“ MAY I HAVE ANOTHER GLASS of wine please?”
“Of course, Ms Elliott, it’s the cabernet sauvignon, correct?”
“Yes please.” I smile up at the stewardess as I reply and settle back into my seat, hoping I didn’t sound anywhere near as drunk as I actually am.
She returns a moment later with a fresh glass and tops it up from the bottle in her hand. I thank her, and she smiles, disappears, and then returns with a basket filled with bags of nuts, crisps, and pretzels. I take a bag of plain crisps and place them on the tray table at the side of my seat.
I couldn’t get a refund on the airline ticket I’d booked for Reggie, so I was determined to get my money’s worth out of the four grand I’d spent on my seat in business class by drinking as much wine as possible. The only problem is, I’m picking up a car when I get to the other end, so I have to get all of my alcohol consumption in at the beginning of the ten and a half hour flight. Hopefully, I’ll spend the second half of the journey sleeping it off and wake up fresh as a daisy, ready to take on the mountains of Colorado once we land. That’s the plan anyway.
We are three hours into the flight, and I am on my fifth glass of wine. “I wish they’d just leave me the bottle, so I didn’t have to keep asking,” I mumble to myself as I take a sip from my tiny, half glass of wine.
The woman sitting beside me aims a sympathetic smile my way. Fumes that scream ‘sad, broken, loser’ must be emanating from my pores, so best I drink quicker then and replace them with plain, old alcohol.
I open the fun-sized bag of crisps and tuck into them, too. We’ve already been served dinner, or lunch, depending on which time zone you’re basing it on. The food, which was a delicious four-course meal of smoked salmon and caper salad, Moroccan spiced chicken on a bed of couscous and roasted vegetables, a choice of dessert from the cart, and cheese and biscuits, was top bloody notch, considering it was plane food.
Since the split between Reggie and I two months ago, I have had zero appetite. The whole thing has been fantastic for my waistline, which has gone down two sizes, but I doubt it will last. Since boarding the plane, I’ve been ravenous, troughing out on anything that’s been offered.
I feel like a huge weight has finally been lifted from my chest, and that for the first time in months…. maybe years, I’m finally able to breathe again.
The last couple of months have been horrible. Absolute shit.
We’ve both remained living in our flat. I knew that I was going to be leaving and couldn’t get another place to live on a short-term lease.
Reggie hasn’t even mentioned either of us moving out, and after I’d slept in the spare bedroom two nights in a row, he’d actually asked me if it was a permanent thing.
He’d then graciously offered to let me keep the master suite, claiming that I had a lot more shit than he did and moving his stuff out would be easier.
This was very true, and so I accepted his offer feeling like even more of a bitch for calling this whole thing on.
Was it really such a bad thing that he loved his job more than me?
Things had remained amicable between us, just awkward. We hadn’t actually argued once since the decision was made.
Then about four weeks ago, Reggie stopped coming home on the weekends. I won’t lie and say it didn’t hurt. It did. The first two weekends in a row, I’d laid in bed, wondering who he was with and what they were up to. Then I stalked his social media, looking for clues, but he hadn’t posted a single thing since the day before our split.
Even though I was the one who ended things, I still felt sick to my stomach the morning I found a shirt of his soaking in the sink in our utility room. The remnants of makeup still smudged all over it.
I had a breakfast meeting in West London that morning and had been up a couple of hours earlier than usual and probably wasn’t meant to see it. I pretended I didn’t and left for work without even making myself a coffee.
Despite this, Reggie still tried talking me out of our breakup and attempted to convince me more than once that we were good together and should try to work things out.
The sad thing is that we had been good together, but I was over always coming second best to his work. We’d been together for five years, living together for three, and things had gotten progressively worse.
Or had they? Was it just me? Did I have unreasonable expectations when it came to relationships? I’d grown up with just my mum. She went out on the occasional date, but there’d never been anyone serious in her life, so really, I had no other relationships to set the benchmark by.
I take a sip of my wine and let out a long sigh.
“Business or pleasure?” The woman in the next seat asks.
“A bit of both,” I tell her. Offering what I hope is a warm smile as I do.
“You?”
“Oh, I’m going home. I’ve been over to London visiting my daughter, she works and lives there. Has for the past three years.”
I nod. My head’s spinning a little, and I’m worried that if I say too much, I’m gonna slur.
