LITMIR.BIZ

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of the opinion that no good could come of strapping tiny stilts to your feet after a particularly nasty incident involving a spiral staircase in a club called Oceana during Freshers’ Week. More than a decade may have passed but if you’d spent your first semester of university on crutches, you’d be wary of anything higher than a kitten heel as well.

      ‘I really do like that dress,’ Adam said, crossing the room to rest his arms on my shoulders. I shuffled my feet apart and pulled him in closer until we were nose to nose. ‘Is it new?’

      ‘Quite new,’ I replied, hoping there were no follow up questions. Adam hated spending a lot of money on clothes, hence only one pair of Nice Trousers.

      ‘It’s like a proper lady dress.’ He nuzzled his face into my hair, pressing his lips against the nook where my neck met my shoulder. I shivered from head to toe. ‘It might be the nicest thing I’ve ever seen you wear.’

      ‘Just checking that’s a compliment,’ I whispered as he slid his hands around my waist and a flush bloomed in my cheeks. Adam was no slouch in the bedroom department at the best of times but on holiday it wasn’t just the bedroom that got him going. The living room, the bathroom, the beach, the toilets at a restaurant we could never go back to … Not that I was complaining. The restaurant manager maybe, but not me.

      I ran my hands down his broad back and rested them on his hips. ‘Perhaps we should stay in tonight?’

      ‘No, we’re going to the restaurant.’ Adam checked his watch then dropped me like a bag of burning dog shit and backed away, jostling the front of his jeans to dispel the beginnings of a boner. ‘And we need to leave now or we’re going to be late.’

      ‘Adam, we’re in Mexico. Nothing has happened at the time it was supposed to happen since we got here,’ I said, brushing my blonde hair forward to cover the stubble rash on my throat and delicately draping my dress back down over my thighs. ‘What’s the rush?’

      ‘They were really funny about it when I made the reservation. It’s supposed to be dead fancy,’ he insisted as he checked his reflection and smoothed down his eyebrows. What a weirdo. ‘Plenty of time for doing it when we get back.’

      My boyfriend was such a romantic.

      ‘Dead fancy,’ I repeated. Dead fancy sounded like the kind of place where you would propose to your girlfriend, or at least the kind of place that would have proper toilets and honestly, either of those things would have been welcomed at this point in the trip.

      Following him outside, I nabbed a quick glance in the mirror as we went. Hair looked good, make-up looked good, but nothing I could do about my sunburned nose except filter it into oblivion. I was as ready as I’d ever be.

      The next time we walked through that door, we would be engaged.

      Or I’d have stabbed Adam through the heart with a spatula. Or a teaspoon. Or whatever was handy, really; I was a resourceful girl.

      ‘Do we really have to go home tomorrow?’ Liv skipped along beside me as I tried to slow down.

      ‘Aren’t you ready?’ I squeezed her hand and smiled, hoping that my palm wasn’t as sweaty as I imagined it was. ‘I’m gagging for a proper cup of tea.’

      ‘Yeah, this is just awful,’ she replied, waving at the white sand and screensaver-worthy sunset. ‘I’d trade it all for a cup of Tetley.’

      ‘You know what I mean,’ I said, looking at the time on my watch. We were definitely going to be late. ‘Come on, let’s pick up the pace.’

      ‘We have definitely been walking for more than ten minutes,’ she said in a tight voice, a few minutes later. ‘How much further is it?’

      ‘Not far?’

      A dark look crossed her face as she gripped my hand hard and attempted to match my long stride. A word of advice: if you’re over six feet tall and you end up going out with someone under five-five, you will never not be frustrated with how slowly they walk.

      ‘I will miss the sunsets,’ I admitted as she walked on beside me in silence. I wrapped my right arm around her red shoulders, keeping one eye on the time. ‘The sunsets are good.’

      ‘The sunsets are good?’ Liv repeated, one eyebrow raised. ‘If it weren’t for the cat, I wouldn’t be going back at all. We’ve got everything we need right here. Sun, sea, sand and surprisingly good internet service? I’m in no rush to go home.’

      As casual as possible, I ran a hand over my hip, checking for the telltale bump in the tiny pocket. I was certain she’d found it back in the cottage when she was packing up my clothes, but if she had, she was doing a fine job of pretending and there was no way she could fake something like that: she was a terrible liar.

      ‘Loads going on when we get back though …’ She carried on talking, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingers. ‘Are you excited to get started on the bar?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘Nervous?’

      ‘Nah.’

      I was so nervous I was bricking it. Just before we left, a friend of a friend of a friend had set me up with a guy who was opening a bar in London and needed someone to design and build the interiors. Since he had next to no budget and I was looking for a project, we’d managed to come to a financially dubious but still exciting accord. But it was still my first major project and there were a million things that could go wrong. Was my estimate right? Was my timeframe realistic? Was I even capable of pulling something like this off without it looking utterly crap? But Liv didn’t need to know how worried I was. Men shitting themselves over their big break wasn’t exactly a turn on for most women to the best of my knowledge.

      ‘It’ll be amazing,’ she said, with an assured nod I couldn’t return. ‘And there’s my dad’s sixty-fifth coming up, Gus’s christening, your birthday, my birthday …’

      I made a noncommittal noise, trying to hold her hand, remember if I’d had a response to my last email from Jim, the guy who owned the bar, and open Google Maps to check where this bloody restaurant was supposed to be. All I could see was beach, beach, and more beach. We’d already been walking forever and I certainly couldn’t see a five-star restaurant with sunset views and a ridiculously-expensive-to-hire string quartet hiding anywhere nearby.

      ‘Things have been mental at the surgery, it feels like everyone on earth just adopted ten dogs and they’ve all got ear infections or worms or something else disgusting—’

      ‘Liv?’ I interrupted.

      ‘Yes?’ she looked up at me with big blue eyes, all smudgy with make-up but in a good way.

      ‘No.’

      There was nothing like a woman talking about putting her hand up a dog’s backside to put you in the mood for a romantic proposal – not.

      ‘Sorry,’ she opened her mouth to say something else and then clamped it shut, staring out to sea. She didn’t look happy.

      ‘Liv?’

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘What do you think Daniel Craig is doing right now?’ I asked.

      She turned round, shielding her eyes from the sun and gave me a look.

      ‘The actor or the cat?’

      ‘The cat.’

      ‘Eating, sleeping or having a shit,’ she replied, pulling on my hand as she began to lag. ‘That’s more or less all he does these days.’

      ‘What do you think Daniel Craig the actor is doing right now?’

      ‘Eating, sleeping or having a shit? That’s more or less all he does these days.’

      ‘Weirdo,’ I laughed, flapping my elbows slightly as I tried to find a phone signal and hoped there wasn’t a massive sweat stain on the back of my shirt. Should have worn an undershirt.

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