Page 21 of The Fallback

‘Oh, right,’ the voice went on. ‘Says here “101b”?’

Rosie tried to keep her irritation in check, this happened all the time. ‘We’re 101c,’ she said.

‘Sorry! Hope I didn’t wake you.’ And the line went dead.

Rosie gritted her teeth and replaced the handset, wishing she had listened to Mitch’s advice and stayed exactly where she was. She looked at herself in the hallway mirror, ran her hands through her hair and rubbed her finger under her eyes where a little mascara had smudged. She took a deep breath and opened Mitch’s door.

‘You were right,’ she said as she walked in, ‘it was?—’

She looked down at Mitch lying on his bed, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, absolutely dead to the world. She tiptoed across the room towards him, wondering whether to nudge him awake and then deciding against it. She leaned across him and pulled the blanket on the other side of the bed over him. She took a chance and brushed his hair out of his eyes, something she had been wanting to do ever since she met him. He looked so peaceful, and just so gorgeous. For a moment Rosie couldn’t believe that tonight had actually happened. And then her stomach turned because perhaps Mitch wouldn’t remember it at all, perhaps for him it wouldbenothing at all. Suddenly feeling all of the drinks she had had that evening, she bent down and turned off the lamp on Mitch’s bedside table before creeping out, silently closing the door and going back to her own room, and her own bed, where she lay wide awake and fully dressed, on top of her duvet all night and waited to see what would happen in the morning.

NOW

‘So now what?’ asked Rosie, ‘What am I supposed to do now, Nadia?’

Nadia considered her for a minute. ‘Well, you have two options: either you meet someone amazing and totally forget all about being in love with Mitch…’ She paused.

‘Or?’ asked Rosie. ‘So far that first one hasn’t panned out so well for me.’

‘Well,’ said Nadia, ‘the alternative might be considered unethical.’

‘Go on,’ prompted Rosie.

‘Well, the alternative is that you do nothing and hope Mitch doesn’t meet anyone between now and Christmas. And then, come January the first, you plan to get pregnant and keep him to yourself, in a sense, forever.’

Rosie stared at her. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nadia, ‘it’s pretty dastardly, and of course it wouldn’t stop him meeting someone at a later date, but at least you know you’d have him in your life forever. Although, of course, as I said, it’s completely unethical to do this and not tell him. And I’m sure Nico would have something to say about the fact this thought even occurred to me. So just forget it.’ The words kept tumbling out of her. ‘Maybe it’s better we focus on you meeting someone new, after all… Hey,’ she said, suddenly, ‘what are you doing Friday? Nico has a new professor visiting from Munich. His name is Tomas. I bet he’s hot. You should come for dinner!’

Rosie rolled her eyes.

ChapterSix

Completely unethical.

Nadia’s words followed Rosie around all week, reverberating through her brain like a jackhammer. She felt distinctly uneasy about having admitted her feelings about Mitch to Nadia. What if Nadia stopped thinking of her as the awesome, organised scientist and instead thought of her as the messed-up girl, mooning over her best friend? It was enough to make Rosie never want to participate in a heart-to-heart again.

And she still didn’t know what to do about Mitch’s proposal. Of course, her first instinct was to reject it outright, but then bloody Nadia had gone and put unethical thoughts into her mind, literally wrenching open the box in which Rosie had carefully compartmentalised her feelings about Mitch, having a rummage around and poring over the contents. Rosie felt sick.

She’d also caught herself staring at passing parents and children, forcing herself to look away before it got too weird. She’d experience an alien yearning to have that parallel relationship in her life, before realising that the harassed parent looked like they were about to completely lose their shit because their darling child wouldn’t do something reasonable like stop playing in the traffic. And then parenthood suddenly looked like the worst job in the world. And it was unpaid. At least when Rosie had to do the bits of her job she didn’t like, she got paid to do it. Being a parent was the equivalent of the worst, most exploitative internship ever. The kind of role that in the corporate world should be made illegal.

And when Rosie wasn’t thinking about babies, she was thinking about Mitch, and not in the baseline way that was normal with best friends that she usually forced her brain to think about him in, but in a distinctly uncomfortable way that often made her blush. Over the years Rosie had come to terms with the fact her feelings were unrequited. She was OK with that. They had an amazing friendship, they spent so much time together, she wouldn’t have wanted to jeopardize that. But now Mitch seemed determined to start thinking about settling down, was this going to destroy that friendship?

If he did meet someone and eventually have children, it would be to that person that he would turn instead of to Rosie. Was she ready to let him go? And what if they did decide to have kids together, that would change everything, too. Yes, he would always be a part of her life but with all the perils and pitfalls of parenthood to navigate, would he end upwantingto be a part of her life? She sighed as she studied the vegetables in Sainsbury’s and wished she had done an online order instead.

As if on cue, her phone rang. Fumbling through her bag she grabbed it just as the name ‘Bestest EVER BFF’ disappeared from the screen.Dammit, she thought as she hit the call button and made a mental note that she really needed to stop giving Mitch access to her phone and allowing him to rename himself. She’d only just worked out how to change the special ringtone that he had given himself after being overcome with embarrassment when Little Mix blared out in the office.

‘Sorry,’ she said when she heard the phone being picked up, ‘I didn’t get to you in time.’

‘No worries.’ Mitch’s relaxed tone came through from the other end. ‘What are you doing? Are you busy?’ he asked.

Rosie looked at her watch, Mitch would be leaving the office about now, either heading to the pub to meet friends or going via the Sainsbury’s Local at the end of his road. It was a Thursday so he wouldn’t be going to the gym, he hadn’t mentioned any work events this week, and if he was out to meet friends there was a good chance she would have been invited to join as well. Was it weird she knew so much about his routine?

Rosie started to panic that perhaps it was. Especially as there was a good chance that he had nothing like that level of interest in Rosie’s life. Would he have a clue that she was stood in the same supermarket that she always did at about this time on a Thursday? The possibility that her insight into Mitch’s life wasn’t reciprocated left her feeling strangely unmoored.

‘No, no it’s fine,’ she said into her phone. ‘I was just getting some things from the shop. Sorry, no, you go.’ Rosie gestured to the woman beside her that she wasn’t waiting for the till.

‘What?’ said Mitch in confusion.

‘No, not you!’ she snapped, making the woman jump and consider whether she should do her shopping elsewhere in future. Rosie tried to placate her with a smile and attempted to point at her phone, almost dropping her shopping basket as she did so. The woman did not look convinced.

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