“Is the wine good?”
“The wine’s fantastic,” I tell her with a grin. She smiles back and presses her button to call the stewardess.
She orders her wine, and I get a top up, too.
“Whereabouts is it you live?” I ask.
“Greenwood Village. It’s on the outskirts of Denver.”
I nod. Having no clue where that is, there’s not a lot else I can offer.
“You, where is it you’re staying?”
“I’m renting a cabin in a place called Addison Creek.”
“Oh, I know it. It’s close to Aspen, a beautiful little town. You meeting friends?”
My heart gives a little stutter at her question, and I shake my head.
“No, just me. I was supposed to be travelling with my boyfriend, but we split up a couple of months ago.” I chug on my wine after putting that admission out there.
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
I let out another sigh and shrug. “Yeah, me, too. We want different things, so it’s probably for the best.”
She nods in understanding and then puts her hand out. “I’m Dayna.”
“Gracie.” We shake.
“What do you do for work, Gracie?”
“I have a lifestyle blog and my own fashion line that I design.”
I don’t like to call myself a fashion designer because I have had no formal training and hold no qualifications, but after getting soaked and traipsing around in mud-filled shoes at Glastonbury two years running, I’d come up with some lightweight, and more importantly, water-resistant, funky designs for ponchos and Wellington boots. Thanks to my social media and blogging skills, I’d turned this into a small, second-income business within the space of a year. Eight years later, after finally plucking up the courage to focus more on my designs, my range includes festival-style clothing that’s lightweight and can be worn come rain or shine.
“Oh wow, how exciting,” Dayna states. I put her age at around sixty, so she probably wouldn’t have heard of my brand.
“What’s your blog called? I’ll have to take a look.”
“Gracie’s Way. Our fashion line is called Gracie Baby.”
“Oh, I know it. You make those funky rain boots. I have one of your umbrellas with the daisies on it.”
For some reason, this makes me feel like crying.
As successful as we are, I don’t often see people wearing items from our range, so it always gets me in the chest when it happens, or like now, when someone has heard of us.
“You’ve made my day,” I admit. Unable to wipe the smile from my face.
“How did you come up with the concept? It’s mostly rainwear, right?”
“No, rain and festival wear. I got sick of getting rained on at festivals and decided to come up with something lightweight and fun that looked good and would keep you dry.”
“I used to work in marketing. How did you get your brand out there?”
“I already had a lot of followers on the blog and YouTube, then with the launch of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it grew from there. Our real break came when an up-and-coming model was seen and photographed wearing one of my water-resistant backpacks with the hands-free umbrella attachment and coordinating over the knee, wedge-sole wellies, all in my matching yellow and white daisy design, and things exploded.”
I know that I’m drunk and rambling a bit, probably more than a bit, but I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved.
“That’s just...wow. Fantastic. Well done you. Let’s get another drink and celebrate your success.”
“Let’s.”
We get another top up as I tell Dayna how I now employ a team of forty-eight people, from Kimberly O’Donahue –Kod, my bestie and personal assistant–to fabric cutters, sewing machine operators, van drivers, warehouse staff, and a promotions and publicity team.
“Is that what caused the split with your boyfriend, your job?”
“No, it was his job. Although, I’m not so sure now. I don’t know if we’d run our course and it was time to go our separate ways.”
“No children, I’m assuming?”
“No, I’d like them, though. I’m ready for all of that and have been telling him for the past two or three years that’s where I’m at.”
“He doesn’t want them?”
“He proposed as soon as I mentioned us splitting up, but . . .” I look at her and roll my eyes, she rolls hers in response, and I smile at our silent girl talk. I’m English, she’s American, but girl speak is a universal language.
“I want to move out of the city but Reggie, my ex, he likes living in the city. He likes—actually, he loves his BMWi8. He lives for our holidays at the adult only resorts in Turks and Caicos, Cozumel and Aruba. He enjoys dining out at the best restaurants and being seen at the most exclusive clubs and bars. Everything we did socially, together or apart, was all about the image and persona he wanted us to represent.”
I pull the soft blanket, which has been sitting in my cubbyhole in front of my seat, out and then drape it over me as I speak. I’m suddenly feeling cold. Not sure if it’s the Reggie talk, a drop in temperature, or tiredness, but a shiver rolls through me.
