mr. L, I was wondering if you fancied moving in with us? I know you live with us anyway but what if we make it official? Then you can give up your other place and if you’re up for it, we could start saving together and buy a bigger place. Maybe even a house? With a garden for Tegan.”

Luke’s reply was to glance away and retreat into silence. A quiet that deepened into a hush that promised to haunt our relationship for years to come. I’d messed up, I realized, as his silence continued and my heartbeat slowed and slowed, threatening to stop at any moment. I’d messed up by bringing this up. “This is a big step,” Luke finally said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

That’s it?
I thought.
After asking something so important, after all my recent efforts, that’s all I get?
It was the whole, “I love you”/“That’s good to know” scenario all over again; another slap in the face when I showed him my heart. “OK,” I mumbled. How many times was I going to let Luke do this before I accepted that I wasn’t meant to be opening up to him? That maybe he wasn’t thinking we’d last the distance.

“That’s not a no,” he added, “it’s just, well, it’s a big step.”

“You said.”

“Ryn, there are lots of things to consider.”

“I know.”

“I do see my future with you and T.”

“So what’s the issue?”

“We’ve been together less than a year.”

“But when you know, you know,” I blurted out. Did I really say that? Me? Adele said that sort of thing, not me.

Had I changed that much since Adele’s death? Had I become a swoony woman with a sense of destined romance? No, I realized. I was as romantic as I had always been. What I said could mean only one thing: I was begging. I shuddered. Luke was making me beg for his affection.

“I do know,” Luke began. “I just need to—”

“It’s OK,” I interjected. “You don’t have to give me an answer straightaway. Take as long as you want.”

“Sure?” he replied.

“Positive.”

As far as I could see, this meant one thing: Luke wasn’t in love with me. He adored Tegan, he’d die for her, there was no doubt about that, so it was me, wasn’t it? He wasn’t in love with me. I never knew where I stood with Luke. He was so transparent in his affection for Tegan, but I never knew what he truly felt about me. That scared me. I had invested a lot of emotion in him and it wasn’t even a sure thing.

“You’re very quiet,” Luke stated.

“Just thinking,” I replied.

Luke sighed, dropped his half-eaten sandwich in a nearby trash can, then rested his hands on my shoulders as he pinned me to the spot with the weight of his gaze.

An expression crossed his face and his hazel eyes clouded over for a moment. “You wouldn’t want me to agree to something I wasn’t sure of just because it’s what you want to hear, would you?” Luke asked.

I shook my head. “Course not. But I am allowed to be disappointed and hurt that you’ve not jumped at the chance to make things permanent,” I pointed out.

“I…” he began, stopped. The expression crossed his face again. I couldn’t read it. Didn’t understand what he was thinking but not saying. “Ryn, I’ll be honest. I’ve been thinking about asking you to marry me. Every time I pass a jewelry shop I go in to look at rings, but then…We’ve been together less than a year. We can’t be getting married after less than a year. It’s not the sort of thing I do, I’m not that impulsive. So you springing this on me…I need to think about it. Us buying a house together would be a halfway step but I don’t know if I want to do things in half measures. Which brings me back to getting married…Which is impulsive. Do you understand why I need to think about this? It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s not that I don’t see my future with you, I’ve just got to work out what’s best. I’ve done this before, remember, and it didn’t exactly work out.”

“Yes, Luke, I remember you’ve done this before. And so have I. I almost got to the altar so I’d have thought you’d at least have thought to talk to me about marriage if you were thinking about it.”

“You didn’t talk to me about buying a house.”

“What do you think I was just doing? I haven’t been looking at houses, or planning where we should live, I brought it up so we could talk. Do you realize what marriage will mean for adopting Tegan? Who does she change her name to? What will it look like for the social workers and judge who decide these things? It’ll make me look impulsive and flighty when I need to come across as steady and stable and suitable to bring up a bereaved child. If you’d mentioned marriage to me at an earlier stage I could have told you these were the things we need to think about. Buying a house together was some way down the line, like I said, we’d save up. And, let’s be honest, it’s no different to how things are now. All it’d be is that you’d be with us all the time and that’s what Tegan and I both want. And the fact you’re there ninety-nine percent of the time suggests that’s what you want as well.”

“If I had proposed, you would have said no?”

I nodded. “I’d have thought you’d know by now that I’m someone who needs to talk about these things. It’s my future too and you being ready for marriage, doesn’t mean I am. Especially when I’ve got a child to consider.”

“I see what you mean…We’re not doing a very good job of planning a future together, are we?”

“I guess not.”

“But I do want us to have a future, though,” Luke said.

“Really and truly.”

“Don’t Teganize me,” I replied, with a thin smile.

He laughed, then his features fell into seriousness. “I want us to be together for…for the rest of our lives. And I’ll think carefully about moving in, OK?”

“OK.”

Luke grinned, kissed me full on the mouth without checking if there were any Angeles staff around first. As he held me close and kissed me deep, a small treacherous inkling began in my mind. It started growing at an alarming rate until it was a full-blown thought that eclipsed everything else: that whole conversation would have gone so differently if I’d had it with Nate.

“And we found the response we had to the vouchers had increased five percent on the last issue of
Living Angeles
,” Betsy was saying to the assembled members of the advertising, merchandising and marketing teams for our weekly roundup meeting. “We’re investigating why this is the case, although Kamryn thinks it’s because we used a picture of people instead of the usual still lifes to push them.”
She’s impressive
, I thought as I listened to her.
And she’s glowing.
Glowing because she was madly in love with the man she’d met back in the days when Luke and I hated each other. She’d been right, he was The One.

I glanced down at my notepad and instead of notes, it was covered in drawings of houses. Houses that my “The One” had told me a couple of hours ago he had to “think carefully” about moving into with us. That still stung. Betsy stopped talking and, because I wouldn’t be called upon now to participate, I tuned out as Luke’s PA, Carla, started the diary check, where she listed all the meetings the three departments had in the coming month to ensure there were no clashes. “And I’ve just had confirmation that the Edinburgh direct marketing campaign rollout meeting will take place on the fourteenth, Luke. Shall I go ahead and confirm your attendance?” Carla asked.

My pen froze in doodling on the page.
The fourteenth? Hang on.
I glanced up at Luke, who had paled as he looked at Carla. His eyes slid across the room to me, then moved away as he seemed to immerse himself in thought. I didn’t know what he was thinking about. What was there to consider? Of course he couldn’t go. Of course he couldn’t.

“Luke?” Carla asked when he’d been silent for a full minute and the quiet had caused all eyes in the room to fall upon him. “Shall I confirm your attendance and book the hotel?”

“Erm,” Luke’s eyes moved back to her, via me. “Erm, sorry, Carla. Yes. Please confirm my attendance.”

My fingers closed in a death grip around my pen, tight enough to crush the plastic case as the heat of anger burned through my veins.

“If there’s no other business then let’s end there,” Luke said. “Thanks, guys.” Everyone picked up their pads and pens, cups of tea and coffee, and glasses of water and filed out of the boardroom. I remained in my seat, rage stampeding through me. Luke stayed in his seat as well until the last person to leave shut the door behind him.