Chapter 12

12

It’s already day three. I wake up sweating after a terrible dream in which Gen and Ryan beat me up with a pair of Sennheiser microphones and livestream the whole thing on YouTube.

“That’s so dark, Delphie,” I mutter to myself, sitting up and thus initiating the horrendous sensation of my brain trying to escape my skull via my eyeballs. I pick up my phone to check the time. Five a.m.? Gross.

A wave of horror immediately worms its way through my body. Usually I don’t have specific reasons to feel bad—it’s more just what my GP refers to as “a general malaise that will be improved by a good diet, regular exercise, talking therapy and twenty milligrams of daily fluoxetine,” but now I have a great big bunch of reasons.

“Uuuuuggggh.” I bury my head in my hands. Then it dawns on me. “Mr. Yoon!” Shit. I was so drunk last night, I forgot to check on his gas and cigarettes. The fact that I’m not dead of fire bodes well, but still, anything could have happened.

I gingerly crawl out of the bed and take a copy of Mr. Yoon’s key from where it hangs by the front door. As quietly as I can, I enter his apartment, the sound of him lightly snoring away a balm to my anxieties. The living room is bright but still cool. I check the oven and his ashtray. Both fine. Good. That’s good.

Mr. Yoon’s cigarettes are extinguished, but the ashtray is almost overflowing with cigarette butts. It would wake him up if I tried to wash it now, so I take it over to the kitchen, tip the ends into the bin, and then crouch down to the left-hand cupboard to look for a fresh ashtray so that he has a clean one for when he wakes up.

The cupboard is crammed with stuff, and I make a mental note to organise it when I get a spare moment. I spot an ashtray behind a picture frame. As quietly as I can, I slide out the picture frame so I can get to the ashtray. I plop down on the floor and turn the frame in the direction of the morning light filtering through the curtains. Gosh! Is this a picture of a young Mr. Yoon? Yes. It’s definitely him. He’s standing on a grand-looking stage, holding a violin and a bow in one hand and a trophy in the other. I try to make out what the words on the trophy say, but it’s an old photo and the quality is pretty low. Either way, Mr. Yoon plays the violin! And he is so good at it that he was once given some sort of award. I wonder why he never told me about this in his notes.

“Very cool, Mr. Yoon,” I whisper to myself, sliding the frame back into the cupboard. I take the clean ashtray over to his table. Beside the bunch of sweet peas I brought him last week lies a massive bag of the fizzy cola bottles I’ve been trying to get him to stop snacking on. How the hell did he get his hands on those? Does he have a dealer? A shady sweet shop man lurking about the building and exchanging baggies of sours for cash?

Tutting, I let myself out of Mr. Yoon’s and creep back over to my apartment. As I step inside, my foot skids slightly on an envelope that’s been slipped under my door.

I pick it up, open it, and take out two pieces of paper from inside. I unfold the first piece of paper, my heart immediately lifting when I see that it’s a black-and-white print-out of a photo of Jonah. The actual Jonah! He’s even more beautiful than I remembered, his eyes twinkling brightly, his smile welcoming and confident. I shake my head. Who sent this?

I unfold the other piece of paper—it’s a note scribbled in black ink, the writing looped and precise.

Delphie,

I did a little more hunting and this sounds like the man you described. Unfortunately due to the resolution of the image, I cannot ascertain whether his eyes could be deemed “dreamy” but otherwise I believe it might be him. His name is Jonah Truman. His social profiles are private and he doesn’t accept messages, but after some investigating I found that he is a member of Kensington Gardens Running Club. They run every morning at 7am. I hope you are able to catch him, if it is indeed the Jonah you hooked up with all over this town.

Regards,

Cooper

Oh my gosh! Jonah has been found! And Kensington Gardens? That’s so close. Does he live in Paddington? Notting Hill? Was he nearby all this time and I never knew?

Wow.

“Jonah,” I whisper to myself. I close my eyes and imagine his lips pressed against mine. In Evermore he looked at me like all I’d have to do is ask him. Just like that. Like someone in a movie from the 1940s. Now kiss me, you fool! But this is the real world. Surely I’ll need to prep things. Ask him for a drink first at the very least.

