Darby typed back quickly, not wanting to overthink her response. Did she want to see him again? Oh, you know, just about every single day for the rest of her life.
Darby:Thanks, I slept well. Would definitely like to see you later.
About ten minutes later, Darby was walking home. However, she was not strolling along on the pavement like everyone else in Pretty Beach. Nope, she was walking on air. What a wonderful evening she’d had. What a turn up for the books. As she passed a few morning walkers who nodded hello and she recognised a few familiar faces on the laneway, she felt as if she was seeing things with new eyes. Possibility enveloped her. Whatever had happened orwouldhappen with Archie, she felt different forherself. Even if she never saw him again, she didn’t care. The night had done something to her soul. A tide had turned. It felt as if she'd bloomed.
By the time she reached her front door, Darby was actually humming. Charged up, on fire, raring to go, she positively radiated happiness with a capital ‘H’ again. She wasn’t on the scrap heap; shedidhave potential. Her life belongedtoher and she’d rescued it. Life wasn’t just happeningtoher. She’d changed it and she could see sparkles. Fab-you-lous.
31
There was one thing that was in no doubt at all: Darby had seen Archie again the night after the morning when she’d woken up in his bed. The same thing may have happened again. Although, actually, it had been better if that were at all possible. So good and so lovely and so wonderful to boot. More needed. Archie appeared as if he had been sent to her from above. This man could do no wrong. Darby loved it, or at least she’d thought she did, until she’d taken a bit of time to breathe and she’d panicked and wondered what the heck she was playing at. Had she thrown herself at him? Did she care?
Sitting at a small round table by the window in a coffee shop on an old wharf on the far side of Pretty Beach, Darby’s brain was going around in circles. With her phone propped against a sugar bowl, she was attempting to watch some footage of her garden but wasn’t able to concentrate. Looking around at the lovely old building in the wharf, she smiled. The café smelled of coffee and fresh scones, gingham curtains framed the windows just to her right and outside the weather had turned for the better. Not being able to focus on the video, Darby sat with her chin on her hand and peered out the window at a long line of pale pink and lemon yellow cottages snaking their way up thehill. In the far distance, across boats bobbing on the sea, she could see the lighthouse glinting and hear a ferry horn every now and then. Her mind kept drifting back to Archie. The way his hand had felt against the small of her back when they’d gone for a walk with Lola, the way they were texting each other, the way he’d kissed her. All of it magnificent.
Whatever it was going on between them had moved at lightning speed. Darby had woken up in his bed more than once, he’d made her scrambled eggs, and she’d worn his t-shirts. She’d even kissed him goodbye at the front door like some sort of normal person who did normal things with normal men. Far out. It was fair to say that our Darbs was wondering what the heck was going on. In a little bit of a whirl, dizzy, spaced out. And then some.
Replaying every moment, every word, every look, she felt a tad removed from heractuallife. As if someone had dropped her from a height into something she’d not seen coming. Truth be told, she’d gone over what was happening way too many times. She’d even journalled it after watching on Mirrie, the YouTuber’s video, that journalling things could assist in helping you see what was what. That had not been one of her better ideas. With the speed of what had happened with Archie and how quickly she’d moved to Stage Ten written down on paper, she’d started to worry, big time. The problem was that it felt so good, so easy, normal. Right, even. Which was precisely why she’d started to get concerned. Her track record told her that normal relationships did not happen in Darby’s world. Quite the contrary, truth be told. That is precisely when the panic had begun to set in.
She took a sip of her tea and glanced around the café. An elderly couple sat in the corner, sharing a slice of Victoria sponge. The man was going from his phone to a section of a newspaper, and every now and then, he pointed somethingout. The woman reached across to touch her husband's hand, a gesture so casual and unconscious that Darby just sat there for ages, wondering about them. Forty years of marriage, probably. Forty years of shared newspapers and slotting into each other. Darby couldn't get her head around it for someone like her as she tried to imagine a relationship that worked so well that it lasted that long.
Her phone buzzed against the table.
Penny:How are you? What’s the latest with Archie? Dare I ask?
Darby stared at her phone. Howwerethings? She had no idea how things really were. On the surface, they looked incredible. However, she’d thought that before. All she knew was that she felt good, which had never actually meant that things had turned out to be good in the past. She felt as if she was teetering on the absolute certainty that she was about to make the same old mistake she'd been making since she was nineteen years old. Though there wouldn’t be a baby involved in this one, so that was a plus.
Darby:Fine, thx.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Penny was clearly composing and deleting responses, which meant she could sense Darby's evasion even by way of a text message.
Penny:You sure???
