The Wedding Date (23 page)

Lauren shifts from one foot to the other, refusing to meet Ryan’s eye. ‘Not exactly.’

Not at all. She’s never really spoken to him inside the gym, unless you count the odd hello or goodbye as she enters and leaves. Lauren has always admired Courtney from afar. Very afar.

‘So this doesn’t change anything, does it?’ Ryan asks softly.

‘Of course it does.’ Lauren sticks her chin in the air and begins to stalk away from the gym’s entrance. ‘It means there’s no point going in there at all ever again.’ She thrusts her thumb at the gym and if it wasn’t for Lauren’s crushing disappointment, I would leap into the air and whoop with joy.

Lauren and I would usually be standing on a treadmill right about now, moving our feet as little as possible while keeping up the pretence that we were working out. But we are not. We are sitting in The Farthing, only moving our feet whenever we need to go to the bar. Lauren and I have quit the gym and it feels incredible. Never again will I have to pull on a pair of shiny leggings and matching crop top to make me look the part. Never again will I have to stretch in public or put my body through the hell that is using a cross-trainer. The rowing machine can kiss my sweet behind and the exercise bike, treadmill and weight machines can go swivel. Big time.

It’s the end of an era. A really rubbish era that I’m glad to see the back of.

‘It just doesn’t seem worth it any more,’ Lauren says. We’ve spent that last twenty minutes justifying our cowardly quitting. But really, what justification is needed? ‘We only joined in the first place because you went on that health kick.’

I drop my eyes to my pint and take a sip, hoping the conversation will move on – and swiftly. I’ve never admitted to Lauren that my health kick was spurred on by Ben’s assessment of my thighs, which were apparently ‘getting pretty chunky’. He no longer found me attractive in skirts or dresses and tried to put me off wearing them whenever we were seen in public together, so I’d decided to take action and put it right. I didn’t want my boyfriend to be embarrassed by me so I’d joined the gym and cut crisps and chocolate out of my life. My health kick didn’t last long. Ben dumped me and I didn’t care about my chunky thighs any more (and I’ve since realised they are not chunky at all. Shapely, yes. Womanly, most definitely. But not chunky). The crisps and the chocolate made a welcome return but the gym visits remained as Lauren had developed her Courtney crush by then. But now we know he’s completely loved-up with Camilla the yoga instructor, what’s the point in keeping up the charade?

‘My health kick is in the past.’ I pick up my pint and take a long slug to demonstrate. ‘I will miss the smoothies though.’

‘I’ll miss Courtney and his calves. They were divine.’ Lauren starts to look glum so I drain my pint and send her to the bar for a refill. A few drinks will sort her out. Once she’s sunk another glass of wine or two, she’ll have forgotten all about Courtney and his rather magnificent calves. Dan is working tonight and as I’m still avoiding him like a double dose of the plague, Lauren is on bar duty.

‘You’ll never guess what Mum’s done,’ Ryan says when Lauren returns with the drinks. ‘She’s set me up on a date on Saturday.’

I choke noisily (and embarrassingly) on my pint. ‘You what?’

‘You heard.’ Ryan folds his arms across his chest and the child inside me giggles as his biceps bulge. Little Delilah James still can’t believe that little weedy Ryan Ford has muscles. ‘She’s set me up with one of her WI friends. I mean, Felicity’s their youngest member. She’s twenty-three, not eighty, but still.’

The bloody cheek of the woman! ‘You’re supposed to be dating me.’

Ryan gives a helpless shrug. ‘I thought she’d stop all this meddling when she found out about our fake relationship but she doesn’t seem to care. She says I’m too young to stick with one girl and I need to keep my options open. She’s not going to stop until I’m shackled to one of her snooty “suitable girls”, is she?’ Ryan reaches across the table and takes hold of my hand, squeezing just that bit too tight in his desperate state. ‘We have to turn our fake relationship up a notch. I’ll fake propose!’

‘No way.’ I snatch my hand away. ‘We can’t go that far. Mum’s already completely over the moon that we’re together.’ She’s started referring to Ryan as ‘your Ryan’, even though she’s known him for over twenty years herself. ‘She’ll combust if she gets a sniff of a proposal. She was convinced Graham was going to propose to Clara on her thirtieth birthday. You should have seen the woman. She was frantic with joy at the prospect of her daughter marrying that dullard. Imagine if she got wind that you were going to be her son-in-law!’

