The Road Trip: The heart-warming new novel from the author of The Flatshare and The Switch by Beth O'Leary (books to read now TXT) 📕

just the light from the loft bulb shining up through the trapdoor. Marcus’s hand brushes the back of mine for a moment as he shifts on the tiles.

‘He’s scared to come up,’ Marcus says.

‘Who, Dylan?’

‘He doesn’t like heights. But he tends to forget until he gets there.’

I can hear the smile in Marcus’s voice. I can hardly look at all the stars above us, like my brain just won’t take it all in.

‘You weren’t scared,’ Marcus says.

‘I was.’

‘But you’re up here anyway.’

‘Sure.’

‘Are you the sort of woman who always does the dangerous thing?’

I smile at that. ‘Not at all. I’m not that exciting.’

‘I think you are,’ Marcus says. He shifts. I think he’s turned to look at me, though it’s hard to be sure in the darkness. ‘And I’m excellent at reading people.’

‘Right,’ I say, humouring him. ‘Sure you are.’

‘Your school reports always said you had lots of potential. You’ve worn those bracelets on your wrist since you were thirteen, maybe earlier – you feel naked without them. You love to dance, and you love to be seen, and you hate to be forgotten. And when you stand at the edge of a sheer drop with somebody else . . . you think for just a moment about pushing them off.’

My foot slips a little and I gasp. Marcus chuckles.

‘Am I right?’

‘You’re a cliché,’ I tell him, resettling, pulse slowing. ‘You’re even trying to mansplain me to myself.’

‘Ah, but I’m right, though.’

I shake my head, but I’ve found as the evening’s gone on that it’s hard to be pissed off with Marcus. You get the sense he doesn’t take a single thing seriously. Telling him off would be like trying to discipline a cat.

‘I do love dancing,’ I concede. ‘I’ll give you that.’

‘I’d dance with you now if the roof were a little flatter,’ Marcus says.

I frown. He’s flirting. I don’t really know what to do about it, and the silence stretches, awkward, until he laughs into the dark.

‘You really like Dylan, don’t you?’ he says.

‘Yeah, I really like him.’

‘He told you about Grace?’

‘The woman he was looking for when he got here? Yeah, he told me.’ We’ve not talked about her much. Just enough to make me feel pretty confident he’s not actually that bothered.

‘So he told you she was with me when they started sleeping together?’

‘I . . .’ What?

‘Oh, he didn’t betray me, or anything as prosaic as that. I can feel the judgement coming off you in waves. I knew, he knew, that’s just how we roll.’

I can hear Dylan coming back into the loft below us. ‘Is it very high?’ he calls up at us. ‘I mean, of course it is, but . . . Is it very high? You know, does it feel high?’

Marcus laughs. ‘He’s kidding himself if he thinks he’ll really do it,’ he says, and this time when his hand brushes mine I can’t write it off as an accident.

‘He’ll do it,’ I say sharply, and shift away. ‘You can’t even tell there’s a drop!’ I call down. ‘It’s too dark! It’s just stars and stars and stars. Come on. It’s amazing, you’ll love it. Just climb up the ladder and stick your head out so you can see.’

Dylan emerges eventually, lit from below. His face is frozen in an expression I’ve not seen before. I can’t help smiling. He looks absolutely adorable, his sleepy green eyes almost clenched shut, his hair all mussed.

‘Look up,’ I tell him. ‘Just look up.’

He tilts his head back. I hear him breathe out. Marcus is silent behind me.

‘Good God,’ Dylan says. ‘It’s like . . .’ He trails off.

‘There’s not much that leaves Dylan unable to find a simile,’ Marcus says wryly.

Dylan looks back towards us. His eyes aren’t clenched quite so tightly now, but I can’t tell who he’s looking at, me or Marcus.

‘Well?’ Marcus says, as the moment stretches out. ‘Are you in or out, my friend? Up or down?’

Dylan takes a tentative step up the ladder and pauses again. ‘Oh, God,’ he says in a strangled voice.

I shuffle closer. ‘You don’t have to,’ I say. ‘You can see it fine from there.’

His mouth takes on this fixed look, like he’s gritting his teeth, and he takes another step up the ladder, then crawls himself up on to the roof. His chest is heaving by the time he’s next to me, but he lies back beside me without a word. I reach for his hand and squeeze it tight.

‘Dylan Abbott,’ Marcus says, sounding mildly impressed. ‘Aren’t you just full of surprises?’

NOW

Dylan

Deb is driving, Dolly Parton is playing, and Marcus is hungry; the result of these three things in combination is almost certain to be bad, so I am very much on edge.

‘You just have to wait,’ Deb tells Marcus, voice raised over Dolly.

Addie’s still sitting next to me, still so distracting I have to close my eyes whenever she moves. Thank goodness for Rodney, squashed to the other side of me, intermittently singing along to ‘Here You Come Again’ with infuriatingly incorrect lyrics.

‘There!’ Marcus yells, so suddenly everyone jumps. ‘Burger van! Pull over!’

‘Fucking hell!’ Deb says. ‘Stop shouting at me!’

‘Pull in, then!’ Marcus says urgently. ‘I need food.’

I lean forward. ‘He is much easier to manage when he has been fed, just to flag.’

Deb makes a noise somewhere between a growl and a fuck-sake and pulls over just in time, braking so hard we’re all thrown forward. Addie rubs the back of her neck, wincing.

‘Are you OK?’ I ask her, as Deb parks up by the burger van.

For a second I want Addie to say no so that I can do something, check her shoulder, her neck, just touch her. It’s such a bizarre, torturous thing to be pressed up against the one person whose body I know almost as well as my own, to have my thigh sliding against hers, and not even be able to place my hand on her arm.

‘Fine, yeah, just the whiplash from