The Honeymoon Prize

‘Perhaps they’ll all go home soon.’

Privately, Freya thought it was unlikely, knowing her friends, but it seemed safe to say that she hoped so. She made herself relax into Dan, and was rewarded by an un-curling warmth in her stomach as he began kissing his way along her jaw.

At last! This was what it was supposed to feel like. Just go with the flow. Tightening her arms around his neck, she turned her face towards Dan’s, but just as their lips were about to meet, someone tugged insistently at her sleeve.

‘Freya!’

‘Not now, Lucy,’ she muttered out of the side of her mouth.

‘It’s important.’

Reluctantly, Freya disengaged herself from Dan, who was looking understandably irritable at the interruption. ‘Somebody better be dead,’ she scowled. ‘What is it?’

‘I think the party might be over,’ said Lucy with a grimace, and turned towards the door.

Following her gaze, Freya saw a man in khaki trousers and a creased shirt with a battered bag at his feet. He had a stern, shuttered face, with thick flyaway brows that right then were drawn together in an intimidating frown. He looked very tired.

And very cross.

Freya’s heart did a sickening somersault as his peculiarly penetrating eyes found hers through the crowd, and she leapt away from Dan as if she had been jabbed with a cattle prod.

‘Max,’ she said in a hollow voice.

Hanging onto the kitchen door frame, Freya squinted through her hair at the man who was standing by the kettle. ‘It is you,’ she said in a voice of deep foreboding. ‘I thought it was all just a horrible dream.’

‘Good morning, Freya,’ said Max. ‘It’s lovely to see you, too.’

Freya groped her way over to the table and collapsed into a chair. ‘I think I’m going to die,’ she said simply.

‘Here.’ He put a glass of water and some paracetamol on the table beside her. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

She screwed up her face as she took the tablets, and then, exhausted by the effort, pillowed her head in her arms so that her newly blonde hair spilled over the table. It felt as if a hammer was being swung around inside her skull.

‘I see you still haven’t learnt to drink in moderation,’ said Max, leaning against the kitchen counter and regarding her with disapproval.

‘I usually do,’ muttered Freya without lifting her poor head. It was true. Ever since the night of Lucy’s twenty-first, she had been careful not to risk another humiliation, but she was in no fit state to introduce that particular subject of conversation. ‘I was nervous last night,’ she said instead. ‘I think I must have drunk more than I realised.’

‘What were you nervous about?’

Very, very carefully, Freya lifted her head to rest her forehead in her palms. There was no way she could explain Dan to Max. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. The noise of the kettle boiling made her wince. ‘It was just something silly,’ she went on feebly, ‘and obviously it wasn’t what I should have been nervous about, which was you turning up without warning! Why didn’t you let me know you were coming home?’

‘It all happened so quickly I didn’t have chance before I left,’ said Max. ‘I rang when I eventually got to Heathrow, but there was no answer, so I assumed you were out. I didn’t know that the only reason no one answered was because nobody could hear the phone ringing over all the noise that was going on here.

‘I’d been travelling for three days by then, and all I wanted was to sleep, so I thought I would just let myself in and leave you a note. I wasn’t best pleased to arrive and find the apartment heaving with strangers and my neighbours all ringing the council to complain about noise pollution,’ he finished sardonically.

‘I can’t remember very much about last night,’ Freya had to confess. ‘I mean, I remember you arriving, of course.’ She could still feel the way her heart had lurched at the sight of him. ‘I remember Lucy arguing, too, and something about sheets…did I make up a bed for you?’ she asked, puzzled in spite of herself.

‘You tried,’ said Max. ‘I have to say that you weren’t much help, what with stumbling on your heels and dropping pillowcases and falling onto the duvet.

