Run To You (27 page)

I can tell.

Her expression is all curls and half-horror.

‘Janos isn’t like that. He didn’t –’ I start, but she cuts in.

She really, really cuts in. She even holds her hands up, as though she’s a lollipop lady and I’m at some junction I’m not supposed to be crossing.

‘Wait. Wait. Did you say
Janos
?’

I come close to just answering in the affirmative, and probably would have done if I hadn’t heard that note in her voice. It’s low and deadly, and it says,
Beware, Alissa
.
Tread lightly
.

‘Erm … no. I said –’

‘Don’t even try to turn Janos into John.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘You
so
were. Oh, my God, oh, my God, you’re talking about Janos Kovacs. This whole cryptic conversation is about Janos Kovacs. Please tell me it isn’t about Janos Kovacs.’

I wring my hands and little and sweat a whole lot, but ultimately answer.

‘I don’t know how to do that, now.’

‘He doesn’t even touch the women he hooks up with. Did you know that? Does he touch you?’ she asks, but she’s too breathless for me to formulate a response. Suddenly I’m seeing the whole thing through new eyes, and it’s making my heart beat too fast. It’s making her heart beat too fast. ‘No, wait, don’t tell me. If he doesn’t, I just want to live vicariously through you for a second and pretend he does.’

‘Well, I –’

‘Stop. Stop. I’m still pretending.’

She really is. She’s got her eyes closed, and seems to be fondling the air with her fingers. And whenever I try to interrupt her she shushes me, until I’m fairly sure I’m just sitting here watching someone having imaginary sex with my boyfriend.

Despite the fact that he isn’t my boyfriend. I don’t know why I just thought of him that way, because he definitely isn’t. And even if he was, he absolutely can’t be now. He probably hates me. Or whatever he does that passes for hatred – mild condescension, perhaps?

‘Do you think you could maybe describe his naked body a bit so I can imagine this better?’

‘What?
No
. No! Stop … doing whatever this is,’ I say, and then I flap my hands a bit in a manner that could be mistaken for jealousy. If I was a crazy person who is totally in love with him. Which I am not.

‘Ohhhh, I bet that means it’s really great, right? He’s all burly underneath, isn’t he? He has to be. And hairy, I bet he’s hairy.’

‘It’s … possible that he’s hairy.’

‘And God, he’s so handsome. Is he that handsome close up?’

I have to swallow thickly around a lump that isn’t there, but I get some words out.

‘He’s very handsome.’

‘Plus … he’s got to be charming.’

‘I’d say so, yeah.’

‘And dashing.’

‘Oh, well. You could probably call him that.’

‘And you love him.’

I’m looking at my hands when she slips those words in there, but I can’t keep doing it once they’re out. I have to hurl a sharp stare in her direction, to show my complete and utter disavowal of what she’s saying. And I have words planned, too. Harsh words that imply she knows nothing.

It’s just a shame they don’t make it out of me. And the stare? It’s not half as sharp as I’d like it to be. Actually, it’s soft in the middle, and if I was really going to put a label on it I’d say it makes me think of two hands reaching out.

Thank God she takes them.

‘It’s going to be OK, you know.’

‘You really think so?’ I ask, but I do it in far too cheery a way.

It makes her crashing practicality that much more disheartening.

‘Mostly? No. You’re in love with Janos Kovacs – things could not be more terrifying. But the main thing is: I’m going to do my level best to help you through this trying time.’

‘That’s good of you. It really is. But I don’t think there’s anything you could do to make this feeling go away, to be honest.’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘It’s like someone shot me, and I just don’t know it yet,’ I say, intending something light-hearted. I’m perpetually intending light-heartedness here. It’s just that my words aren’t coming out that way. They’re coming out so red in tooth and claw, and, once they’re in front of us all bloody and raw, her eyes do this awful thing.

I think a shadow actually passes across them.

‘He’s not worth it, Liss. A man like that … he’s never going to be more than what he is. He’s never going to fall in love and sweep you off your feet. That’s a fairytale.’

She’s right, of course. I’ve heard the same story a thousand times before, in a thousand different ways. The rich prince somehow magically becomes a great guy with a big heart, despite how ludicrous that is when you boil it down. Nobody gets to be where Janos is by being good, and kind, and decent. Reality doesn’t work that way.