‘Was that a compliment?’ Ryan momentarily puts his mother issues aside to bask in the glory of potential praise.

‘Don’t get too excited. I’m comparing you to Graham here.’

‘So did Graham propose?’ Lauren asks but I shake my head.

‘He did have a surprise but it was a weekend in Paris and not a ring.’ It sounds all romantic and spontaneous on the surface but they’re having to wait a few weeks before they can go because they’re both busy with work.

‘I can’t stand this any more.’ Ryan drops his face into his hands. At first I think he’s referring to the conversation revolving around Clara and Graham and can’t blame him at all. ‘I moved out because I was so sick of Mum trying to control my life but she’ll never stop, will she?’

It seems we’re back to the topic of Eleanor which, to be fair, is marginally better than talking about my sister and her boring boyfriend.

‘Can’t you just stand up to her?’ Lauren asks, which earns her a withering look from Ryan. I’m bemused by the suggestion myself.

‘Stand up to her? Don’t you think I’ve tried? She’s like a dog with a pigging bone. There’s no reasoning with the woman.’

‘You either get tough with her and put a stop to it,’ Lauren tells him. ‘Or you roll over and take it. Again and again.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ weedy little Ryan Ford mumbles into his pint.

But two days later Ryan does stand up to Eleanor.

Unfortunately he takes me down with him.

Chapter 27

The Move

Text Message:

Lauren:
That’s it! No more lectures or exams for me. Uni is officially over!

Delilah:
Do you need me to come over at the weekend and help you pack?

Lauren:
But you hate packing. You said it’s messy, stressful and the worst job in the world

Delilah:
But the sooner you’re packed, the sooner you can come back home

Lauren:
Aww, I love you too xxx

‘You told her we’re moving in together?’ I can’t believe my ears. Ryan has told his mother that we are moving in together.

This is madness. Complete, utter, chuffing madness.

‘I had to.’ We’re back in The Farthing after Ryan called an emergency meeting. ‘She invited me to the house for dinner and when I got there, Felicity was there. It was an ambush!’

‘I don’t care.’ I want to reach across the table, take hold of Ryan’s neck and throttle him. ‘How could you tell her we’re moving in together? Don’t you think she’ll be a bit suspicious when I don’t move in with you?’ Ryan looks down at the table for a second before he flashes his blue eyes at me from under his lashes. It’d be quite comical if I wasn’t hopping mad. ‘No.’ I shake my head, knowing where this little-boy-lost look is going. ‘No way, Ryan.’

‘It would only be for a little while. Just to get her off my back.’

‘No.’ I laugh, because Ryan is clearly winding me up. Perhaps Lauren’s in on it too. It was probably her idea, the little minx.

‘A few weeks, that’s all. Until the wedding, max. And you wouldn’t have to sleep with me. You can have the spare room. Of course we’ll tell everyone that you’re in with me. Or they’ll just assume. Either way, it’ll look as though we’re living together properly.’

Ryan’s babbling away, his hands animated as he fights his case. My mouth starts to droop, widening more and more with each word until I look completely gormless. Ryan is still going, still clinging to the hope that I will say yes.

‘And it’s closer to your work so, in a way, it’s more convenient for you.’

I place my hands on the table and lean towards Ryan, my eyes darting around the pub in case this really is a piss-take. Part of me is still expecting Lauren to jump out from beside the fruit machine, grin wide and belly aching from laughing. Gosh, I hope she does.

‘Are you actually serious about this?’ My eyes are going left, right, up and down, scouring the room for my friend, ears pricked for the faintest giggle.

‘Yes.’ Ryan reaches across the table and prises my hands from the woodwork. I hadn’t realised I’d been clutching on so tight. I wouldn’t be surprised to see scratch marks where my nails have been. ‘I’m deadly serious. Mum won’t give up. I know she won’t. She wants me shackled to someone wealthy and successful.’

I snatch my hands away. ‘Someone not like me then. Thanks.’

‘Someone snooty and as much as fun as a foot to the testicles.’ Ryan takes hold of my hands again and I give the vague sense of fighting him off but don’t put any real oomph into it. ‘Someone not like you at all. Because I think you’re fantastic. You know that.’

Lauren isn’t here, is she? She isn’t behind the fruit machine or hiding in the loos, ready to burst out to mock me.

