Somewhere Only We Know (21 page)

“Means more for me,” Holly pointed out, popping another chunk into her mouth.

“You know, for someone who was apparently quite into me, he sure couldn’t shake himself off fast enough.” Nadia shook her head. “It was like a rat off a sinking ship.”

“Oh Nads, stop it. You’re not a sinking ship.” Holly rolled her eyes. Nadia decided not to press the issue; she knew Holly hated any mention of the fact that she might be deported. “So,” Holly continued mercilessly. “What now?”

“What do you mean, what now?”

“You know very well I mean 'what now' with Alex. Does he know you’re young, free and single?”

“Being as it’s been about five minutes, and I’ve spent four and a half of them talking to you, no, he doesn’t yet!” Nadia picked listlessly at the food in front of her again. “Besides, what is he meant to do with that information? Don’t you think that if it was meant to happen between us it would have happened by now?” she argued. Now she no longer had the Lila thing to blame, being too far into the friend-zone was her go-to argument.

Holly was having none of it. “I just refuse to believe that man’s not totally in love with you.”

Nadia snorted with laughter. “And why’s that?”

“Because, A, the way he looks at you…”

“Ahh, yes, ‘the way he looks at me’,” Nadia echoed sarcastically, settling back against the sofa. “That again…”

“B,” Holly continued to list, ignoring her. “The way he’s always angled to where you are. Like he’s a big arrow, pointing at you all the time. And I mean that in a metaphoric, romantic way, not like, you know, a penis.”

“Oh, God, Holly…” Nadia groaned, burying her face in the crook of her arm.

“He was holding your hand last night,” Holly argued. “Why would he just randomly hold your hand?”

“He’s a good friend,” Nadia protested feebly.

Holly gave a snort of disbelief. “You two looked like you were standing at an altar about to get married.”

Nadia dissolved into giggles. “Okay, okay,” she conceded. “You win. He’s clearly madly in love with me, but doesn’t realise it quite yet. But the question remains: what am
I
supposed to do about it?”

“Go round there,” Holly urged. “Ring him.” She pushed Nadia’s mobile phone across the coffee table so it skittered closer to her. “Tell him you’re coming round later. Tell him you broke up with Matt because you like someone else. Smack him in the face with the hintiest hint that ever hinted. Because the man isn’t an idiot. In fact, that’s reason C as to why I’m certain he’s crazy about you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Because he'd
have to
be an idiot not to be.” Holly stuck her tongue out playfully as Nadia screwed up her face again. “Go on. Call him. Come on, Nads,” Holly urged, when Nadia had made no move towards her phone. “Life’s too short,” she finished sadly, the unspoken words hanging in the air between them:
your time might be running out
.

“We’re doing ‘Candy’ on Thursday,” Nadia said after a minute. “I’ll talk to him then. See what the lie of the land is. Seriously!” Nadia insisted, when she saw the look of doubt on her friend’s face. “I promise.”

Holly arched an eyebrow sceptically. “Make sure you do.” Satisfied, she helped herself to yet another piece of pizza. “I wasn’t sure about him at first, you know,” she added, as she picked off rogue peppers with her fingernails. “But I really like him now. You guys sort of
fit
, you know?”

Yes, Nadia knew; ‘fit’ was exactly the word for it. As a foreigner with an eccentric accent – somehow neither quite Russian nor English – Nadia had always felt just slightly out of place. But nowadays, everywhere felt like her castle, as long as Alex was there too.

She could almost still feel the weight of his hand upon hers, a ghost of the night before.

Alex

He was still puzzling out Rory’s weird behaviour as he arrived home. Jez’s birthday “after-party” back at Nadia’s in Clapham Old Town had certainly left them both stupendously drunk, but that didn’t explain Rory’s recent attitude. He’d been an angry sort of quiet on the night bus back to Tooting in the early hours of Sunday morning, but Alex couldn’t be sure if Rory was cross with Alex or cross with him. Either way, he’d spent all of Sunday closeted in his bedroom – sleeping off a bad hangover, for sure – but Alex just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

And now, this evening, Alex had turned his mobile phone on after work to a perfunctory text message from Rory informing him that he wouldn’t be home that night and – mystifyingly – urging Alex to “enjoy his evening”. Rory worked late so often recently that he’d completely given up all attempts at keeping Alex informed of his movements, and he’d certainly never before wasted time with textual well wishes;
what was going on?

