When She Was Bad(37)

But by Sunday afternoon she was getting irritable. Something small and rodenty was scrabbling at her insides as if it wanted to get out. She made excuses – a string of them that she threaded together like a daisy chain. He was so busy. He didn’t want to look too eager. He was sitting staring at his phone waiting for her to ring.

At 8 p.m. she sent him a text. By that time she’d agonized over it for hours, rewriting it again and again on a Post-it pad. Even so, her finger hovered over the send button. She’d aimed for casual – joking about her monumental hangover and enquiring about the state of his head. Directly after sending it, she experienced a moment of paralysing regret. She should have held out longer; she’d played her hand too early. She thrust her phone under a cushion on the sofa and tried to concentrate on the television screen where an actor with nineteenth-century clothes and twenty-first-century stubble was smouldering on a hillside – which made her think of Ewan and the dangerous, alien feel of his biceps under her fingers. She snatched up her phone again to check she hadn’t missed an incoming message beep.

Finally, twenty-five minutes and seventeen snatched glances later, she received a text.

Yeh was not feelin 2 clever yesterday but better today tnx. See you tomoz.

The rush of euphoria that greeted the arrival of the message fizzled into flatness. She’d been hoping, she now realized, that her message would kickstart an evening of intimate text exchanges, the kind where you wear a private half-smile as you compose your messages and a full-on one when you read the replies. But this wasn’t the kind of text that encouraged a response. It was impersonal and throwaway.

It made her feel like she’d been thrown away.

All that night, she’d had a lump lodged in her throat and in her dreams she ran endlessly from unspecified dangers, her breath torn in ragged strips from her throat. She went to work the next morning with puffy eyes and a hardened heart. Then, miraculously, Ewan was attentive again. He’d brought her in a croissant in a brown paper bag and picked a crumb of it out of her hair with gentle fingers. When he went to the kitchen he came back with a cup of coffee for her, and even though he’d put sugar in it, forgetting she didn’t take any, and even though there was a trickle of coffee sludge down the outside, she drank it just because of his fingers spooning in the sugar and his hands wrapped around the mug.

‘You’re looking altogether too well for someone in the state you were in on Friday night,’ he said when he brought the coffee to her desk.

‘That’s due to my fast metabolism.’

She glanced up to see if he was smiling, and then had to look away in case she burst with pride when she saw that he was.

Only after he’d gone to sit down did she question fleetingly this seeming change of heart. It was almost extravagant in its total reversal of the weekend’s silence, as if he was doing it to make a point. If they’d been somewhere other than at work she might even have suspected him of putting on a show to make someone jealous, but they were in the office and it was Monday morning and Ewan had looked at her with eyes that had flecks of amber in them which caught the sun as it slanted through the slatted blinds.

Happiness poured over her as she laboured through all the dreary Monday-morning tasks that Rachel had assigned her in a long, bullet-pointed list she’d printed out and left lying on Chloe’s keyboard for her to find when she came in. She was conscious of Ewan mere yards away, but she concentrated on her screen, content just to know he was there. An email popped up.

Lunch?

She’d smiled to herself but didn’t reply immediately, already secure enough in her beloved status to take him for granted. Her pampered past had bought her the sense of entitlement that allowed her to do that. They’d gone to the sandwich shop around the corner, Chloe trying not to check to see if Rachel was clocking them out as they left. She’d had a grilled panini and regretted it when she bit into it and melted mozzarella dribbled down her chin. They’d been for lunch here loads of times in the past but now she felt self-conscious, sure the other customers could feel the electricity in the air.

Then, without warning, Ewan had gone all quiet on her, eating his chicken wrap with a kind of taciturn intensity that made her talk far too much to compensate. On the way back to the office, she thought he might take her hand and made sure it was fully accessible, hanging down invitingly on the side nearest to him, but then he’d taken his phone out so both his hands were occupied and she’d withdrawn hers, putting it up to scratch her nose as if there’d never been any other plan.

‘Fancy a drink after work?’ She’d been rehearsing the words in her head all the way back to the office, but even so, hearing them said out loud came as a shock.