I’d been nursing a crush on Charlie Wilder since the first day of university and when it seemed as though we had finally found a way to be together, we managed to cock it all up. Him by sleeping with my former flatmate behind my back and me by falling in love with the worst man alive. And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made.
The duck gave a reassuring quack and floated back down towards the taps.
The hardest part was having absolutely no idea what was going on in his life. We used to talk or see each other almost every day, but after an ill-fated trip to Italy earlier this year, when Amy and I were out there with Al, he had blocked the pair of us from all forms of social media. No status updates, no tweets, no Instagrams, Snapchats, Vibers, WhatsApps or even so much as a Periscope update to give me a clue as to what was going on in his life. When someone declares their undying love and then you declare your undying love to someone else, a freeze out is to be expected. I’d stopped trying to talk to him after thirty-six unanswered text messages.
I missed Charlie. I missed Amy. I missed the certainties and straightforwardness of my old life.
The handle jerked into life again, the bathroom door rattling on its hinges.
‘I’m still in here!’ I yelled. ‘I’m in the bath!’
I missed being able to have a bloody bath in peace.
‘There’s no bog roll downstairs,’ the man’s voice bellowed through the door. ‘Can you chuck us some out?’
I looked over to see one sad piece of toilet paper fluttering from the draft that blew in around the warped wooden bathroom window frame.
‘There’s none in here, either,’ I shouted back. ‘Sorry.’
‘F’king hell,’ the voice grumbled outside the door. ‘What am I supposed to do, wipe my arse with my hand?’
I gave the duck a desperate look.
‘First things first,’ I muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here ASAP.’
The duck’s buoyant bob seemed to suggest he agreed. As soon as possible. If not sooner.
An hour later, I was safely wrapped up in Amy’s giant bed, in Amy’s tiny bedroom, holding a letter in my wrinkled fingers. It was one hundred and thirty-six days since I had been given this note. One hundred and thirty-six days since I had opened the envelope and seen his handwriting for the first time. It was something I’d never thought about before, his handwriting. Between emails and texts, I hardly ever saw anything written down these days, but as soon as I saw this, I knew it was from him.
My handwriting had always been flagged as an area for improvement in school, and now that I hardly ever so much as picked up a pen, it was a disgrace. Nick’s handwriting was perfect, of course. Elegant, joined up, and entirely sure of itself. His beautiful, heartbreaking words, etched into a page he had torn from the expensive leatherbound notebook he carried around with him and then hidden away in my passport for one hundred and thirty-six days.
Dear Tess,
I told you I didn’t know if I could do this and it turns out that I can’t.
I’ve been thinking about it all week and I just can’t see another way. Even if you hadn’t left, I still would have been on a plane to New York in the morning – you gave me a coward’s way out. Don’t think this is your fault.
I’d been fooling myself into thinking this was fun and easy and that I could do it but there’s nothing fun and easy about the way I feel. Everything you said last night was incredible. I love you so much, my bones ache. You, Tess, are spectacular and everyone should be so lucky to have you in their corner but I’m not ready for you and it’s not fair.
I could stay and we could keep playing this game but eventually, I’d hurt you one too many times and you would put up with so much before that happened, so I’m saving us both the heartache by leaving now, before I turn you into me.
You deserve better. I want to be better.
All my love,
Nick
Given how fast and how fiercely I had fallen in love with him, I only realized after he left that I really didn’t know all that much about Nick Miller.
The fact I’d never seen his handwriting until he wrote this letter should have been the least of my worries but, looking at it now, it was all I could think of. Before the tears could start, I folded the note along its one crease, once sharp, now so soft I worried it would tear in two from being opened and closed so very many times, and tucked it back inside my passport, back underneath my pillow.
Maybe I didn’t know that much about him but what I did know was how much I missed him. I missed the sound of his voice when he laughed and when he said my name. I missed the little growling noise he made before he ate. I missed the way he would kiss the top of my head before I fell asleep and how he let me put my cold feet on his warm legs in bed and how he always laughed at his own terrible jokes and how he made me feel brave and proud and utterly myself. Ever since he’d called things off, it was as though someone had taken all of that away and no matter how hard I looked, how determined I was to work these things out for myself, I could not find the answers. I didn’t want to need him like this but I did want him to need me. It was all so confusing.
It turned out I could lie to myself about a lot of things if I thought they were for the greater good. I could tell myself that Charlie would forgive me and that we would be friends again. I was happy to pretend I wasn’t at all jealous of Amy’s sudden success and I almost believed it when I told people I didn’t regret walking away from a career in advertising to make cups of tea and sweep up studios but I couldn’t keep telling myself stories about Nick any more.
We had spent two weeks together and one hundred and thirty-six days apart. He hadn’t called, he hadn’t written, but then neither had I. Every time I opened my inbox, I looked for his name; every time my phone rang, the split second before I saw who was calling, I hoped it would be him. The fact he hadn’t even tried to speak to me since he left me in Milan was the reason I found it so hard to fall asleep every night but the thought of calling him and having him tell me he didn’t want me and never really loved me? That was the thing that woke me up in a cold sweat. I wasn’t lying when I told Paige I hadn’t contacted Nick because I wanted to concentrate on work but I wasn’t telling the whole truth either. I’d lost Charlie’s trust and friendship, my career was in shambles, Amy was thousands of miles away and only moving further from me, but with Nick’s letter safely under my pillow, and the tiniest spark of hope that we could still be together one day, that I could get back the things I had lost, I got to keep something.
When anxiety woke me in the middle of the night, it was the memories that lulled me back to sleep. I let myself remember the time we walked through Milan, hand in hand. The time we kissed in the square in front of the opera house. The look on his face when I told him that I loved him. I indulged in our days in Hawaii, swimming in the waterfall, sitting on the beach at sunset. The memories I kept locked away, day in and day out because, in the middle of the night, they felt like a warm blanket pulled right up to my chin on the coldest of nights but in the daytime, they were blinding. A constant reminder of what I no longer had.
It was easy to believe in dreams at night but the tiny spark of hope that I carried around all day was starting to burn my fingers. Something was going to have to change.
‘You sound a lot happier today,’ Amy said. ‘Way less like you’re going to kill someone.’
‘I