Page 33 of Finding Love at the Magical Curiosity Shop
‘Don’t answer that.’ Ren puts his phone down and shoots Ava a reproachful look. ‘Please just ignore my overly inquisitive daughter who thinks it’s okay to pry where she has no business prying.’
‘Like you don’t want to know too, Dad. You specifically said, “How can a girl like that be single?”’
‘I don’t! I did not!’ Ren’s cheeks are burning red and I can’t help feeling a little thrill at the thought of them talking about meandof him wondering about my love life. ‘Ava, if you’re not grounded until Christmas, you will be a very lucky girl. You don’t repeat something like that to the person it was said about!’
‘Mickey doesn’t mind. She likes you too. She said it was okay if I told you.’
Even though itisokay, my cheeks are also starting to burn with a hot tingling feeling as this conversation goes on. ‘It’s okay, I have nothing to hide. And I’m pretty sure your father has worked out that I like him by now. I would have thrown him out ages ago if I didn’t.’
‘How can you say that when he’s standing right there and now he knows? Don’t you want the ground to swallow you up and spit you back out as a different person? I like this boy at school and it would be the worst thing in the world if he knew I liked him. He’d laugh at me. All the other girls would laugh at me. I have to pretend I don’t like him and laugh when the others make fun of him. It’s so embarrassing.’
Ah, the minefield of teenage-girl-politics. I remember those days well. ‘When you get to my age, you get past caring. If I like someone in a platonicora romantic way, they should know. Life is too short to play silly games and keep people guessing.’
‘Can’t argue with that.’ Ren meets my eyes again, his cheeks still tinged a sweet shade of pink. ‘And for the record, I think you’re…’
He’s unable to finish the sentence, and the silence grows until it’s an awkward cloud hanging over our heads with raindrops of awkwardness dripping from it.
‘A hoarding madwoman with a dragon fruit problem?’ I offer to ease the unbearable tension.
He laughs an awkward laugh. ‘That’s the one.’
I laugh too, but it’s a fake titter and I undoubtedly fail at hiding the little sting I feel at his agreement. He’s opened up to me a lot lately, I was thinking –hoping– that he understood me better by now too.
‘Sooooo…?’ Ava prompts me, going back to the earlier question that I wouldn’t have minded her forgetting all about.
‘I was with someone for a long time, nine years, we lived together, he proposed eventually, but it was a “shut up ring”…’ My cheeks are burning as I look between her and Ren, wishing she’d asked me while we were alone so I didn’t have to go into my disaster of a love life in front of him.
‘What’s a shut up ring?’ she asks before I can say anything more.
‘It’s when you’ve been with someone for a very long time, and you expect to get married, but it just… never happens. You get comfortable living together but never take that next step, but you want to, and you don’t realise it, but you drop hints. Probably too many hints. You wonderwhyhe’s not getting down on one knee and why he keeps avoiding the topic whenever it comes up. And then there are outside pressures from family too. His parents already treated me like a daughter-in-law, they talked often about how badly they wanted to see us get married and give them grandchildren, and eventually the pressure gets too much and he proposes, and you’re so happy, you think it’s finally what you’ve always wanted, but then nothing else changes. He isn’t interested in the wedding plans. He blanks you when you try to discuss potential dates, places, guests, or honeymoon destinations, and slowly, slowly you realise that hestilldoesn’t want to get married, but he gave you a ring to shut you up so you and everyone else would get off his back for a while.’
Ren grimaces and sucks air in through his teeth. ‘So we’re kind of opposites then? You wanted to get married and never did, and I did but shouldn’t have.’ He glances at Ava and quickly adds, ‘Apart from you, obviously. I will never regret marrying your mother because it gave us you.’
‘Oh, I know that, Dad. Your life would be extra-dull without me,’ she says with a cheeky grin and a self-assurance that only children can have and turns back to me. ‘Did you break up with him?’
‘I realised the relationship had stagnated. Realised we were more like flatmates than partners. I realised he’d made me feel insecure and needy and selfish for pushing for commitment when he wasn’t ready, because he couldn’t be honest about how he was feeling. Realised we’d fallen out of love, but believed that getting married would fix everything. Realised it was a conversation we should have had many years before, rather thanafterthe most lacklustre proposal of all time and spending a week’s wages on bridal magazines because he wanted to bury his head in the sand rather than being upfront.’
‘That’s a lot of realisations,’ Ren murmurs.
‘I also realised I felt defective and not relationship-worthy and made the decision to walk away, feeling like I’d wasted so many years and that things could have been so different if he’d had the courage to talk it through when he’d started having doubts.’
‘You prioritised your own happiness and found the strength to start again – that’s not a bad thing.’ Ren’s blue eyes find mine and he gives me a nod of solidarity.
‘Except I didn’t start again. I just sort of… stopped. I went back to live with my dad, and around the same time, he started experiencing symptoms that turned out to be cancer, and I… just haven’t moved since. I still feel defective and not relationship-worthy, so now I hide out here, not looking for another relationship, ever. Instead, I invent stories to make up for the fact that my real-life relationship was the opposite of a fairytale, but I still want to believe that they do happen, just to other people, not to me.’
‘Maybe that’s why they say stories are made up – because they’re making up for something in real life?’ Ava says, showing a maturity surely far beyond her years.
‘I’m sorry.’ Ren looks serious and, actually, quite touched. ‘It takes alotto realise you deserve more than you have and to say, “I deserve to be happy” and to actually believe it, don’t underestimate that.Ihaven’t got that far yet.’
His hand slides over mine and he gives my fingers a squeeze, and then pulls his hand back quickly and leans on the counter to pinch the bridge of his nose with a groan. ‘There is something seriously mind-altering in this shop. Are you sure you’re not secretly running an illegal drugs farm from the back room?’
‘Oi!’ I smack at his forearm but when my hand connects with his skin, my fingers stay put just a little bit too long as I rub his arm to make sure I didn’t hurt him.
Ava glances first at him, then at me, and then announces that we should read another entry and turns the page to the one we’d intended to read earlier.
21 March 1899
The best feeling in the world is to feel important to someone. At first, I think he is just being kind to me because we are isolated here, and he cannot manage alone with his broken leg, but as the weeks pass, I start to feel like he genuinely cares for me. I have always been good at knowing what people are thinking when they look at me, and I sense he likes me, genuinely.
