What My Best Friend Did Read Online Free PDF Page B

as getting married …”
    My eyes widened. What?
    “… Or at least legally it is, should anything go wrong—which it won’t.” He held my gaze significantly and then smiled at me.
    Wow. I just stood there, feeling slightly stunned, realizing that my boyfriend of two years had just calmly told me he fully intended to marry me.
    I waited to feel thrilled, like I was “coming home,” as if all the pieces in the jigsaw were slotting into place … but it was a bit of an anticlimax. I didn’t feel anything really, but given that I’d been eating, sleeping and drinking Frances’s wedding preparations until very recently, that was hardly surprising. I pretty much wouldn’t have cared if I’d never seen another seating plan, or order of service, for the rest of my life. And Tom had, after all, told me this over breakfast like he was announcing he’d paid the electricity bill. At the age of twelve or so, when I had dreamily imagined I would be married with several children by the age of twenty-three, I’d never pictured the moment someone would drop down on one knee and say, “Alice, will you get a mortgage with me?” He hadn’t even really asked me to do that.
    “Actually,” Tom rolled his eyes, appearing not to notice I’d apparently gone mute, “what we should do is get this flatmate in now and start looking to buy in a couple of months—best of both worlds! That would give us,” he glanced up at the ceiling briefly, “just under an extra three grand, which should cover the legal fees and some of the stamp duty on whatever we find.” He smiled happily at me. “You’re right, that’s by far the best plan.”
    I hadn’t actually said anything, had I?
    “I’ll ring him later today and get him to move in ASAP. Time is money!” He rubbed his hands gleefully. “Mortgage-wise, what do you think realistically you could say was your annual income now? Net, not gross?”
    “Tom,” I said slowly, finally recovering the power of speech, “I’m about to get on a plane to the other side of the world, I don’t even know where my handbag is and my taxi will be here any minute. Do we have to do this now? Can’t we just wait until I get back?”
    “OK.” He seemed rather disappointed that I didn’t appear to have a relevant spreadsheet of figures in my back pocket. “I’ll just tell the Spanish bloke he can move in then.”
    “Good idea,” I said through slightly gritted teeth as we came full circle. “You do that.” Now, where the arse was my handbag?
    A car horn honked outside. I dashed to the window and looked out. A silver Ford, its driver pretending he was itching and not picking his nose, sat just below the window, presumably waiting for me. “Shit!” I said in dismay, “He’s here!” I rapped on the window and the driver glanced up to see me frantically holding up one hand, fingers spread, silently mouthing, “Five minutes.”
    I whirled around quickly to see my handbag swinging lightly in Tom’s outstretched hand. “Your passport is already in there,” he said. “I checked. Just calm down, you’ve got plenty of time.”
    The taxi honked again.
    “All right!” Tom said, frowning at the noise. “He’s keen. I’ll get the case.” He walked over and picked it up. “Jesus, Al! You are only going for two nights, right?” He puffed as he lifted it up and walked quickly to the top of the stairs. “You’re not secretly leaving me?”
    I laughed, rather more loudly than I meant to, which seem to disconcert me more than it did him.
    “So what’s the theme behind this shoot?” he asked as we went down.
    Men were weird. How could they one minute be talking about something so serious and then the next switch to complete trivia like nothing had happened? “Hooray for Hollywood,” I said in answer to his question. “So much for my plan to start doing more creative, less commercial stuff … I’m just a big, fat, superficial sellout.”
    Tom laughed as I pushed past him and opened