To be honest, Alex was quite looking forward to a quiet night in. It used to be that all his nights were quiet ones in, but since meeting Nadia his social calendar had somewhat exploded. He seemed to be spending more time out and about than ever before, perhaps even more than when he was a student back in Brighton. It was quite nice to realise that he had things like laundry to do and television to catch up on, rather than knowing he was just going to flounder to fill the empty hours of the evening until it was time to go to sleep and start all over again.

It was still stifling in the city – as “hot as Satan’s arse crack” a heavily perspiring Donnelly had poetically dubbed it earlier that week – and so the first thing Alex did after shutting the flat door safely behind him was to kick off his work shoes and drop his charcoal suit trousers to the carpet with a satisfied sigh. If this summer went on for much longer maybe he
would
have to look into getting “suit shorts” for work after all, ha ha. He flicked his trousers up from the floor using his foot and caught them deftly with one hand before moving into his room and throwing them on the bed to deal with later. Time to put that overdue wash on, and then he’d see what he could cobble together for dinner from whatever was lurking in the freezer.

He walked through into the main part of the flat with a collection of indiscriminate laundry piled so high in his arms that he didn’t notice her at first. He continued halfway through the living room towards the kitchen and had to double back, mouth stupidly slack, dumbfounded. Lila smiled in a leisurely way at him. She sat tucked into the corner of the sofa, a book on her lap, exactly where she always used to be. And Alex stood there – like some awful stunt double for Tom Cruise in
Risky Business
– wearing only a rumpled shirt, a pair of old boxers and comedy Simpsons socks.

Firstly – and mainly – he just wanted to full-on die of embarrassment. Then secondly…

“Lils!” He lowered his armfuls of dirty clothes down his torso in what he hoped was both a subtle manner and to a height that would conceal his groin. “What are you doing here? Rory’s not home. Wait.” He frowned at her. “How did you get in?”

Lila slowly put a bookmark into her paperback and slid it onto the coffee table before standing and moving towards him across the room. “Rory let me in earlier,” she admitted.

“He’s here?” Great! Another witness to this saggy-boxered humiliation.

“No.” Lila’s tone was meaningful, as if she was waiting for him to realise something. She came a little nearer and stopped, folding her arms across her chest, smiling at him like someone who has a secret, like someone who is more than a little nervous about something.

He just hoped she wasn’t close enough to smell the slightly stale funk from his laundry.

“I’m just going to stick this in the washing machine,” Alex blurted, shrugging his shoulders to gesture what he was holding, somewhat redundantly. “Hang on a second.” He all but threw the clothes into the drum, barely sparing an instant to throw in a liquitab after it, deciding it was okay to forego the nicety of fabric softener under the circumstances. He exhaled as the machine started up with its low, watery grumble. He glanced back; Lila hadn’t followed him. Then he glanced down, belatedly realising that he was – of course – still trouserless, and now without his dirty laundry groin-barrier – fuck!

“Need any help?” Lila called politely from the next room.

Alex sighed, resigned. “No thanks.” He moved back into the living room. “I should probably get some trousers on, huh?” he joked weakly.

Lila smiled coquettishly, her eyelashes lowering shyly, strangely. “Sorry. It’s pretty hot today, isn’t it?”

“Yeah…” Alex agreed as he edged past Lila and made for his bedroom. He endeavoured to keep himself angled towards her, which unfortunately resulted in him entering the corridor walking like a crab; it just seemed rude to turn his boxered behind to his unexpected guest. The first thing to hand when he reached his room was a pair of tartan lounge pants lying discarded in a crumpled heap at the side of his bed. Alex hurriedly pulled them up his legs as he returned to the living room, and to Lila.

She hadn’t moved; she was still standing in the middle of the wide room, one hand picking nervously at the fingernails of the other. The bright sunlight of the summer evening outside fell into the room in slants through the half-open window blinds and lit her up as if she was on a stage. She was, as usual, gut-twistingly magnificent. She was wearing a maxi dress that was slightly too long for her and bunched up against her toes, where her nails were painted a coral pink. She gave him another one of those enigmatically shy smiles she was suddenly so free with and Alex felt himself swallow tightly; she was so beautiful. He suddenly couldn’t believe there was a part of him that had accepted he might not ever see her again. Which reminded him…

“So, Lils, what brings you here?” Alex forced himself to ask, breaking the spell of the silent moment they were sharing. “When we said we should ‘do something’ one day soon, I wasn’t really expecting a home invasion,” he joked.

