“Right, great,” I say, chewing my thumbnail.
I’ve really messed up here. Well, Graham did most of the messing up. But I’ve brought this whole bigamy drama into the hotel, and now I’m not even there to sort it out—I’m here, sexy-dancing with Lucas. What am I doing?
“Maybe from Woking there will be a bus,” Lucas says, furiously tapping away at his phone.
I look out of the window over the staircase. The snow is coming fast, caught up in itself, whirling and swooping like one of those Van Gogh paintings of the stars.
“UK roads can’t really do snowstorms,” I tell him, leaning back against the wall as someone emerges from the bathroom and hesitates, then dashes past in the moment before Lucas pivots on his heels to pace back again. “I think the odds of buses running in a couple of hours’ time are pretty low.”
“It is a bit of snow! It is a little bit cold!” Lucas snaps.
“Well, OK, I’m not the bloody transport secretary, am I?” I snap back, nettled.
He’s behaving like all that dancing never happened. Gone is the loose-limbed, half-smiling man who circled his hips against mine half an hour ago; here’s grouchy, uptight Lucas, taking things out on me that aren’t my fault.
“Why did we stay so late?” he says, swiping his thumb down to refresh the outgoing trains again. I watch as the red text blinks, the delays lengthening.
“Because we were having fun. Before you switched back to the usual Lucas, who is incapable of fun and just snaps at me about everything.”
He looks up at me at last, surprised. “I’m not snapping at you.”
I pull a disbelieving face, spreading my arms out. “Hello? You literally just yelled at me about it being only a little bit cold.”
“I wasn’t yelling at you about it being cold. Why would I yell at you about that? It’s not your fault, is it?”
He seems genuinely nonplussed. I stare back at him in silence, trying to figure him out.
“Sorry, is this a queue for the toilet?” says a small man in chinos, bobbing up at the top of the stairs.
I wave him through. “So you were just . . . yelling?”
“This is frustrating,” Lucas says, looking back at his phone to refresh the page. “I want to be back at the hotel. And I hate . . . this situation. I’m not frustrated with you.”
“Right.” I pause, fiddling with my necklace. “Actually, no. I don’t think that’s OK.”
He blinks at me, taking this in.
“You didn’t need to raise your voice,” I say. We’re in new territory here—I’ve never called him out on this before, but as I say it, I realise how much it pisses me off. He does it all the time at the hotel. I wonder how often our arguments start because he raises his voice and that in itself just winds me up. “I’m frustrated, too. I’m not yelling.”
“You’re just saying unkind things instead,” he says. “Is that any better?”
“Excuse me?” I’m genuinely staggered by this. I have been called many things over the years—weird, stupid, ditzy—but I’ve never been called unkind.
“I am incapable of fun, you said.”
“Oh, I . . .” I did say that. I guess when it comes to Lucas, I’ve always just given him shit like that, and he gives it right back to me, so it never occurred to me that it was unkind. I can feel my cheeks getting pink. I press the backs of my hands to my warm skin. “I thought . . . That’s just sort of . . . what we say to each other. It’s kind of . . . jokey.”
“Is it?” Lucas resumes pacing. “Neither of us seems to laugh very much.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel quite ashamed of myself.
“You two OK?” Shannon calls up the stairs. “Our flight’s delayed, so everyone is heading home for tonight—can you get back all right?”
We glance at each other.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine!” I call. “Trains are a bit ropey, but we’ll get there.”
“Great,” Shannon says, sounding relieved. “I’d offer you our spare room, but a few friends who live further away need somewhere to crash, so . . .”
“We’ll get going, then,” I say, looking at the trains on Lucas’s phone screen. Another one cancelled. Yellow exclamation marks in triangles everywhere. “Thanks so much for having us, Shannon!”
“Safe travels!” she calls, heels already clip-clopping back to the kitchen again.