‘I’m perfectly capable of making my own bed,’ he added dryly, ‘but you seemed to have gone into hostess overdrive to make up for your evident horror at seeing me. I’d have been quite happy if you’d handed over a towel and pointed me in the right direction, but no! You insisted on coming into the room with me, although you appeared to find the whole business a lot more embarrassing than I did. You kept tugging down your skirt and apologising for the mess.’

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry…’

‘Yes, just like that. I thought you were never going to go.’ Max’s face was quite straight, but Freya was almost sure she detected a gleam of amusement in his pale grey eyes. ‘At one point I wondered whether you were going to insist on putting me to bed and tucking me in,’ he said.

It was all beginning to come back now. Freya clutched at her head as she remembered how horribly embarrassed she had been by the awkwardness of the situation. It was the first time she and Max had been alone together since the night of Lucy’s twenty-first and, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, he had come home to find his immaculate apartment a tip, and the only place for him to sleep was the spare bedroom which she had been using as a wardrobe, and was consequently knee-deep in discarded clothes.

Her nerves, already frayed by the whole business with Dan, had gone to pieces entirely, and she had blundered around, talking too much and obviously making a complete idiot of herself. Freya cringed behind her hair. Please, please, please let her not have done anything really embarrassing, like making another pass at Max! She had a disturbing picture of him unbuttoning his shirt. Had that been last night or six years ago?

‘I hope I didn’t go that far?’ she said nervously.

‘Not quite,’ said Max, ‘but I was reduced to taking my shirt off to get rid of you.’

‘I can see that would have done the trick,’ said Freya, acid edging her voice, but to her annoyance Max’s look of amusement only deepened.

‘Eventually. You just stood there staring at me, with your eyes like saucers, and for a few moments there I thought I might have to strip completely before you got the point, but the penny dropped then and you started to blush and then you bolted.’

Excellent, thought Freya glumly. A sure way to impress him with her sophistication and poise.

She was annoyed to see a smile tugging at the corner of Max’s mouth. ‘If I hadn’t been so tired, your expression would have been funny,’ he said. ‘Talk about covered with confusion!’

‘Glad I’ve provided you with some amusement,’ she said a trifle sullenly.

‘I wasn’t so amused when I got up in the middle of the night to get some water and found you crashed out on the sofa with all lights blazing and the dregs of a martini in a glass that had fallen out of your hand. It was like a scene from a Channel Four docu-drama! I tried to wake you up, but you just kept mumbling something about missing the bus.’

Freya swallowed. Oddly enough, she remembered that bit. ‘I was dreaming about our old biology teacher, Mr Nuttall. He was shouting at me because I was late.’

‘That was me doing the shouting,’ said Max. ‘Not that it got me anywhere. In the end I had to carry you bodily. I’m afraid you just got dumped on the bed, but I wasn’t feeling that strong myself.’

Oh, right. Make her feel fat as well as stupid!

She could dimly remember surfacing at one point to pull her dress off, though, so presumably he hadn’t actually investigated what her mother insisted on calling ‘your lovely womanly figure’.

‘I took your shoes off, but I drew the line at undressing you,’ said Max dryly.

And now he could read her mind. That was all she needed.

‘You needn’t worry,’ he said, misinterpreting her expression. ‘I’m not into necrophilia! But by that stage I was beginning to wish that I’d sent you home with Lucy.’

The kettle had boiled while he’d been talking, and he made a pot of tea while Freya took the opportunity to drop her head back into her folded arms. So far, the morning which had started off so spectacularly badly with possibly the worst hangover of her life wasn’t getting any better. If only she could rewind time, preferably back to the point before she had even heard of a martini, shaken or stirred.

Max poured tea into a mug, added several spoonfuls of sugar, and stirred it before setting it down beside Freya on the table. Turning her head fractionally, she opened one eye to see the mug looming disproportionately large at the odd angle.

‘Go on, drink it,’ said Max. ‘It’ll do you good.’

Lifting her head very cautiously, she took a tentative sip, only to screw up her face. ‘It’s got sugar in it!’

‘Drink it anyway.’