Page 51 of Falling for You

I look down at the message, my skin feeling too small for my body.

Normally, a message like this would fire me up.

I’d be straight on the phone, and then spend hours all week designing and creating the perfect costume.

But now, I just feel numb. If anything, I feel as though I could burst into tears.

‘Oh,’ Pam calls, breaking me out of my thoughts. ‘I suppose I’ll ask Rodney to get some paperwork drawn up.’ She pokes her head around the door to the kitchen. ‘If you’re sure about this, Annie?’

I tuck my phone away, switching it to silent.

‘I’m sure.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Penny says, her eyes narrowed at me, ‘I don’t like this at all.’

I laugh, folding up another jumper and placing it in a box.

Pam gave me some time off before starting my new job, and it’s the week before the three of us leave our perfect little flat.

So, instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself and panicking about where I was going to live, I decided to go home and spend a week with my parents.

I could give the clothes I made to Mum (after speaking to Pam, I couldn’t bring myself to drop them at a charity shop, never to see them again), and spend some time looking at flats online and working out my finances with Dad.

Because that’s what dads are for, right?

But it does mean that I had to tell Tanya and Penny that I was moving out a week early. Which, needless to say, did not go down well.

‘Well, I don’t like it either,’ I say, trying to sound pragmatic. ‘But it just makes sense. If it were up to me then I’d stay in this flat with you both until we were eighty.’

‘Me too.’

I hit Penny with a pillow as she sticks her bottom lip out at me. ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘You’re excited to live with Mike, and I’m excited for you! He’s great.’

‘He won’t be able to talk to me about my periods.’

‘He will if he’s a real man.’

‘Right!’ Tanya says, marching into my room with her label maker in one hand and a roll of packing tape in the other. ‘How can I help?’

‘What are you doing?’ Penny turns to her accusingly.

Tanya blinks back. ‘What?’

‘You’re helping her!’ Penny says incredulously. ‘You’re helping her move out a week early. We should be locking her in her room and stealing her purse so she can’t leave.’

I place a stack of books in a box. Obviously, I’m not planning on taking all my things with me on the train down to the Cotswolds.

Paddington is bad enough as it is. But I’m trying to pack everything up, so when Mum and Dad come up with me at the weekend we can move out in some form of order.

I owe it to them after they turned up to move me out of university in third year and found me asleep, unpacked, hungover, with absolutely no idea what they were doing there.

I just thank the lord there wasn’t anybody I had to stuff out of a bathroom window.

‘It’s just a label maker,’ Tanya says in a small voice. ‘Oh!’ she adds, spotting a Marian Keyes book. ‘Can I have this? Have you read it?’

‘Sure.’ I hand it to her.

‘You’ll have to finish it by Friday,’ Penny says stroppily.

‘Or you can post it back to me,’ I say.

Tanya’s face scrunches up with worry, and I laugh. ‘Tanya, I’m joking, you can keep it.’

‘What is all this?’ she says, looking around at my boxes. I’ve been super organised and labelled them ‘keep’, ‘sell’, ‘bin’. She is eyeing my ‘sell’ box suspiciously.

‘If you want anything in there, take it,’ I say. ‘Now is your last chance.’

‘You can’t sell this!’ Penny cries in outrage, as she pulls out a particularly garish jumper I knitted last year. It’s made out of pink, glittery wool with a black cat sat on an orange pumpkin on the front.

‘Why not?’

‘Annie, you love this jumper!’ Penny says, waving it in my face. ‘Why would you sell it? What’s going on? I’m worried about you.’ She turns to Tanya. ‘We need an intervention.’

Tanya nods. ‘I’ll get the biscuits.’

‘What, no!’ I say, grabbing Tanya’s arm. ‘Nothing is going on, I’m fine . I’m just trying to … you know, get my life in order.’

‘By selling your favourite clothes and taking a corporate job and giving up your dreams?’ Penny shoots back.

‘You sound like Nate,’ I mutter under my breath, turning back to my piles of books.

I keep my back firmly to them both, even though I can feel them exchanging worried glances.

We haven’t spoken about Nate since Saturday night.

Even then, I only told them the headlines of what happened.

He wasn’t seeing other girls, I fucked up, it’s over.

‘Have you heard from him?’ Tanya says gently.

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘And I won’t. He’s gone. But I’ve decided it’s a good thing,’ I hear myself add, apparently making that decision as soon as I voice it.

‘Why?’ Penny sinks back onto my bed.

‘Well, like … was he ever real?’ I shrug.

Tanya and Penny glance at each other.

‘We … we did meet him, Annie,’ Tanya says nervously.

I roll my eyes. ‘No, I mean, he was too perfect! All the romance and chance meetings, the perfect dates and great, easy conversation and the instant connection … that’s not real, is it? Nobody has a relationship like that in real life.’

I’m saying it like it’s a fact, but I can see the doubt on their faces.

‘Annie,’ Tanya says eventually. ‘You deserve all of those things.’

‘And you will have them,’ Penny adds, her voice stern.

I wave them both off. ‘He was a fantasy, the whole thing was a fantasy. And it’s fine.

’ I force myself to smile brightly at them both.

‘Really, everything is great.’ I keep my smile for as long as I can, until it starts to burn at my cheeks.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ I say, letting my smile drop. ‘Tanya. Get the biscuits. I need it.’

Tanya immediately springs forward and darts out of the room into the kitchen. Penny reaches out and grabs my hand.

‘You’re the best person I know, Annie. You do know that, right?’

I smile, my throat starting to ache. ‘You won’t say that when I live in yours and Mike’s spare room for the rest of my life.’

‘We don’t have a spare room,’ she says earnestly. ‘But you can live under the stairs for as long as you like.’

And as I look back at Penny with her serious green eyes, I know she means it.