The Road Trip: The heart-warming new novel from the author of The Flatshare and The Switch Beth O'Leary (ready to read books .TXT) 📖

hair. His movements are even more frantic and erratic than usual; I wonder if he’s taken something. ‘She’s not right.’

I gulp down three cold mouthfuls of beer. My head is spinning. ‘She is,’ I say. ‘She’s perfect.’

‘Stop that,’ Marcus shouts, and I jump, beer running down the back of my hand. ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re turning her into something she’s not. You don’t understand her. She’s not your beautiful muse, Dylan, she’s messy and dark and raw. She’s a disaster waiting to happen. She’s got power and she doesn’t even know it yet, you know? She’s like . . . she’s untapped.’

I stare at him. He’s pacing now, tugging at his curls.

‘She’s not right for you,’ he says. ‘OK?’

‘Well, I think she is,’ I say, a little helpless. He’s definitely high – I don’t know how I didn’t clock it earlier. He hasn’t even seen Addie since France, and we hardly even talk about her – I can’t fathom when he could have got around to deciding she’s so catastrophic for me.

I watch him try to gather himself, pausing mid step and pivoting on his toes to look at me.

‘Role reversal,’ he says. ‘What if it was me doing this? With her? What would you say if I was changing my whole life and being a different person and idolising this girl? You and India would be teaming up for a full-scale intervention and you know it.’

I pause. That’s actually true, to be quite honest. But I’m not Marcus. He falls in and out of love with women the way he falls in and out of love with everything: rapidly, thoughtlessly, with flair. Whereas I . . . I’ve never felt this way before.

‘I know this maybe looks – fast – or a bit spontaneous, but I might as well be in Chichester as anywhere while I figure out what I want to do, and . . .’

Marcus stretches his arms out. ‘Fine. You can do the whole buying-a-flat-in-Chichester thing if you must. But crash here while you’re looking. Don’t tell me squeezing into Addie’s parents’ house is better than this.’

For a split second I imagine myself here, wandering down to the lake on a morning with my notebook tucked into my coat pocket and a pen behind my ear, giving myself the space and permission I need to write. But no. I want to squeeze into Addie’s parents’ house. I want to stand with her in the kitchen as they clatter around her making jokes about cats and semi-skimmed milk; I want to know how her bun slips sideways in the night, how her voice is low and throaty when she wakes, how she blinks and squirms when I open her bedroom curtains.

‘I can’t just live at the end of your dad’s garden. That’s – it’s so good of him to have said I can join you here, but . . .’

‘Dad built it for the two of us,’ Marcus says abruptly. ‘There was no “joining me here” about it. This is ours. A monument to friendship.’ He raises his beer to me, but his eyes are stony.

‘That’s amazing. It’s amazing,’ I say, floundering. ‘I just need a minute to think about all this. It’s quite a change of plan.’

I look around. There’s an enormous TV, flat screen, fixed to the wall above a wood-burning stove. The cushions on the sofa are pristine white fur.

‘All right. Let’s just get drunk and enjoy it,’ Marcus says, downing the rest of his beer, shoulders suddenly relaxing; you can see his mood shift. ‘And I’ll give you another talking-to in the morning, by which time you will hopefully have seen sense.’ He grins, up off the sofa again, heading to the fridge. ‘Come on, Dylan, my man – I’m in the mood for mischief. Let’s see if we can revive the Dylan who completed every Jameson Society assignment in record time in first year.’

Marcus slams a bottle of tequila down on the table, making me jump again.

‘Alexa?’ he yells. ‘Play Zara Larsson, “Lush Life”.’

I jump again as speakers blare. Marcus is already up, already dancing. He’s the sort of man who can dance alone and not look like a tit, a quality I’ve always coveted.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ he says, glancing up at the clock hanging above the doorway. He dances his way to the wine rack set beneath one of the kitchen cabinets. ‘Let’s get some wine chilling, now, shall we?’

‘Who’s coming?’ I down the rest of my beer; I’m suddenly desperate to get drunk.

Marcus shrugs. ‘A few people from uni, a few from around here . . . Everyone you’d want at a housewarming.’

‘Let me invite Cherry and Addie and Deb,’ I say, reaching for my phone.

Marcus snatches it out of my hand. One moment he’s stacking wine bottles in the fridge, the next he’s dancing away with my iPhone in the air.

‘Hey!’

‘One night without the ball and chain,’ Marcus calls over his shoulder, disappearing out the kitchen door into the woods outside.

‘Hey, wait,’ I call, following.

The door kicks back in my face. I push it open again, and the cold hits me like an upended bucket of water. My breath clouds. The fairy lights twinkle, turning Marcus gold as he runs into the trees.

‘Oi! Give me my phone back!’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Marcus yells, laughing. ‘For tonight, you’re solo Dylan, not Addie-plus-Dylan, all right? You’ll thank me, I promise! You’re so whipped these days.’ This is said to my face – he’s back, without my phone, bounding up the steps and smiling at me like we’re both in on the joke.

‘Have you just left it in the woods? What if it rains? And my phone gets wet?’

Marcus rolls his eyes as he pushes the kitchen door open again. ‘Then you’ll buy another one,’ he says. ‘Come on. I want my Dylan back.’

‘I’ve not changed,’ I say, frustrated. ‘I’ve not gone anywhere.’

Marcus claps a hand on my shoulder. Back in the warm of the cabin, my hands begin to thaw again. I can feel