Still, Jonah was still by no means the most subtle of conversationalists, as demonstrated when, in response to my explanation of what I was studying, he said, "You're doing all that business stuff so you don't end up like your mum, hey?"
Abi and Elliot's conversation faltered and Elliot snapped his head round to look at us, his expression flint-like. "Any of us would be lucky to end up like Rox's mum," he said flatly.
Sweet and everything, but not exactly true. My mum was great, but it has to be said that Jonah had a point; I really didn't want her life.
Mum’d left school at 17 and picked up a job as a cleaner before clearly reading too many romance novels and fancying herself in love with the son of the house. From what I can gather, he enjoyed the flirting, but when the flirting turned into unprotected sex and I was conceived, he became less keen on the whole thing. My mum was put out on her ear and that was that.
For my first 10 years my mum took various jobs and worked hard, but the poverty line was still something we aspired to until she got the job with the Sinclair family and finally found some stability. When I turned 14 and was able to work as well things improved further, but at the end of the day, my mum still had very little show for all her hard work.
That was not going to happen to me. Period.
"Cinders, I didn't mean..." Jonah looked stricken and I nodded.
"It's cool, I know you weren't having a go." And I did, but I seemed to be the only one. Abi looked disturbingly like her 'perfect boyfriend bubble' had deflated a little and Elliot's jaw was still clenched tightly.
"Hey, Smelliot," I broke the moment by bringing out the last of our triad of stupid childhood nicknames and poking him with the fork again.
"What?" He snapped out of his 'defend Rox's mum' daze, plucking the pronged cutlery out of my hand and putting it down on the other side of the table, pointedly out of my reach.
"Why don't you tell Abi about the time you and Jonah rescued that mother duck and her ducklings?"
He looked at me like I was mad, but this was nothing new for me and I gazed calmly back, before looking across at Abi and explaining, "Elliot and Jonah once found this family of ducks in the storm drain. They managed to pull the cover up and spent all day trying to catch each of them and get them to safety."
"Aww," Abi cooed, as I knew she would, leaning in against Jonah's side and clearly forgiving him for his earlier insensitive remark.
"We were the ones who hit the ball that scared them down there in the first place," Elliot spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth as the waitress came back with our food.
"Yeah, I know that, but Abi doesn't need to," I whispered back, feeling infinitesimally more kindly towards him after his swift defence of my mum. "Besides, you were only 12 and you felt awful about it so that's something."
He laughed softly and I hastily focused my attention on my newly arrived meal as I caught another whiff of his light scent that made my nostrils tingle, not unpleasantly.
The 'getting to know you' lunch progressed quite well from there. Abigail, being the safest bet for us all, found herself the most popular conversational partner, but I managed to exchange a few words and smiles with Jonah, and only stabbed Elliot once with my butter knife.
All things considered, I thought I'd been on my best behaviour, but then the bill arrived. Beaming the smile of the well-intentioned, Jonah picked it up, heartily announcing, as if he'd discovered a cure for cancer, "I'll get this."
Before I knew what was happening, I'd snatched it off him with a sharp, "No you won't."
Abi's mouth dropped open, Jonah looked at his now empty hand as if wondering how he'd been so quickly dispossessed, and Elliot groaned quietly and muttered, "Here we go..."
"I mean," I said quickly, hoping if I got in there fast enough I could distract them from how rude I'd been, "I'm happy to pay for mine."
"Rox, it's just a sandwich," Elliot said patiently, in the manner of one talking to an obstinate child.
"Yes, my sandwich," I explained, glaring at him despite our truce.
I felt a tug on the receipt in my hand and turned to see Jonah reaching over and trying to get it back.
"Look, how about if I pay and then anyone unhappy with the billing arrangements pays me back if they really feel they have to?" He said, using the sort of patient voice one uses on the insanely unreasonable.
God, it was always like this! You tried to take responsibility for your own expenses, as any adult should do, and people looked down on you like you were some sort of spoilsport.
