It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (31 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Red bag: cycling shorts, cycling shoes, cycling helmet – and it had better bloody work – cycling gloves, socks. Towel, sunblock. Three energy gels, two bottles of energy drink, one bottle water, sunglasses, watch.”

“All there.”

“Blue bag: running shoes, running shorts, running socks, high-vis arm band, sunblock, baseball cap for sun protection, three energy gels, one bottle energy drink, two bananas.”

“Okay.”

“Special needs bag,” I made the horrible politically incorrect face I made whenever I said ‘special needs’, and Ben looked disapproving. “Two Mars bars, one can Coke, one packet cheese and onion crisps, Marmite sandwiches. I’ll make those before we go to bed. Christ, though, this is more like a bloody picnic than a triathlon. Are you sure you don’t need to pack a corkscrew somewhere?”

“No corkscrew. No booze again, ever. Not until tomorrow night, anyway. Remind me again why I thought this was a good idea?”

“Because you’re a man, and you do stupid, man things to prove your manliness,” I said. “Speaking of which, tell me again what happened with Nina.”

Ben abandoned his various bags and came and sat down again, scooping Winston on to his lap, and half-heartedly forking up some pasta.

“She sent me a friend request on Facebook,” he said. “So I accepted it, because that’s what you do. And I sent her a message, just to find out how she was, and then she suggested that we meet up. And when we did she told me she’d just got back from America and had nowhere to stay, and I was worried about her, because you know she’s always been…”

“Barking mad?” I said.

“Emotionally fragile,” Ben said. “I didn’t know about her son then. But the next day she turned up at the flat with all her stuff, and him, and although she never said I was his father, she didn’t say I wasn’t, either. And the name… And she never mentioned that bloody
Oliver. And he was okay, you know, the kid. I’d like to see him again.”

I thought, over my cold, dead body. But I said, “Tell me again that you weren’t sleeping with her.”

Ben reached across the table and put his warm, dry hand over mine. There were calluses at the base of his fingers, from all the weight training and stuff he’d been doing in the gym – I could feel their roughness against my skin. “I didn’t sleep with her,” he said. “I got the sofa and she and Benedict got my bed, and Winston wasn’t too pleased about it, were you?” He scratched Winston under the chin, and the cat began his thunderous purring, narrowing his eyes and looking adoringly at Ben. It’s possible that I may have looked adoringly at him, too. “But what could I do? She needed me, she needed some sort of stability, and she told me she had nowhere to go. She certainly didn’t say she had a Mum living in Croydon.”

“Like I said, mad as a box of frogs.”

“Emotionally fragile,” Ben corrected me.

“But she’s Oliver’s problem now, I guess.”

“Looks that way. They came round on Tuesday to collect Nina’s stuff – not that she had very much. Oliver really seems to love her.” Ben shook his head in bemusement.

“You loved her too, remember? I thought you still did.”

Ben ate some more pasta. “I don’t think it was ever love,” he said. “I was infatuated with her, fascinated by her. And then I got sucked in by all her hysterics and drama, and once I got to the point of wishing I could end the relationship, she was threatening crazy things. I was devastated when she buggered off, because I felt so guilty about not having been able to make things right for her.”

“You’re too nice for your own good,” I said.

“Unlike you,” Ben teased. “Brazen hussy. Trying to shag your sister’s boyfriend.”

I cringed, feeling a blush creeping up my neck. “Don’t,” I said. “I feel so ashamed. I behaved horribly. But then so did Rose, of course.”

“What happened with her and Oliver in the end?” Ben said.

“Well, he found out that Rose had slept with Jamie, the night before she sat for his portrait, which was Oliver’s birthday, and afterwards too. And understandably he was absolutely livid, and dumped her. But Rose was like, ‘You can’t fire me, I quit!’ because she’d realised that things between her and Oliver were never going to work. She was only really with him because she’d got it into her head that she needed to marry a rich bloke because she was in such a financial mess. And then Jamie gave her half the money he got for the Gainsborough Prize, and that little cat picture of his Rose bought is worth loads more now than she paid for it.”

“Is that generous,” Ben wondered, “or a bit creepy?”

