by Hannah Pearl
There was a beeping in the kitchen, and I heard the microwave door open and close. And then Eli was stood at the door to my room, bowl in hand. ‘Sorry,’ I told him, patting my bed, ‘there aren’t any chairs.’
‘Budge up then,’ he said, sitting next to me. He kicked his shoes off, and we lay, side by side, socked feet up by the pillow and heads resting on hands, arms bent at the elbow. ‘You’re going to make me watch something really girly now, aren’t you?’
‘Was there ever any doubt?’
‘I could go upstairs and borrow an action film from Ben,’ he suggested.
‘He’d probably come and watch it too,’ I pointed out. Eli made a low grunting sound, but he stayed where he was. I wondered why he suddenly wanted to be alone with me, but tried to concentrate on the film and not obsess about it. I’d wasted a lot of my teenage years on that topic already. It was no use though, and I spent the next hour and a half conscious every time Eli moved of how close he was to me.
By the end of the film, the heroine was safely married to her dream man. I was wiping tears from my eyes and Eli was staring at me with a look of shocked incomprehension on his face. ‘That was …’ he began.
‘Beautiful,’ I supplied. ‘Heart-warming’.
‘I was going to say cheesy and predictable,’ he complained.
‘How can you say that?’ I asked, moving the now empty bowl to the floor so that I could swipe his arm.
‘She spent the entire film dodging disasters. I’ve never seen a character be so unlucky.’
‘She overcame obstacles in order to have the wedding of her dreams,’ I responded.
‘The dress got burnt, the venue got flooded. Even the groom only arrived just in time and minus his eyebrows. Honestly, why didn’t they just admit defeat and give up? Or failing that, just fly to Vegas and get married by Elvis?’
‘I guess guys don’t dream of having the perfect wedding,’ I muttered.
‘Not all women do either,’ he pointed out. ‘Just the ones that you meet here. No wonder you’re biased to believe all that true love crap.’
‘And you’re not biased?’ I scoffed. ‘Don’t you think that there’s a chance that you might settle down one day, once you’re done sowing your wild oats, obviously. You might fall in love and have your own happily ever after?’
Eli sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed until he was facing away from me. ‘I’m glad that you believe, and I think you’ll find love,’ he told me. I didn’t tell him that I had once before and it hadn’t made me happy, but he continued to speak. ‘You’re beautiful, any man would be lucky to have you. But me, no, I can’t see any happy ever afters in my life.’ It was both astounding to hear him saying such nice things about me, and heart-breaking that he didn’t predict the same happiness for himself. I decided to provoke him further and see what happened.
‘And if that man were to be Taylor?’ I said.
He turned to face me. ‘Do you actually fancy Taylor?’ he asked. I didn’t answer, and he began to grin.
‘I didn’t say no,’ I told him. He laughed, stopping only when he reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. When he kissed me again, this time without holding back, I stopped talking too.
Chapter Eight
I woke up to an empty bed, but Eli had left me a still steaming cup of coffee on the trunk. He couldn’t have been gone long. A million thoughts spun through my mind. What had I done? Well, I could remember that, vividly, in several different positions. But why had we slept together after all of this time? And what did it mean that Eli had left, but not without doing something thoughtful first? I reached for my mobile and checked the display, blinking as the screen lit up the dimness of the room.
No messages. I took a sip of coffee and got up, telling myself that it was because I was hungry, and not just in case Eli had left a note anywhere else in the flat. He hadn’t. I wanted to soak in the bath, but I didn’t want to risk Ben and Dad seeing me first if I were to go upstairs. Not that they could tell from looking at me what I’d been up to. Well, Ben wouldn’t anyway. Instead I took a long, hot shower, trying to ease the ache from my tired muscles.
Afterwards I got dressed in comfy old jeans and favourite hoody. I sliced a couple of bagels and dropped them into the toaster. I chopped some fruit and grabbed a yogurt too. I needed it. We’d burnt a lot of calories over night. I was just smothering the bagels in butter when my front door opened. ‘Daisy?’
