Page 96 of Wish You Weren't Here
‘Right, come the fuck on, Lana, what’s the deal with you and Ethan?’ Tiggy asks. ‘We’re all dying to know.’
‘There’s no deal,’ I insist.
‘You two clearly really like each other,’ Seph points out.
‘Even if you’re trying to pretend you don’t, for some silly reason,’ Eleanor adds. You can tell she wants to get involved but that she also doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction, so her words come out through gritted teeth.
‘I do like him, of course I do,’ I reply. ‘It’s just… it’s a strange feeling. I don’t really understand it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tiggy asks.
‘Well, sometimes I like him, sometimes I want to kill him,’ I begin. ‘Sometimes it feels good, sometimes scary, sometimes I feel physically sick, like something is wrong with me. I get this heavy feeling in my stomach.’
‘Not lower?’ Tiggy jokes.
‘Ah, I know that that is,’ Seph says seriously. ‘I’ve had that before – I have it now, actually, I don’t think there’s a cure.’
Oh, God, don’t tell me it’s some hereditary family illness that I’ve been cursed with.
‘Is it hard to breathe properly sometimes too?’ she checks.
‘Shit…’ I say softly. ‘Yes.’
‘Don’t look so worried,’ she says with a laugh. ‘You’re not ill, you’re in love.’
‘Oh,’ I say simply. ‘No. No, no, no. It’s not that.’
‘I think it might be, cuz,’ Tiggy says, wincing.
‘They are all of the classic signs,’ Seph says. ‘Have you never been in love before?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Is that… Is that really…? Oh, God. What do I do?’
‘You have to go and tell him, you silly goose,’ Seph says. ‘Go, now, get it over with today, don’t do it at my wedding.’
No, we mustn’t forget the most important thing.
‘Go,’ Tiggy tells me. ‘You have your diagnosis; your prescription says that you need to tell him. I’ll take care of these two. Go, figure it out, but just be bloody happy.’
I smile at her.
‘Okay, sure, I’ll go figure it out,’ I reply.
I will go, back to the house, but… am I really going to tell Ethan I love him? Do I love him? I like him, a lot, but none of this changes the fact that we are incompatible, does it?
I’m going to head back to the house, mostly because I feel too flat out to party now. This should feel like a good thing, surely? If so, then why does it feel so bad? I am definitely not ready to tell Ethan I love him, if I even do, but I do need to say something to him, because it feels like limbo right now.
I guess I’ll just have to hope the words come to me when I need them. And that they don’t trigger a nuclear war.
45
The house still looks alive, as the taxi drops me outside. It’s late – the early a.m. – and the night before the wedding, so I’m surprised to see that all of the lights are still on.
The gravel path crunches beneath my feet, as I head for the front door, but I can see Bea on her phone in the hallway, so I decide to slink around the back instead, and head in through the back door.
Of course, once I’m around there, I realise that the large sliding doors are wide open, and the grown-ups are hanging out in there, drinking and chatting. Now there’s a group of people I don’t want to hang around with right now.
I suppose a bit of air might do me good. I could walk through the garden, down to the beach, maybe dip my feet in the sea and try to wash away my stress.
