“Name five.”
I nearly choked on my chocolate. “That’s not fair. Five is loads.”
“Okay.” Bridge pulled the blanket a little tighter around herself.
“Name three.”
“Old school friend, sister he’s never mentioned—”
“I’ve met his sister,” interrupted Bridge. “Also the woman in the photo was white.”
“Adopted sister we’ve never heard of.”
She gave me a disappointed look. “You’re only on the second one, and you’ve already gone to bad sitcom territory.”
“Hey, that trope has been in some very good sitcoms.”
“I’d ask you to name three but that’s how we got into this mess in the first place.”
“Fine.” I stared at the Toblerone for inspiration and found none forthcoming. “What if he’s hiring her to set up a lovely surprise for your wedding, and when he tells you what it is, you’ll be so overjoyed that you forget this ever happened?”
Bridge glanced up suspiciously from the Caramel Chew Chew.
“What sort of surprise?”
“Maybe he’s…he’s arranging a flash mob to do ‘All You Need Is Love’？”
For about eighteen nanoseconds, Bridge let this idea calm her. “I do love Love Actually.”
“Hell, maybe he’s even arranging for some creeper with a camcorder to take stalkery footage of you all night.”
The eighteen nanoseconds were over. “Or maybe he’s cheating on me like Alan Rickman. What if he bought that woman a necklace?
What if he got her sex and a necklace? What if—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I put my hands up. “I know I started this, but we can’t just go through every subplot in that entire movie. If we do, you’ll wind up being worried that he’s going to ditch your wedding to get drunk and watch porn with Bill Nighy.”
Bridge flopped back on the sofa. “Is everything going to be a little bit worse now?”
If the Love Actually gambit had been a plan, I’d have felt bad because it had taken us to a very unhelpful place. As it was, I felt bad because I was shit at this. “No,” I tried. “Tom is not Alan Rickman, you are not Emma Thompson, and that woman definitely isn’t… Okay, I admit I don’t know who plays the secretary.”
“Heike Makatsch,” said Bridget immediately.
And I briefly wondered if the way to keep her spirits up was giving her plenty of opportunities to correct me on rom-com trivia.
“How did you know that?”
“It’s my favourite film.”
“Even though at least half the stories are incredibly problematic?”
“Yes.” She gave me a defiant look. “Now pass me the other ice cream.”
I passed, and for a while we just sat like that, curled up on the sofa dual-wielding frozen dairy products and watching romantic movies from the early 2000s. Every half hour or so, we paused so Bridge could try unsuccessfully to reach Tom.
“How did it wind up like this, Luc?” she asked as we watched the credits roll on While You Were Sleeping. “I thought we’d finally cracked it. You know, life. I mean, we were both with great guys—”
“Instead of both trying to get with the same great guy,” I added.
“Exactly. And now here we are again eating Strawberry Cheesecake H?agen-Dazs and watching old Sandra Bullock movies like nothing has changed.”
There was a strange back-in-halls feeling to the evening. And that made me uncomfortable on a number of levels. “You mean nothing has changed because you’re having a relationship crisis and I’m with somebody who seems great but is inevitably going to fuck me over?” Because that was how it went back in the day.
“No, I mean… Shit, sorry, Luc. I really do believe you and Oliver are endgame.”
“I believed you and Tom were endgame too. Then again, I dated him first and my taste in men is legendarily awful so maybe he is just a cheating, necklace-buying scumbucket you’re better off without.”
Bridge balled up the foil from the Toblerone and threw it at me.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be making me feel better.”
Fuck, I was, wasn’t I? And I’d been doing a passable job of it up until then too. “Sorry. I let self-hating Luc take over for a moment there. I’m back now.”
“It’s all right. I’m just… I’d got used to not feeling this way, and now I’m having to feel this way again and I’m not enjoying it.”