‘I’m in the kitchen, Lily,’ I called out, though by the time I finished saying it she’d taken two steps into the flat and could see me. She looked at me and shook her head.
‘You’ve got enough breakfast here for two people. Where’s Taylor?’
‘No idea,’ I told her.
‘Hence the baggy clothes. Is this covering up some weird reaction to finally getting lucky again?’ I blushed, and she whooped loudly and gave me a huge hug. ‘I always know when people have done it. So, how was he? Tell me everything, and I mean everything. Is he as big as he looks? And I don’t mean his height.’ She swiped half a bagel from my plate.
‘It was amazing,’ I admitted, taking a sip of my drink.
Lily stretched up and waited until I hit her hand in a high five. ‘I knew it, but he left first last night. Did he come back? Did you booty call him? You dawg. I didn’t know you had it in you. Well, I could tell from the satisfied expression on your face that you’d had it in you, but you know what I mean.’ Her eyes were shining with excitement. In fact, I hadn’t seen her buzzed so early in the morning since the last time she went clubbing and she stopped by for breakfast before she went home to crash.
I spun away, suddenly gripped by the need to find a jar in the depths of the cupboard. ‘It wasn’t Taylor,’ I said, my back still turned. I waited whilst she absorbed this, taking my time, spreading peanut butter on my breakfast. I was on my third bite before she spoke again.
‘Eli?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘Still want me to tell you all the details?’ I asked. She waved her hand at me as if she were wafting away a bad smell.
‘I thought you swore off him ages ago? He’s so …’
‘Handsome, thoughtful?’ I remembered how he’d swapped food with me at the wedding so that I had something to eat.
‘I was going to say that he doesn’t exactly buy into the same monogamous lifestyle that you dream of,’ she said, which was more gentle than I expected her to be. Hell, if she’d hooked up with a guy who had broken her heart ten years earlier I don’t think I’d have pulled my punches.
I finished my coffee and stomped towards the bathroom to brush my teeth, but as that only took about two minutes, it didn’t make much of an impact. Afterwards Lily made me swap my baggy sweatshirt for a cute jumper, then she French plaited my hair to make me look a little more grown up and professional. Finally she nagged me until I put on lipstick and mascara, claiming that I still looked like a teenager.
‘What are you doing here so early?’ I asked her.
‘What with the men all going so high-tech last night, I thought maybe you and I could go old school.’ She shook a rucksack off her back. It was made of camouflage material and didn’t coordinate with anything in her wardrobe. ‘I bought it on the way here,’ she explained.
‘And you thought you’d melt right into the jungle background of a busy city street?’
She ignored my sarcasm and started to unpack it. ‘Binoculars,’ she said, handing me a pair. ‘Refreshments.’ She took out cans of soft drinks and bars of chocolate and stacked them on the counter.
‘So where are we going on our stakeout?’
‘That’s the best part,’ she said. ‘Right here. We don’t even know whether we had the right Cody before so there’s no point trekking half way back across London again. It could be a wild goose chase, so I figured instead of trying to find Cody, why not wait here for Cody? Whoever it is, they’ll turn up sooner or later to get their shop set up I thought I’d take the first shift, pull one of tho
se bar stools over and watch out of the front window.’
‘And that won’t be visible at all,’ I said snarkily. Lily ignored me. She deserved to. Hers was probably the most sensible idea I’d heard yet.
‘It’ll be great. We won’t get cold, we have access to a bathroom whenever we need it.’
‘I can see the advantages,’ I admitted. ‘Do you think we’ll find out anything useful?’
‘Won’t know until we try it,’ she said, turning to look at me without lowering the binoculars. ‘I think you have stubble rash on your cheek.’
I was bent over my bathroom sink trying to see if Lily was right when my front door opened again. ‘Hello, sir. How may I help you today?’ Lily seemed to have my customer in hand, so I took the time to dig out an ancient tube of concealer. By the time I emerged, Lily was putting his credit card details through the till, before wrapping his purchases up into a stack of boxes and tying them into a pyramid with a red ribbon.
