Jem is standing outside her parents’ house—if she takes a call inside, she’ll wake everybody up. It is so good to hear her voice. It’s the middle of the night and I am foraging in my fridge, because after lying awake for hours you really start to realise how long it’s been since your last meal. I don’t normally go this long without eating when I’m awake, so why start now?
“You know what I think your mum would say to you right now?”
Oof. Jem is one of the few people who will throw my parents into conversation without flinching. She lived on my road when we were at primary school, and was around at our place all the time—my dad used to joke that they’d only wanted one kid but it seemed this extra one came with the house. She’s the only person who could guess at what my mum would say and actually have me listen.
“She’d say you’re being stubborn as a mule and blind as a bat. How can you not see how much you love this boy?”
I stare wordlessly across my kitchen. I can hear Jem blowing on her hands to warm them up.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” she says.
“Yeah, hi, I can hear you, I just . . . What?”
“Izzy . . . I’m pretty sure you’ve loved him all year.”
“I have not! I hated him until about five minutes ago!”
“OK, so, let’s try this,” Jem says, “tell me the other people you’ve really hated in your life. People who give you that icky, skin-crawl, what-an-asshole feeling.”
I think about it. “Obviously evil dictators and stuff.”
“People you know, I mean.”
“Oh, Mr. Figgle!” I say, grabbing a bottle of milk and heading for the freezer. Milkshake. Milkshake is the answer. “Our old PE teacher, remember? He was so horrible to the kids who didn’t play sports, and do you remember he laughed at Chloe when she said it wasn’t fair that only the boys got to have a football team?”
“Anyone else?”
“Kyle from my interior design course,” I say. “He gaslit, like, six girls on the course. A total sleaze.”
“Gross. Go on.”
I think I’m already out. Hate is a strong word, and generally speaking I quite like most human beings. Except Lucas, obviously.
“So . . . did you want to have sex with either of those people?” Jem asks.
“No, eww,” I say, peeling a banana and splitting it into the blender.
“But Lucas . . .”
“Yeah, it’s a bit different, he looks like a Brazilian god,” I point out, whirring the blender. “Sorry, milkshake. Mr. Figgle looked like a meerkat.”
“Do you think . . . maybe . . .”
“It’s OK,” I assure her. “You can be Mean Jem.”
“Sometimes you can be a tiny bit stubborn? And sometimes . . . you like to take the easy option.”
I pour out my milkshake in silence.
“Sorry, I love you,” Jem says. “I love you, I love you.”
“Yes, I love you, too,” I say tetchily. “What do you mean, take the easy option?”
“Well, committing to a relationship with a man who’s hurt you before? That’s hard. Having sex with him and insisting that you don’t want anything serious? Much easier.”
This blows my mind a little. It feels terrifyingly true.
“Shit.”
“Truth-bomb?” Jem says apologetically.
“Yeah, kind of. I felt like doing it this way would be safe,” I say, testing the thought out, chewing my bottom lip. “But when I realised he’d left the flat, I felt . . .”
Jem waits patiently. But I do feel the pressure of her impending frostbite.
“I felt scared.”
“Ooh, OK, now we’re getting somewhere!” whispers Jem. “Scared of what?”
My voice keeps getting smaller and smaller.
“。 . . Having lost him.”
“This guy you hate, you mean?”
“Fine, hate is over-dramatic, I know that. But we don’t get on. We disagree on everything. We argue all the time. He behaved like a twat last Christmas and never apologised!”
But even as I say it, a hundred other things come to mind. How fiercely he stands up for what he thinks, even when it would be easier to back down and agree with me. How his eyes go soft when he talks about his baby nephew. How he pulls me against him when I turn up at his door, like he can’t stand another second of distance between us.
“What would happen if you talked to him about last Christmas, little pigeon?”