Page 57 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
I ignore him. They’re just words. They don’t mean anything. Theycan’tmean anything.
Baaabra Streisand is sleeping beside the tree trunk, and I push myself up on tiptoes to see what Ryan’s doing.
He’s sitting cross-legged in the tree using a little knife to do … something … to a strawberry. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Aw, you’ve caught me red-handed. I was trying to carve strawberries into roses and present you with a bouquet of them tomorrow.’
‘That’s romantic.’ The words are out before I can stop them.
‘Yes, it is.’ He meets my eyes and holds my gaze unwaveringly.
My legs feel so unsteady that I have to drop down off my tiptoes, and after a few moments, he shakes himself and looks away.
‘Godfrey showed me how to do it. He used to make them for Henrietta.’ He puts down the one he’s working on and picks up another, and leans forward so I can see what he’s doing. ‘If you carve four thin strips here, you can peel them back to look like petals.’ He does that around the widest part of the strawberry and then moves up to the narrower part and does the same in between the “petals” below so they overlap. ‘And then you do it again at the narrow part, and then criss-cross the tip, and voila.’ He hands me the mutilated fruit that really does look like a rose, his fingers hovering over mine as I take it carefully because it’s so delicate.
I can’t help smiling at the idea of a guy who would put in the effort to do that. The last time someone bought me flowers, they were mostly dead from the supermarket clearance bucket and still had the “reduced to 10p” sticker on them,andI later discovered were out of guilt for cheating on me. ‘Beautiful.’
‘The benefits of befriending a man who sold strawberries for forty years. I was going to do a whole load and put them on skewers and wrap them in pretty paper like a real bouquet, but now you’ve caught me, I’ll have to think of something else.’
‘You don’t have to do anything romantic for me …’ I trail off, automatically pushing myself up on tiptoes again as he leans further down.
His fingers are still around mine where mine are around the strawberry and they tighten so much, the fruit is in real danger of being crushed.
‘Fee …’ His eyes close and my name comes out as a breath, his hand coming up to brush my arm, trailing up and across my shoulder. He leans so close that our foreheads are millimetres away from touching, and …
He overbalances and has to grab a branch to stop himself falling headfirst out of the tree.
‘No. No, of course not.’ He yanks his hand away and scrambles backwards, and I step away, my heart pounding and my breath coming in such short, sharp pants that I could’ve just ran a marathon. Except not, obviously, because me and running don’t mix.
‘Sorry if I overstepped the mark earlier with the whole date thing. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. As is tradition whenever I’m around you.’
‘Of course. I get it, Ry, you didn’t mean it like that.’
He looks confused. ‘I meant it likethat, I just didn’t mean to ask you in front of everyone.’
In that moment, something snaps inside of me. ‘All right, I’ve had enough. What are you playing at? All the touches, the hugs, the hand-holding, and now you’re asking me on a date too? You’re doing exactly what you did before. No one can correctly interpret these mixed messages. I got it wrong before and I’mnotgoing to get it wrong again!’
He looks taken aback by my sudden outburst, and I take a step back in surprise because I didn’t realise I was going to say that.
‘Oh, come on, Fee. Seriously? Don’t you know how I feel about you?’
‘No!’ I snap. ‘No, Ryan, I don’t. I showed you how I felt fifteen years ago and you clearly didn’t return it then—’
‘You think I didn’t feel the same.’ He says it more to himself than to me, shaking his head. It’s not really a question at all. ‘There were two reasons I didn’t kiss you back, and believe me, that wasn’t one of them.’
I take a deep breath and steel myself to ask something I should’ve asked years ago. ‘Then what was?’
‘There was someone else.’
‘What?’ It comes out sharper and louder than I intended it to, but I’ve spent years imagining potential answers to that question andthatwas not one of the possible responses.
‘That came out wrong,’ he says quickly. ‘Not someone else inthatway. It was to do with my father’s business. There was this girl. My father had gone into business with her father … I was supposed to marry her.’
While I’m still trying to get my head around that, he scrambles out of the tree and reappears from behind the trunk. ‘It was to cement the ties of the business. There was an assumption on my shoulders that she and I would get married and continue running their business together, and then pass it on for generations to come.’
I thought I was shocked into silence, but I take a step away from him when he comes closer. ‘You were seeing someone else at that time?’
‘No! God, no. Nothing like that. I barely knew her. We’d played together a few times when we were children and that’s it. My father had always made comments about it, but I’d taken them jokingly; I’d never thought it was something they’d actually expect us to go through with, but when he had that heart attack, it changed things. He had to hand the business over to me sooner than he’d planned. Her dad had invested a large sum of money into the company, and working with me wasn’t what he’d signed up for. He didn’t like how young I was. Everyone knew I didn’t have my father’s business head. They thought that marrying his sensible, business-minded daughter would “sort me out” and make me into an adult. And I was obviously never, ever going to do that, but my dad wassoill, and the guilt was piling up on me. I couldn’t tell him, Fee, not then.’
