Married By Christmas

by Bailey, Scarlett

  Anna winced as she felt Miles’s weight ease into the seat next to hers and jammed her legs into ‘I Heart London’s in a bid to ensure they didn’t brush against Miles’s, for fear that he might somehow recognise her knees from the power of touch alone.

  ‘The Big Apple, huh?’ Miles said amiably, clearly yet to notice that he was being most decidedly blanked. ‘So good they named it twice, and all that. I’ve been before of course, but not like this. This trip might be the most important thing I’ve ever done, and if it’s not, well it’s a hell of a city to drown your sorrows in, right?’

  Anna wavered, torn between her innate inability to be rude, even to men who had previously almost caused her sudden and untimely death, and her desire to be anywhere else on the planet right now.

  ‘Hello?’ Miles persisted cheerfully, resolutely failing to take offence. ‘Anyone in?’

  Anna sighed and reluctantly, lowered the magazine.

  ‘Hello,’ she said heavily, unable to bring herself to look him in the eye.

  ‘Shit, it’s you!’ Miles exclaimed, apparently happy to see her, pushing his dark hair off his face and grinning. ‘Angie, right? No … Alice … no … something prim and a bit Julie Andrews … Oh that’s right, Annie! It’s Annie! Bloody hell, what are the odds? Hi, Annie, how are you, over the rash thing now? Shit, I’m really glad you’re not dead, that would have been a bummer. Like, imagine the karma, dude!’

  Anna rubbed her hand across her forehead, acutely aware of the sudden interest all the other passengers in their immediate vicinity were showing them.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t that kind of rash!’ Miles said, catching the eye of a woman across the aisle who was staring at them with naked curiosity, perhaps imagining that they couldn’t see her ogling them at less than three feet away. ‘Not a sex rash, it was an allergy rash, actually more of an allergy swelling. Like, you know, anaphylactic shit, wasn’t it, Annie? I bought her a cocktail, without knowing she was allergic to kiwis, her lips blew up like a pair of massive fish lips, then her head ballooned. It was totally gross. There was a rash all down her neck, and she almost stopped breathing. I had to take her to A&E. Spent all night there while they gave her a shitload of drugs. We couldn’t even talk because, well, Annie sounded a bit like the Elephant Man; she looked a bit like him too, bless her, once the hives came up, size of golf balls. I mean normally, yeah, I do spend the night on a first date, but not normally with one of us on life support.’

  Miles grinned as he turned back to Anna, his stubble darkening in the creases of his smile, his blue eyes twinkling.

  ‘Anna,’ she said, miserably. ‘My name is Anna. Not Annie.’

  ‘Wow,’ Miles said, as if he’d only just really looked at her, turning his back on the woman across the aisle to study her determinedly stand-offish profile. ‘You look a lot better without your head swollen to four times its natural size. I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t surprised when you didn’t call me. I mean apart from me nearly killing you with exotic fruit extracts, it hadn’t exactly been the world’s hottest date, anyway, had it? I think that’s why I bought you the cocktail; I thought it might cheer you up a bit. Shame neither of us knew you were allergic to kiwi. How someone gets to the age of thirty without ever having encountered kiwi, I’ll never know.’

  ‘I was twenty-eight,’ Anna retorted. ‘And I never liked the look of kiwi – it’s furry on the outside and green on the inside, that’s just not natural. And anyway, I was completely cheerful on that date, as cheerful as any person could hope to be whilst having their eardrums violated in the kind of dive that Dettol was invented for.’

  As the plane began to taxi towards the runway, Anna remembered all too well how uncomfortable she’d felt sitting, in her white linen dress and neat heeled pumps, in a bar in the West End, which was situated in some basement of a pub that felt, for polite middle-of-the road pop fan, Anna, a little bit like being trapped in the noisy part of hell. Simon, who was just as much of a brother to her as Liv was a sister, had sworn blind when he’d set her up with the singer from the band that he was planning to employ at his wedding that Miles Harker was her perfect man.

