Page 12 of Date Knight (Roll for Romance #2)

Phil

A my didn’t message me on Sunday, and I was determined to let her make the first move, so I didn’t reach out either, instead settling for staring at my phone instead of getting any work done.

The only time I managed to focus on anything else was Monday morning, when I made some very lopsided pain au chocolat– I’d always been able to lose myself when cooking and baking.

Monday afternoon, as we walked through the door from Ethel’s class down at the art centre, the landline rang.

I knew it was almost certainly for Ethel; the only people who had the number were her friends and telemarketers, and even now she loved having them on.

Even when she was having a bad memory day, it worked out nicely, because she’d just spin them round in circles until they gave up.

Sure, we’d ended up with a set of expensive kitchen knives and a window washer we probably didn’t need given that we lived in a bungalow, but I had to admit those knives cut like a dream.

She walked into the kitchen to answer, and I listened long enough to be able to tell it was a friend rather than a salesperson, then turned my attention to the corset on the coffee table.

It was still in parts; I needed to sew all the panels together, insert the boning, and then shape it.

It was for one of Chloe’s outfits for the festival, and it had me seriously considering a “no corsets” rule moving forward.

I understood why makers online charged so much for them.

But then my phone buzzed, and I realised I had four different messages, all about the same thing. The most recent was from Amy:

AMY

I’m so sorry. This wasn’t me, I promise. Jack can’t keep his mouth shut. Can we talk?

A pit formed in my stomach as I opened the next most recent message, which was from Amy and Jack’s mum Patricia:

PATRICIA

I’ll pretend to be okay with the fact that you two didn’t tell me yourself!

Anyway, I suppose you’re officially invited to family dinners, which I’ll be reinstating for Sunday evenings.

I know you’re off on that camping trip next weekend, but the weekend after you can help me cook. Ethel obviously invited too. LOL

I was pretty sure she thought LOL meant “lots of love,” despite Jack correcting her several times.

I blinked down at the message, trying to piece together what had happened.

Why had Amy still not corrected everyone?

It was one thing to pretend in the moment outside a bar, but it was another thing to actively lie to her family.

My mind was spinning, but I didn’t have a chance to calm down, because the oldest message, from nearly an hour ago, was from Chloe:

CHLOE

Seriously?????? This is how I hear???? FROM JACK?????

I sighed; okay, that one would need some attention. I texted back immediately:

PHIL

I promise it’s not what it sounds like. I need to talk to Amy, but I promise you’re not desperately out of the loop.

The last remaining message was from Grey, sent just a few minutes after Chloe’s, and I let out a somehow even deeper sigh when I read it.

Despite Chloe being furious that she’d found out about Amy and me through the rumour mill– and despite the fact that it was just that: a rumour– she’d clearly been doing her part to keep it spinning. Grey’s message read simply:

GREY

NICE.

At that point I was surprised it hadn’t been shared in our Wench, Please group chat. In fact, it would be so easy to dispel the rumour en masse, I thought. But for some reason, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it before talking to Amy. Before understanding why she’d let it get this far.

So instead, I ignored Patricia and Grey’s messages and texted Amy back.

PHIL

Free whenever you are.

I’d just decided to get the sewing machine out and get stuck in, hoping to distract myself until Amy rang, when Ethel came out of the kitchen, a sad look on her face.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, leaping out of my seat and rushing to her side, taking her arm and guiding her towards her chair. Maybe she’d just learned one of her friends had passed away? I wondered if I should start screening her calls.

She sat down and looked up at me, her already quite wrinkled face further creased in concern. I squatted down next to her, holding her hand in both of mine.

“Philip, my love, I know I don’t have the best memory these days.”

“That’s an understatement.”

She swatted my arm. “Cheeky git.”

I grinned at her. She preferred to keep things light-hearted, and I had to admit it felt better for me too.

“But really,” she said, going serious again. “A lot of things get lost to the Great Sieve that is my brain, but I feel pretty confident that I’m not so far gone I would have forgotten if you’d told me something important.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What are you on about, Ethel?”

“That was Patricia on the phone. She said we’re invited round for family dinner now you and Amy have finally gotten together.”