“Oh, generous, I think,” I said, “but generous with an ulterior motive. Jamie’s absolutely smitten with Rose, you can tell.”

“And Rose?”

“Smitten too, I think. Or at least ninety percent of the way there. Jamie’s lovely, and he doesn’t take crap from Rose.”

“And now,” Ben said, “why don’t you tell me you never shagged Peter Barclay?”

I looked down at my bowl of pasta. There was still rather a lot left. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t even tell you it was rubbish, because it wasn’t, really. But I can tell you it was never as good as with you. Nothing is.”

“I was so fucking jealous of Oliver, you know,” Ben said. “I let you think something was going on with Claire and me, just to try and give you a taste of how it felt.
And then Claire told me about you and Peter, and I realised it had all backfired totally, and then Nina got in touch with me, and I thought, what the hell, I’d see if it was worth giving things another go with her. But I realised it couldn’t work, and that I’d never really felt the same way about her as I did about you.”

“And that is?”

“Ellie, don’t be so needy. You know how I feel about you.”

“I don’t. You’ve never said.”

“Come on, Ellie. I was completely batshit crazy about you from the first time you gave me an impromptu lager shower in the student union bar nearly eight years ago.”

“Seven years, five months and sixteen days,” I said. “But are you still? Even though I’m a brazen hussy, and stupid, and selfish?”

“You have been a bit stupid and selfish,” Ben agreed, “but everyone is, at least some of the time. And you’re those things much less often than lots of people, and you’re funny, and brave, and brilliant and beautiful. And of course you’re a brazen hussy, and that’s really what I like best about you.”

“Only ‘like’?” I said.

“Blimey,” Ben said, “It’s like being under interrogation by the Gestapo. Okay, Ellie, I love you. I always have done. And unless something fairly drastic happens to change things, I suspect I always will. Now I have to be up at four in the morning to swim four kilometres, cycle a hundred and eighty, and then maybe knock off a quick forty-two K run, so we should probably get some sleep.”

I looked at his gorgeous, familiar face, and felt a flood of happiness. Here I was with my favourite person in the world, we were friends again, and he loved me. Everything was going to be all right. And mixed with the relief, looking at his strong hands, the way his
mouth moved when he talked and smiled, the lean muscles in his arms and the breadth of his shoulders, I felt the delicious glow of desire that I’d always felt for him, that had been there so constantly I suppose I’d stopped noticing it. It’s a bit like when your favourite album is playing on your iPod, but you’re doing something else, like the ironing or working out in the gym or you’re looking out of the window of the bus or whatever, and it’s just there in the background, until suddenly a familiar phrase brings you back to the music, and you start to sing along without really thinking about it.

“Not so fast, buster,” I said. “I happened to be reading
Triathlete’s World
the other day, and I happened to come across an article that said the theory that sexual intercourse before a sporting event impairs performance was long ago disproven.”

“Is that so?” Ben said.

“Well, we don’t have the opportunity to test the hypothesis properly, over a series of randomised trials with a control group,” I said. “It comes down to one thing: do you trust
Triathlete’s World
or don’t you?”

“Implicitly,” said Ben, and he stood up, tipping Winston on to the floor, and folded his arms round me and kissed me as if he’d never stop. Breathless with urgency, we pulled each other’s clothes off and pressed our bodies together, rediscovering all the familiar things about each other and learning all the new ones (I felt rather smug about the fact that I was wearing really nice, lacy underwear that matched, and I’d had every bit of superfluous hair waxed off the day before, entirely co-incidentally), and it was as totally amazing at it had ever been. And afterwards, as we were lying sweaty and sated in each other’s arms, with Winston in his proper place on my hip, purring away, I said to Ben, “I love you too, you know. Just saying.”

If the love interest in your life ever asks you to come along and support him while he spends thirteen hours putting himself through mental and physical hell in the interests of raising money for charity, or just because he wants to see whether he can do it, my advice is, just say no. Step away from the lunatic fitness freak and go and find yourself some nice lardy bloke whose idea of vigorous exercise is walking to the fridge to get another tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Seriously. Because if you do what I did, and loyally go along, this is what will happen.