“I was born in Essex and raised by my mum, who worked for Marks and Spencer. My dad cleared off when I was two-years-old. I happened to have hit on an idea that has given me a career, which earns me a better-than-average living. I don’t give a flying fuck where I eat and drink, or who I’m seen with,” I explain. Not sure at this stage if she’s even understanding a single word I’m saying.
Dayna keeps her head turned my way and listens to me vent.
“On point eyebrows, my next purchase from Michael Kors, and never running out of MAC soft and gentle, are the things that I care about most days. Maybe that makes me shallow, but I never have and never will pretend to be anything more than the working-class girl I was raised to be.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Gracie. What does Reggie do, for work I mean?”
“International banking. He basically buys and sells currencies to make other people rich. Don’t get me wrong, he’s very good at it, but I don’t think he will ever be satisfied. Reggie’s family were Irish travellers,” I continue to explain why I think Reggie is the way he is.
“He’d moved around from camp to camp until he was seven. He was the youngest of six children, and it was when his mum was pregnant with her seventh that his family finally moved out of their caravan and took up residence in a house.”
I sip my wine and stare at the flight tracker on my screen for a few moments, wondering what his reaction will be once he realises I’m gone. I never told him I was leaving. I left a note explaining that I’d gone travelling for the next six months and he could message me via social media or to get in touch with Kimmie if there was anything important that he needed to discuss. I planned to get a US SIM card for my phone once I got myself settled, and I wasn’t planning to let him have the number. A clean break is what we needed. Well, I did anyway.
“I think it’s because of Reggie’s upbringing that he feels like he has something to prove. Being called a ‘Gipo’ and ‘Pikey,’ for most of your childhood is bound to have an effect, but the sad thing is, he has no contact with any of his family. We were together for three years before he told me his background. So, what’s it all for?”
I turn my head towards Dayna, who’s starting to look a little blurry. “You tell me because I have no clue. He works his arse off, but his family doesn’t even know how well he’s done for himself because he won’t have fuck all to do with them.”
I’d been doing reasonably well at reining in my f-words, but…. well, wine.
“Trying to change your past and rewrite history is like saying a big fat fuck you to the people that gave you the background knowledge to achieve whatever successes you have in life. For me, it was people like my mum and my grandad, and I feel like I owe it to them to always be myself.”
My nose is tingling, and I can feel a tremble in my jaw. I need to stop talking, otherwise, I’m gonna cry.
“The thing is—and I’m sorry for swearing, but zero fucks were given on my end when Reggie told me about his family. I couldn’t care less if he’d been raised in the jungle by wolves. I love him, end of story. If he’d given me the opportunity, I probably would’ve loved his family, too.”
I let out a long sigh as I finish my drink and stare again at the flight tracker on the screen in front of me. “I’m drunk, so I do apologise for going on, but thanks for listening. I’m gonna shut up now and watch a film.”
I press my call button. “After I get another drink,” I add.
“Don’t worry about it, Gracie, it sounds like you have a lot to think about.”
I nod in agreement, and once my wine glass gets refilled, I look at the photos I’ve saved on my phone of the town where I am staying.
I originally booked a luxury log cabin in the foothills of some ski resort near Aspen for Reggie and myself, but I had to change the location as they wouldn’t let me extend my stay due to other reservations. After explaining my circumstances to the softly spoken Alma-May on the telephone, she found me an alternative cabin that is a little higher in the mountains and not quite as fancy as what I originally booked. It doesn’t matter since it was the only thing available for the whole six months my visa would allow me to stay. This means that not only will I get to see Colorado in the winter, but I’ll also get to see it in the spring and part of summer, too.
Hopefully, staying in what looked as close to Eden as I could get after spending the last five years in a twenty-fifth-floor apartment in East London, I would feel inspired and come up with some new designs for my fashion line.
I press the touch screen in front of me and scroll through the in-flight film choices.
Nothing from the new releases grabs me, so I go to the classics and favourites.
I call for another top up of wine and settle in with my not-so-fun-size half-filled glass of red and watch Me Before You.
I read the book.
I thought I would be fine.
I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
I am also very, very, drunk.
And emotional.
By the end of the film, I’m an absolute mess.
I lie my lie-back seat all the way down and pull my blanket over my head. And then I cry. And I cry. And I cry some more.