Darby:I’m a little bit apprehensive that I’ve jumped in too quickly.
Penny:Eeek.
Darby:I don’t have a good track record here, do I? What was I thinking?
Penny:No, this feels different.
Reading Penny's last message again, Darby tutted. What the heck was wrong with her? Everything and nothing, pretty much. The fact that she'd slept with a man because she’d felt swoonyand had been wooed rolled around her head. The fact that it had felt like coming home. The fact that she was forty-one years old and following the same patterns she'd followed years earlier. The fact that experience had tainted her outlook on what might be on her cards next.
Thinking about the fathers of her three girls and how all three of them had gone so very wrong, she shook her head and crinkled up her face. How charming they had been at the start. How attentive. How she’d fallen, hard and fast, just like now. How they'd made her feel like the most interesting woman in the world right up until the moment they'd got what they wanted. Then had come the gradual cooling, the cancelled plans, the nastiness. One of them had been so obvious, it hadn’t lasted long at all. That one had started looking at his phone when she talked, which had been the first giveaway. It had been months of her making excuses for his behaviour before she'd finally admitted to herself that she'd been played.
The pattern was always the same. Intense interest, rapid escalation, her falling hard and fast, then the inevitable withdrawal once the novelty wore off. She'd thought she was past all that. Was she not wiser, stronger, less susceptible, not as easily charmed? Good God, the realisation dawned on her: she’d only gone and done the same thing. Here she was, obsessing over a man yet again. Jumping into beds, well, not beds as such, but one very nice, expensive one with hotel sheets, way too quickly. It was only her fourth bed in total in her life, but still. Four beds too many? Who even knew?
Opening her notes app, she began typing, as if putting her thoughts into words might make them more manageable. Noting the things that had happened and the things that she liked about Archie made her feel marginally better. Detailing the actual timeline by working back to the first day she’d seen him in the frosty garden when she’d been standing with hertea, she didn’t feel quite as concerned about her hastiness. As it happened, when she looked back, things between them had been a slow, but exponentially hot burn. She stared at the notes for a moment and nodded. On her phone, it made a bit more sense.
Lost in her own thoughts, she stared out the window and watched people going about their afternoon business in Pretty Beach. A woman with a pushchair stopped to chat with the postman. Two teenagers shared earphones as they walked past, heads bobbing to the same rhythm. Everyone looked like they knew exactly where they belonged and what they were doing. Darby wasn't one of them. Nope, she felt as if someone had put her whole world into a shoe box, popped on a lid, shaken the box around and tipped it back out again.
Her phone buzzed again with a notification from her channel. More subscribers overnight. Tapping on the dashboard, she scrolled. Comments from women thanking her for being honest about the difficulties of starting over, for showing that life didn't end when your children left home, for proving that forty-something didn't mean invisible. She scrolled through a few of the messages and nodded. These women got it and they would, no doubt, understand her issues if she aired them. She wouldn’t be doing that. They understood what it felt like to rebuild your life from scratch, to wake up one day and realise you'd been sleepwalking through your own existence, to have that feeling that you were just going through the motions, and had to change them.
As she sat and pondered, it came to her why loads and loads of red flags were waving around manically in front of her. It was so simple, it was comical. Duh, good things didn't last in Darby’s world. Good things were temporary visitors, not permanent residents. They came, they stayed just long enough for her to get comfortable, then they packed their bags and left her wondering what she'd done wrong. It sounded pathetic, victim-like and shedidn’t particularly dwell on it day-to-day, but it was a pure, cold, hard, nasty fact. Whatever the reasons were, whoever's fault, blah, blah, blah, Darby and relationships failed.
Watching the elderly couple in the corner as they packed up their things, Darby continued to wonder. The woman carefully folded the newspaper whilst her husband stood looking at his phone. Forty years of shared routine, of knowing without asking, of comfortable silences and finishing each other's sentences, no doubt. Darby couldn't really picture herself in twenty years, settled and secure with someone who knew all her quirks and loved her anyway. Yeah and pigs, those pink ones, might fly.
The truth was, she had no idea what she was doing. All three men she’d been with had let her and her girls down. Sure, she’d survived, but she was burnt. What if the very same thing was about to happen again? Not only that, she’d been stupid enough to invite it in in the first place.
Sighing, Darby cursed herself for even letting her thoughts tangle into the place they’d ended up. There wasn’t any point. Tutting, she decided to try to put her worries aside. At the end of the day, Archie would or wouldn't work and if she didn’t try, she wouldn’t know. That would have to be the philosophy she would take, or she would drive herself around the bend with what-ifs and questions.