A surge of adrenaline pulses through me at the thought of being sat in a bar, across the table from Jonah, his dazzling blue eyes lit by candlelight.

“Ahahaha!” I shout into the air in case Merritt is watching. “In less than two days! Bet you feel silly for gloating now.” The excitement at getting to see Jonah again, not to mention the huge relief that I have managed to save my own life, propels me straight past the headache and into the shower, where I perform an intense toothbrushing because while Jonah is unlikely to kiss me immediately, it seems that, in this particular scenario, it’s best to be prepared for absolutely anything to happen.

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While I have plenty of clothes that are just fine for a hot day outdoors, I don’t have much to choose from that is (a) suitable for running, assuming that Jonah is going to be jogging, or (b) alluring enough to move a man to want to ask me for a coffee or a dinner or to go for a walk that will—hopefully quite quickly—lead to a lifesaving kiss. My clothes are built for practicality, and he’s hardly going to be enticed if I’m wearing my oversized V&A T-shirt and denim shorts.

I open my wardrobe and riffle frantically through all the clothes I have. As expected, nothing that could be considered at all enticing. And then I get a brain wave. The bag full of stuff Mum didn’t take with her to the artists’ commune! Maybe there’s something in there? Everyone found Mum alluring. Well, everyone except for Dad, in the end.

I drag a kitchen chair over to the tall cupboard by my front door and, standing on my tiptoes, yank the plastic bag out. It’s much heavier than I anticipated and it bounces off my head before plopping onto the ground with a crinkly thud, me following swiftly behind.

I get my bearings and eagerly untie the yellow plastic strings at the top of the bag. As it opens, I’m hit with a scent that triggers a heady rush of emotion. Sadness and longing and nostalgia and anger tumble around in my stomach. I pull out a cotton dress, the fabric a red-and-white-love-heart print. How can these clothes still smell like Chanel No. 5 and Lenor and Nivea sun cream? Like Mum? I made sure to wash them all before I packed them away—I’d meant to take them to the charity shop but I’d somehow never got round to it.

I press the dress to my nose for a millisecond. I’m rewarded for my idiocy with a surge of recollections about Mum. In my memories she is never still. Always zipping from one room to the other, racing through chores, arranging parties, chatting to her pals on the phone, helping Gen and me with homework because Gen’s own mum was at work all the time. Mum treated home life like a project, giving it her all in an effort to make it a total success. After Dad broke her heart, it’s like she suddenly saw the whole project as a failure. Not just the marriage, but her entire life, including me.

She spent the next six months barely functioning, often sleeping in until 5:00 p.m., or having cocktail hour at 11:00 a.m., crying loudly in the bath every night. After Gen and I got home after school one day to find Mum passed out on the sofa, an empty saucepan burning away on the hob, I stopped inviting Gen over. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of Gen knowing that since Dad had gone, life at home had become so bleak. By the time Mum came through the other side, Gen had decided she hated me. And then, of course, Mum met Gerard and moved to the artists’ commune in Texas, deciding to pick back up on the art she used to make before she got pregnant with me.

The dust layered over the old clothes makes me sneeze four times in a row before I recover enough to search through the bag for anything that might be suitable for a momentous kiss in the park.

Aha! There it is! I unearth the outfit Mum used to wear to go running. It’s much skimpier than I remember, though. A cool grey sports bra with orange stripes down the side and a pair of matching leggings. Mum was much smaller than my size 12 but that might be a good thing. If TV shows are anything to go by, then tight clothes could do the trick. I quickly pull the clothes on. I don’t have a full-length mirror to check that the bottom half looks good, but it seems to fit quite well. I check my top half in the bathroom mirror. The tightness makes my boobs splodge out at the top. Other than that it’s fine. Way better for running than anything else I have.

I blast my hair with the cool setting of the hair dryer and tie it up into my usual braids, fastening them securely at the top of my head with ten bobby pins and a shit-ton of hairspray. Then I dab some concealer under my eyes in what turns out to be a futile attempt to cover the grey circles caused by last night’s cocktails.

I slip my feet into my good old Nikes and I leave the flat.