I cry for Will. I cry for Louisa. I cry for me, and I cry for Reggie.
I cry about the unfairness of life. The lives that none of us will ever get to live.
When Dayna leans across and asks if I’m okay, I cry even harder.
The tight-arsed stewardess, who only filled my wine glass halfway, makes me sit up. She kneels beside me, passes me tissues as I blubber, and then presses a bottle of water into my hand.
I know everyone in business class is probably staring, some are probably filming my entire meltdown, but I am too far gone to give a monkey’s left bollock.
BY THE TIME WE LAND in Denver, I’m only a little less emotional and somewhat sober, but nowhere near sober enough to drive.
I thank Dayna for looking after me, and we say our goodbyes before I collect my three large suitcases and call Kod.
“Bitch, this better be good.”
I sniff.
“Gracie?”
“I wanna come home,” I sob.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Me Before You. I drank too much wine. Then I watched Me Before You. It’s not fair, Kod. This life, none of it’s fair. Reggie should be with me. I shouldn’t be doing this on my own. It was a bad idea. Can you book me a flight? Any airline, I don’t care, I just wanna come home.”
I hear her either sigh or draw in a deep breath, I can’t tell which.
“You finished with the pity party?”
“Fuck you.”
"There she is."
"Double fuck you."
I cuff my runny nose on the back of my hand, my trolley coming to an immediate stop because I’m no longer squeezing the handle and the brake together. I make a sort of oomph sound as I walk straight into it, almost winding myself.
“Yeah, and fuck you right back, Elliott. You’ve been planning this trip for over a year. Granted you planned on Reggie being with you for part of it, but that… that didn’t happen. You broke up. You’ve spent the last few months wallowing like a sow in self-pity over a bloke you’ve spent the last three years wondering if you should even be with.”
I again come to a complete standstill; this time because I’m in shock at the way my supposed best friend is talking to me.
“You’ve done nothing but sit on your arse and do sweet fuck all around the office for weeks, and I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna book you a flight so that you can come all the way home and carry on like that.” She pauses.
I open my mouth to speak, but before I can get even a single sound out, she carries on.
“Go enjoy Colorado, Gracie. Be inspired by the scenery, the weather, and the sexy mountain men, and then send me some designs that are gonna knock my fucking socks off, because, ya know, you’ve been coming up with jack shit lately, and the team are worried.”
This is true. Sometimes when I’m stressed, I design, draw, and create maniacally, other times zero, I come up with absolutely nothing. The last few months have been the latter.
“Did you call me a sow?”
“Seriously, Grace, that’s all you got from that?”
“I haven’t been only sitting on my arse.”
Kod sighs. I know for sure this time that it’s definitely a sigh, and it’s long.
“It’s two in the morning here. It’s been a long day. I’m not booking you on another flight so stop behaving like a princess. Suck it up, man the fuck up, shut the fuck up, and go pick up your car.”
“I can’t. I’m too drunk to drive still.”
“Well, get out of the airport and either order an Uber or jump in a taxi, I really don’t give a fuck which. Text me when you get to the house.”
“When did you become such a bitch?”
“When my boss and best friend turned into Princess Pussy. Now, straighten that crown, and go find a car and a driver to get you to your destination. I don’t wanna hear another peep from you until you’re at the house, lodge, cottage...whatever the fuck it is you’ve rented for the next six months.”
“It’s a cabin. You d’narf say fuck a lot.”
“D’narf? What version of the Queen’s English is that? Those Americans ain’t gonna have a Scooby what you’re saying if you go all Essex on them.”
“I don’t care. I don’t plan to talk to many of them.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to talk to your driver at least, so don’t pronounce ‘th’ like ‘f’ and mind your Ps and Qs.”
“Fuck off. That English enough for ya?”
“I think you’ll find it's actually of German or Dutch origin.”
“Well, fickin’ fucken ze off. Does that work better?”
“It’s after two in the morning. I love you, but you’re boring me now. I’m going.”
“Go then. Abandon me alone in a foreign country.”
She yawns. Loudly.
“Bored. Love you. Going.”
The call ends.
“That bitch,” I say to no one in particular. “I’m so sacking her arse when I’m sober and can find a replacement.”
I raise my brows and stare at a woman, who’s watching me talk to myself as I make my way towards customs and immigration, my absolute favourite part of visiting America—said no one ever.