"Fine," I said ungraciously, surrendering the receipt and immediately fishing my wallet out of my bag.
By the time the waitress had been summoned back over and given Jonah's credit card, I'd deposited the exact amount of money I owed on the table in front of him. He made a show of his shaking his head, but he put the money into his own wallet and I was satisfied.
A short time after that, Elliot and I stood awkwardly to one side whilst Abi and Jonah bid their lengthy farewells to each other, even though they were planning on meeting up again that night anyway. I tried to not even look at Elliot. Something about just standing there in broad daylight, without anything specific to argue with him about, felt more uncomfortable than our whole interaction after we'd had our drunken one night stand. Maybe he felt the same, or maybe the terms of our truce still held, because he made no attempt to talk to me and it was with great relief we both welcomed our friends back from the land of the lip-locked.
"So, what did you think of Elliot?" I asked as I linked arms with Abi and finally drew her away from her boyfriend. I didn't consider that I'd pretty much stolen the line she would have had reserved for after lunch, I so wanted to know her impression of the guy she'd heard so much about through me.
"Well..." she bit her lip as we started walking down the pavement back to our room, and my shoulders slumped.
"You liked him, didn't you?" I said flatly.
"Not for what he's like with you," she responded loyally and I gave her arm an appreciative squeeze.
"It's alright," I said nobly. "He's your boyfriend's best friend; you're allowed to like him, even if he is a ridiculous excuse of a human being."
"Oh come on, Rox." Abi hitched her bag up her shoulder and looked kind of exasperated. "I don't buy that he's that bad. You have too much self-respect to sleep with someone who was truly awful, no matter how drunk you were."
Was that true? I really hoped it was because, to be honest, I was still struggling with myself over the 'having sex with someone I didn't like' thing. The way Abi put it gave me an opportunity to view the situation in a slightly different light and I allowed myself a moment to reflect. Maybe it wasn't about having sex with someone I didn't like, maybe it was about me having sex with someone who I at least knew wasn't a racist or a bigot or a deliberate duck murderer.
"Fine," I said heavily, sending a quick look over my shoulder to make sure that Elliot wasn't close enough to have heard my admission. "I'll admit that it's unlikely he'll drag you into an alleyway and kill you."
Abi snorted with laughter before her grey eyes turned serious and she said, "You know, when he was talking to me he was fine. He was interested in my art and he even said some nice things about you."
I stumbled at this sudden revelation and, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand, looked across at her to demand, "Like what?"
"Maybe nice isn't the right word," she backtracked, obviously slightly put off by my intensity, "it was more fond, I guess. I asked about growing up with you and he said that it'd been fun mucking about and working on getting each other in trouble. I suppose it gave me a bit of insight into why you ended up sleeping together despite everything."
Wow, I must have been really wrapped up in my conversation with Jonah the Whale (must stop calling him that) to have missed this juicy bit of information!
"Oh yeah?" I asked incredulously. "Care to elaborate on your findings? Because I still have no idea."
"Well," she lo
oked kind of uncomfortable, but tough! If she thought she had some glimmer of understanding then she was damn well going to have to share it with the class. "Don't you think it could have had something to do with homesickness? Like he was missing home and you reminded him of the good old days or something?"
I stared at her for a moment and then laughed loudly as all expectation of her imparting some kind of wisdom about Elliot's thoughts on that night evaporated in an instant.
"Oh sweetie, it's a good thing you're not doing psychology," I chuckled, "because that was the worst diagnosis I've ever heard."
As was pretty much her wont these days, the rest of the walk was taken up with Abi gushing about how lovely Jonah was, Elliot completely forgotten. This was fine by me as it gave me time to zone out and focus on giggling internally at her suggestion uninterrupted.
It wasn't a secret that Elliot's parents weren't exactly the cuddly types, but I knew better than most just how truly cold and unfeeling they were towards their only child and how gladly he'd left their house.