‘Was that Mr Robinson?’ I asked.
‘He told me to call him Bert,’ she said.
‘He’s been in every year since I opened. Never bought more than a box of chocolates.’
‘This year he decided that he also needed a pair of leather gloves, a scarf and a tray of those expensive truffles you showed me. Though of course you only let me eat one.’
‘That box costs as much as a week of groceries,’ I said. My mouth dropped open as she handed me the copy of the till receipt. ‘Feel free to help out in here while you’re doing your surveilling,’ I told her.
Two hours later we’d eaten all the chocolate that Lily had brought with her, finished the cans of pop and emptied my fridge. ‘I’m going to the supermarket,’ I told her, giving her a quick one-armed hug.
When I got back home with so much shopping that I’d had to call a cab, Lily was rearranging the night gowns. ‘I sold quite a few of these this morning. Did you have more in stock?’ I shook my head and began to put packs of vegetables away. ‘You could try ordering some from that stall you liked the look of at the trade show. I have their card somewhere.’ She began to paw through her purse to try and find it.
‘For the record, I didn’t like those knickers. I was just trying to work out which were the leg holes and which were the bonus ones.’
She grinned and I threw her a box of truffles. ‘They’re just the supermarket version,’ I apologised, ‘but if business carries on like this I’ll be able to afford the posh ones for you next time.’
I took a shift at the window after that while Lily had a rest. She was supposed to be having a nap as she’d be working in her own shop until midnight, but she was obviously wide awake as she asked me every thirty seconds whether I had heard from Eli yet and if I was okay. The answer to both questions was no, but I didn’t want to admit it out loud so I just told her to go to sleep and continued to stare out of the window. I was almost comatose myself when a car pulled up outside.
I shouted for Lily, and she was next to me in seconds, yawning and rubbing her eyes. I pointed at the sleek black BMW that had parked right outside my door. ‘Do you think it belongs to Cody Rainbow?’ I asked.
The back door opened and Eli stepped out. ‘Maybe he’s come to whisk you on a romantic date?’ Lily suggested. ‘Maybe he wants to take you out for a fancy dinner and these are his wheels?’
I surprised myself by hoping that she was right, but I was cruelly disappointed when instead of knocking on my door, he knocked on my dad’s. When Ben came down with a holdall, I pulled my boots on and left the flat.
‘Hi,’ I said, wanting to ask more but not wanting to give away how confused I felt. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Holiday,’ Ben said, opening the boot and dumping his bag into it. ‘Eli booked it yesterday, remember? You were there. And you think I’m oblivious.’
‘I didn’t realise that you were leaving so soon,’ I said, glancing from Ben to Eli. Eli looked down at his shoes for a beat before walking round to face me. He was about to speak, when Dad called him in to help carry his suitcase down. I wasn’t sure that Eli needed to sprint off quite so quickly to help, but perhaps he didn’t know exactly what to say to me either.
‘The Boss said she wants Eli fresh and ready to go on a new project in January so she said better to go now and get it over and done with,’ Ben said, as though a holiday was something to be endured rather than enjoyed. I hoped that Eli would enjoy it, because as much as I wanted answers about what had happened the night before, I knew he needed a break. I ducked back into my flat and put the snacks that I’d bought for Ben and Dad into a bag. I added some bottles of water and made it back out just as Dad was climbing into the car. He stroked the shiny roof as he slid onto the leather seat next to the driver, and I was shocked to see that he was grinning.
I walked round to the back of the car and opened Ben’s door to hand him the bag of snacks and a packet of his travel sickness tablets. ‘Make sure you look after yourself til you get back.’
He rolled his eyes at my worrying, but he completed our saying nonetheless. ‘Look after yourself too. Seriously, Dais, we’re not going to the Moon.’
