Page 43 of Vine

“Hardly.” I laughed mirthlessly. “I have zero transferrable skills, except for pruning a vine without cutting myself.”

Satisfied the rose wasn’t harbouring anything nasty, Emma straightened. “Do you know something, Casp? Before doing this series with you both, I watched all the old episodes ofGay Adventures.Don’t get me wrong. Leigh flexes his biceps and hogs the screen time. And he has the patter and the snarky asides and all that crap. But you’re the main pull.Youserved a seven-tiered cake in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and thechef de cuisinesaid it was as good as hispatissier’s. And you fitted an entire hot water system in a three-storey listed mansion in Notting Hill. I didn’t see Leigh on his belly scrabbling around a U-bend. And let’s not forget you came fifth in a bloody Formula 3 race! Fifth! After just five months of training, racing against blokes who’ve been doing it for years! You’re talented, Casp. If you just had a bit of belief in yourself, you could turn your hand to anything!”

“Is there much call for cake-baking plumbers who can drive a sports car home afterwards really, really fast?”

She laughed. “Sounds like most heterosexual women’s ideal man, to be honest. And now you’re halfway to cultivating avineyard on your own, too. You’ve inhaled all those books I lent you. You ask the right questions. If you had the balls, you could rent this one, or one of a similar size when the series finishes, and make a go of it. Without any help from Leigh. I’d always be on the end of a phone line to give you a few pointers. And there are plenty of courses you can sign up for.”

My forearms and meds were secrets hidden from Emma. I mean, she knew I had serious anxiety issues. How could she not? But I’d led her to believe they were temporary and stemmed from my breakup with Leigh, not brittle veins running through my core. So I listened and nodded, letting her build a pipe dream for the kind of man I’d like to be. Someone who stood on his own two feet instead of crawling behind someone else. A man in control of his own mind, not a slave to it. Someone other people desired as a husband, a lover, and a friend. Someone whose only use for a razor blade was to groom his five-o'clock shadow.

Having banged on his front door several times already this evening, to no avail, I discovered Max was home after all. I peered through one of the little hexagonal windows at the rear of the property and found my face separated from his by nothing more than the thin pane of glass. “Can we talk?” I mouthed through the glass, raising my voice.

“Can’t hear you,” he answered at his normal volume. I added windows to my list of thinly constructed French building materials.

“I said, can we talk?”

“No. Too many air raid sirens. Bye.”

Air raid sirens?What the hell?

“Max? I… you are going to have to explain that one for me?”

I scratched my head, feeling vaguely idiotic conversing through a closed window when a perfectly functioning front door waited on the other side of the house.

“Relationship red flags,” he repeated. “Air raid sirens. You have them.”

“I… I… um… sorry, I… I thought we were…”Relationship? Fuck, had I missed something? Relationship was a huge word. “I mean, I know we kissed and stuff, and maybe you don’t want to do that with me anymore. And that’s…well… that’s fine. But I thought we were friends. Not in a… a relationship.”

“That’s right. We’re not. So you can go.”

He ducked from the window and disappeared out of sight. Cursing, I marched to the front door and hammered on it again. Hopefully, the door was built from rice paper too. “Can we just talk about it, Max? So I can… understand? Is it my medication problem? Is that it? Because, you know, I think you were right. I need to see a different doctor, or a psychologist or…”

“No! Just… go home. Go on. Back to your husband.”

“While that sounds awfully appealing, Max, I don’t have a husband.”

“I said go!”

Rubbing a hand over my chin, I looked up and down the row of sturdy beech trees separating his property from the road. And then back to the door. “Shit, Max. Is that what this is about? You thought I was married?”

“You are married. The internet says you are. Everywhere. Éti translated it for me. Caspian Watts married to Leigh Pumkin. Caspian Pumkin-Watts. That’s you.”

With a groan, I flopped back against the wall. Caspian Pumkin-Watts. It sounded ridiculous in his thick French accent. To be honest, it sounded bloody stupid in an English one too. Only I could be persuaded to hyphenate my perfectly ordinary surname with a misspelt vegetable. “Oh Christ. That’s not me.Well, it is, but… look at these hands, Max.” I wiggled my thin grubby fingers through the little diamond of glass at the top of the front door. “See a ring anywhere?”

That wasn’t going to catch him out. “Lots of married men never wear one. My dad didn’t.”

“Well, I did. A huge fucking platinum one, bought at Tiffany’s in Manhattan nine years ago. And it’s sitting at the bottom of a drawer in a heavily mortgaged shoebox in Chelsea. It’s been there for eighteen months, Max. Since my now ex-husband decided marriage to me wasn’t enough.”

And, when all was said and done, who could blame him?

“Why have you mortgaged a shoebox with drawers in it.”

“So I have somewhere to keep a wedding ring I no longer wear. I ought to sell it. Honestly, Max, my marriage is old news.”

“The internet doesn’t say that, Caspian Pumkin-Watts. Éti’s never wrong. I was looking for a relationship with a single man. I’m not a side piece. I studied thePerfect Peachrules, not the side piece rules.”

Perfectwhat?Side-piece rules?A noise escaped my throat, perilously close to a sob. Laugh or cry, I wasn’t sure which way to land. But at least he was still talking. “Um… are there side… um… side piece rules?”

“Yes. Éti told me about them. And rule number one is that you will only ever be number two. I’m no one’s number two, Caspian Pumkin-Watts.”

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