A fresh wave of amusement hit me and I shook my head. Elliot Sinclair homesick? If there had been one thing that had made him sick, it had been home.
----------
They stood outside the café and watched the girls go.
Physically, Elliot mused, they were about as different as you could get, but he could see that they'd done that weird absorbing each other's personalities thing that girls sometimes did. It'd thrown him a couple of times while talking to Abigail when she'd said something or tilted her face in a way that was Rox through and through.
He'd had a weirdly good time at the lunch, he decided. Abigail had been genuinely good fun and any time spent in Rox's vicinity at least guaranteed you were never bored; certainly worth a few puncture wounds here and there.
"So what do you think?" Jonah asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but betrayed by a tense expression that suggested a negative appraisal on Elliot's behalf would be an offence worthy of beheading. Considering this was a feat Jonah could easily have achieved with one swipe of his massive hand, Elliot was glad he didn't have to lie as he said,
"Abi's cool, mate. I like her."
Jonah's whole body relaxed and he nodded. "Yeah, she is cool."
There was a pause during which Elliot found himself looking back over at the retreating forms of their erstwhile lunch mates. He saw Rox steal a quick look over her shoulder then say something that made Abigail laugh, and had absolutely no doubt they were talking about him. That meant that when, in the next second, Rox seemed to trip on absolutely nothing and whip her head round to stare at her friend, he wished he'd been closer to them and could’ve heard what had just been said.
"Funny seeing Cinders again like that. She got hot, right?" Jonah knocked him with his elbow and Elliot suddenly realised that he'd gone from wondering what the girls were talking about to just plain staring at the swing of Rox's jean-clad arse as she walked away.
Quickly focusing instead on his friend, he gave him a shove back and grinned. "Steady mate, I just got through meeting your girlfriend, don't tell me you're moving on already?"
Jonah shook his head and looked irritatingly knowing. "Nah, I'm just saying. I reckon I see how the other week happened now."
Elliot jostled him again and then changed the subject.
Yeah, Rox had done something to her hair since she'd started uni that made it bounce about as madly as her thought processes, and there was no denying that that butt could get any red blooded male's interest, but Jonah was full of it. Because, although Elliot couldn't deny some of the truth in the 'she got hot' stuff, if Jonah thought that was the reason he'd slept with Rox then he didn't see. He didn't see at all.
Chapter 4 – The Statistical Inevitability and the Personal Space Invasion
A week or so after the lunch with Abi, Jonah, and Elliot, I was looking forward to enjoying a rare bit of time to myself in my room after one of those supremely knackering days. I'd had a coma-inducing corporate governance lecture followed by a gruelling accounting tute, and then five hours in the ref doling out and then cleaning up greasy uni food. My fellow students, as was becoming clearer with every shift, had obviously never mastered the cutlery-to-mouth method of eating, and I'd spent an inordinate amount of time scraping dried food off the tables and floor.
Needless to say, I was well and truly over the day and flopping down on my bed and not moving for the next week was pretty much my top priority. Ever the dutiful daughter, however, I picked up the phone as soon as I got back to my room to perform the obligatory weekly, 'check in with Mum' call. To be honest, it was a ritual that was becoming more and more excruciating.
Mum and I had been so close when I was younger, but from the day I'd bounced in and announced that I'd been accepted into one of the best unis in the country, a little rift had snuck its way between us and it grew every year.
Not that Mum wasn't supportive in her own way; in fact, I probably wouldn't even have been at my top pick if it wasn't for her. Getting to attend my dream uni hadn't been too much of a problem marks-wise, but when it came to me being able to attend from a monetary point of view it got a bit more difficult. For goodness sake, Elliot had chosen to go to the same place as me, and if there was one thing I'd learnt in life it was that, if Elliot was involved, I couldn't afford it. Sure I had a government loan to get me through tuition, but I also had to have somewhere to live and food to eat and that's where things had become tricky.
