‘She went off without her room key card.’
‘Well, you’re here.’
‘Shouldn’t I go after her?’
‘Maybe not?’
‘I’m messing everything up.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re a good mum. You’re totally good, Becky.’
She folds herself into his arms. Hears him drop the packet of popcorn as his arms wrap around her.
After standing in the doorway together for a long moment, he disentangles himself to close the door, then turns back and holds her at a distance, gripping her arms lightly.
She feels his warmth soothe the fused and sparking ends of her adrenalized impulses. Feels his kind eyes glance at her collarbone and follows his gaze down the waves of hair covering her breasts. He looks at her again, as if to say: OK? Are we OK about this?
And she pulls his head to hers, kissing him. She can smell his deodorant and his skin.
She takes him to bed.
Afterwards, they shower, separately. They are shy with each other and dress hurriedly. Aware, too, that if Maisie returns then they must be dressed. And if Maisie doesn’t return soon, they need to go and look for her.
As Adam darts around trying to find his T-shirt he says, ‘Are we? You know was that all ri …? I thought it was …’
Becky goes to him and kisses him again and smiles. ‘Yes. I am glad. Yes and yes. Now, Maisie,’ she says. ‘Hurry up.’
‘She probably wants us to go looking for her.’
‘You’re not just saying that to make me feel OK about looking for her?’
‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘I want to find her as well.’
‘You don’t think something’s happened, do you?’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he says.
And a spark lights, scalding, inside her. She wants to say: Stop saying that to me. You don’t know that everything will be fine.
But she says nothing.
As they walk down the hotel corridor together Adam says, ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You will anyway.’
‘Not if it makes you feel uncomfortable, the last thing I want to do is make you feel …’
‘How I am supposed to know if you don’t …’
‘OK. Those things, on the inside of your thigh.’
‘Oh.’ There are three or four of them, neat blood-mark snips, high up, where you’d only find them if you’d been as close as he just has.
‘Did you, you know … do it to yourself?’
‘Yes,’ she says. Ashamed, relieved.
He glances at her as they continue to walk. She doesn’t need to look at how deep the concern has sunk into his skin, she can hear it in his voice.
‘But that’s worse than the bruising? I thought you said you’d stopped doing all that but, look, I don’t want it to sound like pressure, I just wondered if all this Amber Heath stuff is making you a bit … I dunno, the stress of trying to keep your film afloat?’
‘It hasn’t been fun.’
He grasps her hand. ‘You know I’ll look after you if it falls apart.’
‘I know. I just really want to make that film. I feel like I have to at least have that, after everything. You paid for me to do all the stuff that let me get my foot in the door. I can’t walk away with nothing apart from a few years helping other people make their own things. I want to have my thing.’
‘I understand.’
‘If I get hit by a bus, I want Maisie to have something that she can say I did. Something I made happen, that I put all of myself into.’
‘You could also try and avoid buses.’
‘I’m trying to stay alive, obviously.’
But then she remembers that of course he doesn’t take that for granted. He has seen her not wanting to be alive. He heard her admit it and then he tied himself to her, so that if she went, he’d be blamed.
They wait side by side for the lift in silence, heads bowed. She grips his hand tightly.
Had he loved her that much, even then? To hold her in the world like that, at such a cost? Even when she was broken, withdrawn, in hell, swollen with a baby she couldn’t wait to be rid of, full of anger and hate. Her own father hadn’t loved her through that.
Had Adam felt sorry for her? Or had he loved her? She supposed, one day, that she might ask him and now that day has come into view, and so chaotically. What had she meant, pulling him into her, wrapping her legs around him to lock him into her, feeling him come inside her, and wanting her whole skin to be touching his – what had that meant?
‘You could put the job aside for a bit,’ he says quietly.
‘It can’t just be any old film. It has to be Medea and it’s not the time to walk away. Projects have a moment. If you miss it, it becomes something that didn’t get off the ground. Nobody wants to be a part of one of those, something everyone else walked away from. It’s just how it is. If I don’t make it now, it’ll die. I know it.’
They pass through reception. They check the pool complex. Maisie isn’t there. Fear pricks through Becky’s body.
As they walk toward the bar to check if she’s there, Becky wonders: what am I doing? There had been a few flings in the past, but she’d wiped them from her memory as quickly as they had happened. She can’t wipe anything away now: Adam is by her side and she can feel his cum trickle out of her, an unfamiliar wetness. And then she is back there, remembering all those years ago as she looked down into the crotch of her knickers and found semen there. Suddenly she is dizzy. She holds Adam’s arm. I’m going to pass out, she thinks.
He looks at her. ‘You need to eat something.’
‘Let’s find Maisie first.’
Maisie is not in the bar, or in the games room either, and they are running out of rooms in which to find her.
‘She might
