The Mistletoe Pact by Jo Lovett
Now – October 2022
Dan
‘You look like you had a good night, mate,’ leered the taxi driver as Dan paid him outside Wimbledon station.
‘Yeah, we did actually,’ said Dan, knowing that he was smiling stupidly and really not caring. He was probably going to smile stupidly for the rest of the day. He wondered if it was too soon to text Evie. He checked his watch as he walked into the station. Yep, it was only about fifteen minutes since they’d said goodbye. And she’d be busy with the netball practice. He should probably play it cool. Or at least wait until, say, another fifteen minutes had passed before sending her a text, which he was pretty sure would say something goofy, because he wasn’t going to be able to help himself.
He was pretty sure he was in love.
He really hoped she’d be able to meet for a coffee again next week, because they couldn’t get together properly until Sunday in ten days’ time, because they both had a lot of work commitments and Evie was out with friends on Friday night and he had Katie staying over – for the first time – on Saturday night, and was meeting Zubin and some other friends for beers on Sunday evening.
God, he missed Evie already.
* * *
Dan’s mother came up to London for lunch on Saturday, to spend time with Dan, she said, but he was pretty sure that her main motivation was – understandably – to coo over her youngest grandchild. She arrived laden with soft toys and books that she just happened to have spotted when she’d just happened to be passing a toy shop in Cheltenham the other day. If she carried on like this, Dan’s flat was going to resemble a toy shop itself.
They took Katie out for a walk in her pram, after which Dan’s mum gave her a bottle of Hannah’s expressed milk before Dan put her down for her sleep.
‘So what have you been up to the last couple of weeks?’ he asked his mum as they ate curry from downstairs for lunch. ‘Sorry I haven’t had a chance to call much. I’ve been really busy with work and things.’ Evie. He hoped he wasn’t smiling too goofily at the thought of her.
‘Jenny and I started playing darts again. We’ve been practising in her friend Grant’s pub. I can’t understand why she can’t see that he’s so obviously the man for her.’
‘Maybe it’s a very slow burn thing.’
‘Incredibly slow burn. They met at Lucie’s wedding and that was six years ago.’
‘Yeah, that is a long time. What about you? Have you been out anywhere else recently?’
‘Did Sasha say anything to you? She did, didn’t she?’ Nope, it had been Evie who’d mentioned that Jenny had told her that his mum had been asked out for dinner by a very nice architect friend. A seriously foxy silver fox, according to Jenny. ‘I decided that I’m not ready to meet anyone again yet.’ Five years since she and his father had split up and she still wasn’t ready to go for dinner with someone. Dan was really going to struggle to ever forgive his father, no matter how many tickets to the rugby he offered him.
‘There’s no hurry about these things,’ Dan said, feeling like he was floundering. This wasn’t the kind of conversation you wanted to have with your mother. He shouldn’t have started it. ‘Speaking of nice meals, try some of the prawn biryani. Best one I’ve ever tasted.’
* * *
It was a huge wrench to hand Katie over to Hannah on Sunday afternoon. Dan was busy for the rest of the day, with laundry and some admin to do before he met his friends for their early dinner, but it still felt like he had a baby-shaped hole in his heart knowing that he wasn’t going to see her again until Wednesday evening this week, and then only for an hour before her bedtime.
Presumably as she got older it wouldn’t seem so bad, because he’d get used to it, and teenagers and adults didn’t live in their parents’ pockets, but right now it really felt like he and Hannah were both missing out not getting to live full-time with Katie.
He was halfway through ironing his work shirts for the week, still not in the best of moods, when a message came through from his father. He hoped Dan wouldn’t mind but he was going to have to take some important colleagues to the rugby instead of him and Max and Greggy.
He was so pissed off.
Hurt, he was hurt.
He was in his mid-thirties and he’d been hurt yet again by his own father. It wasn’t the rugby – they could watch that on TV if they wanted to see it – it was that in his father’s eyes rebuilding their relationship was apparently less important than sucking up to some colleagues.
He should say something.
Nope. He wasn’t going to stoop to that level. He was just going to ignore him.
Nope. He wasn’t going to do that either. He was going to be polite and move on. He sent a No worries message and stared at the wall opposite for a long time until he heard a strange noise from the iron and realised he’d left it flat on top of his favourite blue shirt and burned a hole in it. Marvellous.
God, family relationships were shit.
You wanted to stick with just friends. Friends didn’t hurt you.