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) 📖

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Shh. It’s OK. You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’

Her fists clutch the fabric of my pyjama top; I can feel the wetness of her tears against my chest, and I hold her tighter.

‘You make it look so easy,’ she says, her voice muffled, vibrating against me.

‘Make what look so easy?’

‘Forgiving me,’ she says, so quietly I almost don’t catch it.

‘Forgiving you?’ I rub a hand up and down her back, slowly, carefully.

‘I don’t know if I can do that the way you can.’

‘Addie . . . I don’t expect you to forgive me. I understand how hard that is.’

‘No,’ she says, shaking her head into my chest. ‘No, you don’t . . . I don’t mean I can’t forgive you, Dylan – God, I forgave you months ago, right away, maybe, it’s . . .’

She trails off, quivering in my arms, and I’m feeling too many things at once: hope, sadness, the loss of what we had—

The bathroom door clicks open. We freeze.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ says Marcus. ‘I should have bloody known.’

Addie

I flee the bathroom, shoving past Marcus. I can hardly see through the darkness and the tears. I wake Deb by kneeing her in the shin as I try to climb back into bed.

‘Addie?’ Deb whispers.

I burrow under the duvet.

‘This is absolutely classic,’ Marcus is saying in the bathroom. His voice is so loud. I bet Rodney is sitting up in his sleeping bag now, woken by all the noise. I clench my eyes tight shut and try to focus on my breathing, but it’s coming too fast.

‘We should have bloody well walked to that godforsaken bit of Scotland; I should never have let you get in the car with her!’ Marcus’s voice is rising.

‘He was the one asking for the lift,’ Deb says. She ducks under the duvet with me. ‘Ignore him, Addie. You know he’s hell-spawn.’

‘Be quiet,’ Dylan says to Marcus.

Deb and I both startle. It’s a tone I’ve never heard Dylan use before. Not when we argued, not on the night when he left me.

‘Just. Be. Quiet.’

We lie still. I can’t see Deb, but I can feel her gaze.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. And I won’t have you speaking about Addie like that.’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘What’s going on?’ Rodney says from the other end of the room.

‘Why do you keep saying I don’t know what I’m talking about?’ Marcus is yelling now. ‘Why does everyone keep saying shit like that when I am the only person who knows what I’m talking about around here? I took the fucking picture, Dylan. I saw her in his office letting him run his hand up her thigh like—’

There’s a scuffle – Deb reaches across and grips my good hand tight, so tight it hurts, and inside me I feel the desperation again, rising up my gullet, and I tear my hand free from Deb’s and throw myself out of the bed and through the bathroom door right into Marcus and Dylan who are locked together, roaring, fighting, and I push through the tangle of messy limbs and rage and get to the toilet just in time to vomit.

THEN

Dylan

I’ve never seen Marcus like this before. There’s vomit in his hair, crusted to his curls, and his eyes are so vacant he looks like a zombie. The living room of his house is filled with takeaway boxes and every surface looks sticky, fetid; there’s a circle of Fanta spreading slowly across the carpet. He must have freshly kicked it over on his way to answer the door.

‘Marcus,’ I begin, and then I catch him as he stumbles forward into me. I try not to turn my head aside at the smell of him. ‘Marcus, what the hell happened?’

It’s been three months since I left our anniversary dinner and found Marcus drunk in the middle of the road outside his house, staggering through suburban Chichester with a bottle in one hand and his phone in the other, a portrait of dissolution. Ever since then I’ve spent as much time as I can with him, but it isn’t enough – he needs real help. Luke came to stay for a couple of weeks in September, and, actually, Grace has been here more than I would have expected – she’s good with Marcus, too, he’s calm with her – but neither of them can be on-call with him. Grace lives in Bristol now, trying to get herself away from the London modelling scene, and Luke’s back in New York with Javier.

The days get shorter and darker and Marcus behaves more and more strangely. Last week I found him outside our flat – somewhere he’s refused to come lately – trying to climb on top of our dustbin, and when I asked him why, he just kept tapping his nose. ‘All in good time, my friend,’ he said, a crisp packet from the bin flapping butterfly-like against his T-shirt. ‘All in good time.’

Tonight I’m supposed to be taking Addie back to Wiltshire when she finishes at school, so she can finally meet my parents. I can hardly bear to think about the argument we’ll have when I tell her we have to cancel again, but there’s no way Marcus can be left alone.

‘I knew you’d come,’ he says, as I lever him upright and lead him towards the sofa. ‘I knew it.’

‘Yeah, I’m here,’ I say wearily, setting him down on the sofa as best I can. ‘Are you going to be sick again?’

‘What? No! Fuck off. I’m not going – not going to be sick.’

As if there isn’t already an acrid scent of vomit clinging to everything in here, including me, after helping him towards the sofa. I sit down in the chair opposite him and look at my feet. I feel bodily exhausted; a poem tugs at me, something about the ache of giving and its