AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do you think this place is safe?” Joel asked now, and I shrugged one shoulder, forgetting he couldn’t see me.
“It must be reasonably robust, or it’d blow away every time they had a monsoon. Wait, do they have monsoons here?”
There was a silence as Joel tried to figure this out.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Isn’t the monsoon to do with landmass? They don’t have it in the Maldives, I know that.”
“Well, regardless,” I whispered, “I’m sure they’ve had storms before, so the fact that this place is still here is reassuring.”
I heard, more than saw, Joel nod—heard the movement of his beard against the pillow, though even as I said the words it occurred to me, we didn’t actually know how long this villa had been standing. Maybe it had never weathered a storm. Still, there must be building codes. Mustn’t there? Joel spoke again, and I dragged my mind back to the present.
“Are you okay about Nico? It must have been a shock. I know it’s not—you know. Not what you planned.”
“No.” That was putting it mildly. I sighed and turned my pillow to the cool side, willing myself to relax, but I was too keyed up.
After Santana had fixed us up a rudimentary picnic from leftovers she’d found in the staff quarters, Joel and I had been dragged off to the one-to-one booth for interviews, and then to the Ever After Villa, which had, horrifyingly, been dressed up as a romantic honeymoon suite, complete with a heart in scattered rose petals on the bed, a champagne bucket full of ice, and two white fluffy robes. There was only one bed, and Camille shook her head when I asked about the possibility of getting some kind of blow-up mattress.
“I’m sorry, Lyla, there’s nothing of that kind on the island, and as you can see, getting a regular mattress across the jetty wouldn’t be easy. Plus it wouldn’t look great on camera. But I’m sure this one is big enough for two. You can always build a pillow wall!”
In the end, after Joel and I had changed into the robes and done a series of mortifying champagne toasts to each other, followed by shots of us leaning side by side on the veranda fence, staring up at what was supposed to be the moon, but was by now nothing but clouds, the crew had relented and let us go—although more, I suspected, because it was five to nine and Camille was getting increasingly antsy about Baz’s injunction to be back on the Over Easy before nine o’clock.
Before they’d left, I had managed to get the basics of what would be happening to Nico.
He was back on the ship, being filmed and debriefed right now, and then, as soon as the rest of the crew rejoined the boat, they would set sail overnight for an island about six hours away with a helicopter pad, where he’d be picked up and flown back to Jakarta for return to the UK.
The Over Easy would turn around and return here in time for another day’s filming. That was why Baz had been so insistent about the 9 p.m. cutoff—there was a very narrow window for them to get to the helicopter site and back in time for breakfast.
After the crew had left, Joel and I had had a polite but ultimately futile argument about who would take the floor, lots of but I insist and no don’t be silly, I prefer a hard surface.
In the end though, sense had prevailed and we’d agreed to sleep at the far sides of the very large bed, which was honestly farther away from each other than if one of us had been on the floor. We agreed though, not to tell Romi.
“If she asks, I slept in the bath,” Joel said firmly, and I nodded. It was only afterwards, when I was changing into an old T-shirt for bed, that I looked up and clocked the impassive black lens of the camera mounted in the corner of the room. I had no idea what footage they’d be using—hopefully not me scrabbling to unhook my bra—but it would most definitely not show Joel sleeping in the bathroom. It might be better for Joel to tell the truth, given it was going to come out anyway. That said, I wasn’t convinced he and Romi were going to survive this experience. Not just the Ever After Villa—I didn’t flatter myself that my fatal allure had the power to break up long-standing relationships—but the whole thing. The TV show, the exposure if it aired… all of it.
Now, two hours later, I was lying awake in the dark, listening to the wind and wondering whether Nico too was lying awake in a cabin on the Over Easy. Maybe he hadn’t even gone to bed. Maybe he was busy pouring out a stream of bile to some exhausted camera crew. Or maybe he’d drunk himself into a stupor and was snoring his head off.
“What did you put on your answers, then?” Joel whispered, and I sighed.
“Pretty much exactly the same as you, going by the snippets they broadcast. I mean, our ideal nights out were virtually identical, and I picked The Godfather as my favorite film too. And for the place I’d love to go but have never been, I put Venice.”
“Same. What did you put for your favorite book?”
“Rebecca. What about you?”
“I put Remains of the Day,” Joel said. “Romi put Fifty Shades of Grey.” He sighed, and above the sound of the wind, I could hear him rubbing his hand unhappily over his face as if trying to rub away the reality of the day. “I know. Says it all, doesn’t it?”
“Joel, why are you together?” I asked, without thinking, and then wished I’d bitten my tongue. “I’m sorry, that was— I didn’t mean it like that; it’s just that the two of you—you’re not…”
“What?”
“Not a very obvious couple, I guess?” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted them. I had tried to phrase it as neutrally as I could, but I could tell that Joel was nettled. His voice, when he spoke, sounded defensive.
“I could say the same about you and Nico.”
I shrugged. I wanted to argue, but he had a point, one the last few days had made painfully obvious. There was a silence, and then Joel spoke, his voice very low, as though he were trying to make sure it didn’t get picked up by any hidden microphones.
“I don’t honestly know anymore. We’ve been together for years—we met backpacking in Goa after uni, and somehow being far from home… maybe it felt like we had more in common than we did. But since then… we’ve just got more and more different. She doesn’t like any of my friends. I try, but to be honest, I’m not really interested in any of hers. I’m sporty, she’s not. I’m a saver, she’s a splurger. We watch completely different programs. When we met in Goa we were both these grubby, cheapskate students in flip-flops and ripped T-shirts, and since then she’s got more and more high-maintenance, while I’m only marginally more scrubbed up than I was in Anjula Beach. But it’s more than that. We just don’t spend any time together anymore. And somehow now we’re here…”
He trailed off. I thought of Nico and me, the nights I spent at the lab, listening to my podcasts as I pipetted and aliquotted my samples, Nico off at some bar. The way he was extrovert, I was introvert. He was instinctive, I was analytical. He lived life in the moment, I was a planner. And the way we had rubbed along for the best part of two-and-a-half years, our mutual attraction papering over the cracks… until Ever After Island had turned them into a chasm.
