TEN

Jess stood outside the hospital and breathed in the cold air. She was freezing; May nights without a jacket were horribly unforgiving.

She’d already phoned Will and asked him to pick her up, and made sure he had some wine in his flat. All she needed now was a glass of Merlot and Will’s silence while she told him everything. If she was lucky, he might even have a suggestion as to how she was going to deal with her friend’s eating disorder.

What was she meant to do? Jayne wouldn’t even admit she had a problem, so Jess was left to carry the burden for the two of them. She wasn’t used to this sort of thing, especially not with Jayne. The biggest discussions they ever had were normally about what shoes to wear. Their conversations rarely, if ever, ventured into anything more serious.

Did that make her a bad friend? Was she not meant to spot things like this? She’d thought Jayne had been getting thinner recently, but she’d never even considered that there might be anything as sinister as an eating disorder behind it all. But maybe she should have asked. Maybe that was her duty, as Jayne’s friend, to make sure everything was okay and to steer her back onto the right track. Maybe if she’d done that, Jayne would have realised what she was doing, and she might not have ended up in hospital with a stitched forehead and a split lip.

Will’s car pulled up, and he stretched across to open the passenger door for Jess. She got in and rubbed her eyes, sighing through her fingers. She checked her face in the rear view mirror, and brushed a curl of her dark hair away from her forehead.

Will turned to face her. “Ready to go?”

Jess nodded, and Will drove away. That was one of the things she loved about Will. Not once did he feel the need to ask Jess if she was okay or find out what had happened. He didn’t even ask why she’d been at the hospital in the first place. Jess was stressed, and Will knew that. He just kept his eyes on the road and occasionally cleared the drizzle from his windscreen with a flick of the wipers. His face displayed a look of concern, his unshaven jawbone and crooked, previously broken nose reflected faintly in the glass in front of him. But he looked in charge. He looked in control of the situation at hand, despite having said no more than a few words. Jess sat there in silence, trying to figure out a plan and realising once more why she’d fell in love with Will in the first place.

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“It’s not your fault”, Will told her. “There’s nothing you could have done”.

Jess was sat leaning against Will, his arm around her shoulder. She drank another mouthful of wine and nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. She twisted her neck to look into Will’s eyes.

“I just don’t know what to do. It feels like I’ve met a whole new person. The Jayne I know would never starve herself to try and look thinner.”

Will said nothing for a while, but Jess could see he was thinking something over in his head. His dark eyebrows were lowered, his lips pursed, his intelligent grey eyes looking somewhere in the distance.

“Maybe she’s bored of being the Jayne you know”, he suggested eventually. “Maybe she wants to be somebody different for a while. This might be her way of breaking the mould”.

“Why? To get noticed?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she just wants to like herself a bit more.”

God, there was a lot of “maybe” in that suggestion. That pretty much summed it up; they didn’t really have any idea why Jayne had suddenly decided to stop eating. Although, thinking it over, it made a surprising amount of sense. It still didn’t make anything easier, but it was a start. An unsure guess of a start maybe, but a start nonetheless.

She was tired. Tired, and pretty sick of having one mess after another to clean up. There was something building inside her, something unfamiliar that she couldn’t quite understand, something that threatened to throw her off balance if she didn’t get a few moments of peace and quiet with nothing but her own thoughts to spoil the silence.

Why couldn’t something go right for a change? She’d spent the last couple of years of her life ignoring the little problems she had, avoiding the hassle, and she’d thought that would work forever. Why, all of a sudden, did it have to go and blow up in her face? She couldn’t exactly avoid the hassle of Jayne’s eating disorder, or Daniel’s increasingly complicated love life. But she needed her own time, her own life, her own problems to deal with in her own way, and there was never any time for that anymore

Will got up from the sofa, placed his glass on the table beside him and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Jess. He looked as if he was regressing back to his childhood, or about to propose. She wasn’t exactly sure which one would be worse.

He grabbed her hands and looked her in the eyes. “You need to stop worrying about Jayne,” he said. “And Daniel. You need to start being yourself again.”

“Why are you sitting on the floor?”

“That’s not important. You need to start looking after yourself.”

“Right. How do you mean?”

“You’re spending too much time worrying about everyone else. I want the real you back.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah. I want you to be back doing what you do best. Making a mess of my kitchen, falling asleep in my car, moaning when I leave my toothbrush on your bathroom sink”.

Jess wanted to smile, but she didn’t want Will to know he’d won her over that easily by a few nice words and a cheeky smile. If he knew that, he’d expect it to work every time, and Jess would never have any chance of winning an argument ever again.

“Fine”, she said eventually, trying to hide her smile. “I’ll give it a go. Now get up or I might have to break your nose again”.

“Fair enough. That part of Jess can stay where it is, I can live without that.”

Will got up and finished his glass of wine in one mouthful, before pouring himself another. He raised the glass to his mouth, but Jess snatched it from his hand before he could drink it.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure you don’t get a criminal record. You’re giving me a lift to my lecture in the morning.”

“You’re staying over, are you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to go back home and leave you all by yourself while your flatmates are away”, Jess explained, wrapping her arm around Will’s waist. “You might get burgled”.

Will laughed. “And what are you doing to do if that happens?”

Jess looked at Will’s face, a foot or so above hers, and smiled. “I’ll break their noses”.