Page 45 of Love from Pretty Beach

T alk about deflated. The wind had most certainly been knocked out of our lovely Darby’s sails.

And there she’d been sitting on Cloud Nine without a worry in the world.

What did she care? Archie could go and take a running jump.

She slammed around a bit as she got home, popped her bits from the Spar in the fridge and said hello to Lola.

Who the heck did he think he was? For sure, if there was one thing about the meeting in the street, it was that Archie had not appeared rattled by the altercation.

In fact, he’d been the opposite and cool as a cucumber.

After sorting out her bag and getting herself settled, she opened and closed the fridge a few times and decided that carbs and tiramisu were needed.

They were the only thing that had even the slightest chance of helping her.

A nice big bowl of cheesy pasta might do something to somewhat alleviate what was going on in her head.

As a mixture of simmering anger, disappointment and outright upset swirled around her, she ran a pot under the tap, popped it on the hob, turned the switch to fire up the gas ring and banged the lid onto the pot.

Who did he think he was to treat her that way?

No doubt if she hadn’t bumped into him, he would have ghosted her entirely.

She’d cavorted in the man’s bed for goodness' sake. More than once. They’d been on lots of dates, coffees and suchlike.

They’d become an item. Or so she’d assumed.

As she waited for the water to come to the boil, Darby poured a huge glass of wine and went around doing meaningless things.

Watered the herb pots, folded some washing and replied to a work message.

But it was all automatic and she was only half there, as if she were watching herself from somewhere above and to the left.

Opening her laptop to look at the offending video, she winced a bit as she could see that the statistics were still climbing.

Thousands of views and a lot of comments. A brand email about sponsorship. Yikes.

Darby swallowed, pressed her lips together and shook her head.

Yeah, she could see why he’d been niggled.

She hadn’t thought enough about him being in her video.

Truly, all she’d thought about was her channel.

She now saw what she had done as quite selfish.

With a sinking feeling as the water in the pot boiled over, she shot up to turn off the heat and grimaced. Whose bad was it? Definitely hers.

A couple of hours later, Darby was sitting on the floor by the window with her knees pulled up, with Lola by her side, looking out at the street.

Bumping into Archie outside the bookshop played like a video, and not a pleasant one, in her head.

She could see the shape of him and how he’d walked away.

How his whole body language had let on that he was fuming.

Shoulders tight. Steps measured. Face grim. Not as grim as she felt inside.

With a blanket round her legs, she watched the lane; the neighbour's cat stalked across the pavement like he owned it, someone jogged past in neon lycra and a delivery van clattered around the corner. It all went on as she felt terrible inside and as if, yet again, she’d messed up something good in her life.

Without really knowing why, she opened the camera app and flipped it to front-facing.

She looked tired, awful, really all of her forty-one years, but who really cared?

Pressing the big red button in the centre, she shook her head.

‘Hi. This isn’t a planned video. Something I posted recently did better than I thought it ever would, not that I thought about it anyway, which isn’t the point.

It is lovely, I suppose, that people are connecting with my stuff.

Except it wasn’t really meant to, well, go that far.

It was just me, sharing bits and bobs from my life.

And I realise now that not everyone wants to be shared, whatever the intention, and I feel bad.

I’m sorry for rushing it and for not slowing down enough to think something through.

You know what? As I look back at other situations in my life, I’ve often had my fingers burnt because I have done precisely that and not thought things through. ’

Blinking and swallowing, Darby's voice portrayed exactly how she felt. ‘I talk a lot about taking things gently and I forgot to do that when it really mattered. I have to say I feel like an idiot. I’ve failed at so many things and this is why.’

Shaking her head, Darby tutted, clicked the video off, then closed the app.

There was no way she would ever post it, but in a funny way, speaking to her phone now felt cathartic and as if it were part of her life.

A step up from a kitchen wall. For ages, she just sat there stroking Lola and let her mind go on tangents all over the place. Things were not great at all.