Ben set the alarm on his phone for four o’clock in the morning – a time that as far as I’m concerned has no right to exist, except when you haven’t been to bed yet. Then he made me set the alarm on my phone too, and found some online alarm clock and set that too. Then he was too nervous to get to sleep at all, and we lay next to each other and every now and then he’d say, “Why did I think this was a good idea, again?” Then Winston decided there was a mouse in the flat and spent about an hour thumping around, doing the special unnerving yowling he does when he’s hunting. Eventually we did fall asleep, and it felt like about ten seconds later that all the alarms went off at once, and we sprang out of bed and launched ourselves into a frenzy of getting ready, with me checking off the to-do list Ben had made on his phone (and backed up on his laptop, and written down on paper just in case there was some sort of superbug that wiped out the world’s electronic communications. Which I expect would have led to the wretched event being cancelled altogether, but I didn’t tell Ben that, he was too stressed already, bless him). He was so anxious that he’d literally noted down every single thing he needed to do: “Get up. Shower. Drink coffee. Eat porridge.” And so on.

Eventually everything on the to-do list was done, and we left the flat, laden with all Ben’s bags, and got a train and then a bus to the start of the race, where he’d dropped his bicycle off the day before. It was heinously early and still actually rather cold, and neither of
us said very much, because I was too sleepy and Ben was too nervous. But he held my hand in a kind of death grip until it was time for him to go off and squeeze himself into his wetsuit and prepare to dive into the murky waters of the Thames, which looked as cold and unpleasant as anything I’ve ever seen.

“I’ll see you after the swim and at the halfway point on the run,” Ben said. “And at the end. If I get there.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I love you.”

Ben said, “Have you got my Marmite sandwiches?”

I said, “Durrr! Yes! Obviously,” and off Ben went to get changed and start his swim. But of course I didn’t have the shagging Marmite sandwiches, because, well, we’d been so busy shagging the night before that I’d forgotten to make them. His swim was only scheduled to take about an hour and a half, and I calculated that there was no way I’d have time to go back to his flat, make the stupid sandwiches, and get back in time to see him safely on to his bike. I was going to have to brazen it out. So I waited, watching all the totally identical swimmers ploughing through the cloudy water, until Ben emerged, changed again and set off on his bike, looking far less like the Creature from the Black Lagoon than anyone has any right to after swimming in the Thames. None of his fingers or toes had been eaten off by giant carp, or anything. As soon as he was gone, I retraced our steps – bus, train, Tube – back to Ben’s flat, and spent fifteen minutes slicing bread and spreading butter and Marmite on it and cutting the sandwiches into triangles, and I’m ashamed to say I may have given each triangle a little kiss before I wrapped them up, and then I got the Tube and the train and the bus back to the race. I was there when Ben finished his cycle, smiling brightly and holding the special needs bag that contained the sandwiches (and making the not-very-appropriate face) and watched him get changed and set off to run a mere forty-two kilometres on the last
stage of his journey to raise money for a cause I cared about. If I hadn’t known before that I really did love him, I did then.

And when he eventually did cross the finishing line, he looked so amazing, shattered and sweaty but grinning like mad, and I felt so proud of him I just burst into tears. I thought how unbelievably lucky I was to have realised that this gorgeous, brave, kind, sexy man had been right there all along, under my nose, before it was too late. And I hugged him, and he wept a bit too, and I heard my voice, all muffled with crying, say, “Ben, will you marry me?”

And Ben, because he’s not the kind of person to be constrained by the social and gender stereotypes that say it’s the man who should propose marriage, and because he feels the same way about me, said, “Yes, please.”

Or it may have been because he was puking and hallucinating with exhaustion, of course. I can’t say for sure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A funny thing happened at Ben’s and my engagement party. Well, of course, any number of minor ones did, like Alex falling into the river when he tried to punt in a rowing boat, and Vanessa getting chased by an angry swan.

It was a totally perfect summer’s day, and we were all sitting outside in the garden of Dad and Serena’s house, and Rose did the catering and got predictably obsessive about it, except when she was being all neurotic and stressing about the strawberries needing to be chilled for the cocktails and there not being enough space in the fridge for them, Jamie took her face between his palms and looked into her eyes and said tenderly, “Rosamund, stop
being fucking ridiculous.”