Reality is the thing you have to face once you’ve finished convincing yourself that romance exists. I know it is. She knows it is.

And yet …

‘So what happens if he really did fall in love and swept me off my feet?’

She falls silent then, for a long, long time.

Too long a time, if I’m being honest. I have to fill it with something, quickly.

‘But I didn’t feel like I fitted into his world, so I ran away without saying anything.’

I think I expect her expression to change here. Only no change comes. She just keeps on looking at me with that liquid darkness in her eyes, completely devoid of any disapproval.

It makes it easier to keep talking.

And maybe harder, at the same time. Partway through she puts her hand over mine, and the next thing I know I’m leaking. I’m leaking slow, sad tears like some pathetic cartoon puppy, while spewing words at a thousand miles an hour.

‘I fucked it all up, Luce. He did all of this stuff for me – all of this
Pretty Woman
sort of stuff that every girl in the world probably likes, apart from me. I hated it. I hated it. I hated dressing up in the clothes he bought for me and going to the salon appointments he made for me. It made me think he wanted this glitzy and glamorous woman to fit into his precious perfect world and I … I just couldn’t. I started to feel like a different person, and the next thing I know I’m on a plane. I’m on a plane, flying away from Janos Kovacs.’

Christ, it sounds so bad when I put it like that in black and white: I flew away from the man she just shit a brick over. I flew away from him, and no amount of her telling me
hey hey hey it’s OK, it’s OK
is going to change what I’ve done.

I’m a bad, stupid person, and need to express as much.

‘But that’s a terrible reason to just run away from someone, right?’ I ask, then rush on before she can interrupt with the verdict. It’s one I already know, anyway. ‘Wait … wait. You don’t have to say. I know it is. I can feel that it is.’

‘Calm down, babe. Calm down – stop clutching at yourself,’ she says, before I even realise I’m doing it. She says the words and I glance down, and there’s my hand making twisting shapes in the airplane clothes I’m still wearing. ‘It’s not that terrible a reason, OK? Or at least it doesn’t seem like too terrible a reason based on what I can discern from all that frantic babbling. Most women like the idea of
Pretty Woman
, but don’t actually want to live it, for God’s sake. Who wants to be controlled by an eccentric billionaire? I’ll tell you who: no one. No one in the known universe.’

‘Some people might.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as … people … who … like billions of dollars.’

‘Well, there is that contingency.’

‘And … women who fancy … Richard Gere.’

‘I’m sure he has fans,’ she says, in a way that suggests she doesn’t think so at all. She likes hot young studs more than anything else, of the sort I saw milling around on our way up here. She’s never been a fan of older rich men, and to be honest neither have I.

That word – rich – keeps tripping me up, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

‘You don’t really think he is, though, do you?’

‘Think who is what?’

‘Janos. You don’t think Janos is a billionaire.’

She rolls her eyes at me.

‘Of course he’s not! Have you
seen
billionaires? Most of them look like something you’d find under a bridge. At the very least, none of them look like Janos Kovacs.’

‘Excellent point, well made. But come on … you can hardly blame me for wondering.’

‘Haven’t you even Googled him?’

‘I didn’t dare. I was afraid of what I would find.’

‘Like all his mounds and mounds of money.’

‘I kept imagining a swimming pool, like Scrooge McDuck.’

‘And maybe a lair in Antarctica, where he keeps his mutated menagerie.’

‘I bet they can all shoot lasers out of their eyes.’

‘And soon he’ll use them to strongarm the UN into giving him the moon,’ she says, and I’m laughing with her, I am. It’s funny to reduce all of this mess to a silly story about super-villainy.

Even if I still have to face it, in the end.

‘You realise all of this is just making it way worse.’

She nods, as she wipes away tears of laughter. And once they’re gone she’s suddenly serious again. She erased the humour with those little droplets, and now we’re back to the awful, terrible matter at hand.

