Page 69 of Meet Me in Berlin

Casey points to my camera. ‘You don’t want to do more with that?’

‘I’d love to. I’m thinking I might set up a website at least – one of the reasons I’m keen to get plenty of travel shots. I charged for my photography for the first time in a while the night after I was made redundant.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I pull out my phone and open a browser. ‘I left work as soon as they told me and stopped at a wine bar. Their photographer had pulled out last minute for an event they were having the next night, and Caleb – that’s the bloke who owns the bar – noticed my camera and asked if I’d do it.’ I bring up the bar’s website and pass her my phone.

I rest my chin on Casey’s shoulder as she scrolls through the photos, but I’m distracted by her scent and press my nose against her neck, breathing her in. ‘God, you smell good.’

‘We’re going to need to get back to one of our rooms fast if you do that to me,’ she murmurs.

I smile and pull away. ‘Sorry.’

She chuckles and returns to my phone. ‘You took all of these?’

I nod.

‘They’re good, Holly. Really good.’ She points to a photo of the woman who was giving me flirty looks that night. ‘She either fancied you, or someone standing right on top of you.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah, she was kind of giving me that look through the night, and I wanted to capture it.’

‘You didn’t talk to her?’ Casey asks. Her tone is hesitant, like she knows she has no right to ask but that she also needs to know.

I shake my head. ‘No. I wasn’t in a good headspace. Just lost my job, trying to work out what to do, deal with how I felt about Tom.’

Casey’s brows shoot up. ‘This was the Saturday night before you came over here? As in, last weekend?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Tom is that recent?’

‘Yep, we were together three years. The night after I took these photos, I booked my flight, let him go to work the next day so he couldn’t talk me out of it, and packed everything up. When he got home, I was waiting with my suitcase. I told him and left.’

Casey’s eyes widen. ‘Whoa.’

I wince. ‘That’s bad, isn’t it? An awful thing to do. But at the time, I had to go.’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s not bad.’

‘I should’ve talked to him sooner, told him how I was feeling, but I didn’t fully understand it. You know when you’re in a situation and there’s something a bit off about it, but you can’t work out why or what to do, and it’s not until you’re alone or away from it that you think, how fucking stupid was I? Why couldn’t I see that then?’

Casey stares at the ground, picking blades of grass and tossing them to the side. ‘That was a really brave thing to do. I wish I could be more like that.’

‘I’m not sure I would’ve been so brave if I wasn’t going overseas. But I figured I couldn’t just leave without telling him something.’

She nods, but she’s silent as she continues to pick at the grass.

I lean forward so I can make eye contact. ‘You okay?’

She turns her whole body to me and eyes me intently. Her face carries a pained expression, but it’s more than that – it carries a story, too, some history. My heart crashes back down from wherever it had drifted off to. Whatever her story is, I don’t want to hear it. Not today. I’m not so naive to think that she doesn’t have a past, and probably a present of some kind too, but I can’t lose this yet.

Just as her lips part to presumably tell me something, I jump in. ‘Tell me about your family.’

Her shoulders drop and her face brightens. ‘Ah, my fam. They’re the best. Jazzy’s too.’

‘Your families are besties, too?’

‘Yep, next door neighbours forever – well, since me and Jaz were about four. We were like identikit families. Terraced houses. Black dads. White mums. Jamaican grandparents. Lesbian daughters. Hetero siblings. The only difference is I have a younger sister and Jaz has a twin brother. Oh, and Jaz is a total femme.’ She pulls out her phone and switches it on. It buzzes with messages, and she quickly swipes the screen, taps the ‘do not disturb’ option and opens the photo app.

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