I groaned. “Ethel, it’s not like tha?—”

“When were you going to share that with little old me? I know I’m old and senile, but you can’t just keep major secrets from me! And with how much shit I give you about finding someone?”

“Okay, that’s a bit dramatic,” I said, standing up. “You’re not fully senile yet.”

“It isn’t!” she said, standing as well. I didn’t like how quickly she bounced up, putting all her weight on one foot to walk over to me.

“Come on, Ethel,” I said, gesturing towards her feet. “You’re gonna break an ankle again if you’re not careful. Last time you were a nightmare for the ten weeks you were in that boot.” It had also escalated a lot of her dementia symptoms, but that wasn’t helpful to mention.

“Who’s being dramatic now?” she asked, doing what looked to be an attempt at the can-can as if to prove her point.

“That is so unnecessary.”

“I had no idea you two were a couple, Philip. I feel like a fool.”

I sighed, less in frustration than in pity, though I daren’t let Ethel know that. “I promise,” I said, “if there was something to tell you I would. This whole thing has blown massively out of proportion. We’re not actually together.”

“Well, maybe you should tell her that,” Ethel said, pointing around me.

I turned to follow her gaze, and I couldn’t help the way my breath hitched when I looked through the open bay window at the front of the room, past the crystals that dotted the low windowsill, to see Amy walking up the front path.

I let her in through the front door, and Ethel immediately pushed past me.

“So good to see you, Amy,” she said, wrapping Amy in a hug. “And I should be very cross with you, I know, but I’m just so happy for you both.”

Amy’s face went red as she caught my eye.

“I’ll leave you two lovebirds to yourselves,” Ethel said suggestively as she pulled back, disappearing into the lounge.

I reached into the kitchen for the tin holding the leftover pain au chocolat, then led Amy outside into the garden, where the table was still pulled into the middle of the grass from when I’d charged the crystal a few days ago.

Instead of moving the table back onto the patio, I pulled the plastic chairs onto the small lawn so we could sit there, further away from any eavesdroppers.

I felt a chair leg sink into the grass as I sat.

“Want one?” I asked, pulling the lid off the tin and showing Amy the pastries.

“My favourite!” she gasped, removing one delicately from the tin and immediately sinking her teeth into it. I was particularly satisfied by the crunch it made as she bit into it, but then she moaned in pleasure, evoking a very different idea of satisfaction that I quickly banished from my mind.

“So, Ethel heard,” I said. “Your mum told her we’re together, and she got mad that I hadn’t told her.”

“I know,” Amy said, her mouth still half full, burying her face in her spare hand. “I swear I told Mum we weren’t together, but she thought I was just being secretive. Trying to throw her off the scent.”

“Let me guess, Jack?” That guy pretended to be chill, but he could be messy as hell when he wanted to be.

“Yup.”

“Listen, about the kiss—” I started, resolved to get to the bottom of things. Had it meant as much to her as it had to me?

“I know,” she said, cutting me off. “You were my knight in shining armour with that one. It was probably a bad idea, I know, but Chris just looked so smug, and when he called you a townie…”

I tried not to feel disappointed that she’d brushed it off so quickly. “Yeah, that guy was a prick. I’m not sure what you ever saw in him.”

“Honestly? Not much,” she admitted, and I frowned.

“How does that happen?” I couldn’t imagine for a second that Amy would have had a hard time finding a boyfriend, and she could have done much better.

In fact, she couldn’t have done much worse, from what I’d seen.

I knew the broad strokes of what had happened in Manchester, but I wanted to hear it from her.

“Honestly, it was Niamh who pushed me on him. Looking back, I think she thought he would never like her back, so she was trying to live vicariously through me. And we did all have fun together.”

“Were you all friends then?” It was hard to imagine Amy with another group of friends like ours, but she’d lived there for two years after all.

“I was friends with Niamh first from uni,” she said. “We were on the same business admin course. It was why I moved to Manchester. I just wanted to leave, and she had a place there where I could live with her for cheap. She helped me cobble together some part-time jobs so I could support myself.”

“Why did you want to leave?”

She shrugged. “All my friends from school had either moved away or settled down, and I just didn’t really have a life here anymore. I wanted to start over.”