“Rory let me in,” Lila repeated. Alex waited for her to elaborate. She hesitated again. “Okay, Alex, I don't really know how to do this; so I'm just going to come out and say it, I think. The thing is, Rory told me that you have feelings for me?”

She said it so casually, like a question, that the panic didn’t set in immediately; when it did, it hit like a sledgehammer.

“He said what?” A winded Alex struggled to order his thoughts. He couldn’t feel less surprised if Lila had roundhouse kicked him in the chest.

Lila smoothed the flicks of the front of her bobbed hair behind her ears, a nervous trait he was familiar with. “He said you had feelings for me. That you always have.” Her hands were still up, cupped by her face, even though her hair was as smooth and neat as it was ever going to get. “Is it true?” she pressed, after a moment’s more painful silence. “Do you?”

Over the past year, Alex must have pictured this conversation a hundred thousand different ways. In not a single one of them was he being waylaid whilst in his underwear.

“Where did Rory get that idea?” Alex eventually managed, in a pathetically strangled-sounding tone. Hurt immediately flashed across Lila’s face and he felt like ramming his fist into his mouth.

“So, you don’t, then?” Lila mumbled, taking an uncertain half-step backwards. “Oh. This is embarrassing…"

“No, wait, I didn’t mean it that way,” Alex countered desperately. “I just… I was just wondering why this is suddenly coming up now…”

“He called me on Sunday,” Lila explained. She rolled her eyes. “It was mega-awkward. He sort of made small talk for a while, asking me what I’d been up to, how I was, like he cared…” Lila seemed to catch herself and swallowed the bitterness that had been building in her tone before carrying on. “Anyway, I challenged him; I was like, why are you really calling me, Rory? And he just sort of blurted it out.”

Alex had been listening to Lila’s monologue with a sense of rising horror. “Blurted what out?” he echoed.

“That you guys had been at some party, and that he’d got chatting to Nadia’s boyfriend. The subject of Rory being newly single came up…” Here Lila rolled her eyes again. “And then apparently this guy was like, oh, Alex must be pleased and then it all sort of came out.” She gestured vaguely. “That you’d, you know, liked me. You like me,” she corrected her tense, looking up at him shyly for confirmation; Alex exhaled shakily. “Anyway, he just thought that I should know. In case I… wanted to do something about it."

And all Alex could think about was Lila the night of that house party. It was last year, the earliest point you could refer to as spring; the evening still had a fair bite to it. She'd always had long hair, her natural mousy-brown with a wave back at university, and he'd taken a few seconds to place her when she approached him with that sleek, pale bob. He hadn't seen Lila Palmer for years, and they'd shared alma mater memories over a pair of self-poured and over-strong rum and cokes. Lila had only known the younger Alex, the one with all the answers, with the fit girlfriend, the Alex who'd known her for three years and never bothered to learn her surname or what she studied. For that first evening of their reunion, Alex could be that guy again, even if it was just through that one girl's eyes. And he'd liked it; he'd liked it a lot. He liked Lila too. The new styling suited her, gave a bit of bite to her natural cuteness, all upturned nose and bee-stung lips.

Of course, Rory had thought as much too.

You know,” Lila mused, dragging Alex back into the present; she was biting those bee-stung lips. “I don’t think that Rory would have gone for me if he’d known you liked me. He’s a good guy like that, I suppose. And you’re, like, his best mate – and a good friend, Alex. Especially to me; always to me.” Tentatively, Lila reached forward and brushed her fingertips across Alex’s wrist.

Jesus. Was he being friend-zoned, even now? Alex’s stomach jittered madly; what was Lila up to? Was he meant to try kissing her, or apologise for ever even thinking about it?

“So, where do we go from here?” he asked, twisting his wrist so that the sides of his fingers brushed against the back of Lila’s, like the very gentlest version of holding hands.

Lila smiled softly, looking up at him through the veil of her eyelashes in that cute way she did. “On a date, I think.”