LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Liv, what happened?’ Abi’s phone was flashing with a picture of a half-naked man with ridiculous muscles. She frowned and cancelled the call. ‘I thought you were coming back engaged. I’ve spent all day practising my excited face for when you ask me to be your bridesmaid.’

      ‘What makes you think I’d ask you to be my bridesmaid?’ I asked, sliding my glass back and forth across the table. ‘And more importantly, who was on the phone? Are you shagging Fabio?’

      ‘He’s no one. I was warming him up as a wedding date, but if you’re not getting married any time soon, I don’t need to answer that call.’ She tossed her phone into her bag then hid it underneath the table. ‘Seriously now, what’s going on?’

      ‘Technically Cass is right, we’re on a break,’ I explained, turning over my own phone to check for messages. Nothing. ‘All holiday, Adam kept going on about this amazing restaurant in town, how he’d heard it was so great but we couldn’t get a reservation until the last night, and so obviously, I’m thinking he’s going to propose then. But there we were, on our way out, and then I don’t even know what happened. One minute we’re walking down the beach on our way to a fancy night out, and the next thing I know, we’re in a taxi on our way home. No swanky restaurant, no proposal, not even any last-night-of-a-holiday shag. It was all very confusing.’

      ‘Chris said Adam said he wants to work out some stuff,’ Cassie said, twisting the wine bottle to check the label. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see: the Bell had two kinds of wine, red and white. We were drinking the white. It was not good. ‘He definitely said you hadn’t broken up.’

      ‘Chris said that or Adam said that?’ Abi looked distinctly unimpressed.

      ‘Adam said it to Chris, who then said it to me,’ she clarified, stroking the ends of her sleek, black ponytail. Everything about Cassie Huang was sleek. The word most commonly used to describe her was ‘willowy’ which I especially enjoyed hearing from my mum who had generally referred to her own teenage daughter as ‘sturdy’. And she wondered why I’d gone on the Haribo and Diet Pepsi plan in the first year of university.

      ‘They had an early dinner at his dad’s house. I saw Chris for, like, ten seconds before I came out.’

      ‘Sounds like a real keeper,’ Abi said. She’d never been one to mince her words, Abi subscribed to the philosophy of calling a spade a spade. Or a wanker if she deemed it more appropriate.

      ‘Chris says it’s totally normal,’ Cass declared as they continued to argue over me. It was fine, I was perfectly happy to keep quiet and drink my wine. And their wine. And everyone else on the planet’s wine. ‘Chris says all men go back and forth before they pop the question, even if you don’t know it. Steve Harvey basically says the exact same thing in Think Like a Man.’

      Abi gave her a stern look. Abi didn’t care for Cass’s reliance on self-help manuals. Abi really only believed in truly relying on herself. ‘Could you tell Chris to tell Adam that when he has made his mind up do you think he could find the time to tell Liv himself rather than have her wait for it to trickle through you and his brother first?’

      ‘I’m only telling you what Chris told me,’ she said, her phone fluttering across the table, buzzing against the almost-empty bottle. ‘Speak of the devil, I’ll be back in a minute.’

      I half-stood, half-shuffled out of the booth until she could squeeze past, smiling at Mrs Moore, the landlady, as Cass dashed for the door. She smiled back, giving me the once-over as she passed. She’d been serving me since I ordered my first Malibu and Coke at fifteen. If she didn’t like what she saw, she only had herself to blame.

      ‘Liv, I’m so sorry.’ Abi straightened my collar as I sat back down, her huge green eyes full of concern and just a hint of murderous rage. ‘How are you really?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said, raising a hand to wave at Melanie Brookes, my mum’s neighbour, mother of two children and owner of three rabbits and a diabetic cat. There had been a dog as well at one point but he got into a cupboard and ate an Easter egg and there really wasn’t anything anyone could have done about that. ‘I feel sick when I think about it. I just really want Cass to be right, I really want this to be a wobble. Because if it’s not, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

      Abigail Levinson and I had been friends ever since her dad brought her puppy into the surgery when we were both eleven. I was hanging out there, looking for animals to bother, when a little, skinny, dark-haired girl with Coke-bottle glasses and what I thought was a super cool Mickey Mouse T-shirt walked through the door. She sat down beside me as our respective fathers disappeared into the examination room, looked me in the eye and whispered, in her most serious voice, that the dog was not going to make it. I held her hand in silence until both dads reappeared with the dog who, despite my new friend’s most assured diagnosis, bounded out towards us, happy, healthy and a hundred per cent alive.

      After they left, my dad explained Abi had been watching too much Blue Peter and took it upon herself to try to clean her dog’s teeth with her electric toothbrush and an entire tube of Colgate. In the interest of the dog surviving the summer, Dad took her on as his second junior intern (we were only allowed to clean out kennels and feed the cats but we felt terribly important) and we’d been joined at the hip ever since. After we graduated, she’d stayed on at uni to do her PhD and now she was such a super shit-hot veterinary research scientist. Even I didn’t really understand what she did and I was an actual vet. While I was taking pieces of Lego out of the Youngs’ Labrador’s stomach, Abi was curing cancer. Dog cancer, but still, it was impressive. She was Superwoman as far as I was concerned.

      ‘Sod what Adam wants.’ Abi tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and drew her eyebrows together behind her glasses, still Coke-bottle thick but considerably more stylish than they had been when we were kids. ‘What do you want?’

      I looked at her blankly.

      ‘You, Olivia, what do you want?’ she asked. ‘You do know who I’m talking about? Short, split ends, fiddles with animals for a living?’

      ‘I haven’t got split ends,’ I muttered, pinching together an inch of hair and holding it up to the light. ‘I don’t want to break up. I want everything back how it was.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Why do you want things back how they were?’ she asked. ‘It should be an easy question.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed, busying myself by peeling the label from the wine bottle. ‘This wasn’t my idea. Leave me alone, I’m sad.’

      ‘Your idea or not, someone needs to set some boundaries before this gets messy,’ she said in the nicest voice she could manage. ‘And that should be you. He doesn’t get to dictate this entire situation, Liv, even if you are going to be back together tomorrow. You need to think about you a little bit. First he decided you were going to get engaged; now he’s decided he wants a break. You need to know what you want.’

      ‘I want to know what you want,’ I said, nudging her in the shoulder and taking a sip.

      ‘For you to be happy,’ she replied. ‘And for Mini Eggs to be available all year round.’

      ‘I don’t want to break up with him,’ I said, slowly pulling on the label, trying to move it in one piece. Life without Adam didn’t seem like an actual possible thing. ‘I can’t even process the thought of it. If he says he needs space, I should just give him space. This seems like a classic rubber band situation to me, don’t you think?’

      ‘You know I won’t answer that,’ Abi replied, cursing our best friend’s name as the wine bottle label ripped in two. ‘One, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is a shit present, and two, it’s full of shit advice. Cassie should be shot for giving it to you in the first place.’

      ‘Sorry, it was Chris.’ Cass bounced back into the booth and grabbed her glass.

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