  ‘I’m telling you, darling, this man is exactly what you need,’ he’d said over a Sunday lunch at Angela’s house. ‘He’s like your very own human antidote, and he’s extremely good-looking too and quite well built. The arms, oh the arms in a cut-off shirt are to die for darling. If I wasn’t an almost married man …’

  ‘Then why don’t you set him up with Liv?’ Anna had asked Simon. Angela nodded enthusiastically in agreement at her suggestion. ‘Liv’s single, and she’s much nicer than me. People like her.’

  ‘Liv,’ Simon said, winking at his sister. ‘Already has her eye on someone she’s just met at the gym.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Angela said. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘And think of the sex,’ Simon said, neatly deflecting Angela’s attention away from her poor daughter. ‘I can see you two together. Him rugged and rough-hewn, you angelic and prim. Him passionate and base, you uptight and sort of frigid. I bet you’d have really great sex. Besides, apart from Liv, you are the last single straight woman in the whole of London.’

  Anna was not remotely persuaded by the promise of great sex, sex was something she’d had limited experience of and what’s more, what little she had encountered was decidedly underwhelming. What had finally clinched the deal was Simon’s description of her as the last single woman in London. What if Liv did hook up with her mystery man, what would her life be like then, not to mention her plan, which at the time had only allowed her a scant three years to find a man, fall in love, go out with him, swap keys, move in, wait to be proposed to, have a decent engagement, get married at Christmas (as per childhood dream) and allow a year of togetherness, before having the first of two children. No, it hadn’t been the promise of hot sex that had finally persuaded Anna to go on a date with Miles, it had been cold hard fear.

  All Anna had known about Miles, as she’d hurried through Leicester Square one summer’s evening to meet him, was that he was a musician, a singer/song-writer to be precise, played in various bands and did quite a lot of high-profile session work to support himself financially, as he worked on breaking his own career with the sort of single-minded determination that Anna admired, even though she thought it was the law that once you were over the age of twenty-five you could never be a pop star.

  First impressions were pleasing, Anna had noted, when she stopped just across the street from where Miles was waiting for her, bang on time, leaning up against a wall, his hands tucked in his pockets, one biker-booted foot resting against the wall, the other tapping away to some tune that only he could hear. He was tall, the very same muscular arms that Simon had waxed lyrical about were on display, encased along with the rest of his very promising-looking torso in a plain black V-neck T-shirt. He was very far from her usual type, which Anna had to admit was a nebulous concept, and one she hadn’t entirely nailed down herself, what with his tattoos and his longish straight dark hair, which on that evening had been tied back into a ponytail, showing off a small silver hoop through one ear. He was undeniably handsome though, with a strong profile, a good Roman nose, a defined jaw. And as Anna waited to cross, she couldn’t help but notice that the girls that walked past him on that summer’s evening almost all gave him a second glance, and some gave him two or three. One had even walked a few steps past him, paused and then turned on her heel to walk back in the other direction, hopefully tossing her long hair over her shoulder on the return trip in a bold, if failed, bid to get his attention. Miles had not noticed the girl, remaining deep in thought about something, or possibly, now that Anna knew him a little better, napping, as she was fairly sure he never thought very deeply about anything very much.

  Still her hopes, while they had not been sky high, had not been at rock bottom either, as she crossed the road to meet him, wondering what this man in his torn jeans and biker boots would make of her, with her golden hair neatly
coiled in a bun at her neck, sporting a pristine white linen pencil dress and a pair of matching heeled peep-toed pumps.

  As it had turned out though, Anna would never know what Miles thought of her, because they’d spent the first hour of their date unable to hear each other over the dreadful noise, and the next eight hours in Accident and Emergency while a team of doctors tried their level best to stop her from suffocating on her own tongue.

