John was staring at her adoringly, and Josie tried to ignore the little wrench in her stomach at the sight of them. She didn’t think Oliver had ever looked at her quite like that. She also tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed the way Max kept glancing at her, rather than his girlfriend, and the way it was making heat travel along her skin, as Laura raised a toast to the love of her life.
They all clinked glasses, smiling, and clapped as Laura sat down. Josie wondered if Laura had known that Max would be here—whether she even remembered Max from the Christmas party. It wasn’t like she could ask anyway—Laura had far more important things to focus on right now.
Erin started up a conversation around the whole table as waiters came round offering them red or white wine, talking about the castle and its architectural history. Graeme was stating that all of them knew nothing, that given he had a good twenty years on each and every one of them—Josie thought a little more—he had the authority on the history of the place, like being older automatically meant you became more knowledgeable on everything. Max and Erin were bantering, arguing over one of the structures in the castle in an easy, friendly way, laughing at each other over having done the same research. So, she was an architect. Of course she bloody was. Smart and sexy, the jackpot. Josie took a sip of water, erring on the side of safety for this first evening—she didn’t want to get drunk and say something stupid. She wasn’t bitter. She wasn’t. She also wasn’t concentrating on the conversation, so that when Erin asked, “What about you, Josie?” in an overly polite way, all she could say was, “Huh?”
Max’s attention had shot to her, almost like Erin addressing her had given him permission to look at her, and she couldn’t help the quick glance back, even as she flexed her fingers on her glass. “What do you think?” Erin asked, with a small head tilt. “Edinburgh or London in terms of best buildings?”
She thought of Max admiring the architecture of Battersea Arts Center and forced the memory quickly aside, looking very deliberately at Erin and not at him. “Edinburgh,” she said, more confidently than she really should, given her relative lack of knowledge of what made a “good” building. “Pretty” was more what she was going for here. “I mean, not that I’ve seen enough of Edinburgh to be sure of that,” she added, partly because she’d seen Erin’s red lips open, and wanted to cut her off in case she was thinking of arguing. “And London is incredible, obviously, and you’ve got all the iconic buildings there. But, well, I love the cobbled streets here, the way the city feels like its own little world—and the buildings are partly what makes that, right?”
She felt Max’s gaze burning the side of her face as she spoke. He shouldn’t do that. It wasn’t fair for him to look at her like that with his girlfriend sitting right next to him.
Tom raised his eyebrows; Graeme grunted, like what she’d said had no value, while Jess was busy trying to get the waiter’s attention for more wine. Erin paused, then shrugged. “Well,” she said, glancing at Max from under long, full lashes. “Just because one person agrees with you, doesn’t mean you’re right.”
Because of how they were sitting, Josie managed to avoid speaking to Max directly throughout the whole dinner, forcing herself to engage Graeme in more conversation than she would have liked, just so that there weren’t any silences that had to be filled. She couldn’t help comparing her and Max’s situations—he chatting happily with Erin while she was stuck talking to Graeme—even as she told herself not to, that there was no point to it. She excused herself as soon as she feasibly could, right after the Eton mess dessert. She timed it deliberately while Max was in the toilet so she didn’t have to actively say goodbye, and ignored Jess’s and Tom’s pleas to stay up for “just a few” shots.
“I want to be on form for tomorrow,” she insisted. “And you two should think about that too,” she said, with a semi-scolding look at them both. “Laura will notice if anyone’s hungover.”
They descended into grumbles, but she could see from the look they gave each other that her comment had hit home. Erin gave her a distant little smile, nodded in a kind of regal way when she said goodbye. Josie made herself smile back, determined to be on her best behavior. It wasn’t Erin’s fault, after all, that her boyfriend had had a brief fling with Josie nine months ago. Wasn’t Erin’s fault that seeing him had made Josie realize that she still couldn’t quite get over him, get over the way he’d ended it. But what she could do, she told herself firmly, was accept how things were now. She could and would accept that he’d well and truly moved on, that he was with someone else now. She had to.