Oh, god. He’d thought she was a spoilt princess.
‘I was impressed today,’ he said, instead of spelling out what they both knew. She had been a spoiled princess, and then her brother had died and the scales had dropped. Or whatever it was that happened when you realized, too late, giving money to someone who was asking for your time was perhaps more cruel than pretending you’d never received the call.
It was too late, of course, to truly make amends to her brother, but … she could spend the rest of her life trying. ‘Thank you, Fola.’
He gave her shoulder a squeeze then scanned her in a way that she saw now, was entirely professional. A physio looking for faults. Not a future lover looking for clues about the intimacies they might one day share.
‘You’re off the clock, actually,’ she said, giving her hands a swift rub and her feet a quick stomp. ‘You should go get a drink. Eat a family pack of Oreos or whatever it is trainers do to indulge themselves.’
Fola laughed then. A proper, full belly laugh. ‘You know what I do?’
‘No.’ She hadn’t a clue. Much to her shame, she had never once thought about Fola’s real life. Just the fictional one they might live if they ran away from her troubles and her stresses into a future dappled with rainbows and unicorns … Now that she thought about it, she knew next to nothing about Fola Onaberi other than that he was gorgeous, kind, funny, smart, proactive, and obviously in love with his girlfriend who she hoped to god appreciated what a lucky woman she was.
‘I watch your show.’
‘What? No you don’t.’
‘Honestly, I do. You make me laugh. You make everyone laugh. Your heart is kind.’
‘What? Because I know how to take a cream pie in the face?’
That month where Kev had lobbed a pie at her every time a politician got one in the gob had been a cracker. Not.
Fola shook his head, disappointed that was the first place she went. ‘No, because you do it knowing you’ll look foolish but do it anyway because it makes other people happy.’ Fola gave a few rich chortles as he pictured her with cream pie on her face, then waved his hands between them as if erasing the cream and returning her to her normal face. He took her hands in his. ‘You are a very kind woman, Katherine Fuller. You change lives.’
She pulled her hands out of his because it felt too nice, too intimate, and laughed her own, more cynical laugh. ‘That’s very sweet of you, Fola, but now I think you’re stretching it a bit.’
‘You changed my life.’
She smirked. ‘I doubt that, somehow.’
‘You were the first person who hired me to be their personal trainer.’
‘No, that’s not true.’ She thought back to the list of references she’d had for him and came up blank. ‘I had – someone must’ve—’
Fola threw her the first sheepish look she’d ever seen from him. ‘I made up all of the names of all of the clients I had.’
‘What? No. You were—
‘—desperate.’ He filled in for her. ‘No one would hire me.’
‘So you fibbed?’
His grin turned apologetic. ‘I thought that was how it worked in the magical world of showbiz.’ He did some jazz hands. ‘And I definitely didn’t think you’d hire me if I didn’t have some famous names on my roster.’
Kath thought for a minute and then burst out laughing. Hilarious. Absolutely completely hilarious. ‘So you never made Cheryl’s bum—’ she made a gesture that she hoped signified absolutely perfect.
‘Never met her in my life.’
She laughed some more, throwing out more names she vaguely remembered from the list, each and every single one getting a ‘no, not them either’ shrug from Fola.
When she’d calmed down and had assured him it was in absolutely no way a problem that he’d faked it till he made it, they walked back to the hotel in a companionable silence. In the large lounge where many of the cyclists had gathered, Raven was drawing on the back of a t-shirt, a queue of people behind her.
‘What’s this?’ Kath asked as she took in the large flower Raven was drawing on the back of her shirt.
‘An aster,’ she said then pointed towards an older woman – ah it was Flo! – who seemed intent on attracting Fola’s attention. ‘Flo’s had a hard day,’ Raven said in a way that made it perfectly plausible that an aster was the only solution for it.
‘That’s kind. Any particular reason you chose the aster,’ asked Kath.
‘It means patience and a love of variety,’ smiled Raven. Her brightly coloured flame eyes had, from sweat most likely, faded and pooled in tear drop splodges of colour along her jawline.
‘I’m going for the daisy,’ volunteered a dark, curly haired woman watching Raven with hawklike intensity. Rachel? Rachel who, if Kath wasn’t mistaken, had suffered from severe post-partum depression a few years back. She’d made a life-changing phone call to LifeTime when her mother-in-law came to visit her and her colicky baby twins. She’d let herself in, then run up the stairs when she’d realised the house was quiet. Too quiet. It had been. Rachel had been holding a pillow over their faces for just a moment’s peace. The twins were eight now and the loves of her life. ‘It stands for family,’ she said proudly, then teared up, which the chap next to her saw and pulled her into a hug with a ‘there, there, we’re all in this together, aren’t we, love?’ And just like that, Kath knew she was in the right place, at the right time and her life, whichever way it was meant to go, should be guided by exactly this.
Sue took a sip of her soda water, wincing as she discovered stretching her legs out was much more difficult than it had been a couple of hours earlier when they’d sat down for supper. Maybe