  Still, at least Miles had stayed with her for most of the night, until the dawn broke over the city, and the steroids and antihistamines kicked in sufficiently for the hospital to finally let her go home, armed with an epi-pen just in case she ever encountered a kiwi again. And he had insisted on escorting her in the cab until it reached her address, even making it wait while he walked her to her doorstep, where they had stood awkwardly for a moment or two, Anna’s lips still too misshapen and swollen for her to be able to say anything coherent, even if she had wanted to.

  ‘So I suppose a goodnight kiss is out of the question?’ Miles had joked rather sweetly, Anna had thought, given that she looked like some fish-cum-hippopotamus nuclear fusion experiment that had gone awry. ‘I’m really sorry Anna, I didn’t know …’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Anna had said. ‘How could you, when I didn’t? Just bad luck that’s all.’

  Or that least that’s what she’d said in her head. In reality it came out in a series of grunts and wheezes that Miles seemed to get the basic gist of as he smiled, and kissed her on her bumpy, red and swollen cheek.

  ‘Call me, yeah?’ That was the last thing he’d said to her as he’d gotten back into the car, and as Anna had pressed a packet of frozen peas to her lips and sat down in front of the telly, relishing being able to breathe again, she fully expected, hoped even, never to see or hear from him again.

  But of course, yes, of course, after having discovered that Tom was still married to a showgirl he barely even knew, and deciding to fly to New York to try and do her best to salvage the situation, of course, fate had decided to sit her next to Miles Harker of the Kiwi Cocktail Near Death Date Debacle affair for seven hours. Of course it had. And now, like so much else in her life, Anna realised there was nothing else she could do but grin and bear it.

  She tensed, bracing herself back in her seat, as the plane, now at the head of the runway, gathered speed, its engines roaring as they finally lifted into the air. Anna didn’t mind flying, but the taking off and landing parts she wasn’t so sure about.

  ‘So,’ Miles said, leaning dangerously close to her as Anna waited for the plane to stop climbing and banking and level out. ‘You look great, by the way. Really, really … smart. And your normal-sized lips really suit you, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Anna breathed a sigh of relief as the plane settled into its journey. She tucked the magazine back in its pouch and decided that enduring twenty minutes of small talk now might mean she’d get the rest of the time to sleep or watch a film before escaping Miles, hopefully this time for ever.

  ‘And?’ she said, with her best effort at a smile. ‘Why are you going to New York? Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Destiny,’ Miles said, his eyes sparkling. ‘You know I write songs, right? Simon would have told you when he made you go out with me. Well, I write stuff, record it, and sometimes I stick it on YouTube – I’ve been doing it for donkeys – and then a few months back I wrote this song, “Fire Girl”, stuck it up there, thought no more about it, turns out it’s had like three hundred thousand hits or something. You might have seen it?’

  ‘No,’ Anna said, apologetically. ‘I don’t really know what YouTube is for, but then again if it was up to me I’d still use a pen to write a letter and then post it via pigeon, so …’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Miles said. ‘Anyway, there’s this New York band, not famous, not yet, but with a reputation, you know, a following. Their lead singer jacked it all in a few weeks back, apparently found God and decided to become a monk or something, and they need a new frontman. This morning in my inbox was a message from their drummer, asking me if I wanted to go and audition for them. And now I’m on a plane. To meet my destiny. Or crushing, expensive disappointment and bankruptcy, one or the other.’ Miles’s eyes, which Anna noticed were such a vivid blue they were almost violet, shone with a small boy’s excitement, crinkling pleasantly as he relished the prospect of what could be his big break. Anna wondered vaguely if he was still single, thinking to herself that if he was, she should introduce him to Liv. Liv would like him. In fact why had Simon never thought of setting him up with Liv in the first place? Oh that’s right, there had been the mysterious new man at the gym that Liv had been holding a candle for, whatever happened to him? After that one occasion Liv never mentioned him again, and if he’d been important Liv certainly would have told Anna about him.