‘Ryan, sweetheart.’ I shuffle my stool around the table slightly so my arms aren’t pulled out of their sockets as Ryan clutches my hands to his chest. ‘You are completely nuts. Dangerously so. I can’t move in with you. Don’t you think this whole fake relationship is crazy enough?’

‘It is crazy. Completely cuckoo. But I’m doing it. For you. Because I care about you so much and want you to be happy.’

And that’s how I end up agreeing to move in with Ryan Ford, my best friend, pretend boyfriend and now fake live-in lover.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind me leaving most of my things here?’

I’m standing outside on the garden path, looking up at my house, the house I’ve lived in since I was a couple of days old. Mum is dabbing at her eyes with a scrunched up bit of tissue.

‘No. It’s a good idea to do these things gradually. To take your time.’

Mum is thrilled that Ryan and I are ‘an item’, but she was more than a little surprised to discover we were planning on living together. Her first thought was pregnancy, which I quickly quashed. She’s already bought me a dinner service as a moving in present, I don’t need her stocking up on babygros and nappies too.

‘So why the rush?’ she’d asked and I didn’t have a decent answer for her. Telling her that Ryan was too much of a wuss to stand up to his mum and tell her he isn’t interested in her pretentious matches didn’t seem feasible. Instead, I’d claimed we were so in love we couldn’t bear to be apart. And I somehow managed to keep my dinner encased in my stomach while I said it too.

‘You know you can come back any time, don’t you? To see me and your dad and Justin.’

Justin is currently holed up in his smelly bedroom, more interested in battering his Playstation pads than waving his sister off. Even Clara and boring Graham have made the effort to come over and see me off and I don’t even live with them.

‘I’ll have to come back. All my stuff is here.’ I’m only taking the contents of a wheeled suitcase and my old gym holdall. I’m trying to see this exercise as an extended sleepover and there really is no point lugging all my stuff to Ryan’s place, only to bring it back again when we split up after the wedding.

‘You’ll have to come for lunch tomorrow. You and Ryan.’ Mum clutches my sleeve and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t intend on letting go any time soon. ‘Or we could come to you. We could have a nice housewarming family Sunday lunch. Clara and Graham would like to see where you’re living, wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course we would,’ Clara says. I can imagine what that visit would entail – a long list of grievances about the property and its contents in comparison to hers. ‘Here’s one tip though: don’t let Justin bring that friend over. The dirty creature left a ton of disgusting images in the history of our computer when it was my birthday party.’

I hear Ryan snigger beside me but he turns it into a cough.

‘Actually, that was Patrick.’ I’ve never liked Justin’s friends (they’re just like my brother but in multiple) but I won’t let one of them take the blame for this. Grassing on Patrick is just an added bonus, of course.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Clara’s tone is high and offended. She takes on a haughty stance, her head high and shoulders back. No friend of hers would act in such an appalling manner.

‘It’s true,’ Ryan says. He can barely keep the grin from his face. ‘We caught him watching porn in your office that night.’

Clara looks at Graham, her eyes wide and cheeks reddening to dangerous skin-scorching levels. Graham shrugs his shoulders, his face remaining impassive. It’s like he doesn’t have it in him to form an opinion either way.

‘I’m sure there’s some sort of misunderstanding.’ Clara tries to laugh off the event but what leaves her mouth is more strangled cat than humour.

‘Would you like a hand with your luggage?’ Graham asks. He’s stooped to pick up my holdall before I can reply, striding up the garden path towards the gate and away from this embarrassing conversation.

‘You will come back, won’t you? You will visit?’ Mum’s eyes have filled with tears but she doesn’t bother to dab them away with her sodden tissue.

‘I’ll be back really soon, I promise.’ Sooner than she thinks, and permanently rather than for a visit.

‘Come on then, babe.’ Ryan grabs the handle of my suitcase and drags it along the path. His car is waiting out on the street with Graham standing beside it looking as though he would rather be anywhere else but here. I don’t blame him. I don’t want to be here either. I want to be in my house, where I belong.

I shuffle after Ryan, Mum clinging onto me as she does her best to cover her sniffles. I catch movement from Ryan’s parents’ house next door and presume Eleanor is overseeing proceedings but she’s too quick and the only evidence of her presence is the fluttering of the curtains in the upstairs window. Eleanor has not taken the announcement of our cohabitation well and hasn’t spoken to Ryan since he broke the news to her. Ryan says it’s an even better outcome than he could have imagined.