Page 67 of Stella is Starting Over

‘Are you okay?’ she whispers.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper back. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. . .’

She sighs and gets off my lap. ‘Can I be plain?’

‘Are you ever anything other than plain?’

She nods. ‘Fair cop. But look, you look terrible. You don’t seem yourself. And now you’re suddenly trying to move to a different country. What’s going on?’

I laugh. ‘There’s nothing going on! I just got off a plane. I’m tired.’

‘The flight is less than two hours.’

‘I’ve had quite a lot on. At home.’

She looks concerned. ‘Like what?’

And then it all comes spilling out. Florrie, the pregnancy scare, realising that I want kids, realising that I’ve left it pretty late to realise that I might actually want to have kids. Stella. Our date, the almost shag, meeting her husband, hanging out with her kid. The fact that I think about her all the time, that she broke my fucking heart when she called me out the other day, the whole horrible messy, miserable business.

‘You’re an idiot,’ she says, smiling. ‘But I think even you know what the answer is here.’

I shake my head. ‘What if it’s not that I have feelings for her? What if it’s just that, right now, I think I want kids and a marriage, and she’s the fastest way to get there, and then as soon as I’ve got her, if she’ll even have me because she’s in a relationship with a really rich guy whose name is literally Richard – what if I break that up, and then I get bored and I break her heart, and what if I even fuck up Rose’s life?’

I look at Orla, at the flush on her chest and her unbuttoned top and how gorgeously pretty she is. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have taken up your evening when I’m so messed up.’

She kneels up and kisses me gently on the cheek. ‘You’re going to be fine.’ She smiles. ‘And I’m going to find someone who’s a bit like you, but much less trouble.’

I pause, because my phone is ringing and basically no one ever calls me. I look at the screen and do a double take. ‘It’s Stella,’ I say. ‘Why would Stella be calling me?’

Orla shrugs. ‘It sounds like you should pick up the phone.’

I answer. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi,’ Stella says, her voice low. The skin on the back of my neck goes tight. Something is wrong.

‘What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is it Rose?’

‘I’m at a hotel with Richard and I told him that you came over last week, after he’d asked me to stop seeing you, and he’s angry. Really angry.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in the bathroom, I just told him I needed a breather. Listen, if I go in there and I call you, can you just tell him that nothing happened? That it was purely platonic?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Stella! This is not normal – he can’t—’

‘I know,’ she snaps. ‘Please, I just need your help with damage limitation, okay? I lied to him, I shouldn’t have lied to him, I just need to—’

I look at Orla. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mouth.

‘Go into the other room,’ Orla tells me. ‘Talk to her. I’ll make some more coffee.’

Stella

From the moment I say the name ‘Dominic’, I realise that it was a mistake to tell Richard. I mean, arguably it was a mistake to agree to not see one of my best mates, but we’re several mistakes on from that now. Richard is sitting across the table from me, our untouched plates of food getting cold as he stares at me.

‘Dominic?’ he repeats coolly.

‘Yes,’ I say, trying not to get flustered. ‘Dominic. The friend I went on a date with a while back? You’d asked me not to see him any more, but circumstances conspired and I ended up having him over to dinner the other week, and I thought I should mention it, just in the interest of honesty.’