You Belong With Me

Read An Excerpt From You Belong With Me

“It’s someone for you.”

Edie frowned after Meg spoke. She took off the oven glove and placed it next to the pigs in blankets, crossing the room and weaving past her grinning, flushed sibling. Meg reflexively removed her paper hat as if a hearse rather than her elder sister was passing.

Edie knew exactly who was at the door, and yet she still didn’t know, both at the same time. Perfect certainty and the precariousness of hope.

The Christmas Day cook’s cava had her bumping along merrily as it was; now she faceplanted down a log flume of it. The caller at the end of the hall came into focus, his face partially obscured by a large, brown-paper wrapped bunch of white roses. Fireworks went off inside Edie.

“Are roses kind of “cheating husband” cheesy? I don’t speak fluent “flower”,” Elliot Owen said, lowering the roses and offering them to her.

He somehow looked better than she remembered.

He was in a grey winter coat, with a turned-up collar, that whispered at least a grand, possibly even two. His dark hair had been unusually short for a role but was now grown out a little and starting to curl.

Edie accepted the roses with a small exclamation of gratitude, momentarily unable to respond.

“You’re not pissed off I’ve crashed your Christmas Day?” Elliot said, an anxious look she knew so well crossing his face.

“No … I’m merely stunned at seeing you,” Edie said, inclining her head towards the flowers. “Thank you. Cheating husband.”

“I haven’t, obviously,” Elliot said.

A few beats of creaky silence followed as the remark landed heavily: first the idea of marriage and then the notion that he could somehow cheat on her in their current circumstances.

Edie had absolutely no idea what to say, so they were left looking at each other with a you-go-first intensity and longing. She was glad she’d declined the “Santa’s Chimney Legs” deely boppers.

“I didn’t come round only to be a flashy shithouse with a bouquet,” Elliot said eventually.

“I was going to say – I’m pretty sure delivery isn’t that much extra if you’d wanted to pay for it,” Edie said, trying to emulate a level of savvy comeback composure she didn’t feel.

She was incredibly touched and excited that he was here. She also didn’t think microdosing Elliot Owen was ever going to work, so she had the rollercoaster sickness.

Call her a pessimist, but an inner voice was already scoffing: yeah, lovely, he wants to call in and see you on Christmas Day, but imagine the emptiness next year when he doesn’t. When he can’t. When you know why he won’t.

This was precisely why she’d ended it. She wasn’t going to perform the emotional equivalent of barefoot free-climbing the Burj Khalifa to prove it couldn’t be done and confirm that falling the distance would break her. What they’d had was too perfect and good to end that way. She foresaw inevitable outcomes.

And yet, he was here. And suddenly nothing else mattered.

Elliot cleared his throat. “I wanted to say …”

Edie glanced over her shoulder as there was a scuffle behind them and a ceremonious closing of the dining-room door – as if a festive table full of people who’d been trying to listen in to catch the mood of the interaction had decided they probably shouldn’t.

“The reasons you gave for dumping me – they were bullshit,” Elliot said, breaking into a wide smile of nervous relief that he was finally risking saying the thing, and that Edie was at least smiling back.

“I’ve thought about nothing else but you since I last saw you,” he said, as Edie tried to look intelligently neutral and not to fall forward into his arms. “You said you couldn’t fit in with my career? And that I couldn’t manage with your wanting to stay here.”

“That was the size of it, yes,” Edie said, leaning on the door jamb, supposedly casually but actually a little bit for support. “… Thing is, I want you more than I want the career. Why am I binning you off to make way for it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

Edie felt faint and hot in the misty December air. She was wholly unprepared for this and would need to hide in flippancy.

“Is the plan for you to retrain as an electrician and plumber?”

“It’s recession-proof work,” Elliot said.

“Haha. You’d look like Derek Zoolander as a coal miner.”

“Listen, I’m a twat who can’t do anything else – I mostly enjoy acting. And I need to keep all my hot sluts in bunches of roses.”

Edie properly laughed. She was a fool for him when he dropped posh actor Elliot and used his real accent.

“But I’m the only person in charge of my life. If I want the jobs I take to suit having a girlfriend in the East Midlands, they will. Simple as that.”

A pause.

“Elliot …” Edie began. “It’s amazing you’d offer.” She adjusted her hands on the brown paper around the roses, felt her fingertips dappling it with sweat marks. “But I didn’t give you up for trivial reasons. It was the hardest, most grown-up decision I’ve ever made, but I thought about it from every angle, and there wasn’t any other way.”

“You sound like my mum when she had our cat, Inspector Boursin, put down.”

“Inspector Boursin?”

“Don’t ask – Fraser named him.”