‘Yeah, I do. And you know why? Because you don’t want to be some rich guy’s pet. That’s what it boils down to, in the end. You don’t want to think about his money and you don’t want to be dressed up to play some part in his rich life – and that’s OK. It’s OK to want to be yourself. It’s better to want to be yourself. I couldn’t have this weird conversation about laser-eyed animals with anyone else. You shouldn’t have to change.’

I’m breathless by the time she’s done – too breathless to say what I want to. I’ve got all of these thank-yous to give her and lots of garbled words of probable agreement, but in the end I’m glad I keep them inside. They’re too silly, and they don’t go with the measured proviso she adds about a second later.

‘That being said … it might have helped if you actually spoke to him a little bit about these concerns. Did you speak to him about these concerns?’

There’s really nothing I can say to that.

I think my silence says it for me, anyway.

‘Even a little bit? A word or two? A note?’

‘There might have been a note.’

‘
Alissa
.’

‘What?
You
only left a note!’

‘Yeah, but I’m not your one true love.’

‘I didn’t say he was my one true love.’

‘You didn’t say he wasn’t.’

She has me there. It makes my guts twist and my eyes bleed, but I can’t deny her point, or the love thing, or any of this really. All I’ve got are silly excuses.

‘I just didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t know
how
to tell him.’

‘You never know how to go about things when someone’s hurt you. Like now – just now. That’s the first time you’ve mentioned the note I left you in a way that suggests you maybe weren’t so happy about that.’

‘Well … maybe I am happy about it. I think it’s cool that you did this.’

‘But?’ she asks, and I know then that she’s right. I hate confrontation. I hate it so much that this paltry version of an argument is akin to being inside an iron maiden. Every time I speak or she speaks the screws get tighter. Any second now I’m going to be riddled with holes and screaming for mercy.

‘But I … I felt like … you maybe … possibly abandoned me.’

‘And you feel better for getting that off your chest.’

‘Possibly,’ I say, but only because the iron maiden is now five per cent looser.

‘Good. So go call him. Go tell him. Don’t pretend it doesn’t matter, so you no longer have to hope and believe that it does. Hope isn’t poison, Lissa. Hope is the thing that keeps you going when everything is awful and dark and you don’t know which way to turn. It made you pick up the phone with me because you believed I was still your friend – and I
am
. I didn’t abandon you. That’s just what you tell yourself in your little reverse-hope world. You think the worst to protect yourself, baby, but it’s not protecting you. Not really.’

She pauses just long enough to give her words weight, but she doesn’t need to.

They sink to the bottom of me before she’s even finished.

‘If it was,’ she says. ‘Then why on earth are you so sad, huh?

‘Why are you so sad?’

I try for the first time a few hours later, once I’ve eaten and had a shower and then eaten again. I’m eating when I dial, in fact, and bouncing on the spot. From across the room Lucy makes a
calm down
gesture, but if anything that makes it worse. I try to restrain my bouncing and end up in a spasm, and instead of compulsively eating I’m tapping and squeezing my fingers into fists and oh, God, why isn’t he answering? Why? Why?

I shouldn’t expect him to answer, and yet still.

Why isn’t he answering? The persistent prrrrriiiinng of the phone is starting to drill into my head. It’s becoming a taunt:
it’s as bad as you think it’s as bad as you think it’s as bad as you think.
And it ends on the most horrible thing possible.

You shouldn’t have hoped.

Though I suppose that last part is mostly Lucy’s fault. I wish to God she hadn’t told me that about myself. I mean, I knew. I did know. But even so: it’s hard to take when it’s shoved right in your face.

And it’s definitely turning this into the phone call from hell. The damned thing just keeps ringing and ringing like there’s suddenly no such thing as voicemail. Either that or he’s turned off his voicemail service in anticipation of this moment. He’s torturing me with technology, and no amount of fist pumps from Lucy are going to help me with that.

I deflate the moment I hang up. I deflate so much that it takes me a whole day to try again. I need twenty-four hours to forget the torturous agony of waiting to see if he will pick up, so I can come to it fresh. I can pretend I’m blasé, this way, and hardly concerned at all.

Not that this pretending thing works. I’ve now progressed to biting my nails, even though I’ve never bitten them before in my life. And I wait, too, until Lucy’s down at the market, so she can’t give me moral support that only serves to remind me how much I need moral support.