A December To Remember

Luca picked up her bag before she could make a move. ‘I’ll take that.’

Louise scowled. ‘Maybe you could catch up with Ellie later when she’s had some sleep.’

To lighten the atmosphere that she’d created just by being here, Ellie forced a laugh. ‘Trust me, there won’t be any talking about anything past, present or future for the next twenty-four hours. I’m all but comatose on my feet. The sooner I can lie down, the better. I got no sleep at all on the train from Bangkok. The carriage was too noisy and stuffy.’

Luca draped an arm over her shoulders. ‘That’s what planes are for, El. They’re comfortable and fast, and the cabin crew even feeds you.’ Back to being less antagonistic, then. His use of El was a clue.

‘Remind me of that later when I come up with some other hare-brained scheme for getting home.’ She’d left booking flights as she had no idea what she might want to do next, where she might go to fill in the weeks between this job and the position she was taking up early in January. Following Louise, Luca’s arm still on her shoulders and feeling heavy, yet strong and familiar, she sucked in on her confusion. Maybe she did need familiar right now. Maybe her old friend could help her by going back over that time when she’d made the monumental error of thinking she loved Freddy more than her future and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Now she wanted to reroute her life and, if she stopped being so defensive, talking to Luca might turn out to be the fix she needed. If he didn’t rub her nose in what had happened, they should be able to get along just fine. Surely their past friendship counted for something?

Then heat prickled Ellie’s skin. Damn, but she needed a shower. She probably smelled worse than roadkill that had been left in the sun for days. Except this heat felt different from what she’d been experiencing all morning.

She shrugged away from Luca’s arm and straightened up the sags in her body. ‘I’m looking forward to catching up.’ She smiled at Luca. The heat intensified when he smiled back. Most unusual. Had to be excitement over seeing him again, despite the shaky start. ‘But not today.’

Might as well go for friendly; after all they used to be very good at it. There’d been a time, when they were sharing that house, that there was little they didn’t know about each other. At one point just before they’d finished their first year as junior doctors she’d wondered if they might’ve had a fling. They’d seemed attracted to each other in a way they’d never been before, and then she’d met Freddy and that had been that. Eventually she’d moved to Wellington and lost contact with Luca and the others she’d lived with for so long, until the beginning of the year when she’d caught up with Renee and now shared an apartment with her. Ellie had presumed Luca had married and become a father. Seemed she’d been wrong.

Thankfully today she could categorically state she felt no attraction for Luca at all. Not a drop. That heat had been something out of the blue. Hell, today she was struggling with the friendship thing after the way he’d looked at her with that ‘I told you so’ in his sharp eyes. It made her want to grind her teeth and kick him in the shin. It reminded her how he used to be so positive about diagnoses when they were junior doctors. That was ‘the look’ he’d become known for. Unfortunately he was more often right than wrong about everything.

Just like his prediction about her ex. Except not even Luca had got it as bad or humiliating as the demise of her marriage had turned out to be.

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