  ‘Bankruptcy?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but I had to sell some amps and pedals to get together the money to come, and I bought the ticket a few hours ago. I’ve got literally no idea where I’m going to crash when I get there, or what I’m going to do between now and the audition, but you’ve got to grab opportunities when they come, haven’t you? Roll with the punches, go with the flow, all that sort of stuff.’ Miles dropped his gaze for a moment to his hands, twisting a silver ring around and around the thumb on his right hand. ‘Of course, if I don’t get it, I’ll be stuffed. I’ve sold most of my gigging equipment and I can’t afford to replace it without work, which I won’t get if I haven’t got it. But well, I had to take this chance, didn’t I?’

  ‘Honestly, no,’ Anna pointed out, perhaps a little bluntly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Miles asked her, baffled. ‘What do you mean I didn’t have to?’

  ‘Well, I mean that you didn’t have to gamble your equipment and your livelihood and come to New York at the last minute for something that most likely won’t work out,’ Anna said. ‘You could have said no, you could have kept your gear, and known that you’d at least be able to take the next gig that was offered to you, and keep on paying your bills.’

  Miles stared at her. ‘But this is the New York Rock Department – the NYRDs – this is like the next big thing. This could be it, this could be my big break. What I’ve been working towards all my life. I’d be crazy not to go! You must see that?’

  ‘Could be,’ Anna said. ‘That’s the key word there. Could be your big break. I mean, no offence, but you’re thirty, and I think, from what I can remember, that Simon said that you have a pretty great career for a musician: regular session work, gigging, playing for all sorts of bands, travelling all over the world. That’s kind of amazing and in your business that is success. Think of the number of guitarists who don’t make any money at all, who work in Pizza Hut and dream about having the life you do.’

  Miles shook his head. ‘No, no, no, Annie. You’ve got that all wrong. The reason I’ve made a career out of music is because I’ve never stopped following my dream, my ambition, never ever not for one second. And in the process, I’ve built up a career. I’ve never, ever got anywhere by taking the sensible option.’ He smiled at her, light dancing in those azure eyes. ‘And I’m sure as hell not going to stop taking chances now, not ever. That’s not what life is about at all. It’s about grabbing the moment, experiencing every single second to the maximum, without worrying about what comes next. Look at us!’

  ‘Us?’ Anna quizzed him. ‘There is no us, and it’s Anna, by the way. I have mentioned it before. Once or twice.’

  ‘Yes there is an us, Annie,’ Miles said, ignoring her. ‘There is an “us” right now on this plane, you and me, together. Both of us setting out on an adventure. Until this plane lands we are in it together, and who would ever have predicted that when I blew up your head to the size of a watermelon and almost killed you? That’s what I love about life, the unpredictable, the unforeseen. That’s what makes it so interesting. So, yes, if I get an incredible chance out of the blue, it’s yes. I’ll ri
sk everything to take it.’

  Anna thought about what he said, shaking her head with regret.

  ‘I hate the unpredictable,’ she said with a small smile, reaching up to undo her hair, which felt uncomfortable and tight. She shook it out over her shoulders, running her fingers through its golden waves, and added, ‘I hate being taken by surprise, not knowing what’s coming next. I hate curve balls and bends in the road. I like to know exactly how everything is going to be, always.’

  ‘Really?’ Miles said, turning away from her as she loosened her hair, as if somehow he was witnessing something he shouldn’t see. ‘I mean, really? Why is that though?’

  ‘There are a lot of reasons,’ Anna said wearily, faintly surprised to find how easy Miles was to talk to when he wasn’t forcing her to listen to heavy rock or poisoning her. ‘My mum, or sudden lack of her, the whole Regina Clarkson incident, but probably most recently the news that the man I am supposed to be marrying in my dream picture-book, Christmas fairy-tale wedding in two weeks’ time is already married to a stripper.’

  In an instant the woman across the aisle was enthralled once again, and I Heart London closed the book she’d been pretending to read with an eager snap, resting it in her lap.

  ‘You’re engaged, and about to be married?’ Miles asked her, more surprised by that news than he was of Tom’s unexpected ex. ‘Blimey, your life really has moved on since I saw you. I mean of course it has. It’s just … married? That’s … really serious.’