I'd been all set to attend a cheaper institution and dig myself into some serious debt with whatever bank would have me, when my mum, superhero-like, had come to the rescue. She told me she'd been setting aside some money for my wedding, but that she could see it would be put to better use getting me through my chosen uni reasonably debt-free. Once I'd gotten over my initial horror at the fact that the only time my mother had managed to save it had basically been for my dowry, I'd been overjoyed.
That money of my mum's paid for the ridiculously expensive uni accommodation, but more than that, it had been the gateway for my life over the past few years. Fundamentally, it had paid for who I had become, and my current happiness, and there wasn't a night before I went to sleep that I didn't thank any omnipotent being that might have been listening for it.
Despite all that, however, that afternoon once I'd told Mum that all my classes were 'good' and she'd told me things back at home were 'good', we pretty much ran out of stuff to talk about.
"How's Nan?" I asked, on a sudden brainwave. Keen as I'd been to put that night with Elliot out of my mind, I hadn't forgotten how he'd weirdly mentioned his grandma when he'd dropped me off.
There was a little pause and then Mum said sombrely, "Hasn’t Elliot told you?"
I felt my spine stiffen with unease and I sat up slowly on the bed to stare blankly at the ever-critical Mona Lisa poster. This time I could've sworn Da Vinci's muse was saying 'something's wrong and it's been over a month, why didn't you check on Nan earlier you silly, selfish girl?'
"I've told you, Mum, Elliot and I don't have anything to do with each other." As anxious as I was, I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but wasn't very successful.
"And I've told you that I think that's a shame," my mum said, so at least I wasn't the only one failing to not sound frustrated. "Elliot’s a good kid and he could take you far in the sort of place you are now."
Which was hard to take any other way than: 'Elliot, as a rich person, is better than you and, to achieve anything, you'll need to hang off his fancy coattails'.
Determined not to start an argument, I kept my voice controlled as I said, "Regardless, Elliot hasn't told me anything about Nan, could you fill me in?"
"Oh, poppet," my mum's voice instantly softened and my stomach clenched, instinctively knowing that whatever she was going to say next was going to be awful. "She had a stroke about a month ago. A mild one," she hastily added as I poured horrified silence down the line at her.
"How mild?" I asked through clen
ched teeth, my mind making a firm connection with another event that had happened about a month ago.
"Some of her speech is slurred and she's weak down her left side. She's tough as an old boot, though, you know that." Something in her tone prompted me to ask,
"But...?"
Mum sighed and then said quietly, "But she’s not recovering as well as she’d hoped and the doctors say she's got a high risk of more attacks. She's moved into the big house so we can keep an eye on her."
And that last bit, more than anything, told me how serious it was. The Sinclair family owned many properties, one of which Elliot's mum's mum was usually stationed in. That Nan had consented to being brought to the house Elliot's parents were based out of, AKA 'the big house', was horribly telling. Nan had always been the first to point out that 'big house' was a colloquialism for prison, a reference Elliot, Nan and I had always found particularly warranted.
"Is Nan there now?" I asked, stung into action. "Can I talk to her?"
There was a moment where it was clear my mum was hesitating, but then she relented with the warning, "But don't keep her on long, she tires easily."
The straight talking, irreverent, dance until the sun comes up woman I knew being described as someone who tires easily was enough to make my eyes fill with tears. As I said goodbye to Mum and waited for the ringing extension to be picked up, I balled the hand not holding the phone into a fist to remind myself to hold it together. Nan didn't like sooky-la-las.
As always, Nan's first words were a kicker. I didn't even get the full way through 'hello' before she croaked, "You slept with my grandson."
"Nan!"
"Now, don't try and deny your dirty deed, Elliot told me all about it."
The words were so her, but the delivery was all wrong. She was speaking slowly and she tripped over the t's like she was drunk. I tried to reassure myself that, being Nan, it was quite possible that she was drunk, but there was no getting past the fact that there was something seriously wrong.
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