I kissed his cheek then dodged out of the way before he could shut the door on me. I crossed my arms around myself, partly against the wind and partly against the feelings of loneliness. I knew that they all needed the break though and so I tried not to let them see that I was anything other than happy for them. Eli checked that the boot was closed and ran through his checklist with Ben. Passport, credit card, no illegal programmes on his laptop in case they got stopped at customs.
My teeth started chattering but I wasn’t ready to wave them off yet. As he walked towards me I could see the fine lines of tiredness around Eli’s eyes that I hadn’t noticed the day before. As hurt as I was that he was leaving before we had chance to talk, I tried to reassure myself that perhaps it wasn’t me he was running away from. He’d woken several times in the night and though we’d made the most of being awake together, I had wondered if it was stress as much as passion that had contributed.
‘Are you sure that Ben won’t get into trouble for taking time off at short notice?’ I asked.
‘I promise you I cleared it with the office for him too. Besides, they have separate rules for Ben at work,’ Eli said, walking towards me. He took the scarf off from around his neck and wrapped it around mine. ‘You know everyone else in the office wears a suit to work?’
I shook my head. Apart from the recent wedding I’d never seen Ben in anything smarter than a T-shirt with no swear words on it. ‘They do,’ Eli continued. ‘The men all wear ties.’ I looked at his choice of holiday outfit – a pale grey shirt and blue jeans which had been perfectly ironed. Even his casual clothes had an elegance about them. ‘The women,’ he continued, ‘can choose from trousers or skirts, but they are worn with tailored blouses and jackets, not sweaters. We got a new boss last year. We were sitting down for a team meeting when she noticed that Ben was wearing a Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt. She asked where his suit was. He stood up, walked out without another word, and when he got back an hour later, dressed in a new suit that he’d just gone out and bought, he walked in to the middle of the meeting as if nothing had happened and sat down. She shouted at him so loudly afterwards that I could hear it from outside the room with the door shut. The next day he turns up in an Iron Maiden T-shirt. She walks into a meeting room half way through his presentation. When he stops to take questions, she asks where his suit is. He walks out, goes home and gets it on. That time it took him an hour and a half. He gets back to work, goes into the meeting room and doesn’t understand why no one is still there.’
I shook my head. ‘Some days I can’t believe that he hasn’t been fired yet.’
‘The third day,’ Eli continued ‘it’s a Monty Python T-shirt. By lunchtime, he’s installed a code that he’s written that makes the bank accounts of a group of terrorists look to other agencies as if we’ve frozen them. Our American colleagues have been pressuring us to do th
is but we’d been resisting because we wanted to trace where the money was flowing to and from. Ben’s code was amazing. It has a second level which made it appear to those using the accounts that their money was arriving and leaving, but it was a ghost, a shadow. No money ever changed hands, but we could see every transaction that they were trying to make. A suspicious transaction took place that afternoon, the boss organised an impromptu raid. We scored the biggest cache of weapons ever found on British soil.’ By this point I was grinning in pride at my brother’s achievement. I loved it when other people got to see how amazing Ben was too. Anyone who judged him on a few socially awkward behaviours missed seeing what an enormous heart and incredible mind he possessed. It was their loss. I felt very, very lucky to have him.
‘So on the fourth day,’ Eli told me, ‘the boss turns up, hands Ben a bag with a bunch of Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek T-shirts in it, tells him to keep up the good work and never questions him again. But if it makes you feel better, I sent her an email yesterday before I booked the tickets saying that we needed a break and got her authorisation before I booked a thing.’
I threw my arms around him and hugged Eli close, before realising that he might take it the wrong way, or maybe it was the right way, but whichever, I let go and stepped back again. I was about to wish him a safe trip, when Ben wound the window down. ‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘You said on our last holiday that you liked to be by the pool with a drink in one hand and a girl in the other by dinnertime.’
My heart sank. It was my own fault though. It was barely twelve hours since he’d told me that he didn’t believe in happy ever after love. I shouldn’t have got my hopes up that he had changed his mind already. I spun on my heels and walked back inside my shop. Sinking to the floor, I dropped my head onto my hands and sobbed. Lily sat next to me, put her arm around me and rocked me.
